WHY PRESIDENT BUSH IS USING APPOINTEE’S TO DISTANCE HIMSELF FROM EMBARRASSING “CHRISTIANS”

The Bush administration has finally displayed embarrassment over the hate-filled rhetoric spewing from the so-called Evangelical Christian Right (ECR).  ECR members are frequently called “Christian-Zionists” as Ariel Sharon proudly refers to them, or “Judeo-Christians”, or “Dispensationalists” as they sometimes call themselves.  Whatever their label, the ECR has shocked many mainstream churchgoers with their anti-Muslim hate-rhetoric containing virulently racist overtones.  The bigotry has become all too obvious, and is resulting in growing revulsion even among those misguided, non-ECR Christians who have otherwise supported the Administration.  The President has been forced to distance himself from those who constitute his most feverish support base for war with Iraq.  The Administration fanned the fire, but now is forced to cool it just a bit.

Here is how the London Guardian’s New York correspondent, Oliver Burkeman, sees it in his November 15th story:

    “Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, condemned America‘s Christian Right yesterday for      propagating hatred against Muslims, in what appeared to be a coordinated White House campaign to confront anti-Islamic rhetoric from a constituency that includes some of the Bush administration’s staunchest supporters. 
    “Days after the televangelist Pat Robertson said on his Christian Broadcasting Network that ‘what the Muslims want to do to the Jews is worse than the Holocaust’, Mr. Powell told a gathering in Washington: ‘This kind of hatred must be rejected.’
    “The escalation in anti-Muslim comments from conservative Christians includes a recent claim by Jerry Falwell, the country’s leading right-wing Baptist, that the prophet Mohammed was ‘a terrorist’.
    “Veteran evangelist Jimmy Swaggart followed that this week by calling Mohammed a ‘sex deviant’ and a pervert and demanding that Muslim students in the US be expelled.  ‘We ought to tell every other Muslim living in this nation that if you say one word, you’re gone,’ he said.”   -end Guardian quote.

An anti-Islamic theme has been promoted from the White House, as most fair minded observers would admit.  It is a theme repeated everywhere by the media, which has galvanized the ECR to the point that they believe their aberrant theology is not only