It's Sunday - and Easter

Charlie Pierce yesterday took exception to the major TV media lineup for Easter (today).

If this is the way you're going to handle religion, kids, why even try? This could have been a real donnybrook. Instead, as we tote up the scorecard, we find that, in its Paschal gatherings, our elite political media could find no room for Catholic liberals, no room for anyone who might inconvenience the Catholic hierarchy, no dissenting voices on gay issues, or on the hundreds of issues surrounding the Church's finagling with the rights of women. (Atheists? Please, stop, you're killing me.) But they can find room for a birther Mormon, the Thomas Kinkade of evangelical preachers, Timothy Dolan's prancing ego, and Ralph Fcking Reed.

Jesus wept.

And with damn good reason.

  Charles Pierce

Ralph Reed? I thought he had pretty much been disgraced and discredited. Although that almost seems impossible in our political culture – unless you get caught involved in a sex scandal.

Cleaver will also stop by CNN's "State of the Union," joining the Christian Broadcasting Network's David Brody and Christian Coalition founder Ralph Reed for a roundtable discussion of religion and politics.

See, CNN, Ralph Reed is not a religious figure, unless you happen to go to confession every weekend in Indian casinos. His entire involvement in politics has been as a vandal and a shameless charlatan. Here he is in an e-mail from 1998, discussing his missionary work among native Americans.

"Hey, now that I'm done with electoral politics, I need to start humping in corporate accounts! I'm counting on you to help me with some contacts." -Ralph Reed to Jack Abramoff, via email, November 12, 1998

The only thing he knows about religion is that it's a good place to look for suckers, and the only thing he knows about politics is that the suckers can make you rich. He also likes to butch it up by talking about "body bags," as though he were some sort of tough guy, instead of an aluminum-siding salesman with a Bible in one hand, and Jack Abramoff's dick in the other.

Oh! Sorry. It's Sunday. And Easter. (That COULD have been a sex scandal.)