American Taliban: How War, Sex, Sin, and Power Bind Jihadists and the Radical Right Book

"We all agree with the Taliban."
'Rush Limbaugh, October 9, 2009

I picked up American Taliban as an impulse buy when Borders went out of business. It was marked down to about half price and I'm familiar with Markos Moulitsas. Moulitsas, @Markos on twitter, is the founder of the Daily Kos and a CurrentTV contributor. He's as big a Progressive in the public eye as you can find. Good enough reasons for me.

As an Anti-Theist, I liked his subject matter on this one. From the cover, I thought the book would mostly be Markos railing against Christian Theocrats, a group of greedy, pervasive trolls in the United States. To a degree, I wasn't disappointed. The book sprinkles in a few key Religious zealots here and there, but it does a good job of showing how that particular breed of cultural regressive interacts and relates to other types of politically conservative freaks.

The book is broken up into 6 categories. Power. War. Sex. Women. Culture. Truth. Markos shows how, over the years, each of these themes has been drastically corrupted by the presence of the Radical Right crowd. The book explains how people like "Grand Mullah Rush Limbaugh", whose quote at the top is the tagline for the book, Ann Coulter, Newt Gingrich, Deepak Chopra, Bill O'Reilly, the dead Jerry Falwell, the disgraced hypocrite Ted Haggard along with a gaggle of Senators and Representatives have been and still are all working to turn back the clock when it comes to social progress.

Markos draws explicit lines between this gang's actions and those of their counterparts in the now much feared Taliban. He shows those fundamentalists are so similar to our own in the U.S.A. in their quest for censorship, "traditional" gender roles, persuasion by violence, and avoidance of science. Markos paints a picture that makes it eery to think just what our Conservatives would do if they had similar control over public life that the Taliban has in its territories.

I wasn't surprised by any of these people being in the book. I didn't know how long they'd been in the business or how insidious their actions were. A result of not being that politically active just being out of college. This book served as a great overview of the aforementioned Conservative's actions over the past 30-40 years. One account even tells where a sect of Christianity was first co-opted back in 1935 to serve the rich and powerful as opposed to the meek, producing the Religious Right we know today.

Reading the book, I got the feeling that Markos wasn't really out to convert anybody. The book isn't written so much as a persuasive argument for liberal values, or why you should switch from being a Democrat to a Republican, as much as it was an investigative report on terrible things that have been going on in politics for the past ~70 years.