Hey, it wasn't our idea...

There's a lot of handwringing in Democratic circles about whether the result of the election can really be tracked to the most narrow minded, hate filled fundamentalist wing of the Republican constituency. They do indeed represent a marginal perspective, but as I've said for some time, the election was always going to be won in the margins.

Still, as liberals, we'd rather believe that the election turned on something more grand, more rational. So, in fact, would many people who claim to represent something called the Republican "mainstream," by which I think they mean people whose agenda might hurt most Americans, but is rooted in simple selfishness rather than blind hatred. Thus the wave of conservative opinion that insists it wasn't the fundies after all.

Still, whatever we, or the "mainstream" Republicans, may choose to believe, the fundies are out in full force, claiming full credit. To whit...

"The voters have delivered a moral mandate," D. James Kennedy, president of Coral Ridge Ministries in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., declared. "Now that values voters have delivered for George Bush, he must deliver for their values. The defense of innocent unborn human life, the protection of marriage and the nomination and confirmation of federal judges who will interpret the Constitution, not make law from the bench, must be first priorities, come January.”

...

"Now comes the revolution," Richard Viguerie, the conservative direct-mail fundraising pioneer, said Wednesday. More ominously, Viguerie wrote in a letter to other conservatives: "Make no mistake — conservative Christians and 'values voters' won this election for George W. Bush and Republicans in Congress. It's crucial that the Republican leadership not forget this — as much as some will try. Liberals, many in the media and inside the Republican Party, are urging the president to 'unite' the country by discarding the allies that earned him another four years. They're urging him to discard us conservative Catholics and Protestants, people for whom moral values are the most important issue."

There it is. They're claiming credit, and a corresponding right to impose their agenda, an agenda that is, in Viguerie's own characterization, revolutionary.

As in radical. As in the very opposite of the conservatism many people thought they were voting for, believed they were promised, hope will prevail.

The Bush administration is in the thrall of a radical group of people pursuing a basicly un-American agenda. That's a fact. They're going to claim their pound of flesh at every turn. We have to fight them every day, and one way to do that is to give them credit for their claims and expose their extremist agenda.

And, no, it's not their faith which which we contend. It's their dangerously radical, essentially un-American ideology.

We didn't pick this fight, but it's one that we can, and must, win.

Because we're mainstream. They're extreme.