AMERICAN TALIBAN

Great read by Pierre Tristam:

It's time to doff the veil. The United States isn't immune to the fundamentalist El Nino circling the globe. Iran has its mullahs. Afghanistan has its Taliban. Saudi Arabia has its Wahhabites. We have evangelicals, whose world view is different from those doctrinaire brigades in dress only.

What they all have in common is the subordination of private and public conduct to God's law as they understand it and the rejection of the secular values of the Enlightenment on which America's constitutional principles were founded, what historian Garry Wills sums up as "critical intelligence, tolerance, respect for evidence, a regard for the secular sciences."

Quashing those principles may not be what we want as a society. But, for now, it's what we're headed toward. Secularism is by nature accommodating and diffuse where zealotry is grasping and single-minded. And George W. Bush's born-again Republican Party (which has very little to do with Ronald Reagan's GOP and nothing to do with Nelson Rockefeller's and Prescott Bush's) depends for survival on its arranged marriage with evangelicals. The two feed on each other in a symbiosis that will survive so long as national values are defined by the fundamentalists.

Evidence of scandalous presidential deception on, and incompetence in, Iraq; of negligence the summer before the 2001 attacks; of officially sanctioned brutality and torture in military prisons from Guantanamo to Kabul; of routine contempt for due process and other constitutional rights; of wanton cronyism within the administration; of suppressing or faking evidence to manipulate favorable congressional votes (on the true cost of the Medicare prescription law, on tax cuts, on pollution rules) -- none of it matters. What matters is that a self-proclaimed Chosen One is in the White House claiming to be doing God's will and elevating it where he can.