Rolling Stone: Tell us how you REALLY feel?

In one of the greatest articles I've read in quite some time, Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi sums up pretty succinctly exactly what I think about Joel Osteen, televangelist extraordinaire. The following is a quote, although there are portions that I wish I'd have written.

McCain's transformation is so complete that at a recent town-hall meeting in Nashville, when asked to name an author who inspired him, the candidate — who once described televangelists of the Jerry Falwell genus as "agents of intolerance" — put none other than Joel Osteen at the top of his list. "He's inspirational," McCain said.

Standing at the meeting, I didn't write Osteen's name down in my notebook — apparently because my brain refused on some level to accept that McCain had actually said it. Of all the vile, fake, lying-ass, money-grubbing shyster scumbags on the face of this planet, there is perhaps none more loathsome than Osteen, a human haircut with plastic baseball-size teeth who has made a fortune selling the appalling only-in-America idea that terrestrial greed is actually a form of Christian devotion. "God wants us to prosper financially, to have plenty of money, to fulfill the destiny He has laid out for us," Osteen once wrote. This is the revolting, snake-oil-selling dickhead that John McCain actually chose to pimp as number one on his list of inspirational authors. So much for "go, sell everything you have and give to the poor," and all that other hippie crap from the New Testament.

The whole article, if you'd like to read it, is about McCain this and McCain that. And because the Rolling Stone is SO unapologetically leftist, I don't really pay too much attention to what they have to say about politics (it's a music magazine after all), much like I don't pay too much attention to FOXNews...very right wing. Really, there's not a new organization that's fair and pointed anymore, but whatever.

More interesting things in the article pop up when the writer talks to some folks from New Orleans about our presidential candidates. One of the most disturbingly accurate sentences in the entire article sums up a particularly heady challenge Obama faces:

McCain has finally decided to sail with the wind at his back by going dumb and courting the same talk-radio demographic that used to despise him. What enables him to do so is a key insight: that while George W. Bush may be unpopular as an individual, fear and hatred in this country have never gone out of style.

Ouch. So much for progression.