(cross-posted, with fun editorial cartoons, at CampaignSilo.com):

So thirteen percent of people think Barack Obama is a Muslim. An unprecedented crisis in public ignorance? "Not so," said my dad, because Will Gorenfeld is a Civil War buff, or rather a pre-Civil War buff, who knows everything about the year 1856, and believes nothing is new under the sun. "There were rumors," he said, "that John C. Frémont was secretly a Catholic."

(cross-posted at the new Firedoglake site, CampaignSilo.com):

While Obama was giving a pretty good speech in Berlin, conservative bloggers felt a cold breeze blowing across American history, reminding them of History Channel documentaries with names like Hitler: The Rise of Evil. While others were merely riled-up-as-usual by any country that doesn't speak English—like NextRight's Patrick Ruffini, who's aggrieved that an event in Germany was publicized using handbills printed in German—some plunged further into dread.

R.I.P., Tony Snow. Here's how he got his job at the Rev. Moon's Washington Times, from my book.

* * *

On April 14, 1987, opinion editor Bill Cheshire walked into the office of [editor and acid-tongued Washington man of mystery] Arnaud de Borchgrave, with a secretary and three editorialists, each carrying letters that read, "I hereby resign . . . because of the breach of certain agreements of which you are well-aware."

Managing editor Josette Sheeran, a high-ranking member of the Moon sect and the paper’s liaison to the True Father and publisher, turned pale. When the first editor and CEO, Jim Whelan, had quit in 1984, it was easy to explain as a personality clash. But five people leaving? "They thought we would be dutiful little conservatives and do what we were told," says editorialist John Seiler, the last to hand in his badge. "Good riddance," he remembers de Borchgrave shouting after him.

I have no jokes left to tell about the Rev. Moon, publisher of the Washington Times and sponsor of the Bush family. As the story grows increasingly lurid, wretched and morally objectionable, I often feel like Elliot Gould as the detective in Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye: "Nobody cares but me." Well, or me and Ed Brayton.

But then a hero columnist like the Houston Chron's Rick Casey comes along with this deadpan bombshell: "Did Bush sip Moon's 'holy juice'?"

Jeremiah Wright? Come on.

The Moonies have just trumpeted the latest delegation of their dreaded leader, Sun Myung Moon, to the Bush presidential library in College Station, TX. The occasion: a statesmanlike party Moon was throwing in D.C., from April 28 to May 2, 2008, celebrating his dreams of influencing world events and burying Jesus Christ.

The host: George H.W. Bush.

While everyone was bickering over Jeremiah Wright, legendary ex-Newsweek reporter Robert Parry--my hero and the most fearless journalist in America, was in his ConsortiumNews.com studio, cutting his latest bombtrack. I hope this doesn't get ignored because of primary politix.

In a world where the right wing controls the debate, Parry writes,

[I]t's not news that a viciously anti-American religious figure has invested billions of dollars in financing the U.S. conservative movement and put fat wads of cash into the pockets of many prominent Republicans, including members of President George W. Bush's own family.

Jeremiah Wright? Come on.

Thanks to DarkSyd's excellent diaries, we've already had the pleasure of meeting Sun Myung Moon, the mad '70s cult leader whose billions bought him a ludicrous seat at the table of the Right coalition.

Now I want you to meet his deputy, Chung Hwan Kwak. Mr. Kwak is the corporate official directly in charge of the conservative Washington Times and UPI. Here he is with the Bushes:

This is from a Korean news show. A reporter was touring Kwak's office, and the cult leader proudly showed him this photo, which the camera zoomed in on. (We'll come back later to this fascinating picture, which has just become public knowledge.)

Oh, by the way, if you live in Albuquerque's 18th state senate district, your local anti-gay politician, State Sen. Mark Boitano (R), is a cult member with a violent past. Clearly New Mexico has the shocking story.

The brother of Brian Boitano, the figure-skater, the senator has tried to outlaw gay marriage. He's also one of a generation of politicians groomed by the Reverend Moon, Washington Times publisher, to enter politics and expand Moon's clout. I discovered that Boitano, a family values type, once shot a gun at a car to stop a group of ex-Moonies from moving on with their lives.

Yesterday Rolling Stone's Jeff Sharlet dropped an amazing tidbit. Seems that the Faith-Based Initiative--the Bush plan to send billions of tax dollars hurtling to religious groups--was dreamed up by the geniuses at The Family, the District of Columbia's spiritual mafia and no fans of the Establishment Clause.

Which reminds me. Way back in 2002, below the radar, a bunch of God-oriented offices sprang up within the Department of Labor and other secular agencies. The idea was to grease the path of dollar bills from the U.S. government to social programs inspired by one deity or another.

So I decided to get in touch on behalf of a controversial faith--the fictitious congregation from H.P. Lovecraft's classic horror stories, about a terrifying fiend from the deep. I was just cleaning out my closet and found this:

Word was, earlier this month, that the Reverend Moon's wretched Washington Times was going mainstream with the arrival of John Solomon. Known to Media Matters fans for his questionable attacks on John Edwards, Solomon was being pitched to us as the guy who would usher the Times into being a real newspaper. No more scare quotes around the word "gay," for example!

