It’s Back.

Ralph Reed was, seemingly, just born bad. His mother describes him as if he were the little boy in Twilight Zone, whom adults must appease or he’ll send them to the corn fields – uncontrollable, willful, stubborn and selfish. A little dictator. The kind of kid who just doesn’t care what other people want, he is going to force them to live by his way of thinking. I can see him, defiantly refusing to eat his vegetables, having to win at every game, mutilating animals.

Looking more like he was about to blow up the school than an activist student, Reed met fellow student Jack Abramoff – who looks 40 –  at University of Georgia, as “Young Republicans”. Reed trolled college campuses organizing for Ronald Reagan. He fell for right-wing political activism and street theater after witnessing a vitriolic protest in response to the hostage crisis in Iran, students chanting “nuke ‘em ‘til they glow,” demanding that Iranian students in the US quit “taking our jobs and go home.”

More pol than preacher, Reed was indifferent to religion, but a rabid Republican. He was a major douchebag, penning a column taking hawkish positions on gun control and the nuclear freeze. Stepping into the well of the state house as a freshman, he actually argued  in favor of raising the drinking age to 21, facing a wall of contempt from fellow students.

While running student campaigns, Ralph gained a reputation as a dirty trick player, and elections rigger. He was also the cheater in a plagiarism scandal. His response to having been caught cheating was a harbinger of things to come from a new generation of Republicans: he attacked his victim, claiming the accusations were motivated by personal antipathy on the part of the student who exposed him, “and to imply otherwise is the most shocking, profane form of personal attack I can imagine”, said Reed. Former classmates describe him as creepy, nerdy and judgmental.

What DOES it take to get kicked out of U of Georgia? And, seriously, how OLD was Jack Abramoff when he went to college?

[Dan 11:37] He will only honor a “god” of the military. His whole focus and attention will be on his military. He will conquer lands and distribute them [Daniel 11:39-44]

As a “College Republican”, Ralph was one of those Cold War idiots in shirt-sleeves and ties, using army metaphors and dreaming up stupid stunts. Members were ordered to memorize the famous opening speech from the movie “Patton”, substituting the word “Democrats” for the word “Nazis”. Despite his clean-cut Latter Day appearance and protestations against underage drinking, the undergraduate political operative was no saint. Rather, he was described as a “hard-drinking ladies man”.

When the sixth angel blew his trumpet, The Beast was freed from the bottomless pit. and wrecked havoc upon the earth.

Then Ralph Reed had a religious conversion experience.  And it was at  a bar called “Bullfeathers” in Washington DC. Says Reed:

“The Holy Spirit simply demanded me to come to Jesus.”

Yes, there in the cavernous sports bar, amid the hooting sportsfans at Bullfeathers, Ralph Reed had a million dollar idea. He would take up the persona of an “outspoken Christian” in order to dupe real Christians for political gain. It was beautiful in it’s simplicity, a potential lucrative mainstream market in the vein of nouveau-Natives “finding” their fractional American Indian heritage and raking in benefits meant for the real blood quantum’s. Reed’s newfound faith reportedly compelled him to seek forgiveness for his past transgressions.

Soon after his miraculous call to Christ at Bullfeathers, the well-oiled little fascist met his would-be wife at a romantic rally for firebrand Senator Jesse Helms. Reed was 23. She was….16. “Fate” brought them together, the adult DC political operative and the teenager/high school junior.

After his come to Jesus moment at Bullfeathers, Ralph Reed began to devote his life to love, tolerance, acceptance, and forgiveness – as Jesus encouraged – by bursting into abortion clinic waiting rooms, verbally abusing patients and staging mock baby funerals. As the scheming leader of Operation Rescue, Reed rented a powder blue Cadillac to serve as a hearse and organized protests and “pray-ins” outside the clinic, and picket the homes of doctors.

He will rise from obscurity…a “little horn” [Daniel 7:8]

It was 1989, and the lilliputian AntiChrist was working as a hotel waiter until his “Time”. There he met Pat Robertson at an inaugural dinner for George H. W. Bush. Reed must have conjured up some very potent Satanic sex appeal to use on old Pat, because within months the 27 year old waiter was anointed executive director of the Christian Coalition. The blue-eyed choirboy was the perfect cure to the decade of TV-preacher scandals, putting to rest the stereotype of the creaky old fiery televangelist with wagging moralizing finger. Reed was the personification of the modern, ascendant religious right, a presentable ambassador to lead the jowly old scolds  into the new political age.

