Mike Huckabee has been on quite a roll lately.  While he’s out hocking his latest book, he’s also been weighing in on the issue of Prop. 8’s passage in California.  

Yesterday, he told “The View” that gays haven’t really been seeing their rights violated because they haven’t been getting the skulls cracked:

HUCKABEE: It’s a different set of rights. People who are homosexuals should have every right in terms of their civil rights, to be employed, to do anything they want. But that’s not really the issue. I know you talked about it and I think you got into it a little bit early on. But when we’re talking about a redefinition of an institution, that’s different than individual civil rights.

BEHAR: Well, segregation was an institution, too, in a way. It was right there on the books.

HUCKABEE: But here is the difference. Bull Connor was hosing people down in the streets of Alabama. John Lewis got his skull cracked on the Selma bridge.

And today he told Bill Bennett that Prop. 8 didn’t actually take away anyone’s rights at all:

HUCKABEE: The very people who voted for Barack Obama in California…also voted to sustain traditional marriage. I refuse to use the term, “ban same-sex marriage.” That’s not what those efforts did. They affirmed what is. They did not prohibit something. They simply affirmed something that which has and forever has existed.

Of course, as Think Progress pointed out, that is exactly what Prop. 8 did – it was right there in the description of the amendment: “Changes the California Constitution to eliminate the right of same-sex couples to marry in California.”

Raw Story highlights the recent CNN piece on a Kansas pastors who has posted a rather provocative sign outside his church:

CNN's Rick Sanchez reported on a church marquee that reads "America we have a Muslim president. This is a sin against the Lord." Mark Holick is pastor of The Spirit One Christian Center in Wichita, Kansas where the sign is being displayed.

Holick told KSNW, "The main point of the marquee is to cause the Christians to understand he is not a Christian, Again, they will call me and they will tell me that he's not a Muslim because he is a Christian. That's not the point. The point is he's not a Christian."

The idea that Obama is not a Christian has become commonplace among many on the Right, as has the idea that it is perfectly acceptable to attack him because of his faith and that a voting for him was a sin. But this is the first time I’ve seen anyone argue that his understanding of his Christian faith actually makes him a Muslim.  

If the point that Holick wanted to make is that Obama is not a Christian, why didn’t he just say that instead of saying that Obama is a Muslim? That doesn’t even make any sense.

We wrote about Grassfire.org a few times back in 2007 during the height of the immigration debate and then, once the issue died down, stopped paying attention to them because, with their core issues no longer on the table, they seemed to lose focus and stagnated.

But then I came across this Buzzflash piece that informed us that not only is Grassfire back in business, they have re-formed themselves as the home of the “patriotic, resilient, conservative resistance” to Barack Obama:

Grassfire.org has launched this “Join The Resistance” campaign to give grassroots conservatives a place to join together around the common goal of holding off as much of the Obama agenda as possible. Our goal is to bring together 1 million Resisters by Inauguration Day. That would give us one-tenth of the 10 million Obama loyalists who were recruited during the campaign, but we believe 1 million equipped Resisters can make a difference.

The key will be providing web-based structures that truly equip conservatives to Resist. We begin here – by building this email network to give us the ability to respond immediately to each and every effort by the Obama administration to undermine our liberties. We plan to add to this platform social networking that will connect Resisters to others in their communities. We are also exploring ways to put the tools of the Resistance into your hands through mobile phone-based apps that allow you to Resist on the go. We will use fax, email, phone, and personal visit campaigns to press our case with leaders in Washington, D.C., who need to know that millions oppose Obama’s rush to the Left …

Resisting is just the first step. That is why we propose a three-phased recovery for conservatives: Resist, Rebuild, and Restore. We believe that resisting will create newfound unity among conservatives. Out of this, we must then Rebuild our structures. New, invigorating models must be developed that inform, equip and bring together conservatives and prepare us to return our ideas to political prominence. The Internet will be a key battleground The Left has moved far ahead in its embrace of and usage of new 2.0 technologies. The Rebuild process will leave Americans with a clear ideological and practical choice between the Left’s statist model and our model based on God-given individual liberties.

Having rebuilt, we can then Restore conservative ideas to leadership by winning elections. Ultimately, a movement’s ideas must result in electoral victories because that is the basis for legitimate authority and ultimately for implementing one’s ideas. Grassfire.org will soon be announcing a breakthrough effort that will allow our members to get engaged directly in the election process. Stay tuned.

