Brody is such a rube.

Uh, my question is what type of "spirituality" is DeMint talking about? As far as I can see, for example, his "C street" Republican pals seem to have some issues with that sanctity of marriage part.

The hypocrisy is just mind-bending.

DeMint does not see a movement built around spirituality. He sees a movement built around the cynical exploitation of ignorance and intolerance.

I sorta, kinda, agree with DeMint, in a way. I think there is a religious revival happening on the right, and I think it could ally with the Tea Partiers. The two groups certainly share resentment toward "liberal" elites-- so it's not a ridiculous notion. I also think that people who are principally libertarians are an itty-bitty minority, so that's just not a factor here.

Steve Benen wrote: "Conservatives are going to have to figure this out eventually. One side wants smaller government in all instances; the other wants bigger government on issues related to gays, abortion, religion, and marriage."

The ruthless, rapacious, reactionary corporate oligarchs who are behind the fake, phony, trumped-up, Madison Avenue-scripted, focus-group-tested, talk-radio-programmed astroturf pseudo-ideology known as "conservatism" in America today have already "figured this out".

Just keep lying to both sides.

After all, that's the whole point of using the phony "conservative" media to keep both those groups of Ditto-Heads stupid and ignorant and gullible: you can feed them any line of idiotic, self-contradictory BS you want and they will swallow it.

The Republican party is an equal opportunity exploiter. They'll go with whoever is getting the biggest crowds and headlines at the moment, although the Teabaggers are a lot more quixotic and fragmented bunch than the Taliban wing ever was. It will be interesting to see how this all works out.

Sort of like watching the Cybermen duke it out with the Daleks, for those of you into Dr. Who.

it would be on thing if the tea partiers really wanted smaller government, but they don't.

what they want is to express their hatred of barack obama: that's the single characteristic that most unifies the tea partiers and distinguishes their outook on issues from the rest of america, the extent of their hatred of obama.

if they were serious about smaller government, they would have come into existence during the bush administration, but they aren't, and we shouldn't treat them as thought they are adult, honest conservatives.

they are childish right-wingers who hate barack obama and that's all they are.

That's a nice try, I suppose, but I'd be surprised if even DeMint actually believed this.

This sentence is true for just about everything DeMint says.

Which part of this 'spiritual' movement is DeMint referring to --

- the spiritual movement that stages loud angry anti-gay protests at military funerals?

- the spiritual movement that describes anyone who disagrees with them as a traitor and threatens to shoot them?

- the spiritual movement that murders doctors?

- the spiritual movement that calls Barney Frank a "faggot" and John Lewis a "nigger"?

- the spiritual movement that wants to treat women as chattel and turn them back into 2nd class citizens?

DeMint and his 'spiritual' conservatives are ignorant, hypocritical, racist scum. Period.

i gotta disagree, blank. i think the really scary thing about deminted is that he does believe that shit... making him really opposed to what most teabaggers want.
what's the old saying: libertarians are republicans who want to smoke dope and get laid?
imo, the only thing that really unites the baggers and the crossburners is a hatred of a 1) black, and 2) democratic president.

I think he believes it... as I have said... if I were the Republicans I would take a few college courses in history, science, public administration and economics... then and only then will they be eady to discuss the future of the country.

Until then, we just have to make sure the crafty and clever politicans are shown up for the intellectual slobs they are.

@Curmudgeon - "Sort of like watching the Cybermen duke it out with the Daleks, for those of you into Dr. Who."

Fantastic!

To be honest, I think there's not that much difference. they're all swimming in the same sewer. I would guess the vast majority of the Tea Baggers would identify as "Christian." It's the same ugliness in slightly different drag.

Hello, these are the same people, they just happened to pissed for different reasons today. Last decade they were screaming at abortion clinic doctors, today they are screaming at liberal lawmakers.

Every teabagger event I have seen clips of some religious nature, not just a prayer, but 'god on my side' crap.

No need to reconcile the same idiots, just point them in the direction you want, give them a sign for the 'cause du jour', and off they go.

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@Curmudgeon - "Sort of like watching the Cybermen duke it out with the Daleks, for those of you into Dr. Who."

So good it had to be complemented a second time.

Have to disagree with Benen here about the fissures in the GOP.

The Tea Partiers aren't really "libertarian" in the philosophical sense employed by ivory tower academics who worship Smith, Hayek, Friedman, and Rand. The tea party base is all pretty socially right wing too: how much pro-gay, pro-choice, pro-drug opinion are you going to find at those things? My guess: almost none. So there's not much of a fault line, just a matter of emphasis in a recession era when economic policy has become primary. All those same folks will still be happily GOP once the culture war comes raging back.

"Libertarian" is just a catchy moniker for far right fringers who have come to understand, at least instinctively, that GWB had largely discredited the GOP as an instrument of conservatism. The name gives them the illusion of independence, but as we know from survey data, most "independent" were always already partisan leaners. So they tell themselves that, despite their voting records, they're not REALLY to blame for Bush, while at the same time embracing--and even radicalizing--his disastrous policies.