Today, though, Think Progress reports that Mr. Solomon has assured the conservative Heritage Foundation that he hasn't "drunk the Kool-Aid" of the Washington Post. Which is kinda funny considering his new boss literally commands cult members to drink "Holy Juice" symbolizing the blood of Reverend Moon.

Yeah, Romney's out of the race. But Robert Lichfield, a Republican bigshot from Utah who was his most controversial fundraiser, remains in serious need of scrutiny for what he's doing to American kids, even if this particular Red State horror is no longer part of the 2008 election.

Lichfield runs an extremely profitable network of "tough love" private schools for American teenagers. He's based in Utah, but his dungeon-like punishment center, Tranquility Bay, is run in Jamaica, beyond the reach of U.S. law. He had to leave the Romney campaign after it emerged that he was facing hundreds of child abuse complaints, including stories of children locked in dog cages.

A special treat awaits after the jump.

So the big story out of Rev. Moon's Washington Times is that the new editor, John Solomon of the AP, will supposedly be remaking it into a normal, mainstream newspaper. Yesterday I related this claim to a Japanese journalist friend of mine, a longtime chronicler of cults who was once followed to his New York hotel by the Moonies, who own the influential national paper--and one in his homeland, too. He couldn't believe any American would fall for such a claim.

Former Washington Times contributing writer Bill White (right) is behind harassment of writer Leonard Pitts, Jr.

Quite a number of African-American community leaders have welcomed the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, Washington Times publisher, as a modern-day Martin Luther King, Jr. One commentator has called him a role model for black fatherhood, even hailing his mass weddings as an antidote to "the imagined lure of thug life."

In fact, as Bill Berkowitz reported, such have been the efforts of the Unification Church to identify itself with the black civil rights legacy that it won $80,000 in federal funds to celebrate King's birthday. Moon's son, the charming Hyun Jin, has even said: "It has been my father's work that's really raised Martin Luther King onto the national level, to be respected nationally."
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(Cross-posted at Talk2Action)

(Mike Signorile is on this story too.)

He thought the "God Hates Fags" church had the right idea, after watching footage of the Rev. Fred Phelps and his vile kin. And he said as much in a heartfelt post the other day to Jeremy Hooper's gay rights blog, Good As You. "[T]ry to understand where [Phelps] is coming from," he said.

But then the proprietor of Good As You discovered  that this was no ordinary Phelps fan, but a senior official in a fancy anti-gay group housed at the Washington Times building.

(Cross-posted at Talk2Action.)

Word comes from FishbowlDC that George H.W. Bush, the 41st president, and the Reverend Moon, pontiff of the Potomac, are to share a stage May 17. The occasion: the 25th anniversary of the Washington Times, the enigmatic hard right newspaper.

In 2004, U.S. Senator John Warner said Moon's representatives had "deceived" him into signing off on a Capitol Hill ritual in which Moon dressed up like the Emperor Napoleon, and pronounced himself "God's ambassador." You would think Bush would be given pause by a long record of such behavior: Moon's claim to be Jesus Christ's replacement; his reputation among the Southern Baptists as a "wolf in sheep's clothing." But it turns out, their decades-long association has withstood many such bumps in the road. (More after jump.)

Inside the magical thinking of a Guantanamo Bay fan:

I recently chatted with bestselling atheist author and waterboarding enthusiast Sam Harris, then wrote a piece on his work for AlterNet. In our chat, his gusto for smearing fake menstrual blood on Muslim prisoners was disarming, as was the credence he loans theories of ESP and reincarnation.

In times like these, when empirical reason itself is attacked by a White House whose aides believe, like New Age mystics, in "creating your own reality," the End Of Faith author has written a pious monument to our fearful and superstitious times. Widely embraced by progressives, his work offers a jarring combination of Dennis Prager-ish Islamophobia, Fox News arguments for torture as well as Eastern religion, awkwardly linked with crowd-pleasing attacks on Christianity.

He's the robot who takes on the MSM and he's back in business: celebrated pundit R. Robot, the world's first self-writing weblog. Enter the name of a friend or enemy, and he'll automatically compose a preposterous, Jonah Goldberg-style assault on his/her outrageous acts of seditious treason.

Originally a take-off on Andrew Sullivan, I built him in 2003, and from time to time have updated his list of "traitors." Since Little Green Footballs hasn't really budged since then, I don't think the joke has dated much. The robot broke down a couple years ago, but thanks to WordPress he's back in business, as unsparing as ever. Is it time to give R. Robot his own L.A. Times column?

(Cross-posted from Talk2Action.)

Warnings flood the airwaves that there is a war on Christmas and Christendom, and everyone knows who's waging it: the liberals.  Outgunned in the God department by the Republican Party and its megachurches, they are erecting Web sites like "Faithful Democrat" in which they meekly ask not to be despised by Middle Americans, who've seen Fox News and the Justice Sunday telecast, and have heard that the out-of-power party is toiling "like thieves in the night, to rob us of our Christian heritage," as the host of that latter event said, his chosen method for saving Christianity from robbers a TV show lamenting that Democrats were blocking Bush's judge picks. Ann Coulter has pronounced Democrats no less than "Godless" in contrast to the GOP.

It is against this seething background of the 21st century that the story of Reverend Moon and the religious right unfolds.