The Washington tragedy almost surely marks the end of Huckabee's political career. Ironically, however, for once his alibi is more right than wrong. For his own protection and everybody else's, Clemmons ought to have been inside a locked-down psychiatric unit. The system failed from top to bottom.

But let's start at the top, shall we? Although he posed as a conservative hard-liner, when it came to crime and punishment, the glib, self-deprecating Huckabee proved as softheaded and gullible as the woolliest sociology professor in the faculty lounge.

During the former Baptist minister's decade as Arkansas governor, it appeared that no matter how heinous an inmate's crimes, all he had to do for a pardon was drop to his knees, praise Jesus and persuade some preacher known to Huckabee of his newfound holiness. "Everybody knows that Mike Huckabee makes up his mind what to do by what God tells him to do," said one minister who gained clemency for a prisoner serving 100 years for the strong-arm robbery of elderly neighbors.

Making the governor's personal acquaintance also seemed to help. Inmates competed to be assigned to do yard work at the Governor's Mansion. "If you do a good job raking the governor's leaves," Pulaski County (Little Rock) prosecutor Larry Jegley complained bitterly, "you can go free."

Altogether, Huckabee commuted 163 inmates' sentences, including a dozen murderers. Several have already ended up back in prison. Indeed, given Huckabee's track record, Maurice Clemmons probably won't be the last to earn notoriety. We must pray that he ends up being the worst. Only a strong public outcry in 2004 prevented the governor from freeing a Lonoke County killer who'd beaten, raped and run over a pregnant woman with his car, only to get religion in the penitentiary.

The most notorious was Wayne DuMond, Arkansas' celebrity inmate of the '90s. Convicted in 1985 of raping a Forrest City cheerleader at knifepoint, DuMond was a glib psychopath who persuaded ideologically deranged crackpots who circulated Clinton administration "death lists" that he'd been framed. DuMond's victim, see, was a distant cousin of the then-president's. Articles appeared in places like the New York Post portraying him as a victim of the Satanic Clinton machine.

Becoming governor after Kenneth Starr deposed his predecessor, Jim Guy Tucker, Huckabee came into office publicly doubting DuMond's guilt and talking about a pardon. After the prosecutor and the victim herself courageously objected, Huckabee pulled some hugger-mugger with the parole board that ended up freeing Dumond -- the proud recipient of a "Dear Wayne" letter from the governor celebrating his release.

In 2001, DuMond was arrested and subsequently convicted of the rape and murder of a Missouri woman. Huckabee's 2007 campaign bio titled, get this, "Character Makes a Difference," falsely claimed that DuMond died in prison awaiting trial. The man's worse than a hypocrite; he's a fool. Even so, establishment pundits pretty much gave Huckabee a pass. After all, he's so charming on television. Anyway, where, exactly, is Kansas City?

Maurice Clemmons, too, played the holy card to Huckabee, who got him turned loose back in 2000. But the governor had no seeming role in Arkansas' failure to revoke Clemmons' parole after he was convicted of two more armed robberies in 2001, bringing his total to seven felonies. He was released in 2004.

Nor was Huckabee involved in Washington's decision to free Clemmons on bail with seven pending felony charges -- one involving forcing 11- and 12-year-old relatives to strip naked and fondle him while he pronounced that he was Jesus. President Obama, Clemmons proclaimed, would soon declare him the Messiah. These are unmistakable symptoms of criminal psychosis.

How and why Washington authorities failed to act is frankly beyond comprehension.

Hanna Rosin's Atlantic article exploring the economic consequences of the so-called "prosperity gospel" is no mere blog post, but before reading it, I felt my own hackles rise in preliminary disagreement with the provocative lead-in. No one factor deserves all the blame for something as incredibly complicated as the global economic crash we just lived through. Everyone has their own favorite villain -- the Community Reinvestment Act, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, China, the repeal of Glass-Steagal, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, Goldman Sachs self-dealing, the conflict of interest inherent in how credit rating agencies work, the originate-to-distribute model of mortgage loan securitization, bad computer models, mismatched incentives, Wall Street executive greed, government leadership failure, the list goes on and on. The story of the crash is how all these different factors interlocked, reinforced each other, and blew up.

