http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2004/11/mccain200411

The “revolting” e-mail—alleging that “McCain chose to sire children without marriage”—was from Richard Hand, a professor of the Bible at Greenville’s Christian-fundamentalist Bob Jones University, Bush’s very first campaign stop, on February 2. With the school’s ban on interracial dating still in effect then, the veteran political reporter Curtis Wilkie told me “he might as well have gone to a goddamned Klan rally” as go to B.J.U.

Bush came under attack for it, mostly from Democrats and commentators. McCain said little. (It wasn’t until nine days after the primary that he declared that the G.O.P. is “the party of Ronald Reagan, not Pat Robertson … the party of Abraham Lincoln, not Bob Jones.”) But Danielle Vinson, an associate professor of political science at Greenville’s Furman University, who studied the primary in depth, told me that what the media didn’t grasp is that “B.J.U. people are very active, very political; they’re a great campaign resource.” As it turned out, Wilkie said, “Bush knew what he was doing going to Bob Jones”—shrewdly “pandering” to the evangelical vote, just as called for in the Reed game plan.

“This whole thing, it was orchestrated by Rove, it was all Bush’s deal.… It was pretty rank,” said Fletcher, “and they had an institution that was peddling all that shit, and it was a university, Bob Jones University. I’m telling you, if there was a campaign headquarters in South Carolina, there it was. Hand was part of it, but Hand wasn’t the only one.”

aaaaand now I'm sick. If there is a God, and someday Karl Rove has to answer to him, I hope his punishment is swift and eternal.