Bush’s hallelujah chorus

In a recent piece for Pacific News Service, columnist Earl Ofari Hutchinson delivered a report that should have Democrats praying for help. In a column headlined, “Black Evangelicals: Bush’s New Trump Card,” Hutchinson points out that a segment of this group, traditionally Democratic stalwarts, helped Bush take Ohio, Florida and Wisconsin, thus giving him a return ticket to the White House.

By pushing hot-button “moral issues” such as gay marriage and abortion, and doling out “millions through their faith-based programs to a handpicked core of top black church leaders,” the Bushmaster and his fellow Repubs seek to gain their support, despite the fact that this administration’s domestic policies are wreaking “havoc on poor black communities.”

Michigan, with its large bloc of black voters, poses a particularly juicy target.

“Bush and the Republicans bank that their strategy of bypassing black Democrats and civil rights leaders to make deals with black evangelicals will finally break the decades-long stranglehold Democrats have had on the black vote,” Hutchinson writes in the piece, which can be found at alternet.org. “If they’re right, it will spell deep peril for the Democrats in future elections.”

The theologians here at News Hits are going to have to go in search of a Bible. Seems to us that somewhere in the good book there might be a stray passage or two suggesting that the killing of one’s fellow man is frowned upon by Christianity’s Big Guy. But we could be wrong about that, considering all the religious righters genuflecting before a prez who oversaw a record number of executions while governor of Texas, and then launched two wars during his first four years in the White House.