Jimmy Carter's Judas

Media Matters caught it. Digby reports it—Chris Matthews and Time's Michael Duffy hacking up same old right-wing hairball about Democrats' supposed "contempt" for Christians.

Leave aside that one of the American right's major funders has actively pledged himself to destroying Christianity.

Leave aside that John Kerry considered the priesthood and is a weekly communicant, and that Al Gore has been darkening the doorstep of the same Baptist church in Carthage, Tennessee since childhood.

No, consider this part of the exchange:

DUFFY: it seemed to be part of the program. They did it to woo a secular left that they thought didn't want to have anything to do with that.

MATTHEWS: Was turned off by the religious people, yeah.

DUFFY: Starting with Jimmy Carter and the --

MATTHEWS: I hear it. I've heard --

DUFFY: Yeah.

MATTHEWS: -- years of people --

DUFFY: Right. Absolutely.

"Starting with Jimmy Carter"?! These goofuses might as well be yip-yapping about bigfoot for all the sense that they're making. Jimmy Carter was the most famously religious American president in history—the man who introduced the phrase "born again" to beltway elitists like Chris Matthews. Who, by the way was one of Jimmy Carter's speechwriters, but now spins insults about him from whole cloth.

Go to hell, Chris Matthews.

(Below: Species in natural habitat.)

[UPDATE: Commenters have made the reasonable argument that Matthews and Duffy are not claiming that Carter was irreligious, but that there was an irreligious reaction to Carter. Under that interpretation of their words, I revise my sentiments thus: Chris Matthews can still go to hell. Carter was challenged from the left in 1980—by another weekly communicant, Ted Kennedy. Carter remains as religiously grounded as ever—and is more honored than ever. Whatever garbly-gook they were trying to get out, the underlying message remains the same: they're lying about liberals. It's second nature to them.]

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