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Too much of Middle America is in the grip of Dispensationalists and other Christian Taliban fundamentalists, to the detriment of progressives and Christians who still believe in the original values propounded on the Sermon on the Mount. The brutal reality is, the way the electoral math stacks up, there may really be no way to dislodge their rule of the country. Even the erstwhile "swing states" in the Midwest are beginning to harden into GOP strongholds as the walls separating church and state break down.
Think about it, think about how many times Bush and his team have utterly, royally screwed up, on *just about everything*-- the deficit, Iraq, the environment (want a little mercury and arsenic with your coffee in the morning?), Hurricane Katrina, the war in Afghanistan (because of all the diversion to Iraq), and now the upcoming ultra-FUBAR in Iran and/or Syria. Yet Bush still retains 40+% support, "because he's a good Christian" (as though it's a Christian value to go around butchering dark-skinned Muslims in the Mid-east because they "stand in the way of prophecy" at least as some deluded 19th-century warmonger has laid it out). When election time comes, this of course goes up as the specter of the big, bad tax-and-spend liberal comes into the fray.
The painful reality is that the swing states are almost all going Redder since, for understandable reasons, gays, progressives, and cosmopolitan urban folk tend to dislike living in fundamentalist-lite fiefdoms and gravitate toward Blue States themselves. (Pity the progressives stuck in those places.) In the meantime, the American Taliban consolidates its hold over the middle of the country, with the exception of Illinois (and of Arizona and New Mexico, which retain a more open Latino consciousness). Not only the Congress and the Presidency, but also the Judiciary is now dominated by the ultra right wing. So the brutal truth is that we're rapidly moving toward one-party rule by the fundamentalist, Armageddon wing of the Republican Party, with folks like Tom Delay and Ralph Reed dictating our "moral values." This is why so many of my progressive friends have been emigrating to the EU in recent years, and why in Vermont and California, they're holding secession conventions of all things-- there's a good chance that progressivism in the USA may be crushed for good, relegated to a permanent minority doctrine.
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