So sure, evangelical Christian preachers telling the members of their flock that all they have to do is trust in Jesus and they'll be moving, lickety-split, right on up into that McMansion on the hill, played some part in encouraging a blithe American sense of entitlement, a confidence that riches should be our earthly reward just for being born again. But it is by no means the whole story, and in a perverse way lets regulators, Wall Street executives, and economists off the hook while partially blaming the lowest rung of the totem pole, the Jesus-dazzled Americans who took out loans that they couldn't afford, for being the prime movers in creating an economic disaster, when in fact they were just as much victims as perpetrators.

That having been said, Rosin's article is an excellent exploration of the amazing contradiction inherent in how evangelical Christianity in America, to borrow Andrew Sullivan's formulation, "supports wealth while Jesus demanded total poverty." There's a lot of great reporting, particularly regarding the concrete intersections between the mortgage lending industry and the Jesus biz.

Rosin's chief narrative vehicle, Fernando Garay, the pastor of Casa del Padre in Charlottesville, Virginia, didn't just preach the prosperity gospel, he prepared the loan papers too.

From 2001 to 2007, while he was building his church, Garay was also a loan officer at two different mortgage companies. He was hired explicitly to reach out to the city's growing Latino community, and Latinos, as it happened, were disproportionately likely to take out the sort of risky loans that later led to so many foreclosures. To many of his parishioners, Garay was not just a spiritual adviser, but a financial one as well.

The demographic correlation between foreclosure hotspots and the newer "prosperity churches" is also interesting, as is the evidence that lenders executed a conscious strategy of reaching out to churches in order to target low-income, minority populations.

The idea of reaching out to churches took off quickly, Jacobson [a former top loan officer in Wells Fargo's subprime division] recalls. The branch managers figured pastors had a lot of influence with their parishioners and could give the loan officers credibility and new customers. Jacobson remembers a conference call where sales managers discussed the new strategy. The plan was to send officers to guest-speak at church-sponsored "wealth-building seminars" like the ones Bowler attended, and dazzle the participants with the possibility of a new house. They would tell pastors that for every person who took out a mortgage, $350 would be donated to the church, or to a charity of the parishioner's choice. "They wouldn't say, 'Hey, Mr. Minister. We want to give your people a bunch of subprime loans," Jacobson told me. "They would say, 'Your congregants will be homeowners! They will be able to live the American dream!"

Sounds like high time that somebody escorted the money-changers out of the temple again, but that's never really been the American way.

I can anticipate right now arguments to excuse this outbreak of bigotry in the Alps that will be advanced by our own fringe Right, of neoconservatives and those who think, without daring to say it, that "white culture" is superior to all other world civilizations and deserves to dominate or wipe the others out.

The first is that it is only natural that white, Christian Europeans should be afraid of being swamped by people adhering to an alien, non-European religion.

Switzerland is said to be 5 percent Muslim, and of course this proportion is a recent phenomenon there and so unsettling to some. But Islam is not new to Europe. Parts of what is now Spain were Muslim for 700 years, and much of the eastern stretches of what is now the European Union were ruled by Muslims for centuries and had significant Muslim populations. Cordoba and Sarajevo are not in Asia or Latin America. They are in Europe. And they are cities formed in the bosom of Muslim civilization.

The European city of Cordoba in the medieval period has been described thusly:

For centuries, Cordoba used to be the jewel of Europe, which dazzled visitors from the North. Visitors marveled at what seemed to them an extraordinary general prosperity; one could travel for ten miles by the light of street lamps, and along an uninterrupted series of buildings. The city is said to have had then 200,000 houses, 600 mosques, and 900 public baths. Over the quiet Guadalquivir Arab engineers threw a great stone bridge of seventeen arches, each fifty spans in width. One of the earliest undertakings of Abd al-Rahman I was an aqueduct that brought to Cordova an abundance of fresh water for homes, gardens, fountains, and baths.