Resist. Rebuild. Restore. It’s not an easy path for grassroots conservatives, but it is a clear path. We know what we must do. And it begins with resisting rightly — respecting the new President but never backing away from the God-given ideals of freedom and liberty upon which this nation was founded.

I have to say that the Right’s sudden penchant for referring to itself as some sort of “resistance movement” is taking on a militia-esque tone that is getting to be a little bit disturbing.

Earlier this week, Time had an article on Mike Huckabee’s new book in which the former presidential candidate lashed out at various Religious Right leaders like Pat Robertson, John Hagee, and Gary Bauer. Today, Bauer has issued his own press release in response to that article, voicing his own disappointment in Huckabee’s pettiness:

"As a former candidate myself for the GOP Presidential nomination in 2000, I understand the disappointment Governor Huckabee must feel about his failure to win the GOP Presidential nomination in 2008. It is unfortunate, however, at a time when the GOP needs to close ranks and seek unity, that Governor Huckabee in his new book has aimed his fire at his fellow Republicans.

"In addition, Governor Huckabee expresses frustration that when he sought my endorsement in 2006 and 2007, I was concerned about issues of national security and military strength in addition to values issues. I plead guilty. The defense of the United States at a time we are at war with jihadists should be the concern of every American. Indeed, I did not endorse Governor Huckabee in 2008, because I reached the conclusion he did not sufficiently understand national security issues. That was a "deal breaker" for me as I believe it was for many other conservatives.

"In spite of our disagreements, I look forward to working in the future with Governor Huckabee to build a Republican party that is committed to smaller government, lower taxes, a strong national defense, the sanctity of life and family values."

All I can say about this statement is that it is obviously based on the Time summary of the book and not on having read the book itself.  And I can say that because I am currently in the process of reading it myself and Huck makes it pretty clear that he has no use for the likes of Bauer, whom he calls “politically clueless,” as he sees himself as one of the new leaders of the Religious Right movement, along with a bevy of currently fringe right-wing figures who supported his campaign, such as Janet Porter, David Barton, and Rick Scarborough.

This summer, Douglas MacKinnon released a novel entitled “The Apocalypse Directive” in which a fundamentalist US President uses his office to try to destroy the enemies of Christianity and bring about the apocalypse.  Roll Call offered this summary:   

Set in the near future, the novel centers on Ian Campbell, the deputy chief of staff to President Shelby Robertson, a religious zealot whose presidential decisions are based solely on his extreme view of Christianity. Campbell doesn’t share those beliefs; he’s a former Navy SEAL who’s jaded by the whole business of organized religion.

But to get the coveted White House gig, Campbell tricks Robertson into believing he shares the president’s religious views. Soon, Robertson is welcoming Campbell into a secret group calling themselves the “Christian Ambassadors,” whose goal is to advance the cause of Christianity and destroy those who oppose it.

Campbell soon learns that Robertson and his crew, made up of top military men and other government officials, are planning to launch a full-scale nuclear war to rid the earth of nonbelievers. Still fooling Robertson, Campbell is put in charge of a secret bunker built to provide a place for the Ambassadors to hide out during the slaughter, and he uses his new role to get more details on Robertson’s deadly plan before it is too late.

The use of the last name Robertson for this fictional president was undoubtedly intentional … but it turns out that it wasn’t actually a Pat Robertson presidency that MacKinnon was afraid of, it’s a Mike Huckabee one:

While doing publicity for my new novel “The Apocalypse Directive,” a number of interviewers asked me who served as the inspiration for the Evangelical President of the United States who professes to speak directly to God and so twists his Christian faith, that he is preparing to carry out the most heinous act known to humankind?  Other than stressing that it was not George W. Bush, I mostly left the question unanswered as I moved on to the next subject.

Mike Huckabee’s renewed, juvenile, and un-Christian written assault on former rival Mitt Romney compels me to admit that it was he who served as the inspiration for the evil character.

I should probably point out as well that MacKinnon is not exactly some wild-eyed liberal:

Douglas MacKinnon was a press secretary to former Senator Bob Dole. He was also a writer for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush and a special assistant for policy and communications in the Defense Department.

