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Hunting Bubba
16 June 2005"'I got sick of preachers telling me how great Reagan was,'" Dave "Mudcat" Saunders, a man on a mission to win back rural voters, tells The Weekly Standard's Matt Labash. "'Jesus don't give endorsements,' Mudcat thunders. 'He don't give a damn about partisan politics. G-O-P, God's Only Party--that's bool-sheet. And it's bool-sheet that He's a Democrat--they'll tell you to doomsday about Him healing the sick and clothing the nekkid, as if that's proof. He's too big to get involved in partisan politics. I know this, because when I'm in politics, and pray about it, I don't get any answers. But when I pray about my heart, I get an answer right now.'" The Revealer likes Mudcat's sermon, because we're as tired of selective readings of scripture by liberals as we are of same (to different ends) by conservatives. And we like Matt Labash's profile of Mudcat for the conservative weekly because Labash, a religious man himself, writes with a total lack of piety. That makes this piece a good story. What makes it good journalism is the fact that so little of it is dedicated to religion. Mudcat and Labash talk hunting and deficits and jobs and wars, and mostly leave God out of the equation. Can that formula work? Well, Mudcat helped engineer Democrat Mark Warner's successful bid for Virginia's governership by bringing rural voters into his column. Labash thanks the "Color Gods of Feature Writing" for Mudcat's mouth and let's him run it, and the results are revealing of a story about red, blue, and Southern white men that hasn't often been told.
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