Reed’s recipe for success was far more simple than his coiffed exterior: master the banal drudgery of grassroots organizing. He wasn’t the smartest guy in the room – but his organizational and oratorical skills were good enough to allow him to fan out around the country and sell the coalition like a crusade, convincing members to act as political missionaries for the cause.

Reed took the Christian Coalition from a loose array of evangelicals into a 1.9 million member team able to activate on a moment’s notice, barraging politicians with calls and letters. Reed created ‘ farm team’s’ of  ”pro-family, pro-life, pro-free-market’ candidates at every level of government, from school board on up. He taught his candidates to avoid publicity, stay out of the limelight and not call attention to themselves. He would campaign on their behalf exclusively in fundamentalist, Pentecostal and Charismatic churches, distributing his “Values Voter Guides”.

Reed was said to speak in crafted sound bites, speaking and laughing a little too loudly. He dressed in flashy, double-breasted suits, impeccably knotted silk ties, Trumpian gold cuff links, and black ostrich cowboy boots.

But it was that face. An unlined heart, a pale peach under a swoop of ebony hair. Eyes the color of ice flashing from under a dark brow. The pimply nerd in tear-drop lenses had become a swan. He really was an adorable little fucker,

Before Ralph Reed,  the stock in trade of the fundamentalists was faith healings by scary old crones on TV evangelist broadcasts. Reed taught followers to focus on the literal realtime partnering with God  – and ix-nay on the tongues and snake-oil and faith healings – because that was harder to be skeptical about.

Under Mr. Reed’s tenure, the Christian Coalition’s annual budget jumped from $200,00 to $27 million.

The Antichrist will rise up out of the sea of nations. The Beast will appear as an astute and miraculous political leader, who comes in to power on a platform of peace, safety and prosperity.

 

In 1996, Reed turned the Coalition into a driving force behind Sen. Bob Dole’s presidential campaign. Bob Dole was not Reed’s first choice – that would be clownshow ideologue Pat Buchanan – but Reed pulled out all the stops delivering the nomination to Dole. Reed and company took over the Republican National Convention, turning it into a prime-time, right-wing pep rally.

Alas, Reed’s stealth strategy didn’t work against the superpowers of Bill Clinton, and the zany convention antics scared off voters. Guys like Reed and Newt Gingrich were starting to seem dusty and dowdy after sexy Bill Clinton defeated boring old Bob Dole and old coot Ross Perot.

He will try to change the laws, perhaps to gain an advantage for his new kingdom and era [Daniel 7:25]

Reed’s goal of making the Religious Right a key player in the Republican mainstream had failed, prompting Reed to contemplate quitting politics all together. If ONLY. Reed was reanimated when President Clinton tried to lift the ban on gays serving in the military. Via Robertson’s “700 Club” broadcast, Reed mobilized his right-wing grassroots by orchestrating a flurry of opposition and generating so many calls that they jammed the Capitol Hill switchboard.

Reed was concerned that the Right had become, in his words, “ghettoized” by a narrow band of issues like abortion, gay rights and school prayer, that held it back from becoming a mainstream force. To counter “ghettoization,” Reed broadened his agenda to include issues like health care.  Thus, when President Clinton announced his plan to expand healthcare to include more Americans, Reed unleashed the “Christian” Coalition’s most expensive campaign ever. Reed spent $1.4 million to oppose a healthcare plan – just like Jesus wanted – by focusing primarily on its alleged abortion, gay rights, and sex education ramifications. Reed warned his minions that it was nothing but:

“a Trojan Horse for a not-so-hidden agenda to …promote a radical social agenda.”

In 1997, 10 years after joining the Christian Coalition and having built it into one of the most potent forces in Republican politics, Ralph quit Pat. He left the CC having driven the it into the ground, bankrupt, and under investigation by the FEC, having ripped off members to the tune of 1 million dollars – typical Business Satan stuff. Reed formed his own organization, “Christian Coalition to form Century Strategies”, a political consulting firm whose clients had to oppose abortion, taxes and gambling. Reed left the CC in shambles, but succeeded in Satan’s goal of bringing religious extremism into American political life.

After Reed’s exit, the Christian Coalition continued to deteriorate and, by 1999, found itself $2.5 million in debt, having its tax-exempt status revoked and fined for having improperly supported Newt Gingrich’s election and sharing its mailing list with right-wing Senate candidate, good old Oliver North.

As Bob Irvin, a prominent Georgia Republican and former Speaker in the Legislature, put it:

“[Reed’s] M.O. is to tell evangelical Christians that his cause of the moment, for which he has been hired, is their religious duty, and therefore they need to write regulators, turn up at meetings, or whatever. As an evangelical myself, I resent Christianity being used simply to help Reed’s business.”

