Now that American Muslims aren’t supporting Bush, it’s okay to go back to defaming them, err, we mean, Telling the Truth About Islam. Conservative commentator, J. Grant Swank, Jr., poses a Cheney-like ultimatum. “If Kerry wins,” he warns, “Muslim power will loom in America.” What does Swank imagine this will look like? Slave girls, lustfulness, burning plantations, genocide and assassination…and all this starts with sensitivity training for teachers with Muslim students.

“‘I’m not going to debate this with you, God! You’re beginning to sound like you belong to the reality-based community!'” Bush’s persona endures another imagined conversation with God, this time courtesy of The Guardian. Though Bush probably regrets it more, at this point, we’re also sorry that he ever gave his satirists this material.

In the fallout after Pat Robertson’s appearance on CNN — where he claimed that President Bush hadn’t believed there would be any U.S. casualties in Iraq, and that God had informed Robertson himself that Iraq would be a “messy” “disaster” — theological allies have dismissed the televangelist. Southern Baptist Convention leader Richard Land ridiculed Robertson as having “developed a habit of recounting what he says God has told him on matters of public interest,” and said that Robertson represented an “‘ever-diminishing group of evangelicals.'”

Christian theologian and author, Tom Beaudoin, doesn’t want to hear any more about candidates’ personal faith. “Today a public confession of faith by a presidential candidate is so deeply enmeshed in the calculating politics of manipulation that it simply should not be believed. Anyone who thinks a modern major-party candidate can talk about faith in a way that is not seen as angling for some political advantage, some movement in the polls, is asking the impossible.”

Russia-Belarus Union Secretary Pavel Borodin proposed a rederendum to allow President Vladamir Putin to run for a third term in office, saying that Russia is ruled by tsars and thatPutin’s power comes from God. Putin’s spokespeople quickly distanced the president from Borodin’s remarks, saying they had “‘nothing in common with reality.'”