I spent some time reading a lengthy piece in the Texas Observer this morning about recently announced GOP presidential candidate Gov. Rick Perry of Texas. It's a well written and thorough article, the kind of reporting that makes me feel like the Observer might become the next Anchorage Daily News of sorts as it serves up informative local reporting on a wingnut governor while the national media swoons.
Thus far, the GOP presidential field is pretty uninspiring. Some are taken more seriously than others, but in general I don't think anyone (their base included), expects any of the current crop of candidates to mount a realistic challenge to President Obama's reelection prospects. For that same reason, none of the current candidates really scare me. President Bachmann or President Palin would be categorically awful, but the chances of that ever happening are so incredibly remote that it's not really worth fretting over.
I don't think you can say the same for Perry. I would still place his chances of beating Obama as something of an uphill climb at this point, but the thing he has that the other candidates do not are those certain unique qualities that make him "serious" and leave the national media waxing poetic to the point of breathlessness. He talks in a folksy, southern drawl, he has deeply held religious beliefs, he straps on a laser sighted gun when he jogs, etc. The media eats that shit up. That and we are a profoundly stupid country, and just because we elected a know-nothing, Bible-thumping, dumb fuck Texan once doesn't mean that we won't do it again. His potential electability, coupled with the fact that the media at large will largely paper over or ignore his extremist religion and just what that would mean were he elected, are what scares me. He's the first candidate of the field about which I can make that statement.
Schlueter, Long and other prayer warriors in a little-known but increasingly influential movement at the periphery of American Christianity seem to think so. The movement is called the New Apostolic Reformation. Believers fashion themselves modern-day prophets and apostles. They have taken Pentecostalism, with its emphasis on ecstatic worship and the supernatural, and given it an adrenaline shot.
The movement’s top prophets and apostles believe they have a direct line to God. Through them, they say, He communicates specific instructions and warnings. When mankind fails to heed the prophecies, the results can be catastrophic: earthquakes in Japan, terrorist attacks in New York, and economic collapse. On the other hand, they believe their God-given decrees have ended mad cow disease in Germany and produced rain in drought-stricken Texas.
Their beliefs can tend toward the bizarre. Some consider Freemasonry a “demonic stronghold” tantamount to witchcraft. The Democratic Party, one prominent member believes, is controlled by Jezebel and three lesser demons. Some prophets even claim to have seen demons at public meetings. They’ve taken biblical literalism to an extreme. In Texas, they engage in elaborate ceremonies involving branding irons, plumb lines and stakes inscribed with biblical passages driven into the earth of every Texas county.
If they simply professed unusual beliefs, movement leaders wouldn’t be remarkable. But what makes the New Apostolic Reformation movement so potent is its growing fascination with infiltrating politics and government. The new prophets and apostles believe Christians—certain Christians—are destined to not just take “dominion” over government, but stealthily climb to the commanding heights of what they term the “Seven Mountains” of society, including the media and the arts and entertainment world. They believe they’re intended to lord over it all. As a first step, they’re leading an “army of God” to commandeer civilian government.
In Rick Perry, they may have found their vessel. And the interest appears to be mutual.
Umm, yeah. If that doesn't frighten you, it should. Perry finds himself at the head of an enormous shadow group formed for the sole purpose of subtly establishing a permanent theocracy in America. And these lunatics believe ancient demons control the Democratic party, which more or less already fits in with the standard GOP position. I've written here many times about how Obama cares little for liberals or true progressive policies, simply because they will always come home to roost and vote for him. And in the face of zealots like these, that's certainly true. But it also works on the other side of the aisle as well. They've spent so much time propping up Obama as the most evil Satanic Hitler since the original Hitler that it doesn't matter how your average conservative voter feels about Perry's extremist religion or affiliations, they're going to pull the lever for him anyway because the alternative is Satanic Hitler.
Lucky for us in these savage times, they have a unique solution to all that ails the country:
“With the economy in trouble, communities in crisis and people adrift in a sea of moral relativism, we need God's help,” Perry says in a video message on The Response website. “That's why I'm calling on Americans to pray and fast like Jesus did and as God called the Israelites to do in the Book of Joel.”
