Former Bush Admin Official Kuo: Falwell 'Very Much Damaged Name of Jesus'

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In 2003, David Kuo resigned from the Bush administration's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives and later wrote a book [published just before the 2006 mid-term elections] claiming that the administration was hypocritical in its dealings with religious conservatives.

The MSM had a field day because according to them [as E.J. Dionne wrote here, for example], Kuo was a religious conservative himself. But is that true? What kind of religious conservative, the day after Jerry Falwell died, would go on MSNBC's Tucker Carlson show and say this about the late pastor?:

DAVID KUO: In bringing the pulpit to politics in the very strident, narrow and frankly angry way that he did, he very much damaged the name of Jesus.

View video here.

Later, Kuo made an illogical claim to the effect that Falwell's ministry was a failure.

KUO: If you look at the social statistics in 1979 when he started Moral Majority and compare them to today, out-of-wedlock births are up, divorces are up, drug use is up, teen sexuality is up, family formation is down and church attendance is down. So it's an interesting, what was the trade?

MSNBC HOST TUCKER CARLSON, completing Kuo's thought: I thought that yesterday. In the end, it wasn't that effective.

Kuo and Carlson's logic is fundamentally flawed, a classic example of post hoc ergo propter hoc. An uncontrolled experiment. For all we know, all those social parameters would have been that much worse had it not been for the work of Falwell and other religious conservatives. Kuo's comments reveal much more about himself than they ever could about Falwell.

Contact Mark at mark@gunhill.net