Reed’s political consulting business got off to an inauspicious start.  In 1998, fewer than half of Reed’s clients had won their election races. Many of Reed’s clients’ losing campaigns followed a similar trajectory toward defeat: starting out strong, with heavy appeals on “moral” issues, faltered in the stretch and ultimate resorting to a blizzard of last-minute, outrageous, low-ball (sometimes racially tinged) tactics before stumbling toward defeat.

Naturally, often these attacks were racially tinged. One of Reed’s clients, Gary Hofmeister, a congressional candidate from Indiana, ran an ad in which the face of his opponent, Julia Carson, who is black, melded into images of prison doors and hypodermic needles. HAHAHAHA

Another client, Mitch Skandalakis, and candidate for Georgia lieutenant governor, reacted to his slide in the polls by launching a series of blistering attacks on the alleged incompetence of the predominantly black administration of Atlanta.

My personal favorite is the ad Reed aired featuring an actor resembling Mitch Skandalakis’ opponent, Mark Taylor, clad in a tattered robe, shuffling down a hallway in an Atlanta mental asylum.  HAHAHHA

Both Hofmeister and Skandalakis went down to defeat, and the blame was placed squarely on Ralph Reed, not just for his clients, but for for bringing down the entire Republican ticket in Georgia.

“There is something wrong with his eyes.” – Rosemary Woodhouse

“It’s like guerrilla warfare. If you reveal your location, all it does is allow your opponent to improve his artillery bearings. It’s better to move quietly, with stealth, under cover of night. You’ve got two choices: You can wear cammies and shimmy along on your belly, or you can put on a red coat and stand up for everyone to see. It comes down to whether you want to be the British army in the Revolutionary War or the Viet Cong. History tells us which tactic was more effective.” – Ralph Reed to the Los Angeles Times, March 22, 1992

Reed’s “star power” had transcend the reality of him as a not-too-bright political operative, a difficult-to-fathom mix of high-end political pontificating and low-ball campaign tactics. But despite Reed’s embarrassing performance in 1998, he continued to be in high demand –  talk-show pundits continued to book him as if he were still a wunderkind. People continued to be bamboozled by the charlatan.

In 1998, Bill Gates hired Ralph Reed. He needed to garner George W Bush’s support to Microsoft’s position in the Justice Department’s antitrust case –  should he win the upcoming presidential election.

The software colossus had been getting grief from the Clinton Justice Dept over its alleged anti-competitive practices. Naturally Microsoft leaned towards anti-regulatory, laissez-faire economic policies espoused by Republicans, but it’s still weird that they’d hire a guy touting Christianity as the righteous cure for all that ails poor American’s pocketbooks. He was not known for opposition to regulations and taxes, but for opposition to abortion, gay rights and other tenets of the Christian conservative agenda.

When Microsoft first hired Reed in 1998, he hadn’t yet signed on officially as a Bush advisor. But Reed stayed on Gates’ payroll after becoming a senior advisor to the Bush campaign in 1999. Gates may have thought he’d had a stroke of luck when his lobbyist ended up as a key insider in the Republican candidate’s campaign. Reed, however, knew exactly what he was doing.

Whatever the case, the perception was that the software barons were brazenly trying to buy its way into a presidential candidate’s graces, and it was a public relations fiasco. Naturally, when the story of Reed’s involvement with Microsoft came out, Reed claimed that he had never, ever asked Bush to take a position on the government’s antitrust case against Microsoft. Bush spokesidiot Scott McClennen said:

“Ralph said it was an error on his part. Neither the governor nor the campaign has been talked to or personally lobbied by anyone at Ralph’s firm about Microsoft.”

“When the richest provinces feel secure, he will invade them and will achieve what neither his fathers nor his forefathers did. He will distribute plunder, loot and wealth among his followers. He will plot the overthrow of fortresses-but only for a time“ (Dan 11:21-24)

Reed claimed that he was “done with electoral politics”, and now was the time for him “to start humping in corporate accounts”. He joined the Jack Abramoff /Grover Norquist self-described “Triumvirate”, a perfect partnership of skulduggery: Grover, the bearded, anti-tax ideologue; Jack, the world-class schmoozing straight man,/peddler of congressional influence; and Ralph, the “born again” sleazebag who’d be the motivational organizer and undercover operative, OR as Abramoff said of him:

“a bad version of us”.

