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hiredgun: trying to work out something like a weighting (not sure if this is the clearest way to say what i am getting at...a way of assessing the relative influence/importance) of far right protestant millenarian ideology in making far right american foreign policy toward israel would be tricky, i think. alot of conservative ideology mimics the structure of protestant evangelical views, so the relationship appears tight--but it is not obvious that the relationship goes further than that really--in other words, conservative ideology is built around a particular relationship to political statements that lets that enables them to work categories like nation as if they were transcendent. i think this has alot to do with the bizarre variant on identity politics the right has been trafficking in the past 15 years or so. alot of its appeal seems to be to hinge on it. and alot of ugly political consequences follow from it as well.
but that doesnt mean that evanglical ideology proper is shaping what the right does in the exercise of power. not even in the bizarre-o case of the bush administration's passivity last summer as israel bombed the shit out of lebanon.
i think sometimes it looks as though the bush policies are so completely fucked up that disaster is the goal, and on that basis you can slot the information contained in the nyt article into an explanatory role.
but i am not sure how it would actually work if you were to try to make something more concrete of it. how would you go about it? sociology? would you gather information about the religious preferences of various bush people and use to attribute causation? that would assume that people can only occupy one relation to the world and that religious committments determine that relation. but you couldn't assume that, so you'd have to gather data and then make an argument about the correlation--and the argument would be tricky to do.
just saying i think this is more complicated than it appears to be.
this not so much a critique of you or what you are saying in this thread as much as it is thinking about what the thread raises as roachboy unfolds himself.
a parallel question about will's post: i dont understand the premise. i understand the parallel, but not how you could make it more than a parallel. this most because i am suspicious of anthropormorphisms, particularly of states. i dont see what it accomplishes, really. that said, what will posted is as interesting as anything i have heard or read by academic types in history or poli sci who try to explain this relationship. they use the category "special relationship" hedged round with a bunch of historical boundary conditions and then wander away from trying to explain it.
i was going to write "they throw up their hands" but it sounds funny.
and with the continued presence of different versions of bleatbot the scatboy in this thread, i figured it would just engender another juvenile joke. so i made the juvenile joke.
hmm....
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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