DeMint is a nut. Not surprisingly, his history is whacked, too. He claims that the founders credited the "Great Awakening" for their spiritual superiority -- but the First Great Awakening started in the 1730's and continued in the 1740's, and had waned by 1750. Of the founders, Adams was only 15 years old in 1750. Jefferson was 7. John Jay was 5. Neither Madison nor Hamilton were born yet.
I suppose Benjamin Franklin may possibly have been personally affected by it -- but from what I know, somehow I doubt Ben Franklin is Jim DeMint's favorite founder.

And I thought most of the Founding Fathers were Deists.

The tea party movement needs to...

Dear Social Conservatives:
Please keep telling the TeaBag crowd what to do. Keep telling them that they have to do this and that for you---right up to (and including) the point where they bite you in the throat.

Thank You.

If there was a religious revival going on do you think Scott Brown a.k.a Mr. Nude Cosmo (and also pro-abortion) would have been supported by them? Hmmm?

DeMint is just blowing smoke to keep the CBN crowd satisfied and on board and certainly among Palin Tea-Partiers there's a religious component. But the reality is Religious Right politics is a dead end. Because the thing a Religious Right persons would want clash very much with the idea of smaller government, especially on the Federal level. The FFC isn't going to ban smut on TV or the radio, Roe v Wade isn't going anywhere, there is going to be a constitutional amendment to allow prayer in school.

In fact many of the issues of interest to the Religious Right are best dealt with on the state and local level. It's there they must go to have any real impact.

One side wants smaller government in all instances

Are you referring to the so-called tea party? I must have missed their calls for massive cuts to Medicare, Social Security and the military.

Or, as usual, what howard said.

No, conservatives don't have to figure this out now any more than they've had to figure it out for last 150 years.

For Christ's sake. Jim DeMint garbles American history almost as badly as Dick Armey, who thinks the ultra-nationalist Alexander Hamilton was a really a small government conservative.

The American Revolution wasn't won before the first shot was fired because it was some kind of "spiritual renewal" as DeMint says. What DeMint was no doubting thinking was John Adams' famous remark that the American Revolution was "won in the hearts and minds" of his countrymen even before Lexington and Concord because Americans were aleady thinking of themselves as Americans.

Don't you just love these flag waving, red, white and blue right wingers who haven't a clue about their own history? Maybe that's why they keep making it up.

My apologies to Sen. DeMint. When I looked up the Adams quote I referenced earlier, it's plain language does speak of a revolution in religious sentiments. And while I disagree with DeMint's conclusion, I can see that the quote could reasonably be used to draw a connection between the revolution and some spiritual renewal.

"The Revolution was effected before the War commenced," said Adams. "The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations. This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people, was the real American Revolution.”

However, it should be said, that the usual context of this quote is that Adams understood a new sense of American nationalism had already taken root before the individual colonies were able to secure their independence as a separate country -- that America existed in spirit before it existed in fact. And this is why, for example, a conservative like Edmund Burke, who believed in the natural, organic evolution of nations, could support the American Revolution against his own country while opposing what he thought to be the artificial and ideological revolution which took place in France just a few years later.

@ Ted Frier: I don't think that "religious sentiments" in the Adams quote has much to do with actual religion. I think it's a reference to a nationalism that feels as passionate as religion. Anna Laetitia Barbauld does something similar in "Sins of the Government, Sins of the Nation" (1793):

"by national religion I understand the extending to those affairs in which we act in common and as a body, that regard to religion, by which, when we act singly, we all profess to be guided."

FlipYrWhig

I agree entirely. Adams is clearly talking about a new birth of American national feeling in that quote and not religion per se. But since I whacked DeMint for not knowing his history I thought it only fair to say a reasonable person could interpret the quote differently.

Hey, that's my senator you're trashing. Good. Demint is a moron who's also a few bricks shy of a load. Further, he's a cynical manipulator who's up for reelection this year.

Oh, yeah, he'll win. I won't vote for him, but this is South Carolina, after all, where white people still hope for the south to rise again. And, unfortunately, the state where black people do not vote in great numbers. That's a pity, because Demint is a racist, as are many leading lights in this poor state.

And on the Adams quote: you know there is another definition of religious, one that's fallen out of favor in recent years. It involves being conscientious and faithful, without actual reference to church or a god. We're talking 200+ years ago; English usage was not the same as it is now. Adams is mute in this matter, but one can well imagine that he only meant something on the order of diligent, honest, faithful, etc. Adams was not a big religious guy—none of the big founders were—so the interpretation I provide makes as much sense as that provided by Demint.

You also have to consider that I'm not as wacko as Demint, I don't have my hand in your pockets and I'm not trying to infringe on your liberties.

According to Wikipedia:

Influence on political life

Joseph Tracy, the minister and historian who gave this religious phenomenon its name in his influential 1842 book The Great Awakening, saw the First Great Awakening as a precursor to the American Revolution. The evangelical movement of the 1740s played a key role in the development of democratic concepts in the period of the American Revolution.[Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Harvard University Press, 1992 p. 249,273-4, 299-300]

Sounds authentic, but I can't vouch for it.

Cultural conservatives and tea partiers will probably meet up on immigration. A lot of this base seems convinced that the President is a foreigner. Muslims and Mexicans will be the target. For the rest, well, they'll take it from there.

you know there is another definition of religious, one that's fallen out of favor in recent years. It involves being conscientious and faithful

Yes -- as in "I watch that show religiously."