Bachmann and Perry more come-out than their predecessor

Jerry Falwell & Ronald Reagan

With the colorful likes of Michelle Bachmann and Rick Perry focusing us on the present, we might forget that their superstition doesn't significantly break the mold of a particular conservative icon.
    As Christopher Hitchens reminds us on pp. 232-233 of his 2010 memoir, Hitch-22:

The Leader of the Free World was frequently photographed in the company of "end-times" Protestant fundamentalists and biblical literalists like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson: tethered gas-balloons of greed and cynicism once written up by Martin Amis as "frauds of Chaucerian proportions." The president found time to burble with such characters about the fulfillments of ancient "prophecy" and the coming Apocalypse. He also speculated drivelingly that the jury might yet return an open verdict on the theory of evolution. He was married to a woman who employed a White House astrologer....

Hitchens had prefaced those pertinent remarks with some other observations on the man:

...I did not at all like Ronald Reagan, and nobody then could persuade me that I should...There was, first, his appallingly facile manner as a liar. He could fix the camera with his folksy smirk that I always found annoying but that got him called "The Great Communicator" by a chorus of toadies in the press, and proceed to utter the most resounding untruths. ("South Africa has stood beside us in every major war we have ever fought," he declared while defending a regime whose party leadership had been locked up by the British for pro-Nazi sympathies in the Second World War. "The Russian language contains no word for 'freedom'" was another stupefying pronouncement of his....Up close, at press conferences, the carapace of geniality proved to be flaky: I was once within a few feet of his lizard-like face when he was asked a question that he didn't care for—about the theft of President Carter's briefing book by Reagan campaign operatives during the 1980 elections—and found myself quite shaken by the look of senile, shifty malice that came into his eyes as he offered the excuse that the New York Times had also accepted stolen property in the case of the Pentagon Papers....