Street roots., November 13, 2009, Page 10, Image 10

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Education * Dialogue ♦ Independence
The last
Republican
Investigative journalist M ax Blumenthal
looked deep into the heart o f the Republican Party.
What he found should make the GOP blush
BY ROSETTE ROYALE
REAL C H A N G E , SEATTLE
ometimes, you admire someone before
you meet him. Such was the case with
Max Blumenthal.
A little more than a year ago, I came
across a YouTube video called “Generation
Chickenhawk,” an eight-minute piece on the
2007 College Republican National
Convention. In it, a whole cadre of young .
men and women, done up in business attire,
wax philosophical about why the Iraq War is'
necessary (“We went there because al
Qâeda is there.”) arid why they hadn’t
enlisted (“I can’t because of medical
reasons.”), all the while, completely
embarrassing themselves. It’s pretty
hysterical. Until you realize how disturbing
it is.
These rightwing lads and lasses were
confessing their opinions to a young, almost
Republican-looking man who was
interviewing them on camera. Who, I
wondered, was he? Turned out his name was
Max Blumenthal. I decided to see what else
he’d done. That search didn’t prove hard.
Basically, Blumenthal could be found just
about everywhere a lefty might search out
information; The Nation, NPR, Democracy
Now!, Thé Rachel Maddow Show, The
Huffington Post," salon.comr^terneLorg; He
provided both print and video journalism for
these and other media outlets, often
focusing on the impact of the conservative
movement on the Republican Party. Not
only was his work damning, but pretty damn
witty.
Tho$e investigative skills, that wit:
They’re all on display in his first book,
“Republican Gomorrah: Inside the
Movement that Shattered the Party” (Nation
Books, $25), an enlightening — and, at
times, terrifying — narrative recounting of
how the Religious Right’s emphasis on
creating a theocracy based on a Christian
G-O-D did a number on the G.O.P. The cast
of characters is huge and their scandals,
legion. It reads like fiction. Too bad it’s fact.
So when Blurhenthal gave a . talk in Seattle
recently, I knew I wanted to meet him. And
thé staïs, they aligned: We wound up having
brunch earlier that day, iri Belltowh. And
over omelets — I had veggie sausage and
Swiss, he had veggie sausage and broccoli —
we took a rightwing tour of Biblical
proportions, with stops iri the Swiss Alps,
the White House, Kiambu, Kenÿa and, of y
course, Wasilla, Alaska.
S
Rosette Royale: “Republican Gomorrah:”
You know, Gomorrah’s a Biblical town that’s
linked to Sodom and, essentially, things didn’t
go so well. So why choose Gomorrah as part of
the title?
Max Blumenthal: Arid ! managed to
look into Gomorrah and not turn into a
pillar of salt
It’s a reference to the Republican
experiment — from the Gingrich Revolution
in ’94 to the end of the Bush era — and
during that time, a Gomorrah-like sea of
scandals exploded into the open, ranging
from the bizarre sexual escapades of
rightwing, supposed family-values
Republicans from Ted Haggard [the
evangelical preacher caught having sex with
a male escort while using methj to Larry
Craig [the former Idaho Republican senator
arrested for lewd conduct in an airport
bathroom] to David Vitter (the Louisiana
Republican senator who frequented a high-
end prostituté’called the “D.Ç. Madam”), to
lesser known figures who did even more
bizarre acts, to the wanton criminality of
Tom DeLay, “Tjie Hammer,” who (was
charged with money laundering and
violating campaign finance laws and) was
the majority leader of Congress. And these
scandals, to me, while they’re entertaining,
they suggest a lot of hypocrisy. I wanted to
go beyond that and show how they reflected
an essential sensibility of the Christian
Right, and haw bridging that movement into
that party brought the party down.
R. R.: When did this movement begin?
You iriention Newt Gingrich.
M. B.: The movement had been building
capacity in the 196Qs, and my narrative s o rt
of starts in the Civil Rights struggle, and
Jerry Falwell was inveighing against Martin
Luther King from the pulpit: He’s attacking
King for being political and laying preachers
shouldn’t be. Falwell was primarily
concerned with his private Christian schools
being integrated and King was a threat to
that. The irony of attacking King as political
can’t be lost — I don’t know how long I can
go with the answer.
R.R.; As lone as you want.