Since his religion was just something dreamed up over Amstel Lites and chicken wings at Bullfeathers, Ralph Reed had no problem squaring up all the terrible, immoral, illegal things he would be asked to do with his salvation through his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. I mean, he couldn’t possibly be a real Christian because he would know his actions are damning his eternal soul, right?

There were the moneymaking schemes pegged to life insurance payouts from elderly African-Americans (“mortgaging old black people“), where Reed would have been the point man with church leaders, ushering them through the sticky process of getting their elders to sign up for life insurance policies payable to Jack Abramoff and Ralph Reed.

There was the public condemning of China for its horrific human rights history, while privately being paid to lobby for supporting China’s trade status.

It went like this: In order to appease his business clients, who it behooved to have a relaxed U.S. trade policy toward China, Reed tapped into his vast network of conservative religious activists, to whom China was anathema. Soon something called the “Alliance of Christian Ministries” in China was telling Congress that free trade would open doors for missionaries in an atheistic nation. The alliance, naturally, was a facade. Reed’s MO was to trick conservative Christian groups into making the case for causes that benefit Reed’s clients – obscuring the clients’ identity. Reed would exploit his connections in the evangelical Christian community even as they contradict positions he advocated as one of the nation’s most prominent spokesmen for the religious right. Reed formed the “Alliance for Christian Ministries” to exploit its evangelical goals to serve the interests of his paying clients, a “coalition” of big businesses including Boeing Co., which had a more secular objective: to sell the Chinese government $120 billion worth of airplanes.

He will try to change the calendar, perhaps to define a new era, related to himself [Daniel 7:25]

The Triumvirate opened the money spigot and the one-time college Republicans turned the conservative revival into a full-on racket. Reed’s role was, literally, to “BRING OUT THE WACKOS”.

With that directive, Ralph Reed went full Antichrist.

Reed’s assignments from Abramoff came swiftly. Abramoff used Reed to undermine human rights installments in the Mariana Islands – a US Commonwealth that had been under US control since the end of World War II. The US at that time was making long-overdue efforts to clean up sweatshops on the Mariana islands, where Chinese women had been brought in to work under despicable conditions and paid pennies for producing garments labeled “Made in the USA”.

The women were forced to live behind barbed wire in squalid shacks without plumbing. Women and children were forced into prostitution. Women were routinely subject to forced abortions. Frank Murkowski, then (R) Sen from Alaska, submitted a bill to extend U.S. minimum-wage labor protection to the workers in the CNMI. The Senate passed the worker reform bill unanimously. The bill was blocked in the house by Tom DeLay.

From 1995 – 2001, Jack Abramoff was employed – for $6.7 million – by corrupt CNMI officials, to stop the Washington reforms. Abramoff, in turn, brought in his faux-Christian boy bully and his direct mail company, “Millennium Marketing”, to conduct a phony grass roots campaign urging Alabama Christians to take political action to oppose the human rights reforms.

Reed didn’t tell these Christians that he was being paid millions to keep the sweatshops running and the forced abortions coming. His company explained it was just trying to encourage “grass roots citizens to promote the propagation of the Gospel” and that many of the workers were “converted to the Christian faith and return to China with Bibles in hand.” Reed told the gullible Christians that the reforms were a “trick” orchestrated by “The Left and Organized labor”, and that limits on the treatment of Chinese workers would keep them from being “exposed to the teachings of Jesus Christ.”

(Watch the great Bill Moyers‘ The Resurrection of Ralph Reed featuring the pimply whipper snapper in a brass encrusted office, illegally wheeling and dealing).

It’s 1994 and Reed is credited with catapulting the Republicans to their first victory in the House in 40 years. The Republican Party is riding high. Under Newt Gingrich, the GOP pursued an ambitious agenda, highlighted by their stupid Contract with America. Unfortunately for them, they going up against President Clinton, their intellectual superior, who wielded veto power, tore apart the Contract with America point by point on TV, and reveled in repeatedly cock blocking Newt.

The Antichrist was now infamous enough to get his rubbery mug on a horrifying cover of Time. Little did Americans know that The ” Right Hand of God” had the left hand hand up Abramoff’s ass and in everybody’s bank account.

Fuck TIME for stoking his ego – but then again, it started the pathway toward disgrace.

 

 

 

Before the hanging chads, before the 6-hour lines of black voters, before the thieving of an election, George W Bush had to get the party’s nomination. During the 2000 election cycle, Then-Governor George W Bush was threatened enough by Reed’s ability to siphon wacko born-again votes to not have him on his team, by any means necessary. W put a call into his good buddy Ken Lay and suddenly Ralphie had himself a 6-figure lobbying gig at Enron.