So if the Swiss think that Islam is alien to Europe, then they are thinking of a rather small Europe, not the Europe that now actually exists. Minarets dotted Cordoba. The Arnaudia mosque in Banja Luca dates back to the 1400s; it was destroyed along with dozens of others by fanatics in the civil war that accompanied the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

As for the likely comeback,that Muslims came to Europe from the 700s of the Common Era as conquerors, unlike Christianity, actually both were conquering state religions. It was the conversion of an emperor that gave a favored position to Christianity in Europe, which was a small minority on the continent at the time. And Charlemagne forcibly imposed Christianity on the German tribes up to the Elbe. In the cases both of European Christianity and European Islam, there were many willing converts among the ordinary folk, who thrilled to itinerant preachers or beautiful chanting.

Others will allege that Muslims do not grant freedom of religion to Christians in their midst. First of all, this allegation is not true if we look at the full range of the countries where the 1.5 billion Muslims live. Among the nearly 60 Muslim-majority states in the world, only one, Saudi Arabia, forbids the building of churches. Does Switzerland really want to be like Saudi Arabia?

Here is a Western Christian description of the situation of Christians in Syria:

In Syria, as in all other Arab countries of the Middle East except Saudi Arabia, freedom of religion is guaranteed in law . . . We should like to point out too that in Syria and in several other countries of the region, Christian churches benefit from free water and electricity supplies, are exempt from several types of tax and can seek building permission for new churches (in Syria, land for these buildings are granted by the State) or repair existing ones.

It should be noted too that there are Christian members of Parliament and of government in Syria and other countries, sometimes in a fixed number (as in Lebanon and Jordan.)

Finally, we note that a new personal statute was promulgated on 18 June 2006 for the various Christian Churches found in Syria, which purposely and verbatim repeats most of the rules of the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches promulgated by Pope John Paul II.

That is, in Muslim-majority Syria, the government actually grants land to Christians for the building of churches, along with free water and electricity. Christians have their own personal status legal code, straight from the Vatican. (It is because Christians have their own law in the Middle East, backed by the state, that Muslims in the West are puzzled as to why they cannot practice their personal status code.) Christians have freedom of religion, though there are sensitivities about attempts to convert others (as there are everywhere in the Middle East, including Israel). And Christians are represented in the legislature. With Switzerland's 5 percent Muslim population, how many Muslim members of parliament does it have?

It will also be alleged that in Egypt some clergymen gave fatwas or legal opinions that building churches is a sin, and it will be argued that Christians have been attacked by Muslims in Upper Egypt.

These arguments are fallacies. You cannot compare the behavior of some Muslim fanatics in rural Egypt to the laws and ideals of the Swiss Republic. We have to look at Egyptian law and policy.

The Grand Sheikh of al-Azhar Seminary, the foremost center of Sunni Muslim learning, "added in statements carried by Egyptian newspaper Youm al-Saba’a that Muslims can make voluntary contributions to build churches, pointing out that the church is a house for 'worshipping and tolerance.'" He condemned the fundamentalist Muslims for saying church-building is sinful. And Egypt has lots of churches, including new Presbyterian ones, following John Calvin, who I believe lived in ... Geneva. About six percent of the population is Christian.

The other problem with excusing Switzerland with reference to Muslims' own imperfect adherence to human rights ideals is that two wrongs don't make a right. The bigoted Right doesn't even have the moral insight of kindergartners if that is the sort of argument they advance. The International Declaration of Human Rights was crafted with the participation of Pakistan, a Muslim country; the global contemporary rights regime is imperfectly adhered to by all countries -- it is a claim on the world's behavior, something we must all strive for. If the Swiss stepped back from it, they stepped back in absolute terms. It doesn't help us get to global human rights to say that is o.k. because others are also failing to live up to the Declaration.

The other Wahhabi state besides Saudi Arabia, Qatar, has allowed the building of Christian churches. But they are not allowed to have steeples or bells. This policy is a mirror image to that of the Swiss. So Switzerland, after centuries of striving for civilization and enlightenment, has just about reached the same level of tolerance as that exhibited by a small Gulf Wahhabi country, the people of which were mostly Bedouins only a hundred years ago.

