How to Get Ahead in the Republican Party

Don't miss the profile of Congressman Patrick McHenry, from our neighboring 10th District, in the Washington Monthly (he replaced Cass Ballenger in Congress in the same election that sent Virginia Foxx to Washington).

It's a stunning look at the ethics of young Republicans as molded by the Rove/DeLay era, with lots of details about how young McHenry rose through the ranks of College Republicans to beat Sheriff David Huffman in the same primary last year when Foxx was beating nut-hatch Vernon Robinson. Adjectives spring to mind to describe these young Republican males: unscrupulous, sleazy, amoral.

In at least one way McHenry resembles our own non-male Virginia Foxx ... his Catholic religion. Plus the way he manipulated Baptists:

"McHenry, a Catholic in an overwhelmingly Protestant district, also started attending Baptist youth groups. 'I knew he was against abortion and against the homosexual agenda,' Pastor Ruffin Snow, a Baptist minister from Hickory who is considered a major power broker in McHenry's district, explained.... 'But with him being Catholic, the most important thing was I asked him, actually, the same question I'm fixin' to ask you.... I asked him, Patrick, if God were to call you today and ask you whether you deserved to go to heaven, would you be able in your heart to tell him you did? Because,' the pastor added with a sly hint of the deep and dark, 'everyone spends eternity someplace.' Pastor Snow let that sink in and continued: 'And Patrick said to me, "yes, because even though I'm Catholic I'm also born-again, I've accepted Christ into my heart." And that was good enough for me.' "

Foxx has played that same game with the Baptists in the 5th District. Doesn't it make your skin crawl?

ADDENDUM: Fake it, that's how you get ahead in the Republican Party, because if you happen to be a Republican and piously say "Jesus Christ," religious conservatives go into an acquiescent swoon. David Batstone of the Southern Baptist Sojourners magazine writes:

"I find it more than a bit disturbing that Christians who back Rove, DeLay, and Frist in their political efforts express so little concern about the possibility of corruption at the highest ranks of government. Worse still, many Christians express blind allegiance to these men. Is this what we have come to, when we sell our birthright for a pot of political porridge?"