Chucky’s back

Yesterday I got a direct mail solicitation from Angel Tree, an annual program by Chuck Colson's Prison Fellowship that collects and distributes Christmas toys for the children of prisoners.

It's a nice program, well conceived and well run. The toys are collected from church or business groups, just like with Toys for Tots, and then are distributed to the children through their parents. Lately, Angel Tree has expanded to include mentoring and camping programs for these children. Like child-sponsorship programs, Angel Tree recognizes that its easier to get people to give to help the needy by making them feel warm and fuzzy about it, and the program cannily harnesses that sentiment for a good cause.

I used to plug Angel Tree every year back when I worked for the "alternative evangelical" Prism magazine. But I'm reluctant to do so this year. That reluctance, in part, is because Colson has spent the past year as an outspoken campaigner for George W. Bush.

Charles Colson, you probably remember, went to prison himself for his role as one of Nixon's hatchet men in Watergate. Forget the third-rate burglary — Colson was involved in some of the first-rate character assassinations and the dirty tricks of a dirty, vindictive administration. As he says himself, he was "willing to do almost anything for the cause of his president and his party."

But then, in prison, Colson was born again. He repented of his sins and became an ardent supporter of the church behind bars and the rights of prisoners. Prison Fellowship has grown over the years, spawning related efforts such as Justice Fellowship, which advocates reforms in the criminal justice system based on the idea of "restorative justice."

One of my biggest complaints with Colson over the past year is his failure to live up to the idea of restorative justice in his personal life. After his born-again experience, Colson reportedly apologized to many of the people he had attacked and slandered while working in Nixon's White House — people like Daniel Ellsberg and John Kerry.

That's right, John Kerry. Richard Nixon hated and feared John Kerry's work with Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and Colson's job was to destroy anything and anyone that Nixon hated or feared. So Colson hired John O'Neill — the same John O'Neill who resurfaced from his crypt this year to lead the Swift Boat liars crusade — to batter the young veteran with all the lies he could invent.

The lies and slanders thrown at John Kerry during the recent campaign were all recycled from the 30-year-old files of John O'Neill. They were concocted at Chuck Colson's direction and on Chuck Colson's payroll.

Yet the born-again Colson did not bother to make a single statement this year condemning the rebirth of his and O'Neill's filthy campaign. (Or, at least, if he did condemn O'Neill, he did so very quietly and I never heard it.)

Instead, Colson spent the year once again working in concert with people like O'Neill. He recorded pro-Bush GOTV phone messages and used his "Break Point" columns and radio commentaries as an extension of BC04 (apparently he'd finally run out of ways to paraphrase/borrow/steal from C.S. Lewis' The Abolition of Man).

As an ex-con and advocate of prisoner's rights, you might expect Colson to have strongly condemned the abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib. He did, sort of, churning out a series of "this is very bad, but …" pieces and absolving the Pentagon and the White House of any responsibility. (The real problem, Break Point guest commentator Al Mohler said, was women in the armed forces.)

The election seems to have revived the old man's political instincts for the jugular and ability to stay on message. Consider this BP column, in which Colson starts with the horrors of Abu Ghraib and then tries to redirect that moral revulsion against, yes, gay couples:

We are living in troubled times. The scandal over the abuse of Iraqi prisoners seems to grow worse every day. A friend of mine at the Pentagon who has seen all of the photos said they were "demonic." He felt a cold chill of evil, which is not surprising — Satan would like nothing better than to poison our policies in the Middle East. And then this past Monday here at home, gay "marriage" became legal.

Now, it may seem odd to link these two stories, but …

Yes, that's right, the common denominator is the demonic hand of Satan. And thus Colson points to the shame of Abu Ghraib as evidence to support the administration that made it possible.

I'd like to support Angel Tree, but it's not possible to do so without also supporting all the rest of this — the apologetics for Abu Ghraib; the demonizing of gay couples; the decades-old campaigns of slander and lies; the dismantling of the safety net that the children who receive these toys need to survive — and it seems to add up to a net loss.

The final straw for me was that the mailing for Angel Tree included an endorsement of the program from spanking guru James Dobson — head of Focus on the Family. Dobson … well, let's save Dobson for another post.