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Chucky's Back
...Charles Colson, you probably remember, went to prison himself for his role as one of Nixon's hatchet men in Watergate. Forget the third-rate burglary -- Colson was involved in some of the first-rate character assassinations and the dirty tricks of a dirty, vindictive administration. As he says himself, he was "willing to do almost anything for the cause of his president and his party."

But then, in prison, Colson was born again. He repented of his sins and became an ardent supporter of the church behind bars and the rights of prisoners. Prison Fellowship has grown over the years, spawning related efforts such as Justice Fellowship, which advocates reforms in the criminal justice system based on the idea of "restorative justice."

One of my biggest complaints with Colson over the past year is his failure to live up to the idea of restorative justice in his personal life. After his born-again experience, Colson reportedly apologized to many of the people he had attacked and slandered while working in Nixon's White House -- people like Daniel Ellsberg and John Kerry.

That's right, John Kerry. Richard Nixon hated and feared John Kerry's work with Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and Colson's job was to destroy anything and anyone that Nixon hated or feared. So Colson hired John O'Neill -- the same John O'Neill who resurfaced from his crypt this year to lead the Swift Boat liars crusade -- to batter the young veteran with all the lies he could invent.

The lies and slanders thrown at John Kerry during the recent campaign were all recycled from the 30-year-old files of John O'Neill. They were concocted at Chuck Colson's direction and on Chuck Colson's payroll.

Yet the born-again Colson did not bother to make a single statement this year condemning the rebirth of his and O'Neill's filthy campaign. (Or, at least, if he did condemn O'Neill, he did so very quietly and I never heard it.)

Instead, Colson spent the year once again working in concert with people like O'Neill. He recorded pro-Bush GOTV phone messages and used his "Break Point" columns and radio commentaries as an extension of BC04 (apparently he'd finally run out of ways to paraphrase/borrow/steal from C.S. Lewis' The Abolition of Man).

As an ex-con and advocate of prisoner's rights, you might expect Colson to have strongly condemned the abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib. He did, sort of, churning out a series of "this is very bad, but ..." pieces and absolving the Pentagon and the White House of any responsibility. (The real problem, Break Point guest commentator Al Mohler said, was women in the armed forces.)...