From a speech to a Texas audience at a fundraiser, September 30, 2005, now available online:
The phenomenon of our time is how the religious, political, and corporate right, under the cloak of ‘moral values,’ has forged a mighty coalition for the looting of America. With one hand they stretch upward for the pearly gates, and with the other they reach down and behind your back to pick your pocket or your purse.
Their appointed poster boy is George W. Bush. Everything he knows, he learned here in Texas. Unfortunately. I don’t mean this as a knock on your schools. What I mean is that the system here is rigged to assure the political progeny needed to perpetuate itself with minimum interference from the nuisances of liberal democracy. You remember liberal democracy: the rule of law, the protection of individual and minority rights, checks and balances against arbitrary power, an independent press, and the separation of church and state. But George W. Bush was nurtured by a dynasty of patronage and privilege that mocks those values, a system that owes its perpetuation to a permanent fix. the Observer got it right some years ago: “The men who run the Lone Star State, through a tacit but powerful interlocking directorate of politicians and corporation executives, are perpetrating and perpetuating a monstrous deception on the public” – namely, the illusion of self-government.
The crowd that came to Washington from Texas arrived like atheists at the Vatican – they don’t believe in government – except as the means for aggrandizing their autonomy, wealth, and privilege.