The media was apoplectic. I'm not talking about the ad where Hillary Clinton pretended to be Santa Claus with "presents," like free health care, under a Christmas tree. No, I'm talking about Mike Huckabee's Christmas ad with a windowpane above his head that vaguely looked like a cross.
The media reacted like Dracula. AAAAAA!! A Cross!!! There's a cross above his head!!! Good Morning America declared Huckabee was starting a "holy war." After telling Americans for a half century that Christians are Nazis, the media now believes the cross is a swastika.
This incident is emblematic of the Grand Canyon between the worldview of the media and that of the American voter. Most Americans claim to be Christian and for our 230-plus-year history, the majority opinion has been: this is a Christian country, the redeemer nation of history – a view validated by history.
The media has hidden this truth from Americans for 50 years, with the giant hoax that the founders were early communists creating a secular utopia where Christianity had to be hermetically sealed in churches and not allowed to infect the public.
The media tells us George Washington was a deistic nominal Christian. History, on the other hand, says he kissed the Bible when he was sworn in and added, "so help me, God" at the end of his oath. In his farewell address, he said American Democracy could not survive without Christian morality. The media tells us Thomas Jefferson was a deist. So why did Mr. Separation-of-Church-and-State make the Bible the textbook for public schools? Why did he and Ben Franklin, propose a picture of Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt for our national insignia? We are told John Adams was a Humanist Unitarian, yet he and his son wrote of their belief the constitution was Christianity in "civil government" form.
If you get your opinions from the delusional media, you will think the last thing America needs is another evangelical president! No, we need "change!" Change, of course, has been the rallying cry of the revolutionary monsters of the last century from the Bolsheviks and Hitler to Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. These agents of change made the 20th the most monstrous, murderous century in history.
So clearly, the greatest, most prosperous, freest nation in history, the place that draws people like a magnet, needs change! According to the media, we need to get over this Christian America thing.
Unfortunately, the history of the last 44 years of elections couldn't disagree more.
In the most liberal era of U.S. history, America has increasingly chosen exactly the kind of president the media tell us we absolutely don't need – an evangelical president. And Americans have rejected the kind of candidate the media keeps telling us we need.
Part one: WINNERS OF THE LAST 48 YEARS OF PRESIDENT ELECTIONS
1960: John F. Kennedy was portrayed 48 years ago as a good Catholic who looked and talked like a Boston Brahmin (i.e. Puritan). JFK seemed so Christian to1960s America that millions of U.S. homes had his picture on a wall next to a picture of Jesus. JFK's father got Billy Graham to informally grant JFK the evangelical seal of approval. So even though he was posthumously transformed into the mythic icon of liberal secularism, in 1960 he wasn't seen that way. If he was, he couldn't have won against Christian-America vice president Richard Nixon. Even so, JFK barely squeaked by in one of the closest presidential elections in U.S. history.
1964: Lyndon Johnson did not win the 1964 election by showing America what his faith really was: utopian socialism. Rather he posed as a good ole ranch boy with a Texas drawl who grew up in the fundamentalist Disciples of Christ denomination. He updated FDR's New Deal with his "Great Society" for Depression era Democrats who remembered it with fondness. But he knew the U.S. voter well enough to have Billy Graham at the White House as much as possible. It worked for JFK and it helped LBJ make voters think he was a Christian country boy. The Democrats used this strategy to trick voters and win the White House two more times.
1968: Richard Nixon's parents were Quaker evangelicals and his identity as a true Christian America patriot was cemented during his prominent role in the McCarthy exposes of communist spy rings in two Democrat administrations. Being vice president in the Republican "Christian America" 1950s didn't hurt. No one questioned that Nixon stood for conservative Christian America principles. And unlike JFK's wafer-thin win against him in 1960, Nixon won by a landslide.
1972: Nixon won re-election easily, which got Democrats to plotting his demise. The Watergate scandal while trivialized by the dark revelations of the Clinton era, were devastating in 1973 – the year Nixon ended Vietnam, the war JFK started. In hindsight, the drawn-out TV hearings and theatrical Democrat rhetoric were an obvious morality drama. The purpose of this national object lesson was to convince America: Republicans – not the communist-friendly Democrats – are evil.
After the Democrats disposed of Nixon, they got religion. It was the Democrats, not the Republicans, who started this whole evangelical president thing. For the next 30 years, the only way the Democrats could win the White House was by tricking voters with faux evangelicals. They did this right after selling America the idea that Republicans were the party of "dirty tricks."
1976: You'd never know from the media's constant, hysterical warnings about the "religious right" that it was the Democrats, not the Republicans who started the "religious right" thing. Evangelical posturing was key to the Democrats winning the Oval Office over the last 32 years. Sure, they do the Separation-of-church-and-state tango on one foot. But they do the Hee-Haw polka on the other.
They won the last two presidencies by tricking Americans into believing their candidates were conservative Christians. Oddly, they won by offering the kind of candidate they now insist can't be president anymore – an evangelical.
