Religion, Republicans, McCain-Rove

Journalist Sarah Posner offers a round-up on Evangelical religion and the Republican party.
I am among the many who feels we are watching a kind of tragic meltdown of John McCain from seasoned Senator and war hero to typical Rovian swiftboat politician. He said he was willing to lose the election to win the Iraq war, but sadly, it appears his character has deteriorated to the point where he is willing to lose his integrity to win the election. He is doing so by degenerating into Rovian “slash and burn” swiftboat politics. For example, check out this. Even youtube has higher standards in what they’ll show than the McCain camp has in what they’ll produce.
Speaking of Rove, you can read about how he trashed McCain in 2000 here … and how he’s now working for McCain here.
I was reading Andrew Sullivan’s in-depth political bio of Rove in the Atlantic Monthly, and this paragraph – about Rove’s role in Mark Kennedy’s 1994 judicial campaign – jumped out at me:

Some of Kennedy’s campaign commercials touted his volunteer work, including one that showed him holding hands with children. “We were trying to counter the positives from that ad,” a former Rove staffer told me, explaining that some within the See camp initiated a whisper campaign that Kennedy was a pedophile. “It was our standard practice to use the University of Alabama Law School to disseminate whisper-campaign information,” the staffer went on. “That was a major device we used for the transmission of this stuff. The students at the law school are from all over the state, and that’s one of the ways that Karl got the information out—he knew the law students would take it back to their home towns and it would get out.” This would create the impression that the lie was in fact common knowledge across the state. “What Rove does,” says Joe Perkins, “is try to make something so bad for a family that the candidate will not subject the family to the hardship. Mark is not your typical Alabama macho, beer-drinkin’, tobacco-chewin’, pickup-drivin’ kind of guy. He is a small, well-groomed, well-educated family man, and what they tried to do was make him look like a homosexual pedophile. That was really, really hard to take.”

The eery, sleazy similarity between Rove versus Kennedy in 1994 and this week’s disgusting “sex ed” ad from the McCain camp … it deserves a second thought.