by Will Moredock
In 2009, Sen. Jim DeMint released his book Saving Freedom: We Can Stop America's Slide Into Socialism. It was the most fatuous piece of political propaganda I have ever seen, and I devoted a week's worth of my precious words exposing DeMint's silly claptrap for what it was.
In Saving Freedom, DeMint poured in roughly equal parts religion, history, economics, and old-fashioned, flag-waving jingoism, then hit the purée button. What he poured out was a preposterous sludge of superstition and bigotry, which held that American exceptionalism and unbridled capitalism were ordained by God and anyone who thought otherwise was a threat to the divine plan.
As I wrote that week: "What DeMint does here is romanticize America's past, turning it into a bucolic Christian utopia, in which friends and neighbors took care of each other. There were no industries to regulate, and no ethnic conflicts to sort out. That's the way we should see the country today, he says ... Don't listen to those darn socialists, with all their complicated theories and prescriptions."
Alas, I had only 800 words to fling at DeMint two years ago, when there was so much more to be said. I am pleased to report that another patron of rational thought and fact-based reality has taken up the cause. South Carolina native Barrett Maners has devoted a whole book to calling out Jim DeMint and his harebrained followers in Stopping Radicalism: We Can Stop Jim DeMint's Crusade for Stupidity.
Read the entire review of Demint's book from the Charleston City Paper
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