Revenge of the Magic Dolphins
Sorry, duckies, it's too late to turn back the sundial.
by James Wolcott

Peggy Noonan, Charles Krauthammer, and some of the honkers at NRO's Corner are issuing distress calls about the overegging of religion in the Republican primaries.

Noonan:
The Republican race looks--at the moment--to be determined primarily by one thing, the question of religious faith. In my lifetime faith has been a significant issue in presidential politics, but not the sole determinative one. Is that changing? If it is, it is not progress.

Krauthammer:
This campaign is knee-deep in religion, and it's only going to get worse. I'd thought that the limits of professed public piety had already been achieved during the Republican CNN/YouTube debate when some squirrelly looking guy held up a Bible and asked, "Do you believe every word of this book?"--and not one candidate dared reply: None of your damn business.

Back in 2000, when Noonan endorsed George Bush for president, his muscular Christianity reduced her to rhetorical mush:

George Bush is a compassionate conservative. He sees the needs other, older conservatives did not always see, or did not always think they must or could address. But he applies conservative solutions to these needs: more freedom, more choice, the inclusion in the public sphere of faith-based approaches. All the money in the world, he knows, cannot and will not turn around a troubled child’s heart. But God can, and his workers are eager. Bush does not fear faith as an opposing power center to the state. He likes it as an opposing power center to the state. After all, faith freed Poland; perhaps it can free a tough 16-year-old in inner-city Detroit too.

This doesn't sound so very different to me than the compassionate conservativism Mike Huckabee is espousing, as when he rebuked Mitt Romney over wanting to deny college aid to children of illegal immigrants. But now that Mike Huckabee has flapped his arms and scattered the pigeons, jeopardizing the candidacies of expensive empty suits such as Romney and Fred Thompson, not to mention Giuliani's big-state gameplan, the media's collective bobblehead brain trust has rediscovered the virtues of secular firewalls and tucking faith in the vest pocket rather than draping yourself in velvet yards of it. For the last seven years we've been subjected to hero-worshipping prose about Bush's faith and fortitude and his appealing to a "higher father" for guidance and succor, and saintly photographs of the presidential seal forming a golden halo around Bush's warrior profile (Lucianne.com loved running such jawline porn). And for longer than seven years, Democrats have been caricatured and reviled as the party that harbors hostility and sneery condescension towards people of faith and established religion, a godless sect barely indisguishable from a postmodern pagan cult. As liberal Democrats were being pounded from the right, concern trolls in the squishy center knitted their brows about the widening "faith gap" between Repubs and Dems and called for a restoration of religion in the fabled "public square" that doesn't really exist anywhere but inside the minds of journalistic deacons such as Jon Meacham and similar platitude mongers. Recall this serving of unsolicited advice from that bubblegum dispenser and aluminum-sided Beltway Boy, Mort Kondracke:

Democrats Need To 'Get Religion.' It's Not Scary

My post-election advice to Democrats is: Go to church. Don't go to "get religion," although it might be good for your soul. Just go, in the first instance, to "get" religion, i.e. understand what goes on in the heads and hearts of those who devoutly believe in God and how it affects their views of the world. It will help you politically.

I have the distinct impression that many secular Democrats believe that hidden away in most Evangelical Protestant churches is a secret room filled with white Klan sheets or maybe even Swastika armbands.

I have the distinct impression that he probably received that "distinct impression" from his Beltway Boy sidekick Fred Barnes, who in turn probably dug it out of his ass or plucked it out of thin air or whatever it is he does when not scribbling notes to himself on the set of Fox News as the other pundits are speaking.

Now, instead of urging Democrats to find a spot amid the bare ruined choirs, conservatives such as Krauthammer are finding a certain silent eloquence in the abandoned cathedrals that Mitt Romney verbally gestured to as a cautionary tale:

He spoke of the empty cathedrals in Europe. He’s right about that: Postwar Europe has experienced the most precipitous decline in religious belief in the history of the West. Yet Europe is one of the freest precincts on the planet. It is an open, vibrant, tolerant community of more than two dozen disparate nations living in a pan-continental harmony and freedom unseen in all previous European history.

When Bush was at his perihelion of power and popularity, such sentiments were less in circulation from our syndicated columnists.

There was a certain smugness in being able to count on the evangelical wing voting Republican and being sewn up as part of the permanent Rovian majority. But now the permanent Republican majority is a leaking sandbag and the front runner status of a Mormon or thrice-married Catholic threatens to incur the resentment of evangelicals, who don't enjoy feeling they're just allowed to be along for the ride as long as they don't dictate the parade route. Historian Richard Brookhiser, the shrewdest and most dryly acerbic observer at NRO's Corner, recognizes that the internecine strife underway as a self-inflicted folly. This is what happens when purity tests and theological thumb-wrestling take hold in the political process.

Conservatives wanted to cram religion down everyone's throats when they thought it was to their advantage and now they're the ones gagging. For Peggy Noonan, the Magic Dolphin lady herself, who rhapsodized after 9/11 that God was back, for her to lament "that faith has been heightened as a determining factor in how to vote, that such things as executive ability, professional history, temperament, character, political philosophy and professed stands are secondary, tertiary" is a jewel of irony worthy of a giftbox. Let Balloon Juice's John Cole break out the bubbly glee:

I simply can not tell you how much I am enjoying this. The GOP has been pandering to these stupid bastards for years, and every time I pointed it out I was called "anti-Christian" or something or other. Those of us who saw what the party was becoming were told to shut up, that it was good politics.

Enjoy your new GOP, folks. And here is something else to think about--are the evangelicals going to support Romney or Giuliani if you do manage to trash Huckabee enough to secure the nomination for them? Will the eye for an eye crowd learn to forgive and forget? Have fun!