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• Tuesday, October 17, 2006 11:56 AM

  Here's one for the NASCAR set

  Anybody who's seen 'Days of Thunder' remembers Tommy Cruise illustrating the racing principle of 'drafting' on future-wife Nicole Kidman's inner thigh. For those who didn't, drafting is a technique in racing that deals with resistance. To reach its top speed, a stock car will use the maximum power of its top gear to overcome fight the drag of wind resistance. Drafting is when a second car follows right behind the lead car, making that car absorb all of the wind resistance with it's top gear. This allows the drafting car to run as fast as the lead car without using all of it's available power. This in turn, allows the trailing car to floor it, using his reserve power to 'slingshot' past the lead car at a strategic point in the race.

  I thought of this when Kuo asserted that church leaders are essentially star-struck by their association with power, and that they are politically naive in believing that politicians are on their side. The drafting metaphor allows one to picture how the Republicans saw the fundamentalist right as a constituency. Their motive was money and power and they used 'compassionate conservatism' as a kind of Trojan Horse (mixing metaphors is bad) in the arena of public opinion, to infiltrate the evangelical cause of spiritual salvation through political action. So leading up to election time you can see the evangelical leaders revving up to full speed with the Republicans following close behind, nipping their ankles with promises of faith based initiative and scripture-inspired legislation. The Republicans let the religious leaders take the brunt of resistance from the media and the left as they cruised on with their agenda. And then, just when it was sure that a new era of spiritual government would be built form the alliance of evangelicals and conservatives, the Bush team floored the engine and slingshotted ahead, leaving the evangelical cause in the dust.

  —No Name Given
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