Dobson's World

Kevin Phillips' new book is attracting a lot of attention. It joins Jimmy Carter's Our Endangered Values (2005) as a book explicitly challenging the role of the Christian Right in the Bush administration and today's Republican Party.

From The dangers of religious fervor in politics by Robyn Blumner St. Petersburg Times 03/26/06:

Former Republican strategist Kevin Phillips writes in his new book American Theocracy that Bush's call to remove Saddam Hussein included "jeering at the United Nations," proclaiming the evil of Saddam and pretending that democracy, not oil, was the motive. According to Phillips, that script followed nearly precisely what LaHaye had written in his Left Behind books (in which an evil Antichrist rose to power within the United Nations and was headquartered in New Babylon, Iraq).

Not to say that we are at war in Iraq solely or even primarily because the president thinks it will hasten the end times. Just that it did not escape the administration's notice that certain ideas resonate with Left Behind's 60-million readers, of which an estimated 15- to 20-million are American voters.

This rapture-and-Armageddon crowd, more than any other group, makes up the president's base, and he happily dances to its tunes. It is flatly disingenuous for Bush to claim that he never before considered the biblical currency of America vs. Iraq. (my emphasis in bold)

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