In Defense of the Religious Right

The older culture warriors favored Ted Cruz; younger Christians wanted Marco Rubio (Falwell Jr.’s Liberty University voted decisively for the Florida senator); the naïve wanted Ben Carson. Iowa, the evangelical stronghold whose first-in-the-nation status makes every sophisticated G.O.P consultant groan, gave Trump one of his worst early-state showings, while more secular Northeastern states handed him landslide wins.

.. The bottom line is that if it weren’t for the religious right, the Trump takeover would have been far easier, the G.O.P.’s surrender that much more abject

.. Asking Christian conservatives to accept a Clinton presidency is asking them to cooperate not only with pro-abortion policy-making, but also their own legal-cultural isolation.

.. For every Carson, murmuring on cable about how “sometimes you put your Christian values on pause to get the work done,” there is a Russell Moore or an Erick Erickson or a Beth Mooreattacking their co-religionists for making a fatal moral compromise.

.. America needs a religious right. Maybe not the religious right it has; certainly not the religious right of Carson and Falwell Jr. But the Trump era has revealed what you get when you leach the Christianity out of conservatism:

A right-of-center politics that cares less about marriage and abortion, just as some liberals would wish, but one that’s ultimately far more divisive than the evangelical politics of George W. Bush.

.. without the pull of transcendence, the future of the right promises to be tribal, cruel, and very dark indeed.

Jeff Zucker has no regrets

“We recognized … there was a little bit of a phenomenon to Donald Trump,” Zucker said, acknowledging that “we did give him quite a bit of coverage.”

If there was one thing he would change about their early coverage, Zucker repeated a sentiment he’s made before: less unfiltered nonstop streaming of Trump’s early rallies.

“We probably did put on too many of the campaign rallies in the early months unedited,” Zucker said. “In hindsight we probably shouldn’t have done that as much.”

 

Stone ‘happy to cooperate’ with FBI on WikiLeaks, Russian hacking probes

Several months ago, Stone predicted an October surprise that would disrupt Clinton’s campaign and his recent Twitter posts suggested Podesta would soon be facing scandal, including an August update stating, “Trust me, it will soon the Podesta’s time in the barrel. #CrookedHillary”

Speaking to reporters earlier this week on Clinton’s airplane, Podesta confirmed he’d spoken to the FBI on Sunday as it probed the criminal hack into his email and he leveled a charge that Stone had “advance knowledge” of the document leaks.

.. former Acting CIA Director Mike Morell said during a conference call organized by the Clinton campaign that several of the GOP nominee’s former staffers “may be in this more deeply and may have relationships with Russia, perhaps financial relationships or other relationships and they’re working on behalf of the Russians to get this material out and spread this around.”

.. last Friday, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson and director of national intelligence James Clapper issued an unprecedented statement signaling with high confidence that the Russian government was trying to meddle in the U.S. presidential election via cyber espionage.

.. “The way that DOJ works, once they start looking at something they don’t look at very narrow discrete questions when there are other related questions swirling around. They try to get the rest of the picture,” said Matthew Miller, a former Obama administration Justice Department spokesman. “It stands to reason,” he added, “they’d already be investigating the Trump campaign.”

.. “There’s no way they’d do that before the election,”

.. Stone said what’s out so far is just “small potatoes compared to what I’m told is coming.”