Maureen Dowd on "Rove's Revenge"

In Sunday's NYTimes, Maureen Dowd devotes her column to Karl Rove's motivation. She writes that as a child of age nine, Rove supported Richard Nixon in his presidential-election battle against John Kennedy. Her proposition is that he continues to fight the same battle today against progressive/liberal America. His greatest desire is to turn the world back to a different time -- a time before Vietnam-war guilt, a time before demonstrations for peace, a time before the fight for civil rights -- when there was no gray. Rove longs for the days when every decision the country faced was right or wrong, when there was no middle ground to be argued by 'liberal elites.'

Karl Rove and his surrogate GWBush fight against the New Frontier offered by Kennedy. In the words of Ms. Dowd, "Instead of the New Frontier, Karl and W. offer the New Backtier." It is Ms. Dowd's assertion that "this White House's frontier is not a place of infinite progress and expansion, stretching society's boundaries. It doesn't battle primitivism; it courts primitivism." She cites Bush's pledges to overhaul Social Security, Medicare, and the tax code. She mentions Bush's desire to once again mix church and state, to replace science with religion, and to replace fact with faith. She argues that faith in politics has not always been so at odds with fact and science.

Jimmy Carter won the evangelical vote in 1976, and he won it in Ohio. He combined his evangelical appeal with a call for social justice, integrating his church and laboring for world peace. But W. appealed to that vote's most crabbed insecurities - the disparaging of the other, the fear of those godless hedonists in the blue states out to get them and their families. And the fear of scientific progress, as with stem cell research.

When William Jennings Bryan took up combating the theory of evolution, he did it because he despised the social Darwinists who used the theory to justify the "survival of the fittest" in capitalism. Bryan hated anything that justified an economic system that crushed poor workers and farmers, and he hated that the elites would claim there was scientific basis for keeping society divided and unequal.

The new evangelicals challenge science because they've been stirred up to object to social engineering on behalf of society's most vulnerable: the poor, the sick, the sexually different.

Yet the Bush conservatives do their own social engineering. They thought they could toughen up the American character with the invasion of Iraq. Now they want to reshape the country on "moral" issues - though their morality seems to allow them to run a campaign full of blatant distortions and character assassination, and to mislead the public about the war.

Basically, Ms. Dowd shares the same thoughts that most of us feel after the victory for the incumbent. This administration and its adherents have no use for social justice, assistance for the poor or elderly, or an overarching necessity to be good stewards of the environment. This administration is in favor of big business at the expense of all else. It favors the 'moral issues' of pro-life -- except in the case of war or the death penalty or the respectful treatment of prisoners -- and of pro-family -- except in the case where a family does not consist of one man, one woman, and their children (even a single parent would not fit this pro-family agenda; in fact, the newly elected Republican Senator from South Carolina would not want a single-mother to be a public school teacher!!)

Are these really 'Christian values'? Would not Jesus have embraced the down-trodden? Did not Jesus speak out against the accumulation of wealth? (Read Luke 6:20 - 49 -- For example: "Woe unto you that are rich! for you have received your reward. Woe unto you that are full! for you shall hunger.") A true Christian understands that God (and Jesus) calls men and women to help their fellow humans, to support each other, and to provide for the needs of the many rather than of the few. As you reflect on your vote this week, did you really follow the words of Jesus? Were the 'moral issues' that influenced your vote the issues of the weak and the oppressed, or were they the two issues that the Republican Party told you represented 'moral issues'?