Sarah Posner sends a dispatch from inside the most recent Council for National Policy gathering, the secretive right-wing umbrella group that vowed to bolt the GOP if Rudy Giuliani was the nominee and whose members wept tears of joy when John McCain tapped Sarah Palin as his running mate:

While the CNP was trying to look to the future last week, it seemed hopelessly enamored of its aging leaders. When I arrived to meet Warren Smith, the conservative evangelical activist and journalist who had invited me to chat, we ambled past anti-evolutionist Ken Ham, who was holding court to a small but rapt audience in the hallway; eyed Left Behind author and CNP co-founder Tim LaHaye, who was shuffling in and out of the "CNP Networking Room;" caught a glimpse of Rick Santorum, who since being booted out of his Senate seat has led the charge against "radical Islam" from his perch at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center; and spotted the religious right's anti-feminism doyenne Phyllis Schlafly, 84, who had earlier that day delivered a speech to the CNP Youth Council on how to "find your place in the conservative movement."

…

Although the CNP's meetings are closed to the press, Smith filled me in on some details: Conservative direct-mail entrepreneur Richard Viguerie, a patriarch of the modern conservative movement, rallied the troops by pointing to prior comebacks, from Reagan to Gingrich to Bush. Viguerie, Smith told me, "is saying that we need to fight for conservative ideas and conservative values and not worry about who embraces them." Smith added that the group talked "about changing the culture, entertainment, media, TV" -- a longtime goal of the religious right's dominionism that it seeks to achieve by taking over social, cultural, and government institutions, much like religious-right figures are now plotting their new takeover of the Republican National Committee.

"What I'm hearing is that there is no loyalty to the Republican Party," said Smith, meaning no loyalty to the party as constituted but loyalty to one purged of insufficiently conservative members. "What Richard Viguerie talks about is not a third party but a third wave. Basically there needs to be a flowering of grass-roots conservative activism and local groups, local PACs. He's basically saying you've got a Republican county commissioner in Buzzard's Breath, Texas, and he's not a conservative? Run a conservative against him."

…

[A]ctivist and radio host Janet Porter, an early Huckabee backer in the 2008 campaign, told me she favored either Palin or Huckabee in 2012. Porter is straight out of the wing of the movement that is all frothing ideology, and no stone-cold strategy. That explains her ongoing fixation with the long-debunked lie that Barack Obama does not have a U.S. birth certificate, and her attempt to stop the electoral college from voting next month in the formality that will officially make him president.

Porter insists that Obama has not produced a U.S. birth certificate (he has) and that he was actually born in Kenya (he was born in Hawaii). She claims to be awaiting the results of the lawsuits filed by attorney Philip J. Berg, whose effort to halt the presidential election because of the alleged question of Obama's U.S. citizenship was rebuffed by the United States Supreme Court.

When I asked Porter about the mood around the CNP meeting, she said, "My mood is more upbeat than those who don't actually know these cases are being filed and that there's actually still a chance to maintain the freedom that we have. We're not going away. Win or lose, whether this goes through, whether it amounts to anything, we just believe that [for] something this important we need the answers. And we're going to fight for freedom, and we're going to use whatever freedom we have until it's taken away with the efforts of hate crimes, ENDA, fairness doctrine, wiping out all the pro-life legislation. Everything's on the line."

My skepticism showed, I suspect. "I think this might be a little more newsworthy than you think," she insisted and handed me a flyer about her effort that read: "Not extreme. Not fringe. Just Constitutional."

Conservative columnist didn’t win any friends among the right-wing die-hards in the Republican Party when she penned a column in September calling on Sarah Palin to drop out of the campaign in order to stop the damage she was doing to John McCain’s campaign and the GOP.  Needless to say, her message did not go over well and the right-wing backlash ended up becoming a story in itself.  

So it is probably safe to assume that her latest column is probably not going to win back any friends among those who see the Religious Right as the foundation of the Republican Party and Sarah Palin as its future:

As Republicans sort out the reasons for their defeat, they likely will overlook or dismiss the gorilla in the pulpit.

Three little letters, great big problem: G-O-D.

I'm bathing in holy water as I type.

To be more specific, the evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy branch of the GOP is what ails the erstwhile conservative party and will continue to afflict and marginalize its constituents if reckoning doesn't soon cometh.

Simply put: Armband religion is killing the Republican Party. And, the truth -- as long as we're setting ourselves free -- is that if one were to eavesdrop on private conversations among the party intelligentsia, one would hear precisely that.

The choir has become absurdly off-key, and many Republicans know it.

But they need those votes!

So it has been for the Grand Old Party since the 1980s or so, as it has become increasingly beholden to an element that used to be relegated to wooden crates on street corners ...

Which is to say, the GOP has surrendered its high ground to its lowest brows.

