Jefferson

via Salon.com

By Sidney Blumenthal

Nov. 11, 2004 | The election of 2004 marks the rise of a quasi-clerical party for the first time in the United States. Ecclesiastical organization has become transformed into the sinew and muscle of the Republican Party, essential in George W. Bush's reelection. His narrow margins in the key states of Florida, Iowa and Ohio, and elsewhere, were dependent upon the direct imposition of the churches. None of this occurred suddenly or by happenstance. Nor was this development simply a pleasant surprise for Bush. For years, he has schooled himself in the machinations of the religious right, and Karl Rove has used the command center of the White House as more than its Office of Propaganda.

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"History, I believe," Thomas Jefferson wrote, "furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes."

But we're not all Jeffersonians now.