At the height of the cult scare, in 1979, Americans ranked Moon just above Charles Mansion in a national poll of attitudes towards well-known figures. No matter what your politics, by 1982 you were likely to have formed an unfavorable opinion of Moon after seeing him in TV news specials like "Escape From The Moonies." (Watch it here.)

Hundreds of parents and teenagers lined up to say that this man, with his ferocious speeches in Korean (listen to one here), who said, "I will conquer and subjugate the world" and "I am your brain!" had dashed apart their families with the mind games of his Unification Crusade Army. They were enslaved, they said, 18-year-olds who'd once been promising English majors, now busking on street corners, grinning and aggressively selling trinkets to finance Moon's lavish lifestyle and his political ambitions, raising money for phony charities, raising millions to supplement the fortune flowing into Moon's empire from his interests overseas.

People tend to remember his huge weddings, and not his political ambitions. They remember that two thousand couples married under his command in Madison Square Garden in 1982, but not that he marched his army around the Washington Monument dressed up as George Washingtons and Betsy Rosses, swathed stadiums in red, white and blue, staged a "God Needs Richard Nixon" campaign, planted pretty girls in Congress to work his agenda and called democracy "Satan's harvest." Or that in private, he told his apostles it was their destiny to control the American government: "Let's say there are 500 sons and daughters like you in each State," he told them in 1974. "Then we could control the government..." (There's a reason they made creepy movies like "The Parallax View" in the 1970s.)

What the public never found out was that since 1965, long before he made the news for seducing teenagers, he was working assiduously to form alliances with politicians -- including a smattering of Democrats, but overwhelmingly tilted towards the Republican world and the Christian right. He made them offers they couldn't refuse, and in return became a pervasive figure in the backrooms of God politics.

Just one example: The Washington Times, which he created in 1982, betting that Republicans couldn't say no to a newspaper pushing the new line of the Reagan Administration. He has sunk about $3 billion into this money-losing enterprise since then. Strings were attached. In return, he has won a breathtaking number of friends on Capitol Hill. Not long after founding it, Moon boasted to his flock: "Many comfortable Washington political bureaucrats who have had their beautiful offices inside big marble buildings considered Reverend Moon and the Unification Church as insignificant as peanuts. However, now they have found themselves having to respond to The Washington Times; they are reading it and trembling at some of the stories.”

Yeah, but who reads the Washington Times, you say? Everyone -- or at least that's how the news media treats the paper, offering opinion page editor Tony Blankley and other Times journalists a sizable amount of TV coverage, and following the Times's lead in whipping up stories about the war on Christmas. The Southern Poverty Law Center and the ACLU recently credited the Times with all but summoning the Minutemen from out of nowhere by running so many stories that hysterically inflated the supposed numbers of the border-watch movement.

Imagine if L. Ron Hubbard backed The New York Times, and was going around saying he founded the paper "to fulfill God's desperate desire to save the world," as Moon has of his own paper. You'd never hear the end of it. Every month Jonah Goldberg or some other wiseacre at The National Review would be making cracks about how, through Scientology's E-meter technology for cleansing our bodies of alien spirits, the newspaper had deemed Iraq "clear" of WMD. Your neighbors would know about it.

The everyday American has not heard that Moon owns the Times. Try telling your barber.

Meanwhile, principled conservatives have long been nervous that their colleagues, taking Moon's funds to start all sorts of political action groups and attending his sumptuous rallies around the world, are dallying with a cult leader who preaches that Jesus is a failure. And unprincipled ones are concerned about being caught. "Because almost all conservative organizations in Washington have some ties to the church," reported U.S. News & World Report as long ago as 1989, "conservatives also fear repercussions if they expose the church's role."

Unlike live-and-let-live liberals, conservatives are typically unhappy with Moon's claims: that Jesus was a failure, that Moon is his superior replacement, that the True Father's sexual rites (to be performed in front of Moon's photograph) will save the world from sin.

"What has been the source of God's anguish?" Moon asked rhetorically in 2004, not long after being coronated as the Messiah on Capitol Hill in the "Crown of Peace" scandal that made national news. "He has not been able to shed tears of joy and of deep emotion for a victorious son. He longed to see His son's substantial victory. That is to say, God's anguish has persisted throughout history because there was never a person God could affirm as His own historically victorious son." In his speech, he cited two recent ceremonies in U.S. government office building, affirming his status as the True Parent of humanity, as proof that Moon (unlike Jesus) was "historically victorious."

After years of work funding the religious right and bailing out the likes of Jerry Falwell from debt, Moon has become the unlikely Citizen Kane of the GOP. Though formerly imprisoned as a tax cheat and banned from a number of countries, he divides his time between mansions along the Hudson River; his Lake of Souls in Korea, where he communes with the dead; speaking tours of the world, often accompanied by pious U.S. politicians, if not members of the Bush family, as I will get into later. In Japan, the Supreme Court has condemned his church for raising money through aggressive elder fraud, scaring lonely widows into giving over their life savings for fear their husbands would otherwise burn in hell.

Invisible in the national media -- between 1992 and 2004, national news networks devoted only 3 minutes, 50 seconds to him, focusing on his business and religion but not his political machine, according to a search of the Vanderbilt University TV archives -- he has quietly continued his strange vengeance against traditional Christianity. And he's gone about it like a caricature of an antichrist in the popular Left Behind books (co-authored by Tim LaHaye, by the way, another recipient of Moon largesse.) The National Council of Churches rejected Moon's application for membership in 1977 on the basis his teaching is "incompatible with Christian teachiing and belief."

For Easter, 2003, he launched an ambitious "Tear Down The Cross" tour of black churches in Ameirca, paying ministers in gold watches in exchange for literally taking down the symbol of Christianity, hauling the cross out to the dumpster as a symbol of Satan, and looking instead to the symbol of the crown -- the symbol of Moon's authority on earth, as recognized by the U.S. Congress.

The tour concluded in Jerusalem, with his officials -- some of whom administer the Times and UPI, two of many media properties -- holding a funeral for the Christian cross.

It looked like this:

Smashing the barrier between church and state has been a cause Moon has funded, in one form or another, since the 1970s. Active promoters and recipents of the Faith-Based Initiative, his political legions are active in campaigns against gays, whom Moon calls "dung-eating dogs," and Darwin, among other foes.

Through the 1980s, in an act of transfiguration that is stunning to behold, the leader of the Moonists became a secret patron of Republican politics and media. When money is no object, and Washington scruples are finite, then miracles are possible.

Update [2006-9-8 13:46:27 by John Gorenfeld]:Just a little rewriting. Sorry, I can't help but fix grammatical errors.