In its vain, and vaguely sickening attempt to find some way to bring President Obama down to their level or to find something as base about him as the embarrassment who was identified as our president for the prior eight years, the far right fools who have taken over the Republican Party spent half the week either distorting things the President said to adoring crowds in Europe, or accusing him of subjugating our nation to royalty (after his wife was accused of insulting royalty by touching the Queen).

The clearest sign that these out of touch hate mongers---inheritors of the mantle on which the careers of Father Coughlin and Westbrook Pegler were born---do not understand what our country is all about, was their attack on the President for explaining that

we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation; we consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values

There is nothing radical, or even vaguely controversial about this. The now famous (and slightly ironic this week) Treaty of Tripoli, negotiated during Washington's administration and signed after ratification by President Adams, certainly reflects the founders identical view that

the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion

and, of course, there is President Kennedy's "declaration of independence" while running for the the presidency:

"I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute...I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish; where no public official either requests or accept instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source; where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials...

Yet there they are, again, with that great moral arbiter Karl Rove explaining

Yeah, look, America is a nation built on faith. I mean, we can be Christian, we can be Jew, we can be Mormon, we can be, you know, any variety of things. We're a country that prizes faith

In these pages, I have ranted about presidents---the one we finally rid ourselves of, and the one about whom we are so rightly proud---announcing a national policy about funding scientific research based on the particular president's religious beliefs. I have nothing against those religious beliefs: every president is entitled to believe what the president wants to believe. My objection has been to any suggestion that the president's religious beliefs are those of the nation, and that I am bound by them.

and then, came this:



This news, and then this beautiful photograph, was so touching because it said that Passover, just like Easter, is a holiday in this country. You don't have to celebrate it, but you can and, if you do, you do it not simply as a member of your faith but as an American.

The White House seder. The President of the United States at the head of a table where the four questions are asked, reading from that oh so American "Maxwell House" haggadah so many of us have used over so many years. Laughing and smiling in front of the symbols of a holiday about redemption and slavery and freedom.

That is what the United States of America means. And when we send Barack Hussein Obama abroad to represent us we send that message, the real message our founders intended to send, loud and clear. The people who hate us around the world have no answer to that message, one of hope and of freedom and of what we can mean to those who suffer in the forms of slavery that exist today around a still unhappy world. This was how the people in the "huts and villages" as President Kennedy described them, should see the United States of America. And this is who we really are.

As it happens, the wisest statement on the subject I have heard on recent years was by a fictitious presidential candidate, Sen Arnold Vinick, on West Wing, whose told a press hounding him on his religious fidelity (in a script written by
Lawrence O'Donnell, Jr.):

I don't see how we can have a separation of church and state in this government if you have to pass a religious test to get in this government. And I want to warn everyone in the press and all the voters out there if you demand expressions of religious faith from politicians, you are just begging to be lied to. They won't all lie to you but a lot of them will. And it will be the easiest lie they ever had to tell to get your votes. So, every day until the end of this campaign, I'll answer any question anyone has on government, But if you have a question on religion, please go to church.

It is bizarre and not just a little bit scary to hear this rhetoric directed at a hugely popular president by the grossly out of touch people who somehow took over our national politics for almost 30 years. I remember similar screaming from people like Fulton Lewis III in the 1960s, but those people were understood as cranks, not the recently deposed arbiters of political thought. These sad characters should be seen for what they are---not the political thinkers they claim to be---but horribly misguided fools who we tolerate because of our reverence for the right to free speech (something they do not share with us, either).