For its part, the “oogedy-boogedy branch of the GOP” has no intention of letting the so-called moderates in the party throw them overboard.  Nor, as I’ve said before, does the GOP have any incentive to actually do so – at least not until the party can nominate a presidential candidate who openly eschews the Religious Right and still wins the election or the Right gets a dream nominee who makes the right-wing agenda the centerpiece of their campaign and then gets utterly destroyed at the polls.  Until then, the Religious Right and the moderates in the Republican Party are going to be stuck with each other whether they like it or not.

I wrote a post last year noting that the Right-Wing had a lot of different groups under which they pressed the agenda.  On top of their own organizations, a lot of right-wing leaders are also involved in umbrella organizations like the Arlington Group and the Council for National Policy.  There are also various state-level organziations like the "Patriot Pastors" movement and the "Restoration Projects" that are active in places like Texas and Ohio. 

And then there are things like the Iowa Renewal Project, where Mike Huckabee hobnobbed with various right-wing leaders as he rallied to win the Iowa primary.   Apparently there is also one in Georiga as well, which is slated to host Gov. Sonny Perdue, Daivd Barton, Mat Staver and other for a luncheon next week:

Georgia Renewal Project

Cordially invites you to participate in its Pastors' Policy Briefing Luncheon

Rediscovering God in America

With Special Guests

The Honorable Sonny Perdue
Governor of Georgia

and

Historian David Barton
WallBuilders

Who will be accompanied by

The Honorable Bob McEwen
Dr. Mat Staver
and other guest speakers

To be held at the Renaissance Waverly Hotel
2450 Galleria Pkwy, Atlanta, GA 30339
on Tuesday, November 25, 2008.

11:30 AM - 2:30 PM
Registration begins at 11:00 AM.

There will be a reception prior to the luncheon beginning at 11:00 AM.

The luncheon is complimentary and will be provided by the Georgia Renewal Project.

CWA's Beverly LaHaye also seems to be involved, as she is issuing her own invitations to the event.

I have to admit that, as someone who follows this stuff for a living, even I am routinely confused by sheer number of different organizations that have different names, yet all seem to contain the same handful of Religious Right leaders. 

I fully understand the Religious Right's need to explain the trouncing the Republican Party experienced at the polls and fight back against the idea that they were somehow to blame.  I likewise understand their standard post-electoral trick when explaining such losses is to claim that the reason the GOP lost not because of the Right, but because the candidates and the party were not sufficiently committed to their right-wing agenda. 

But what I don't understand is this incessent effort to rewrite history, especially when the time frame at issue was just a few weeks ago:

Some pro-lifers, [Mike] Huckabee said, abandoned the Republican Party in recent years because it failed to stand up for pro-life principles. Democrats took control of the House and Senate in 2006 and then padded their majorities this year.

"We didn't lose elections because we were pro-life," Huckabee said. "We really started losing elections when we didn't act like that mattered. And so, the people who really do care about issues -- whether it's marriage, life, Second Amendment -- felt like, 'If this party isn't going to have a significant different stand than the Democrats, then why not just vote for the Democrats and give them a chance?'"

To hear Huckabee tell it, traditional Religious Right voters have started abandoning the GOP for Democrats because the Republican Party has abandoned the issues that they care about like marriage, abortion, and guns. 

When did that supposedly happen?  I've been watching the Right and the GOP pretty closely for several years now and I don't recall them ever offering up a bunch of pro-gay marriage, pro-choice, anti-gun candidates.  In fact, I don't recall them offering up any such candidates.

And wasn't it just a few weeks ago that the Right was crowing that the Republicans had produced the strongest pro-life, pro-marriage, most conservative platform in party history?

For some reason, the Right is busy trying to convince itself and everyone else that the reason the Republicans lost this time around was because they had become just like Democrats on the social issues that traditionally conservative voters care about which, as anybody whose been paying any attention knows, is not even remotely true.

Just last week I was noting on Janet Porter had squandered whatever tiny shred remained of her credibility when she joined the crackpot right-wing conspiracy theory that Barack Obama (if that is his real name) was not a natural born citizen of the United States and was therefore ineligible to be President.

