Polemics with style

From The Rude Pundit, September 2, 12:30 pm:

If you’ve ever read “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” by the Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards, you probably had a ringing fundamentalist voice in your head speaking the words. But the thing about Edwards is that he actually spoke very calmly about the fires of Hell burning you to a crisp. It’s even more frightening when the preacher sounds rational and reasonable. That’s what Cheney offered last night: a vision of doom and violence masked with the rotting face of rationality, like these things are self-evident. Standing on the stage, smirking like he was drinking the blood of an oil-stained Iraqi child, Cheney basked in the glow of the crowd, choreographed to chant “Flip-flop” when John Kerry’s record was attacked. Cheney, the calm Grand Poobah of cynical exploitation of government, one of the great liars ever to hold high office, stood and hated with Zen-like stillness. And the crowd went wild, booing and hooting. The demonstrable proof of a world where God either doesn’t exist or stays out of human efforts is that the center of Madison Square Garden didn’t open up and Dick Cheney was not sucked down into screaming hell.

Damn. I wish I’d said that.

Oh, by the way - good morning.