On the highly symbolic 200th birthday of America, when pundits were musing about the end of the U.S.A.. the Democrats gave America what it wanted: a born again, evangelical, southern Baptist candidate. We now know Jimmy Carter is as "born-again" as Hillary, but in 1976, the media cooperated with the Democrats in the Carter hoax. Magazines would run ominous headlines like, "Can America Afford An Evangelical President?" There was no shortage of pictures of Carter standing under a cross.
The media laid it on thick, pretending Carter was a scary fundamentalist, knowing this would bring Republicans to vote for a Democrat. The clueless GOP gave America what it is offering for 2008 – a liberal Republican (Gerald Ford) – and got trounced. Carter won in a landslide.
1980: Finally, the Republicans gave America what it had been waiting for: the most evangelical president since Abraham Lincoln. Ronald Reagan grew up in the same fundamentalist denomination LBJ did, the Disciples of Christ. Unlike LBJ, Reagan was a church Bible teacher during the Scopes Trial when the Bible was trashed as full of "fool ideas." Naturally, the media hid Reagan's authentic evangelical faith. Instead, they portrayed him as a B-movie-Hollywood-has-been upstaged by Bonzo the monkey. Why he's nothing but a senile old fogy, the puppet of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, a checkered pants-divorcee.
They were as wrong about Reagan as they were about JFK, Carter and Clinton. Reagan was exactly what the media pretended JFK was – one of the greatest and most powerful presidents in history. He was precisely what the media pretended Carter was: a true evangelical. The media told us over and over Reagan didn't go to church.
What they hid is: Reagan's plan was to do what John Adams and Benjamin Franklin advised: implement biblical principles in government. Naturally the media portrayed Reagan as the resurrection of Nixon.
Unlike the media pretense that JFK was the returning spirit of Lincoln, Reagan was the president closest in spirit to Lincoln. It's not just because both were Republican presidents. Reagan and Lincoln's familiarity with the Bible shaped their administrations, and both preserved America against enormous threats to its survival. Lincoln preserved the union of states from collapsing in the 19th century. And in the 20th century, Reagan preserved America from collapsing after Carter put it into a nosedive and helped Iran start Jihad against America.
Reagan did what his six predecessors couldn't: he ended the biggest foreign threat to the U.S. in the 20th century – the Cold War. He helped create a boom economy and a Great Awakening of the type of evangelical faith that spawned the American Revolution. He won two landslides.
1988: George H. Bush rode in on the coattails of Reagan. Bush was a GOP hybrid, a country club Republican with orthodox Christian sympathies and willing to make deals with the evangelical lobby. In office, he talked about God, Christianity and the New World Order, as if they went together.
1992: The wily Democrats – Bugs Bunny to the GOP Elmer Fudd – offered another faux evangelical, Bill Clinton. Reprising the Carter role as a Bible-believing Southern Baptist, Clinton happened to be the biggest tomcat to sit in the Oval Office ("Acting! Genius!!). No president toted a Bible around publicly more than Clinton. Bush Sr. didn't have a chance against Elmer Gantry.
Ole' Billy used the Good Book as a prop for photographers when the Clintons played Jethro and Ellie May goin' to Sunday mornin' meetin' for all the "hicks in flyover country." Hey. It helped win him reelection. And it gave a shocking insight into the increasing gullibility of U.S. Christians.
Clinton's evangelical posturing did not scare his socialist supporters. Under Clinton, America saw this strange anti-Christical Democrat religion emerging, a religion that offers messiahs, rather than presidents. When his supporters looked at Clinton, they saw the messiah who would deliver, as Barak Obama is preaching: "the kingdom of God on earth." They urged him to use his "bully pulpit" to preach liberal salvation. When Clinton offered Americans a "New Covenant" it wasn't that far from Jesus saying to his disciples at the last supper: this is the new covenant in my blood.
2000: Perhaps nothing says more about who the U.S. voter is than the fact that both George W. Bush and Al Gore opened their campaigns by claiming to be true believers in Jesus Christ. Bush was boldly evangelical, with Rev. Graham a part of his redemption story. Al Gore did a great impression of a black preacher. Of course we now know he's a true believer....in global warming.
2004: George W's bold evangelical talk coupled with his normal-American presence, not to mention the fact that World War III had been declared on America by people the Democrats told us were from a religion of peace, gave him a second term. John Kerry couldn't "believe I'm losing to this guy."'
2008: With the possible exception of Mike Huckabee, the American voter is being offered the kind of candidates they've rejected for the last 50 years – not to mention the kind of candidates who tend to be disasters as presidents.
How come the Republican leadership is unaware their big success story is an evangelical? The oldest president in history was one of the most powerful because he, like Lincoln, actually believed the national motto: In God We Trust. Reagan, like Lincoln, tried to do the will of the "God" referenced on our dollar bill, and that invisible king provided the power.
The two greatest Republicans, Lincoln and Reagan actually trusted God. And crazy as the media insists that belief is, their presidencies are testimonies to the raw power that "superstition" has supplied to America since 1776.
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