John Gorenfeld writing for AlterNet explains how the Rev. Sun Myung Moon wants to build a 51-mile underwater highway that will connect Alaska to Russia. But that’s not the weird part. The weird part is the President’s brother, Neil, apparently supports the project.
Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the South Korean giant of the religious right who owns the Washington Times, is on a 100-city speaking tour to promote his $200 billion “Peace King Tunnel” dream. As this self-described Messiah envisions it, the tunnel would be both a monument to his magnificence, and a totem to his prophecy of a unified Planet Earth. In this vision, the United Nations would be reinvented as an instrument of God’s plan, and democracy and sexual freedom would crumble in the face of this faith-based glory.
Moon’s lobbying campaign is “ambitious and diffuse,” and the sheer range of guests revealed just how many Pacific Rim political leaders the Times owner has won over, including Filipino and Taiwanese politicians. And the head of the Arizona GOP attended a recent stop in San Francisco. But perhaps the most surprising VIP to tag along is Neil Bush, George H.W. Bush’s youngest and most wayward son, who made both the Philippines and Taiwan legs of the journey, according to reports in newspapers from those countries and statements from Moon’s Family Federation.
Neil isn’t the only Bush to attend Moon events. In 1996, his father, President George H.W. Bush, traveled to Buenos Aires with the Reverend in one of several such fundraising expeditions. “The 41st president, who told Argentine president Carlos Menem that he had joined Moon in Buenos Aires for the money, had actually known the Korean reasonably well for decades,” writes former top GOP strategist Kevin Phillips in his book American Dynasty. “Their relationship went back to the overlap between Bush’s one-year tenure as CIA director (1976) and the arrival in Washington of Moon, whose Unification Church was widely reported to be a front group for the South Korean Central Intelligence Agency.”