The reference to Joel likely wasn’t lost on Perry’s target audience. Prominent movement leaders strike the same note. Lou Engle, who runs TheCall, told a Dallas-area Assemblies of God congregation in April that “His answer in times of crisis is Joel 2.”
[...]
The Book of Joel describes a crippling drought and economic crisis—sound familiar?—in the land of Judah. The calamities, in Joel’s time and ours, are “sent by God to cause a wicked, oppressive, and rebellious nation to repent,” Bickle told his students.
To secure God's blessing, Joel commands the people to gather in “sacred assembly” to pray, fast, and repent.
As Perry showed recently in the face of a historic drought in Texas, one of his preferred solutions to unprecedented crises is...prayer. Because that is definitely what our country needs now. Sadly, in a way, it may not be that different from what's already going on - send confidence boner signals to the market, and otherwise sit on our hands and just hope and wait for the worst economy in decades to pull itself up by its bootstraps.
These people are sick, and Perry is their golden boy. A standard bearer to carry their dogma and champion their cause all the way to the highest echelons of the halls of power in America. Their perverse brand of religion includes standard brain washing operating procedures - prey on peoples hopes and fears in the midst of pervasive national instability, predict catastrophe and doom if their tenets are not strictly observed, and finally, sell themselves as the only solution to prosperity and righteousness in an increasingly evil world.
Call me an unhinged dirty hippie, but these people scare me far more than Islamic extremists:
The New Apostles talk about taking dominion over American society in pastoral terms. They refer to the “Seven Mountains” of society: family, religion, arts and entertainment, media, government, education, and business. These are the nerve centers of society that God (or his people) must control.
Asked about the meaning of the Seven Mountains, Schlueter says, “God's kingdom just can’t be expressed on Sunday morning for two hours. God’s kingdom has to be expressed in media and government and education. It’s not like our goal is to have a Bible on every child’s desk. That’s not the goal. The goal is to hopefully have everyone acknowledge that God’s in charge of us regardless.”
[...]
“We’re going to influence it,” Schlueter told his congregation. “We’re going to infiltrate it, not run from it. I know why God’s doing what he’s doing...He’s just simply saying, ‘Tom I’ve given you authority in a governmental authority, and I need you to infiltrate the governmental mountain. Just do it, it’s no big deal.’ I was talking with [a member of the congregation] the other day. She’s going to start infiltrating. A very simple process. She’s going to join the Republican Party, start going to all their meetings. Some [members] are already doing that.
Isn't that cute? They don't want Bibles on every desk in America (yet). They just want us to, you know, be lovers of Christ. I'm sure.
In any other country in the developed world, a Perry candidacy would be laughed off the national stage. But here in America, it is heralded and embraced, you know, because we are a center right nation and the Founding Fathers were huge Bible thumpers and Jebus lovers and all that. I think the GOP field is going to come down to a pitched battle between Romney and Perry, but in my opinion, Perry stands a much better chance to become the nominee. Unlike the Democrats, the Republican brand cares very little for the center of the electorate or the political whims of independents. The only sort of outreach they do to these demographics is their endless vomit cyclone of misinformation and propaganda on the off chance that they can convince a few centrist morons that their policies aren't as ludicrous and misguided in theory as they are in practice. Outside of that, their primary goal is to roil their base into a feverish and energized froth and to maintain that pitch through Election Day by means of a persistent stream of red meat and hyper polarized media. And a Perry candidacy is the perfect foil for just that. Perry's brand of religious extremism and Texan macho real murkin swagger will crystallize the Republican base and tea baggers alike, as if these two things were mutually exclusive to begin with. Perry's special love of Jebus will coalesce the anti-gay/anti-Muslim/anti-anything-not-white-and-Christian/pro-life social conservatives, while his deregulatory, free-market-knows-best, low-tax love of plutocracy will almost certainly deliver the mouth breathing tea bagger vote. That's a feature, not a bug. They don't want or need independents when they have a firebrand candidate around which their most ignorant and staunchest supporters can rally, emboldened by their efforts at the state level to disenfranchise or otherwise bar reliably Democratic constituents from ever making it to the polls.
And he must never be allowed to take the White House. If flagging Dems needed a rallying cause for 2012, it has just arrived.
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