This article (also liberated from the subscription only NY Times Select section) compares the way the producers of the Da Vinci Code have co-opted Christians into watching and promoting a movie that questions their religion with the way the Republicans have managed to co-opt Christians into a party that has nothing to do with actual Christian values. It's interesting and you should give it a read, although i'm not sure how good a comparison it is.

Anyway, what's important is when the author gets to the part where the Democrats try to get in on the game:

The bad news is that no sooner does the religious-right base show signs of cracking in a youthquake than the Democrats trot out their own doomed Da Vinci strategy.

This idiocy began the morning after Election Day 2004, when a vaguely worded exit-poll question persuaded credulous party leaders that "moral values" determined their defeat (as opposed to, say, their standard-bearer's campaign). Their immediate response was to seek out faith-based consultants not unlike those recruited by Sony, and practice dropping the word "values" and biblical quotations into their public pronouncements. In the House, they organized, heaven help us, a Democratic Faith Working Group.

As the next election approaches, they're renewing this effort, to farcical effect. The Democrats' chairman, Howard Dean, who proved his faith-based bona fides in the 2004 primary season by citing Job as his favorite book in the New Testament, went on the Pat Robertson TV network this month and yanked his party's position on same-sex marriage to the right. (He apologized for his "misstatement" once off the air.)

Not to be left behind, Senator Clinton gave a speech last week knocking young people for thinking "work is a four-letter word" and for having TV's in their rooms, home Internet access and, worst of all, that ultimate instrument of the devil, iPods. "I hope that we start thinking some very old-fashioned thoughts," she said. (She also subsequently apologized, once her daughter complained, joining the general chorus of ridicule.)

I supported Dean in the primaries and for his chairman position, so i'm doubly disgusted by him, but in general the Democrats just continue to show what idiots they are. They are not an opposition party. They're a lesser-degree-of-evil-stupidity party. They are useless.