Short version: Rummy in the last throes of classic transference.

Prescient then, and more timely than ever.

” The symptoms of fascist thinking are colored by environment and adapted to immediate circumstances. But always and everywhere they can be identified by their appeal to prejudice and by the desire to play upon the fears and vanities of different groups in order to gain power. It is no coincidence that the growth of modern tyrants has in every case been heralded by the growth of prejudice. It may be shocking to some people in this country to realize that, without meaning to do so, they hold views in common with Hitler when they preach discrimination…”

[snip]

“…Out of this modern civilization, economic royalists [have] carved new dynasties…. It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction…. And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man….”

[snip]

“These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power.” Source

Haven’t mentioned G. Walker’s misbegotten “faith-based in initiatives” in quite a while. Voila.

U.S. District Judge Robert W. Pratt didn’t mince words. Officials at Iowa’s Newton Correctional Facility had become, he wrote, far too entangled with religion by establishing a special wing for Prison Fellowship’s InnerChange program. InnerChange, Pratt declared, is suffused with religion.

“The religion classes are not objective inquiries into the religious life, comparable to an adult study or college course, offered for the sake of discussing and learning universal secular, civic values or truths,” Pratt wrote. “They are, instead, overwhelmingly devotional in nature and intended to indoctrinate InnerChange inmates into the Evangelical Christian belief system.”

Later in the ruling, Pratt observed, “For all practical purposes, the state has literally established an Evangelical Christian congregation within the walls of one of its penal institutions, giving the leaders of that congregation, i.e., InnerChange employees, authority to control the spiritual, emotional, and physical lives of hundreds of Iowa inmates. There are no adequate safeguards present, nor could there be, to ensure that state funds are not being directly spent to indoctrinate Iowa inmates.”

[snip]

On paper, InnerChange was open to any inmate who wanted to take part. The reality on the ground was something else. The program was so saturated with the conservative, biblically literalist form of Christianity favored by Prison Fellowship that members of other faiths found it inhospitable. During the trial, several inmates testified that they found InnerChange impossible to reconcile with their own religious beliefs. Article

Yuppers. (emphasis added)

…President Bush emerged from a meeting and, flanked by advisers – including the secretaries of labor, commerce and the Treasury – announced to reporters, “Things are good for American workers.”

The comment is preposterous.… Article

Welcome aboard. Now let us tell you about the rest of reality.

It’s mentioned far too little, but never, never forget the man behind the man behind the curtain.