The nationalist Swiss People's Party describes minarets, the distinctive spires used in most countries for calls to prayer, as symbols of rising Muslim political and religious power that could eventually turn Switzerland into an Islamic nation.

Muslims make up about 6 percent of Switzerland's 7.5 million people. Many Swiss Muslims are refugees from the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. Fewer than 13 percent practice their religion, the government says, and Swiss mosques do not broadcast the call to prayer outside their buildings.

"Forced marriages and other things like cemeteries separating the pure and impure -- we don't have that in Switzerland, and we do not want to introduce it" said Ulrich Schlueer, co-president of the Initiative Committee to ban minarets.

The move by the People's Party, the country's largest party in terms of popular support and membership in parliament, is part of a broader European backlash against a growing Muslim population. It has stirred fears of violent reactions in Muslim countries and an economically disastrous boycott by wealthy Muslims who bank, shop and vacation in Switzerland.

Taner Hatipoglu, president of the Federation of Islamic Organizations in Zurich, said, "The initiators have achieved something everyone wanted to prevent, and that is to influence and change the relations to Muslims and their social integration in a negative way."

Hatipoglu said if in the long term the anti-Islam atmosphere continues, "Muslims indeed will not feel safe anymore."

The seven-member Cabinet that heads the Swiss government has spoken out strongly against the initiative, and local officials and rights defenders objected to campaign posters showing minarets rising like missiles from the Swiss flag next to a fully veiled woman.

The People's Party has campaigned mainly unsuccessfully in previous years against immigrants with campaign posters showing white sheep kicking a black sheep off the Swiss flag and another with brown hands grabbing eagerly for Swiss passports.

The four minarets already attached to mosques in the country are not affected by the initiative.

Geneva's main mosque was vandalized Thursday when someone threw a pot of pink paint at the entrance. Earlier this month, a vehicle with a loudspeaker drove through the area imitating a muezzin's call to prayer, and vandals damaged a mosaic when they threw cobblestones at the building.

Statements like these are a dime a dozen in “Wiley World.” Political correctness isn’t a concern to Drake. And yet, his assertions about Muslims are far from his most controversial. What has garnered him the most media attention is what he said to national radio talk show host Alan Colmes in June. 

“Are you praying for his death?" Colmes asked Drake, referring to President Obama. "Yes," Drake replied. "So you're praying for the death of the president of the United States?" Colmes asked. "Yes." "You would like for the president of the United States to die?" Colmes asked once more. "If he does not turn to God and does not turn his life around, I am asking God to enforce imprecatory prayers that are throughout the Scripture that would cause him death, that's correct."

Drake says he regrets the media frenzy caused by the Colmes interview, but he stands by his use of imprecatory prayer, a form of prayer he says is biblically mandated -- an appeal to God that is, unlike most prayers, a request not for something positive but for misfortune, a kind of curse meant to fall on those considered evildoers.

With his gray hair slicked back and a slightly pinkish complexion, Drake sported suspenders and glasses as he explained that his decision to use imprecatory prayers stemmed from a desire to better organize his early morning telephonic prayer meetings. Drake decided praying the Psalms would be one way of redirecting these sessions. But soon, he came to Psalm 109: “May his days be few; may another take his place of leadership. May his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.”

"That’s the one that got me in trouble," Drake says now.

The problem is that Drake began to recite this prayer, and others like it, while keeping certain people in mind. In the case of Psalm 109? President Barack Obama.

But Drake is far from alone in his use of imprecatory prayers. Pastor Steve Anderson of Faithful World Baptist Church in Tempe, Ariz., also incorporates this form of prayer in his worship. In fact, Frederick Clarkson of Religion Dispatches surmises that Anderson inspired one regular attendant of Faithful World Baptist, 28-year-old Chris Broughton, to show up to a speech by the president with two guns in hand when he issued the following sermon:

"You’re going to tell me that I’m supposed to pray for the socialist devil, murderer, infanticide, who wants to see young children, and he wants to see babies killed through abortion and partial-birth abortion and all these different things," Anderson said, referring to President Obama. "Nope. I’m not gonna pray for his good. I’m going to pray that he dies and goes to hell."

