You'd think that after all these years of demonizing gays and lesbians, goofy weather predictions, the raising of millions of dollars from the hapless viewers of his television programs, the charitably challenged practices of his charities, and an all-purpose never-ending stream of mean-spirited and loopy statements, that at least in presidential election years, Pat Robertson would have been relegated to the outer reaches of Hageeville.

Yet there was Mr. Robertson, on stage with Mitt Romney, the Republican Party's presidential nominee, at a recent rally in Virginia Beach, Virginia. 



Seeing Robertson directly behind Romney's podium - now a little grayer and more stoop shouldered - a few days before the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, one couldn't help but flash back on one of his, and the late Rev. Jerry Falwell's, most shameful, divisive and ignominious moments. 



"I'm a college president. If I were at the intellectual level of Michael Moore, this movie would be a dud." -- Dinesh D'Souza

The Scorecard:

The Book: OBAMA'S AMERICA (Regnery, $27.95) is now #5 on The New York Times Combined Print and E-Book Best Sellers (Nonfiction) and #2 on the NYT's Hardcover Nonfiction List.

The Movie: 2016: Obama's America -- #10 at the box office this past week according to boxofficemojo.com, and now #2 on the list of all-time documentary box office (still trailing Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 by over $90 million).

If you were the generous sort, you might call Dinesh D'Souza, the Neil Armstrong of conservative filmmaking, since the controversial longtime Christian conservative political activist and provocateur, has landed where no other conservative making documentary films has ever landed before; on the list of the top ten highest-grossing documentary films in history.

Although D'Souza's thesis about President Obama was eviscerated by Bill Maher on HBO's Real Time on Friday, August 31, a recent Fox News.com headline, "Conservative documentary film 2016: Obama's America poised to surpass Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth," signified that his unabashedly anti-Obama film is having enormous box office success.

The religious leader who founded the Unification Church in 1954 in Seoul, South Korea, and built it into a multibillion-dollar business empire; founded the conservative daily newspaper, the Washington Times; and supported and bolstered the religious right in America, has died in South Korea at 92.

Last August, I wrote:

Trying to recap more than 50 years of Moon-ness is like having Tolstoy's War and Peace made into a classic comic book.

On Saturday, Mitt Romney plucked Paul Ryan out of the political closet. The Wisconsin congressman, who has described himself as not much of a political figure and being above the partisan fray, bounded onto the campaign trail. Although the Washington Post reported a while back that Ryan "has a level of disdain for the sort of rank political calculations required of people who want to climb the electoral ladder," and Politico noted that he has stated that partisan politics is not his "natural tendency," Ryan is as partisan as they come.

Watching Ryan, on the campaign trail with Romney, I couldn't help thinking that he bore a striking similitude to Ralph Reed.

If you are paying any attention to Mitt Romney's choice for his running mate - and we'd all be better off spending our time doing something else - you certainly understand that there are contenders (shortlisters) and pretenders (long shots).

Amongst those on the short list are establishment-type Republicans Ohio Senator Rob Portman and former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty. The names of former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, and Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan, a favorite amongst shut-down Medicare conservatives, have also been tossed around.

There's another name, however, that's being pushed by some conservative Christian leaders; Mike Huckabee, the Christian Right's hero of the Battle of Chick-fil-A. 


David Barton, president of the Christian conservative WallBuilders organization and a frequent guest on Glenn Beck's broadcasts, has for years been getting away with historicide. Criticism of Barton's politically motivated and tenuous grasp of history, once the sole province of liberal scholars, church-state separationists, and left wing political activists and bloggers, is now spreading beyond liberal enclaves, as several Christian scholars are criticizing Barton for just plain making stuff up.

In a recent World magazine article titled "The David Barton controversy", Thomas Kidd reported that "some conservative Christian scholars are publicly questioning Barton's work."

No matter how many gaffes Mitt Romney and his advisors may have committed during their trip to Great Britain, Israel and Poland, and despite not having much love for the Republican Party's presumptive presidential candidate, conservative Christian evangelicals will turn out in November in droves to vote against President Barack Obama.

A question I raised in an April piece titled "Will They or Won't They? Romney and the Evangelicals," was: Will conservative Christian activists became active member of Romney's electoral army? My answer at the time was that he might not need them.

I concluded that piece with this observation: "Picture this: Come August, cities and towns across the state of Utah begin to resemble ghost towns, as armies of Mormons spread out across the swing states to work for Romney."

You wouldn't recognize him on the street and he definitely isn't a household name, but the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, the President of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference is more than ready for his close-up.

With the country's demographics rapidly changing and immigration no longer on the back burner -- but not quite on the front one either -- Rodriguez is becoming more influential with both sides of the political aisle, has been in regular contact with Team Romney, and is drawing ever so much closer to a number of conservative Christian evangelical leaders.

In short, this is Reverend Rodriguez's time.

"Christian nation" pseudo-historian David Barton is on the defensive. It's a place I've wanted to see him for a long time.

If you're just joining us, Barton is a Texas Religious Right activist who makes his living peddling a revisionist history of America designed to prove that the country was founded to be a Christian nation.

A few weeks ago, I was rummaging through a storage closet at home when I came across a stamp collection I kept when I was a kid.

I was surprised to see it because I assumed that I had long ago discarded this battered book of postage stamps mainly from the 1960s and `70s. I began leafing through it and almost immediately spotted a U.S. stamp that made me do a double-take. It was an 8-cent stamp from 1972 that depicted a drawing of a typical nuclear family of a mother and father with two children. Across the top were the words "Family Planning."

Several years ago, when Mitt Romney was merely a multi-millionaire Massachusetts politician, he couldn't locate the conservative Christian evangelical movement with a GPS or MapQuest. Over the past few years however, Romney and his team have been holding a series of meet-ups - whose pace has been recently accelerated - with conservative Christian leaders to assure them of Romney's fealty to their issues.

When Romney heads off to Israel later this summer, he hopes to accomplish at least three objectives: renew his longtime friendship with Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu; convince Jewish donors and voters that he is more Israel-friendly than President Barack Obama; and, send a message to conservative Christian evangelicals that he can be trusted.