Grand Old Party of Hezbollah?

Andrew Sullivan (author of "The Conservative Soul") bemoans the religiose sentiment that appears to be strangling the Republican Party: "Examine the candidacies of the two front-runners for the GOP. One [Perry] launched his campaign in a revival meeting calling for God to solve our economic problems (having previously led mass prayers for the end of the Texas drought); the other [Bachmann] emerges entirely out of Dominionist theology and built her entire career in the Christianist world of home-schooling, and anti-gay demonization. ... This is what this party now is: a religious movement clothed in anti-government radicalism. It has nothing to do with the conservative temperament, conservative political thought or conservative ideas. It is hostile to most existing institutions, especially government, contemptuous of the courts, and seized of an ideology as rigid as any far-left liberalism, as utopian as any wide-eyed socialist, as fanatical as anything the left spawned in the 1960s. And it has hijacked an entire political party; and recently held to ransom an entire country. I knew it would get worse before it gets better. But this bad?"

(Image: "One morning at the gates of the Louvre," a 19th century painting by Édouard Debat-Ponsan, shows the morning after the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in Paris in 1572. Somehow, it seemed appropriate for the Sullivan excerpt.)