Bill Moyers updates the article that caused a big flap last February for a possible second-hand misquotation of former Reagan secretary, James G. Watt, in The New York Review of Books. Though the Watt reference made for good snark — setting the former secretary up as poster-boy for fundamentalists’ disregard for the environment in light of the coming Rapture — it was challenged and appears to have been taken out of context, if it was said at all. But Moyers’ revised article is worth reading even for those who caught the earlier version. The Rapture-ready anti-environmentalists section is expanded and more measured, but more important is Moyers’ implied argument about why there’s no need for such a neat connection between the anti-environmentalism of the fundamentalists and that of run-of-the-mill big business. Whether or not the White House is talking Revelation, many of those who helped elect Bush are. But in either case, this conflation of ideology with theology leads down the very same path. Talk of Bush following “God’s master plan,” writes Moyers, “will mean one thing to Dick Cheney and another to Tim LaHaye, but it will confirm their fraternity in a regime whose chief characteristics are ideological disdain for evidence and theological distrust of science. Many of the constituencies who make up this alliance don’t see eye to eye on many things, but for President Bush’s master plan for rolling back environmental protections they are united. A powerful current connects the administration’s multinational corporate cronies who regard the environment as ripe for the picking and a hard-core constituency of fundamentalists who regard the environment as fuel for the fire that is coming. Once again, populist religion winds up serving the interests of economic elites.”