With the help of Krakauer
 

Marreen Dowd sets her take on Romneys speech. To quote Mike Gundy, ""Three-fourths of this is inaccurate."

Despite some problems with the article, there was a valid point to be gleaned:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/op...prod=permalink

Another good quote:

This is my main gripe about the GOP. Too much focus on political red herrings, like abortion and gay marriage.

Let's solve other problems that impact everyone on a day to day basis.

Another Krakauer quote:

I must have missed that memo. What part of the New Testament do we not "buy"?

Another good one:

All of the excerpts seem about right to me. What's so inaccurate?

I used the Gundy quote partially in jest, but one-piece garments are non-existent in the under-65 Mormon crowd, blacks have full rights and privileges within the church and it's wrong to say that we don't "buy" the whole New Testament.

Yeah.

The article had some great quotes. But some silly errors also.

Oh I haven't read the article, so I was just going off the quotes.

The issue seems to be this: Romney's speech is being compared to JFK's, and rightly so, because they were given similar opportunities to defend their religious belief and explain the impact it would have on their presidency. That's where the similarly ends. JFK used his opportunity to guarantee that the separation of church and state would be "absolute." Romney used his opportunity to declare that the separation of church and state is overrated, and was never intended to result in a secular nation, when I think we all realize that the exact opposite is true. The American Revolution was done in defiance of theocracy, and one of the main goals of it was to establish a secular government. That Romney got it so wrong probably means he's still pandering to whomever he thinks will get him elected, but the scary version is that he actually believes that bullshit he said is true.

It also seems to be the case that the "creator" spoken of in the preamble is the generic, deistic creator, and that Christian values did not play that big of a role in our nation's founding. Mitt once again got it exactly backwards when he declared in his speech that the US is unique because it was founded on religious principles. Obviously, that's not true at all. What makes us semi-unique is that the exact opposite is true. Romney got it horribly, horribly wrong, and his entire speech was a disaster. The polls seem to agree with this assessment, and it seems that the collective orgasm on CB over it was just the typical partisan hackery that we've all come to acknowledge over there.

Dowd is a bitter woman who can't stand it when anyone doesn't see things her way.