After W lost the New Hampshire primary to Sen. John McCain by nearly twenty points, Reed went to work targeting evangelical voters in South Carolina, just as he had done for Bob Dole. Reed promised Karl Rove that he could deliver the nomination to W. He gleefully took on his unsavory role in the campaign, running a vicious smear attack against John McCain, the likes of which modern politics has never seen. Reed contended that; McCain’s wife, Cindy, was a drug addict; McCain had slept with hookers and given Cindy  V.D.; he’d turned traitor in the “Hanoi Hilton,”; he was mentally unstable from his captivity; was a Manchurian Candidate, brainwashed to destroy the G.O.P. and, in the coup de gras, that he had fathered an “illegitimate black baby”. Veterans had formerly been off limits, but Ralph Reed changed those rules forever. Reed succeeded in taking the ex P.O.W out of the presidential running. Although “Swiftboating” was not officially coined until 2004, the practice was created in 2000 by Ralph Reed.

As one of Reed’s political allies would say years later:

“[Reed] is completely Machiavellian.  He will do anything to win”.

In a GQ article entitled, The Sins of Ralph Reed, former Reed adherent and Southern GOPer Maurice Atkinson says about his former colleague that he’s “got no core” and that he’s “either an awfully cheap whore, or he’s diabolical.”

He will blaspheme God, [Daniel 7:25; 11:36; Rev 13:5] slandering His Name, dwelling place, and departed Christians and Old Testament saints [Rev 13:6]

Reed’s shameless public espousals of “faith” were in sync with W’s own evangelical efforts needed to remedy a lifetime of slackery, draft-dodging, boozing and cocaine use. Under Reed, self-professed evangelicals became one of Bush’s largest bases of support. Like an evil Pete Campbell, all shameless shenanigans and bluster, Reed helped put W over the top even before hanging chads sealed the deal. The elfin AntiChrist made the Christian Right seem as if they were ascendant and inevitable future, putting into practice the destructive and alchemization of Republican politics and evangelicalism that is ruining our country today.

Reed’s next move was to get himself elected Republican chairman in Georgia, presiding over the best Republican election year since Reconstruction. Predictably, his powers of persuasion are the roots of his strength and the roots of his frequent failures.

His major atrocity as chairman was his attack on sitting Senator, Max Cleland. Reed launched ads against Cleland attacking his “patriotism”. The ads featured footage of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden and attacked Cleland’s record on national security, suggesting that Cleland was in league with terrorists. The voice-over announced that Cleland had voted against the Homeland Security legislation – legislation that he had actually co-sponsored. Reed defended the ads, denying the they equated Cleland with Osama and Saddam because their photos were not literally morphed into Cleland’s face. Republican Sens. Chuck Hagel and John McCain  — both Vietnam veterans — were so offended and irate that they forced their party to remove the ads.

Senator Max Cleland was a decorated war hero, a triple amputee, a victim of a grenade explosion in Vietnam in 1968 that left his body mangled, three limbs left on a battlefield in Khe Sanh. After Vietnam, Cleland spent years recovering from his physical and emotional scars. Yet, he says that his Senate defeat after one term at the hands of Ralph Reed was even worse than the trauma than he suffered in Vietnam. The American patriot had to be readmitted to Walter Reed — where he’d first been put back together nearly four decades earlier — for crippling depression.

“I cried uncontrollably for 2 ½ years.”

“I was younger when I got blown up. I had only my limbs to lose. This time I had a … career. It was the losing of the lifestyle, the losing of the sense of purpose.”

Speaking of himself and john Kerry who was similarly attacked by these jackals:

“Karl Rove managed to take away our service.”

Something about the parable in Matthew with the “whited sepulchers” — outwardly beautifully whitewashed tombs with dead men’s bones and rotting corpses inside — seems to sum up Ralph Reed.

By using his position to shovel GOP cash towards destroying Max Cleland, and away from the presumably doomed gubernatorial campaign of Sonny Perdue, Reed had made a strategic error. When Perdue won and became Georgia’s Republican potentate, he quickly kicked the smarmy Ralph Reed out the door. During Reed’s apparently “triumphant” 2002 stint as state party chairman, he made himself the object of a deeper, and less publicized, scorn.

Fortunately for Reed, in between his high-profile election work, he had been busy building his “consulting” business.