Today, she takes to the pages of WorldNetDaily, the home of insane right-wing ravings, to explain as cleary as she can that the very existence of the nation is at stake if Obama is not stopped and that "the gallows for our freedoms are already being built": 

The good news is the real election hasn't taken place yet. The Electoral College doesn't meet until Dec. 15. That gives us less than a month to find the answers to the looming questions regarding whether Barack Obama meets the constitutional requirements for the office of president ... If you believe in life, liberty and the family, you already are a target. The henchmen are selected; the gallows for our freedoms are already being built. And the only candidate in history to never move an inch to the center during the campaign has no intentions of changing his agenda of outlawing our viewpoint with the "unfairness doctrine," "thought crimes," "The Employment Non Discrimination Act" the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act and all the rest. As I wrote about in my book, "The Criminalization of Christianity" (which will surely come true if we don't act now), "Never fail to do the right thing for fear that the opposition will attack you in response. The other side can and will attack you anyway, at a time of their own choosing rather than yours, regardless of whether you act" ... In four years, we won't be able to recognize what's left of our country. And if you think taking on this issue right now is hard, try doing it when our radio airwaves are shut down and our freedoms are stripped from us, as he has promised to do. And with Obama's promise to pass the so-called Freedom of Choice Act as "the first thing" he does, you can say goodbye to the notion of protecting unborn children again – and goodbye to every law in all 50 states that notifies parents, keeps our tax dollars from footing the abortion bill and prevents even a single partial-birth abortion ... With God, all things are possible. Eight years ago the election was called for Al Gore, and he never took office. If God is the same today as He was yesterday, He can still split the sea, raise the dead, stop the sun and reverse the results of the popular vote if the basic requirements of the Constitution are not met in the candidate.

Also pushing the case that Obama is ineligible for the office is Alan Keyes and his running mate Wiley Drake, who are claiming that they are really doing Obama a favor by trying to eliminate any "doubt as to the legitimacy of his tenure": 

In response to questions about why the suit was being filed, Ambassador Alan Keyes commented, “I and others are concerned that this issue be properly investigated and decided before Senator Obama takes office. Otherwise there will be a serious doubt as to the legitimacy of his tenure. This doubt would also affect the respect people have for the Constitution as the supreme law of the land. I hope the issue can be quickly clarified so that the new President can take office under no shadow of doubt. This will be good for him and for the nation.”

The scary thing is that these people and their views are not only not shunned by the Republican Party and its right-wing base, but are actually embraced - after all, Porter was co-chair of Mike Huckabee's Faith and Family Values Coalition during his presidential campaign and Keyes was once the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Illinois.

ABC News has an article about a sociologist at Rutgers University who questioned 157 scientists about "their work at the crux of a 2003 political clash between several members of Congress, a Christian lobbyist group called the Traditional Values Coalition and the National Institutes of Health" and found, not surprisingly, that TVC's rabble-rousing put enough pressure on them that "nearly a quarter of respondents said they either modified their studies to seem less controversial or abandoned controversial grant proposals."

I was particularly impressed by this statement by Andrea Lafferty, executive director of Traditional Values Coalition, who admits that she sees no "abuses of science" but plans to continue her crusade against science nonetheless: 

Andrea Lafferty, executive director of Traditional Values Coalition (TVC) in Washington, D.C., sees no "abuses of science" but agrees that with the new administration, the content of grant proposals is likely to expand.

"My main idea is the NIH ATM machine is going to re-open in 09," said Lafferty. "It's some guys in their jammies at universities drinking beer asking, 'hey, how can we study how prostitutes spread disease?' Then they take it to the NIH" ... "NIH has always been treated like a sacred cow ... scientists overall don't believe in God, and they don't want to be questioned," she said. "These people want to say it's just TVC but you take what we find is being studied, go to any grocery store and ask people what they think. Taxpayers would be outraged."

So the NIH is primarily just a slush fund for drunken, PJ-clad atheists looking for a way to consort with prostitutes? How come I didn't know about this? More importantly, how do I apply for a grant?

The Hill has an odd article about how conservative and right-wing bloggers are actually looking forward to the coming Obama Administration and Democratic control of Congress as an opportunity for it to develop into a powerful force that will reshape the Republican Party:

A Washington in the hands of Democrats offers online pundits on the right a fresh political target and a chance to vent against their ideological opponents. The reverse scenario allowed their liberal counterparts to blossom during the blogosphere’s infancy, when the GOP controlled the Congress and the Bush administration held power between 2003 and 2006 ...

“The rightosphere will be much better when the right has something to oppose,” said Jon Henke, who writes at The Next Right.

