Bill Kristol's gift for spiritual discernment

In his NYT editorial, Kristol dissects Obama's "guns or religion" gaff. Quoting Marx and explaining how Obama's "mask slipped," Kristol peels away the layers of exoskeleton for us - a la Independence Day - to uncover the "real" Obama.

Andrew Sullivan punches back,

"Kristol is deliberately distorting to paint Obama as a cynical manipulator of religious faith for political ends, rather than as a genuine Christian. He's calling him a lying, Godless communist.

[. . .]

A non-Christian manipulator of Christianity is calling a Christian a liar about his own faith. That's where they've gone to already. And it's only the middle of April. What are they so scared of?"

Perhaps with "manipulator," Sullivan is lumping Kristol in with the likes of Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff-associate, Michael Scanlon, who reduced the GOP's attitude towards conservative Christians in America to this little nugget:

"The wackos get their information through the Christian right, Christian radio, mail, the internet and telephone trees," Scanlon wrote in the memo, which was read into the public record at a hearing of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee. "Simply put, we want to bring out the wackos to vote against something and make sure the rest of the public lets the whole thing slip past them." The brilliance of this strategy was twofold: Not only would most voters not know about an initiative to protect Coushatta gambling revenues, but religious "wackos" could be tricked into supporting gambling at the Coushatta casino even as they thought they were opposing it.

Please, Bill. The mask is off, all right. And it's yours. Allen Raymond, one of your own, put it better than I could (after getting out of jail):

"When it came to playing in the gutter, we were the professionals—the Dems weren't even junior varsity."