We can all rest easy now!

From Max Blumenthal at The Daily Beast:

On January 7, second-term Republican Rep. Paul Broun of Georgia and two friends prayed over a door. It was not just any door, but the entranceway beneath the Capitol that President-elect Barack Obama will pass through as he walks onto the inaugural stage to take the oath of office.

[snip]

While Mahoney prayed, Rev. Rob Schenck turned his palms to the sky and muttered, “Yes” and “Have mercy” over and over. Then, he dipped his fingers in a jar of oil and painted several crosses on the door’s brass framing “as they did the furnishings of the tabernacle in the temple to the use of God and his word,” he prayed.

An officer from the Capitol Police Department stood immediately on the other side of the door, keeping watch over the inaugural stage, a top security concern for both his department and the Secret Service. With his back turned to the door, the officer appeared unaware of the secret ceremony Broun, Mahoney, and Schenck were performing just feet away. Whether security officials gave authorization for the ceremony is unclear; neither the Capitol Police nor Secret Service returned my calls. Broun’s office also refused to respond to my requests for a comment about the anointing.

While the Capitol prayer partners appeared earnest in the prayers for the president elect’s success, they have each distinguished themselves from their Christian right comrades by leveling some of the most paranoid imprecations Obama has faced since he arrived in the Senate. On November 10, 2008, a week after Obama’s election victory, Broun took umbrage at the President-elect’s call for a national civilian security force, a proposal also backed by George W. Bush. According to Broun, who acknowledged the possibility that he might be “crazy,” Obama had revealed himself as a radical Marxist Nazi socialist comparable to Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.

From Digby:

'Broun became entranced by a “gentleman with this big type hair wig on” holding a “John 3:16” sign. “As I sat there in my office that fall trying to figure out life, I picked up the Bible and read John 3:16,” Broun said. He suddenly transformed into a true believer, a cadre of the Christian right.'

(The wigged “gentleman” was Rollen Stewart, an evangelical fanatic and fixture at sports events who is currently serving three consecutive sentences in jail on kidnapping charges as well as several minor sentences for stink bomb attacks).

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