Theoconic Hypocrisy

I don't know what Kos is thinking with this description of the Christianist wing of the Republican Party:

Theocons

This is the Christian Coalition/Moral Majority crowd, desperate for the wedding of state and religion, desperate to prevent the wedding of same sex couples. Unafraid to spend tax dollars on "faith-based" initiatives, while seeing immigrants as a replenishing source of new converts and religious foot soldiers.

Government spending: Pro
Aggressive foreign policy: Against
Immigration: Pro
Traditional values: Pro
Notables: Mike Huckabee, Pat Robertson, James Dobson

My own description of the Theocons would be:

Government Spending: Against
Agressive Foreign Policy: Pro
Immigration: Against
Traditional Values: Pro

Maybe Kos is only looking at Huckabee and his gubernatorial record, along with some of his campaign statements, relative to the most anti-government spending, pro foreign policy agression, and anti-immigrant Republican in Congress. But I wouldn't depict the Theocons as a base of the party as having the perspectives Kos assigns them.

That in fact also seems to be the observation of this already much referenced op-ed from Harold Meyerson in today's Wash Post:

But it's on their policies concerning immigrants where Republicans -- candidates and voters alike -- really run afoul of biblical writ. Not on immigration as such but on the treatment of immigrants who are already here. Consider: Christmas, after all, celebrates not just Jesus's birth but his family's flight from Herod's wrath into Egypt, a journey obviously undertaken without benefit of legal documentation. The Bible isn't big on immigrant documentation. "Thou shalt neither vex a stranger nor oppress him," Exodus says the Lord told Moses on Mount Sinai, "for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt."

Yet the distinctive cry coming from the Republican base this year isn't simply to control the flow of immigrants across our borders but to punish the undocumented immigrants already here, children and parents alike.

So Romney attacks Huckabee for holding immigrant children blameless when their parents brought them here without papers, and Huckabee defends himself by parading the endorsement of the Minuteman Project's Jim Gilchrist, whose group harasses day laborers far from the border. The demand for a more regulated immigration policy comes from virtually all points on our political spectrum, but the push to persecute the immigrants already among us comes distinctly, though by no means entirely, from the same Republican right that protests its Christian faith at every turn.

We've seen this kind of Christianity before in America. It's more tribal than religious, and it surges at those times when our country is growing more diverse and economic opportunity is not abounding. At its height in the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan was chiefly the political expression of nativist Protestants upset by the growing ranks of Catholics in their midst.

It's difficult today to imagine KKKers thinking of their mission as Christian, but millions of them did.