Joe Conason helps unravel the unholy alliance of the modern American corporate pharisees and mammon with this piece in Salon.

Jack Abramoff and his deeply religious right-wing cronies express their “biblical worldview” by swindling Indian tribes and bribing legislators. Verily, mysterious are the ways of the Lord.

Rarely has the contrast between the rhetoric of the religious right and the behavior of its leaders been so starkly exposed as in the Abramoff scandal. The most obvious example was the manipulation of Christian activists in Louisiana and Texas by Reed, former executive director of the Christian Coalition, who said he was helping them fight gambling when he was actually using them to promote Indian casinos (and to make a few million bucks for himself).

That episode alone should have alerted honest Christians to the moral rot within the Republican leadership that professed to represent their interests. But there is of course much more evidence of the religious cynicism of Abramoff and his cronies.

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