Obama and Democrats will eventually provide conservatives with a “unifying grievance” that they can seize on. On the Democratic agenda could be universal healthcare proposals that would expand government programs, union-backed card-check legislation that would allow workers to bypass secret-ballot elections when unionizing, and calls to reverse momentum to expand offshore drilling, Henke said.

Being in the opposition is also a natural posture for conservatives, who want smaller government but have seen GOP lawmakers in the last few years create more federal programs, expand the deficit and spend greater sums of taxpayer dollars.

“It’s hard to be anti-state when you are state,” Henke said.

Presumably, the desired outcome of this effort will be for Republicans to eventually retake the White House and Congress and actually govern, which is something these bloggers seem to be admitting they aren't all that good at or interested in.

After all, if they are "much better when they have something to oppose" and can't complain about the state when they are the state, what exactly do they intend to do if their plan actually bears fruit and they someday end up back in control?

Hopefully they'll figure out that puzzle before they actually end up in power. It's kind of important.

The Family Research Council is getting fed up with suggestions within the Republican Party that its best hope for winning future elections is to jettison the Religious Right base of the party and are warning that efforts to actually do so will all but spell doom for the GOP :

To those of us in the pro-family movement, the Establishment's diatribe is a familiar one. When the GOP succeeds because of social conservatives, our importance is ignored. When the party fails for overlooking us, values voters are somehow to blame. With the exception of Gov. Sarah Palin and some hollow overtures by the Democratic Party, the 20 percent of voters who cited "moral values" as their first or second priority in this election had no real horse in this race. Maybe that explains why believers were less active in this election cycle. More than four million Americans who go to church more than once a week and voted in 2004 stayed home on November 4. Those voters would have made up half the difference between McCain and Obama. As the members of the Republican party jockey for position in this brave new Congress and sort out their internal leadership, a commitment to life and marriage is non-negotiable. Without it, the prospects of a Republican revival are bleak.

It is interesting that FRC focuses on the decline among voters who attend church more than once a week as evidence that it was the demoralization among "values voters" that doomed McCain because, while exit polls from 2004 and 2008 do show such a decline, they also show that the number of voters who attend church "weekly" actually increased by nearly half a million (though as an overall percentage of the voting population such voter were down slightly from 2004, there was an increase in actual numbers due to greater turnout.)  And among those voters, Barack Obama did substantially better than did John Kerry. 

So one way to interpret that is to say that, despite all their talk, the Religious Right and the GOP cannot claim to be the sole political representatives of religiously active voters.  Of course, that would only end up undermining the very case that FRC is trying to make which is why they chose to highlight this specific subgroup as "proof" that the GOP needs to wed itself to the so-called "values voters" if it wants to win elections.

Grover Norquist has decided to request a government bailout: 

I write today to formally request $700 billion from the TARP Capital Purchase Program. Since unionized auto companies, state and local governments, and certain credit card companies are applying, I thought I should, as well … I have a plan for this $700 billion which should be just what’s needed to get the American economy going.  Since the money came from the taxpayers in the first place, I propose giving it back to them.

I suspect that he is trying to make a joke because he tells the Treasury Department to “consult my staff for any ACH transfer information your people may need.”  As anybody familiar with Norquist already knows, that’s not how he operates at all. 

If he was serious about getting funding for his operations, he’d just have Jack Abramoff swindle some Indian tribes out of millions of dollars and then funnel the money to him via his Americans for Tax Reform.  And he certainly wouldn't pass the rest on to the taxpayers; instead he would take a large cut and the rest would go to people like Ralph Reed in order to cover the money trail and nobody would find out until a Senate investigation uncovered the illegal activity and a bunch of people went to jail.

All this time I assumed that the National Black Republican Association was nothing but a humorless right-wing fringe group that nobody took seriously, but it must be far more powerful than I had imagined as it apparently has the capacity to absolve White Americans of their sins and guilt: 

White Guilt Emancipation Declaration

We, black American citizens of the United States of America and of the National Black Republican Association, do hereby declare that our fellow white American citizens are now, henceforth and forever more free of White Guilt.

This freedom from White Guilt was duly earned by the election of Barack Hussein Obama, a black man, to be our president by a majority of white Americans based solely on the color of his skin.

Freedom is not free, and we trust that the price paid for this freedom from White Guilt is worth the sacrifice, since Obama is a socialist who does not share the values of average Americans and will use the office of the presidency to turn America into a failed socialist nation.

Granted this November 4, 2008 - the day Barack Hussein Obama was elected as the first black president and the first socialist president of the United States of America.