A Last-Minute Falwell Tribute?

Gee, I wonder where Ewa Sowinska got this idea? Yet another Polish joke apparently (Eh ohhh)…

And speaking of Falwell, I didn’t see anything like the information communicated here from Pastor Dan in the various obits (which isn’t surprising, really), but I want to mention it below (re: the fact that Falwell and “the base” didn’t do much by themselves to elect Republicans)…

…What Falwell and (James) Dobson particularly excelled at was creating an activist base. Which is to say, a group of people who followed the news, wrote letters, made phone calls, staffed campaigns and did a thousand other scut jobs to fuel the conservative movement.

It's just that that never really translated into that many votes. None that weren't already headed into the Republican column, anyway. Falwell and the Religious Right leaders who came after him may have helped sustain the conservative tide in the 70s and 80s, in other words, but there's little evidence that they did much to create it. That work was largely done through an economic realignment that favored the South and West, particularly in the military-industrial complex, and by coded racial appeals in the same areas. But of course it's not nice to tell a partisan base that their core principles are racism and self-interest, so the fiction of the Moral Majority suited everyone's needs. Falwell, Dobson, et. al., got to feel important, and the conservative movement had a moral face to show the rest of the country. That's why Rove was so eager to blow kisses at the evangelical leaders in the pre-9/11 days, before the Bush regime based its moral authority on the War on Terror.

When our corporate media decides to “lie down” with the Tony Perkins, Gary Bauer and Dobson crowd (deferring to them in their coverage to lend them an authenticity they don’t have and probably never will), they end up looking as credible and realistic as Tinky Winky.