There are other signs imprecatory prayer is growing in popularity. Beliefnet’s Rabbi Brad Hirschfield writes that Psalm 109 is now a top Google search; it’s even inspired a line of bumper stickers and T-shirts that sinisterly read “Pray for Obama,” while pointing to the Psalm, and in particular, the passage that calls for an end to present leadership, though Gawker recently noted that CafePress, popular purveyor of homemade T-shirts, has stopped selling the items.

But what is it, exactly, that unites people who pray for the death of the president?

Most likely, it's a rabid antiabortion stance. Drake "prayed" for abortion doctor George Tiller, and reacted to Tiller’s murder by noting that his death was an answer to those prayers.

Drake insists this isn’t as evil as it sounds.

"I’m not for a Christian or anybody killing somebody," he told me. "That’s God’s business."

Tiller’s death, then, according to Drake, must have been God’s will, and his prayers simply aligned with God’s providence.

When speaking about Obama, Drake often refers to "baby killing." Anderson is also pro-life. And both men believe homosexuality is a sin -- views that fit neatly into not only certain religious camps but political parties as well.

Anderson is a member of the Constitution Party, which is, according to its own site, the third largest political party in the United States in terms of voter registration -- a party that is pro-life, pro-gun and anti-gay. The monthly newsletter, Ballot Access News, puts the party’s voter registration total at more than 400,000 or .44 percent. This is considerably less than the numbers Democrats, Republicans or Independents boast, but still greater than the numbers on record for the Libertarian Party or the Green Party. And Drake himself ran for vice-president of the United States on Alan Keyes’ 2008 ticket as a member of the American Independent Party, the California affiliate of the Constitution Party.

But aside from politics, there is the question of whether people who pray the Psalms in this manner stand on any kind of solid theological ground.

Stephen Chapman from Duke University’s Center for Jewish Studies says Jews and Christians inherited the tradition of imprecatory prayer from the Ancient Near East but used this form of prayer in a specific way: Imprecatory prayers were meant to remind the faithful of the covenant they held with God and the consequences that would follow if that covenant was broken.

Given the New Testament’s message of love and forgiveness, Christians in particular have struggled with what to do with the material ever since, says Chapman.

But Drake argues he’s in good company when it comes to imprecatory prayer. Both Martin Luther and John Calvin prayed this way, he says. Still, there have been other famous theologians, C.S. Lewis for one, who found these kinds of prayers distasteful. Present-day Hebrew scholar Walter Brueggemann has tried to find some kind of middle ground by arguing that the Psalms can serve as a kind of liturgical venting -- a psychological release from the pent-up anger and frustration life continually piles on us. 

The Southern Baptist Convention has distanced itself from imprecatory prayer, though Drake himself once served as the SBC’s vice-president; SBC president Dr. Johnny Hunt has called imprecatory prayer unbiblical. But this is where, in a sense, Drake is right and others are wrong. Prayers calling for the downfall of our enemies can be found in the Bible, there’s no arguing that. But the question is: What do we do with the text now? 

This isn’t an easy question to answer. Though Drake’s or Anderson’s actions may strike most of us as plainly and abhorrently wrong, same-sex marriage no doubt strikes Drake as decidedly wrong. That's yet another conviction upheld with the help of biblical text, and which is, no matter what fundamentalists argue, clearly open to interpretation. It’s a reality that not even historical context can save us from, and the danger that comes when considering a text as beautifully complicated as the Bible sacred. 

But discrediting people like Drake or Anderson should remain a priority, even for those of us who don’t believe in the power of prayer, because in these instances prayer is tantamount to hate speech -- an act of violence that the First Amendment makes difficult to do anything about in the United States. Drake has just recently lifted his call for imprecatory prayer against the president, but only because he wants Obama to live long enough to stand trial for treason. Drake continues to argue that Obama is not a U.S. citizen and that his claim to the presidency is illegitimate as a result. But Drake is no doubt using imprecatory prayers on others, and one look at the evidence screams he’s not alone.