You never know, some day I may want to run for political office. And the only way an atheist can get elected in the USA is to lie.

Obama was “in bed” with that preacher at least as much — or as little — as Republican candidates are “in bed” with fundamentalist evangelists.

Obama went to that church for 20 years. There aren’t any current Republican candidates who routinely attended a fire-and-brimstone Rapture-believing evangelist church. If there were, it would have made a lot of news by now.

If you say it’s all just for pragmatic political reasons, and there’s no serious belief involved, then you’ve really got nothing to worry about, do you?

(There are also a lot of radical Islamic barracudas in the waters if you want to tie the metaphor up more tightly.)

Obsessing on the polar bears is not normal.

Your definition of “in bed with” is pretty broad, too.

The President you’re going to vote for again spent twenty years in a fanatical radical church run by a nut case, and completely skated on it. He was a lot closer to that ideology than I am to fundamental evangelism.

It may be a relic of a time when a “gentleman” was an aristocrat, hence an oppressor. In the new Republic, there was no nobility, and acting or appearing that way was unnaceptable.

I know it’s not just me. I came from a more European culture that prized refinement and education, that aspired to it. And it was always astonishing to us how Americans, who we knew were no smarter or less capable than we were, always acted as if those qualities were effeminate, or even subversive.

And why? To justify your conviction that anyone who dares question you on tax policy or health insurance must be fiendishly desiring and tirelessly working for World Communism.

Your “rational thought” has concluded that anyone who doesn’t accept your dogma without question must be degenerate and evil, and your pathetic historical analogy is all the proof you need. It makes your delusions sound patriotic, humane, and well-informed.

That’s what really makes my flesh crawl.

Someone who stays awake nights worrying about right wing evangelism destroying the country — “end of days,” you said — and doesn’t give a shit about the widespread irrational ideas that actually have destroyed nations and people, is doing a lot of intellectual editing.

Like I said, those are your beliefs, and you’re welcome to them. But “rational thought” has little to do with it.

Your “flesh is crawling?” It’s like sitting in a raft in tropical waters filled with sharks and listening to someone obsessed with being eaten by a polar bear.

I think it is possible to portray the positive without the negative, but Stevenson didn’t pull it off.

I thought Kennedy did it better than anyone I can think of, off hand, in my lifetime.

Intelligence and natural refinement are on the short list of presidential qualities but they are not at the top. Maybe they should be, I’m ambivalent. It could be the crux of our problem.

Too soon to say whether Huntsman can exude some gravitas. He did not appear to last night.

I have to agree with the pundits that Romney won big last night and critiquing the others is splitting hairs for now.

I suspect that is code for “he’s a man not ashamed of his own intelligence and natural refinement”.

DUHHHH! Well, no shit, Sherlock. Is that the best you can do? No one is defending the great villains of history here, I’m just pointing out how your spiritual allies are ignorant frauds, and you are still making excuses for them, bravely covering their backs, and your backside. Well, here’s one you can use the next time you feel the need to rescue these dildoes: Attila the Hun was probably worse than the Evangelical Right. Does that feel like a moral victory for you?

You are neither a religious fanatic, a creationist/ID advocate, or a young earth loony; in fact, although you never bring it up, I suspect you are an agnostic, or at most, vaguely deist. But I’ll cut you some slack on that because you choose to not discuss it and I can respect that.

So the mystery remains. Why do you make excuses and cover up for these
Hillbilly Hitlers and their voodoo Protestantism? If they were Democrats or Liberals, I have a feeling we would NEVER hear the end of it from you.

You do it because your politics can’t affford to alienate any of its allies, no matter how ludicrous they are; and because you know anyone capable of rational thought cannot take your ideology seriously as long as it insists on allying itself with these intellectual and spiritual pygmies. You need these troglodytes, you need all the backup you can get, just like you need the Glenn Becks and Rush Limbaughs of the Fourth Estate.

So you pretend they’re not there until they’re attacked, then you feel compelled to rush to their defense by reminding us Stalin was really worse, because he was a Commie too, just like Barack Hussein. After all, anything the statists are for must be evil.

So if it makes you feel any better, yes, I will concede you a small rhetorical defeat. Southern Baptists are probably NOT as evil as Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot or Genghis Khan. Now you can go bask in your victory.