Beginning in 1999, Reed, who had once called gambling “a cancer on the American body politic,” was hired by Jack Abramoff  to employ his expertise in mobilizing the right-wing grassroots to help shut down gambling initiatives that threatened the interests of Abramoff’s casino-owning clients. Abramoff  subcontracted Reed’s “Century Strategies” to generate opposition to attempts to legalize a state-sponsored lottery and video poker in Alabama, an effort that was bankrolled by the Choctaw Tribe, the wealthiest gambling tribe in the country. Reed’s one directive: to enflame moral outrage over gambling among Christian activists.

Reed promised that “Century Strategies” was “opening the bomb bays and holding nothing back”, running a religious-themed anti-gambling campaign at the behest of the interests of the Choctaws. He directed Christians to pressure politicians and voters to end gambling activities at competing casinos. He engaged the Alabama chapter of the Christian Coalition, as well as influential right-wing figures such as James Dobson, to work to defeat the proposals.

Ralph Reed repeatedly assured the Christian Coalition that the funding for its work was not coming from gambling interests. But it was. To pay for this campaign, Reed took millions from the Choctaws and funneled it through the bogus “Christian Coalition of Alabama” and “Citizens Against Legalized Lottery”. Christian groups were ignorant to the fact that Reed was being paid $4.2 million by competing Indian casino owners. From 2000 – 2002, Ralph Reed perpetrated the theft of $88 million from six Indian tribes.

For his part, Abramoff dismissed his Indian clients as “morons,” “monkeys,” and “troglodytes” in widely publicized emails to Scanlon and was primarily concerned with getting his “mitts on [their] moolah.”

When word of the grift first broke, Ralph and Jack turned on each other like a pitbull on a Palin. Reed claimed that he had “no direct knowledge of Abramoff’s lobbying firm’s clients or their interests.” But Reed knew exactly what was going on, that the money funding his anti-gambling operations was coming from the Choctaw tribe and that he was indirectly working to protect the tribe’s multi-million dollar gambling interests. Emails emerged from the Abramoff investigation that made it clear that Reed was fully aware of the whole mess.

There seems to be a puerile, romantic element to Reed’s description of himself to a Virginia newspaper in 1991:

“I want to be invisible. I do guerrilla warfare. I paint my face and travel at night. You don’t know it’s over until you’re in a body bag. You don’t know until election night.”

When the information began to surface in the press and the Christian Coalition learned of the source of the $850,000 it had received, it demanded an explanation from Reed who apologized in a letter saying he should have “explained that the contributions came from the Choctaws,” admitting he had been fully aware of the source of the funding. But by the time Reed offered his “after-the-fact apology,” the gambling initiative had been defeated and the Christian Coalition had been duped.

Things got worse when e-mails showed that the casino Reed secretly helped Abramoff close was run by the Tiguas, whom Abramoff turned around and signed up as clients months later with promises that he could help them reopen their gambling operation.

The Antichrist’s central role in the Abramoff fiasco was fully revealed during a now infamous Senate investigation. The hearings also spotlighted the Marianas sweatshops, which led to reform via congressional action. Fast forward to the 2012 presidential elections, and the Mariana Islands minimum wage plank is weirdly part of the 2012 Republican platform.

When the smoke cleared, Abramoff was behind bars, but Reed – miraculously- was left standing. Reed correctly notes that he has never been charged with a crime and implies that he had been fully investigated by John McCain’s Senate Committee on Indian Affairs. But that is demonstrably false. According to sources, Reed was supposed to have been called before McCain’s committee but Karl Rove intervened and threatened McCain not to call Reed. Reed was still an enormously powerful fund-raiser for the Republican Party. His satanic trajectory, however, was derailed. His poll numbers plummeted. He was disgraced.

“In 2005, the evangelical magazine World came under fire after it published an article about [Ralph] Reed that concluded:

“The portrait that emerges is one of a shrewd businessman who has spent years leveraging his evangelical and conservative contacts to promote the economic interests of his clients, rather than the principles of the political movement he once led.”

He will speak boastfully [Daniel 7:8; Rev 13:5]

In 2006, the once mighty Reed was relegated to running for Georgia’s lieutenant governor, a second-tier office in a down-ballot race in an off year. When polls indicated Reed losing to a generic Democrat, and with Republicans became increasingly nervous that nominating Reed could nationalize the entire Georgia election and make it easy for Democrats to raise money country-wide to counter Reed’s war chest. Party concern over Reed’s chilling effect on the entire GOP ticket prompted 21 of Georgia’s Republican state senators to issue an open letter calling on Reed to withdraw from the race; one even formally requesting the return of his $4000 contribution. Reed stayed in the race. His brimstone foundation melting, he stayed in the race.

