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The Daily Inquisition / October 13, 2008
By The eXiled Inquisition Team

Cletus, god of the heartland

Today’s Defendant: Evangelical Ministers

Statement of the Grand Inquisitor: Every few months for untold years now, an evangelical minister crawls out from under a rock in the American heartland and says something transcendently stupid that gets picked up by the media. This time around it’s Pastor Arnold Conrad, formerly of Graves Evangelical Free Church. He gave the invocation at a McCain rally in Iowa last Saturday, and had this to say:

“There are millions of people around this world praying to their god—whether it’s Hindu, Buddha, Allah—that [John McCain’s] opponent wins for a variety of reasons. And Lord, I pray that you would guard your own reputation, because they’re going to think their god is bigger than you, if that happens.”

No point in even specifying all the ways this guy is a moron—we don’t have the space for it here anyway. The key point is this: it’s important, if you’re going to worship a god, that you get yourself a good one. No sane human being goes out stumping for a god whose street cred is so shaky you’ve got to worry he might meet one of the other, fiercer gods in a dark alley. There’s just no point. If you’re god isn’t an awesome god, ditch him. And the evangelical god has been shown up, time and again, as the dumbest, lamest, most defenseless hick in the pantheon, a veritable Cletus the Slack-jawed Yokel among gods, if Cletus had a mean streak, that is. This proves evangelical ministers are too stupid to live!

Statement of the Defense: But Mean Cletus is sorta crafty sometimes. Just look how his evangelical minions thrive. They can get away with anything. Remember the Rev. John Hagee, the one who endorsed McCain? He said his god created the Holocaust in order to make the Jews go back to Israel, and that the Roman Catholic Church is the “great whore,” and Hurricane Katrina was a holy judgment on the citizens of New Orleans, who were about to have a “homosexual parade” the day the storm hit. Notice how nobody rushes the stage and murders him in cold blood; he goes right on giving sermons and eating fatty foods. All those evangelical guys do.

Verdict: Kill ‘em all and let Cletus sort ‘em out.