Saturday, July 25, 2009

Can you tell me how to get, how to get to C Street?

Hugo Zoom said: John, how is it this 2009 post ["C Street, the Family and Ivanwald are still around?"] has comments from 2005 and 2007? Me heap confused.

Versen,
I deleted part of the original post from 04/05/05 and published the abridged version as a new post. The comments came along for the ride. No magic was involved. The article by Jeffrey Sharlet was originally from '03, and I was surprised when Rachel Maddow brought up the Family again not long ago—six years later. Apparently some of the guys who were living at C Street back in '03 are still there. Maddow didn't mention Ivanwald as far as I know. And Sharlet's article mentions The Cedars "just down the road from Ivanwald," also not mentioned by Maddow. But they're all the Family's properties. I feel so safe with the Family looking out for our interests. It's sort of like The Waltons for the 21st century.

After Maddow started discussing C Street, and after I saw the clip of Coe, in which he expresses admiration for the Nazi's organizational skills, I sent a message to Maddow suggesting she look into the possibility that Cheney is exhibiting paranoid schizophrenia and that Coe is exhibiting garden-variety schizophrenia and shouldn't we, the public, know a little more about the condition so we can avoid electing those suffering from the condition to public office. The next day, during a story about the Sotomayor hearings on MSNBC, I noticed that the graphic in the lower right of the screen displaying the title of the story showed a picture of Sotomayor and the title "Hearing Voices." Is that totally cool or what? I imagine whichever admin assistant read my message first forwarded it to everybody else and they all had a good chuckle over it. Isn't that great? My brush with fame.

Then the other night, Maddow referred to the general public as "the public, such as it is" when asking Feinman about the effect of Obama's news conference. I know it's paranoid of me, but I was wondering if she had me (among others) in mind when she said that. But, then, she must get the looniest emails all the time. Surely my suggestion that Cheney is paranoid schizophrenic wasn't the first time she'd heard that and didn't catapult my email to the top of the loony pile. Surely not. I'm just being paranoid.

Friday, July 10, 2009

C Street, the Family and Ivanwald are still around?

This excerpt is from my post of 04/05/05:

When I googled "'republican party' platform," I stumbled onto TheocracyWatch.org, and the horror comedy abruptly started on my computer screen.

Dominionism? Dominionists?
It is dominion we are after. World conquest. That's what Christ has commissioned us to accomplish. We must win the world with the power of the Gospel. And we must never settle for anything less... Thus, Christian politics has as its primary intent the conquest of the land -- of men, families, institutions, bureaucracies, courts, and governments for the Kingdom of Christ.
The Changing of the Guard: Biblical Principles for Political Action by George Grant, former Executive Director of Coral Ridge Ministries
I wondered what TheocracyWatch.org was, was it just the angry ramblings of a pot-smoking paleo-hippie sitting cross-legged on a dirty floor somewhere, but TheocracyWatch is a project of the Center for Religion, Ethics and Social Policy (CRESP) at Cornell University. Does that make it credible? You decide.

Definitely check out TheocracyWatch.org for the fear factor. You'll read about, for example, the Constitution Restoration Act of 2004, an actual bill: H.R. 3799 and S. 2082. John F. Sugg of the Weekly Planet explains that the bill "would acknowledge Christianity's God as the 'sovereign source' of our laws. It would reach back in history and reverse all judicial decisions that have built a wall between church and state, and it would prohibit federal judges from making such rulings in the future." The text of H.R. 3799 can be read on the Yurica Report site and probably any number of other sites that could be found with a search engine.

As I researched the above paragraph, however, I noticed an innocuous-looking link on the same page that leads to a Harper's Magazine article entitled "Jesus Plus Nothing" by Jeffrey Sharlet. Now...after reading about Ivanwald, the Cedars, the Family—such tranquil, pastoral names—nothing is the same. I've passed through a gate, a membrane, into another place. Single young men, living and praying together in a D.C. suburb, denying the lusts of the flesh, consecrate themselves to preparing for covert war and are wholly focused on establishing a new government based on the power of Christ. But it's not just about a group of self-purifying zealots. It's also about the power suits who attend prayer breakfasts where the zealots are attendants, "a rotating group of ambassadors, businessmen, and American politicians." Are you ready to take the red pill? Read the article.


Ivanwald

Now, was Jeffrey Sharlet killed shortly after publication of this article? How is it that the article is still online? Am I at risk because I link to it?

Wait, when was the article originally published? Was it an April fool's joke? March 2003. But there's no "gotcha" at the end of it, only footnotes.

Nah. The Family can't be real. Nobody's that dumb.