M.B.: So moving from the Deep South
with Falwell, I move to the Swiss Alps, to a
hippie coriimune run by a guy named
Francis Schaeffer, who was the
quintessential Jesus freak. Timothy Leary,
the LSD guru, came to visit him; Jimmy
Page, from Led Zeppelin, was a fan.
After Roe v.-Wade, Schaeffer became
radicalized arid believed the government had
legalized infanticide and went to Washington
D.C. And using his incredible oratory skills
to evangelize the Republican leadership
there, he became friends with Gerald Ford
and helped Falwell start the Moral Majority.
He told Falwell: Forget about this business
M.B.: Well, Martin Luther King reached
the mountaintoparid, like Moses, he saw
the Promised Land. What these people saw
is a theocratic dystopia that they wanted to
create that would have made you and I
second-class citizeris, at best
R.R.: You were recently on MSNBC and
you cited a poll that claims 58 percent of
Republicans don’t believe Obama was bom in
thé U.S.? How can people believe that?
M.B.: It’s a Research 2000 Coast poll
taken in, I think, August of this year.
Republicans started going after him; a video
with Jones referring to Republicans as
“assholes” can be seen on YouTibe).
It all stems from the same “know-nothing-7
ism” of Jhe Right: The belief that Barack
Obama can’t be one of us, the only way to
fix Arnerica is to get all the foreign elements
o ut Including Barack Obama. And they will
not accept alternative forms of information.
They demonize inainstream media: They call
it secular or liberal media. Soriie of them
believe it’s run by the antichrist; 12 percent
of Republicans in New Jersey, according to a
recent Public Policy poll, believe Barack
"1 can't fully account for their mentality, but they're not coming up with these ideas on their
own: It's being instilled in them from demgognes in the media, ranging from Glenn Beck to
more obsure figures who are increasingly influential"
with integration; what we need to do is use
the tactics of Martin Luther King against
abortion, and target abortion clinics and
abortion doctors as a means, jiot just of
stopping abortion, but of unraveling the
underpinnings of secular society. But
, Schaeffer was a sophisticated guy and saw
where Falwell and these characters were
going. He saw Reagan tell Falwell and a /
group of evangelicals, “I know you can’t
endorse me, but I endorse you.” He saw
that it was really becoming all about power,
and that they had this disgusting
homophobic and racist strain^ But Schaeffer
died of cancer in 1985, before he could
denounce the Christian Right
They moved into Washington^ and other
figures took the reins of the movement and
moved it into more of the Republican
mainstream, to the point where they
reached the mountaintop with the reelection
of George W. Bush.
R. R.: A rather unfortunate mountaintop.
They can believe that because their
sources of media are telling them he has no
birth certificate; that he was either born in
a Kenyan salaam or Indonesia; he’s a
foreigner; he might even be a Muslim. It’s a
way to de-legitimize his presidency.
In my book, I talk about how it all started
when Sarah Palin, without the permission of
John McCain and his staffers, attacked
Barack Obama as not one of us: He’s friends
with terrorists, he’s friends of people who
hate America. And that inspired, at these
rallies, cries of “traitor,” and even worse:
racial slurs. It’S all on video.
And it didn’t end when Obama was
inaugurated: It just intensified, to the point
where (Fox News TV host) Glenn Beck
started going after the people that Palin had
named, trying to oust them, people like
(former special advisor to the White House
Council on Environmental Quality) Van. . •
Jones, who 1 know, who’s not really that
radical. And unfortunately, the Obama
administration has capitulated on this. (Van
Jones resigned from his White House
post on Sept .5, months after
Obama is the antichrist. In other words: the
son of Satan.
So I can’t fully account for their mentality,
but they’re, not coming up with these ideas
on their own: It’s being instilled in them
from demagogues iri the media, ranging
from Glenn Beck to more obscure figures
who are increasingly influential.
R.R.: You mention a lot of names. So I
thought maybe I could give you a name and
you could talk a little bit about this person.
Let’s start with Sarah Palin. And your
relationship. [Chuckles.]
M. B.: Yeah, I’m going to Alaska on
Saturday (Sept. 26). It’s my one-year
anniversary.
R.R.:Q/?
.M.B.: Of goirig to her church, that she
spent 20 years in - the Wasilla Assembly of
God — which is a pretty extreme Pentecostal
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