The only support Reed could muster was from Rudy Giuliani and  Zell Miller, and Mississippi’s lunatic-in-charge lunatic Haley Barbour. On election night, the big names who’d once groveled at his feet were nowhere to be seen, as were his diminished fundamentalist base. In a half-empty hotel ballroom, Reed conceded defeat before a scraggly bunch of downcast loyalists and a sobbing wife. In the end, voters punished Reed for the same kind of duplicitous political behavior he used to build campaigns against. In the end, Ralph Reed couldn’t even fill a room.

Reed’s willful, unrepentant participation in Abramoff’s schemes didn’t sit well with his church-going base, who found his hypocrisy too much to take, and even the “The Right Hand of God” ultimately couldn’t get himself out of this one.

A few years later, Ralph Reed dropped a hot pile of slash fiction upon the earth, a bawdy roman-à-clef called The Confirmation, a High Supreme Court drama. It had Somali pirates, Iranian nuclear scientists,  “yellow cake” uranium (just like in pretend recent history), randy Dem senators and hot young interns, and high fashion. The Confirmation is that creepy conservative political fiction sub-genre of alternate-history fantasy. “What would it look like if the Democrats were the lecherous scumbags?”. Take all the recent GOP scandals: briberies, elections fraud, anonymous gay sex in airport bathrooms, phone sex with male interns, meth, secret Argentinian lovers, Cheese Wiz fueled passion withLouisiana crack whores, $100k payoff’s to your mistress’ husband— but instead of Republicans, have it be the Democrats doing it. Ka-zing!

So…..surely even today’s Republican party could have welcomed the actual Antichrist back into the ranks just 8 years after imploding in spectacular, biblical fashion? Surely even todays Republican party wouldn’t accept back into their fold the grunge-era huckster of manufacturing rube hysteria and gobbling up of Jack Abramoff lobbying fees to fund his hideous $2 million dollar house in Duluth. Right?

Oh Ye, of little faith. Republican leaders are lining up to kiss his ring and pander to his minions. It’s a reminder that there is literally nothing a conservative can do to be permanently excluded from polite company. By any reasonable measure, Republicans should avoid taking this lunatic’s phone calls. As Dave Weigel noted last fall:

“Reed was supposed to be dead, dead, dead. His 2006 defeat was covered as the effective end of a 45-year-old political strategist who was forever tainted by scandal.”

Rather than serving hard time, Reed is out painting himself as the hero of moral conservatives and championing the likes of Newt and Mitt and fucking Tom DeLay. It seems as if the”conservative” friends Reed fucked over in 2004 have forgiven his trespasses. His ties to Jack Abramoff are ” largely in the rear view mirror”, they say. So the AntiChrist is out of his lair, looking for a bunch of morons to rob with his same old running buddies, like Steve Scheffler, the GOP’s Iowa National Committeeman, Iowa Christian Alliance’s President, and Iowa’s Faith & Freedom Coalition Fuher. Scheffler says about Reed’s association with Abramoff :

“if you look at the whole explanation it was a nonissue, it was the press that made something out of nothing that was there.”

And Ralph does not like to talk about his connection. to Jack Abramoff.

In 2008, 60% of caucus goers identified themselves as evangelical, propelling fatty Mike Huckabee to a surprise win over establishment candidate Mitt “Mittens” Romney. Later that year, Reed held a forum that was attended by nearly every Republican candidate: Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, Pro-Life dipwads Ron Paul and Herman Cain, freak of Jesus Rick Perry. The Mormon wisely abstained. In attendance was the AntiChrist’s Co-Chief Money Launderer Steve Scheffler, fresh from a a conjugal visit with crime partner Jack Abramahoff.

Satans of A Different Cloth, trying to pick each others pockets, money exchanging hands for fresh laundering at the Antioch Church. Ladies, Watch Your Purses! The keynote speaker was famous propagandist historian, David Barton. The GOP’s favorite amateur historian (suck it, Newt), gave his usual King James Version of American History. God supposedly talks to Mr. Barton, so when will God ask Barton produce a historical work on the Abramoff/Reed scandal? When will anybody connected with Jack and Ralph ever tell the truth; the whole truth and nothing but the truth; so help them God?

