A little preview of tomorrow's column from Gene Lyons:

Hypocrisy in a politician is universally held to be a very bad thing, religious hypocrisy worst of all. Alas, to Americans holding post-Enlightenment world-views, it has come down to this: either we must earnestly pray that George W. Bush is a cunning opportunist merely throwing hay to the great lowing herd of pious cattle who confuse the evening news with the Book of Revelation, or face the prospect that the United States has embarked upon a faith-based foreign policy as distant from reality as the ranting of Osama bin Laden. Many commentators have noticed that Bush has repeatedly cast the conflict with al Qaeda and Iraq in purely biblical terms--good against evil, "the forces of darkness" against the forces of light, etc. In a speech on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, as Bruce Nolan's article in Sunday's Democrat-Gazette noted, Bush hinted that God was stage-managing the "war on terrorism" for divine purposes. "I believe there is a reason that history has matched this nation with this time," Bush said. According to Bob Woodward's book, "Bush at War" even in one-on-one interviews "[t]he President was casting his mission and that of the country in the grand vision of God's Master Plan." This observation followed Bush's pronouncement that "[w]e will export death and violence to the four corners of the earth in defense of this great country and rid the world of evil." Conquering evil is bin Laden's plan too. Even fighting beside the "socialist infidel" Saddam Hussein, he hinted in a taped statement Feb. 11, was permissible "to establish the rule of God on earth." Quoting the Koran, he assured his followers that "'those who believe fight in the cause of Allah, and those who reject faith fight in the cause of evil.' So fight ye against the friends of Satan: feeble indeed is the cunning of Satan." So have we really been transported back to the 12th century A.D. with Bush as Richard the Lionhearted and Osama/Saddam as Saladin, in a replay of the Third Holy Crusade? We'd better hope not, because although medieval prophets convinced Richard that recapturing Jerusalem from the Muslims would bring about the Second Coming and usher in the millenium, he dragged back to England defeated in 1192.

It's come to this folks. We are lead by a man who openly boasts about exporting death and violence to the rest of the world as if this were a good thing. And the media continues to see this as just more of Bush's pandering to the right-wing crowd.