The AntiChrist was called in again, this time by a top-secret group of mega-rich and powerful individuals to assist in Governor Walker’s recall fight in Wisconsin. Cometh the preternaturally youthful operative, again cloaked in the cape of a Christian crusader, now 51, aged enough only to not arouse suspicion, possibly with some “work” done. Reed’s new Faith & Freedom Coalition – which Reed describes as “a 21st century version of the Christian Coalition on steroids”  and “not your daddy’s Christian Coalition” – purportedly activated 600,000 conservative Wisconsin voters in the recall fight, despite substantiated charges of corruption leveled against Walker. If you’re looking for reasons that the Walker recall effort failed, you’re looking at Ralph Reed.

The newly activated Mr. Morally Superior “Christians-for-Hire” boasts a 5 million membership, massive database,full-time lobbyists in all fifty state capitals, and an annual budget of $100 million, a colossal effort aimed at putting in place a right-wing social agenda.

Where is the money coming from, you ask? That money is funneled through so many  subterranean, untraceable tunnels, through Kochs and “non-profits” and evil CEOS, under the guise of a shady company called “Century Strategies”, which is a subsidiary of that old for-profit consulting firm – Millennium Marketing, a political consulting firm whose CEO just happens to be Ralph Reed. As Bill Moyers says:

“The Right Hand of God doesn’t need to reveal what the left hand is doing.”.

Reed’s short-term business strategy is to keep evangelicals in the Republican fold by melding the old religious far-right loons with the modern Tea Party loons. Their strategies are, after all, similar: exploit the mobilizing effect of social issues on older Christian conservatives, while folding the issues into a larger agenda that emphasizes individual liberty and economic freedom against the stranglehold of “Big Government”. It’s the same old foul confluence of radical-mean conservative religiosity coupled with a determination to make the rich richer. Although marketed as a “revolt of the fiscal conservative”, The Tea Party’s candidates turned out to be the same old religious nuts that Reed’s been recruiting for years: Sharron Angle, Joe Miller, Christine The Witch, the guy in Colorado. Religious nuts, sailing under the Tea Party banner.

Perhaps on the basis of his lifelong immoral and illegal acts, rather than despite them, Reed was tapped to speak at this year’s Republican National Convention, where he asked his faithful to pray for seventy two days straight to defeat President Obama. He did this despite the fact that he believes Mitt Romney belongs to a cult and that he is not a Christian. Mittens, naturally, was delighted to accept Reed’s support. Flashy now to the point of efete, Reed in Tampa was a thing reborn, lauded at Grover Norquist’s “First National Center Right Meeting” aka right wing revival tent, in his tragic glory, sharing a stage with crackpots Newt and Phyllis Schafley.

Reed is working his old grift – the smarmy, V05 line of rubber chicken poppycock. But it is a snake in a new, lime green Zoot suit, Brylcreem slick-backed hair. His missions this time: to give the Mormon nominee Jesus cred, because it seems that 1 in every 4 conservative christian is weirded out by Mormonism. The Christian Cleaner was called in to mindfuck Christians into believing that Mitt Romney  is really one of them, that Mr. Romney is actually an evangelical Christian.

”I am proud as an American, and particularly proud as a conservative evangelical, that we have nominated a ticket that is the first ticket in U.S. history without a Protestant on it.” – Ralph Reed, 2012

Reed has reportedly raised $12 million for the Romney campaign.

“He is a liar and a thief of thieves. He makes an agreement and promises peace but then breaks his promise and deceives many.”

The baby-faced, disgraced false Xristian Xrazie who milked his flock for Abramoff is shearing a new flock, literally littering the country with mailers (a real barn-burner, right wing grab bag of debunked, and malicious rhetoric, comparing the President’s policies to the threat of Nazi Germany and Japan circa World War II), texts and email subscriptions. His propaganda flier’s best line is that, if Obama wins reelection:

“He can complete America’s destruction”.

The religious right has been the ground troops for the GOP since the the Jimmy Carter era,  but only in the past few decades has the extremist church served as the grassroots base for this breed of corporate totalitarianism. It doesn’t matter who the Democrat is, they’re always outraged that one’s in office, and they always activate their mobilization network against him. The biggest advantage the Republicans have over the Democrats is the messianic intensity that it’s able to harness in linking its electoral base to the religious right. There is no close analogue to that in the Democratic party. Sometimes, someone like Clinton or Obama is able to articulate a powerful vision for why Democrats need to hang together. But in a party that has increasingly drawn upon the language of “reason” to make its case, there’s never going to be an equivalent to those who believe:

A) the shit that is in the Bible is real.

B) that we are on the threshold of the apocalypse.

C) that the election is a call from Jesus to suit up and wage war against the forces of evil.