no supper tonight

Whenever I find myself drifting dangerously close to what ordinary, well-balanced minds would call “a good mood,” I find it a useful corrective to fixate on someone I well and truly loathe. Especially if I can add to the fires the kind of gut-churning envy that comes of recognizing that said person enjoys all the trappings of wealth, fame, and power while I wallow in the slough of poverty, unknown and impotent, and that one talent which is death to hide / Lodg’d with me useless. Dwelling on the reasons—as lengthy, precise and detailed a menu as possible—for the fits of well-nigh murderous rage into which I am wont to fly at the mere mention of certain names is an exercise from which I inevitably emerge eyeball-rolling, foaming-at-the-mouth, crockery-smashing rabid. I highly recommend this exercise whenever you find yourself brimming over with what  Alan Greenspan once dryly referred to as “irrational exuberance.”

Having recently felt a few burdens lifted, and all-too-susceptible to the smallest signs of Spring emergent, crocuses coming to life in the front yard, Orion low and brief in the evening sky, and last night the caroling of the spring peepers in the marshes a half mile away, I found myself in one of those blossoms-bloomin’-head’s-all-empty-and-I-don’t care kinda states.  Aware that a particularly pungent leavening of dust and ashes was called for, I mulled over my catalog of cretins and decided to look back in anger at Gary Bauer, recalling that he recently got himself a few of those headlines he craves with his endorsement of John McCain.

Jesus’ Son
You may remember that Gary Bauer ran a laughable campaign of his own for the Presidency in 2000, running on a hodgepodge of zany far-right fundamentalist inanities. Maybe, too, you’ll remember the accounts of Bauer’s unseemly dalliance with a comely young staffer:  

This source said that rumors of an affair have circulated inside the campaign for months, and that several people told the candidate of their concern. “Bauer told them basically to buzz off — that it was his personal business,” the source said…. Bauer called a press conference to deny having an affair and called the rumors “devastating.” Concerning his time spent with the young woman … [he] even denied that any campaign staffers had raised questions about the relationship with him…

Damn but if that didn’t have familiar ring. Of course! It reads like a transcript of Senator McCain’s recently publicized maybe-sexytime-maybe-not “relationship” with the alluring Vicki Iseman, along with the not-so-maybe but pretty well documented relationship he pursued with her less alluring boss, along with their clients:

Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of [McCain’s] top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block the woman’s access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity… [He]said … that he never had discussions with any staffers about an inappropriate relationship with [her]…. He also denied having a romantic relationship with her. If staffers had such concerns, [he] told reporters, they never conveyed them to him.
Hilarious, no? Like the Senator, Bauer’s a staunch moralist, but, like the Senator, he has a taste for canoodling with pretty young women half his age. Birds of a feather, these “family values” types. You pull of the sanctimonious mask, and what do you find?  Bill Clinton leering out at you. Tramps like us, baby we were born to run.

Now, you’re probably wondering what happened to ol’ Gary, right? Not to worry: he landed on his trotters, as these types always do. Today, Bauer, who did a stint as President of the Family Research Council,  heads the “American Values” organization, one of several all-too-influential organizations dedicated to gay-bashing, Arab-bashing, and, in Bauer’s case, China-bashing.

I won’t belabor the gay business: it’s typical run-of-the mill hysteria, exciting once upon a time, maybe, when the Republicans, realizing that the threat posed by Scary Black People was diminishing, cast about for another oppressed minority to terrorize and settled upon Scary Gay People, but kinda boring today, seeing as how the Scary Arab People are busy preparing “dirty bombs, ” acting downright churlishly after all we’ve done for them in Iraq, and trying to shoehorn one of their own into the White House, while all gay folks have done is … what Scary Thing Have they been up to? Oh, right, sanctifying their unions. But let’s pause for a moment to take stock of Bauer’s economic views.

Bauer’s not one to get bogged in the soporific details—he’s a big picture guy, so his Web site tends to focus on conclusions, not evidence or methodology. His Web site informs us, briefly yet pointedly, that “Most Americans don’t realize that so many of the products we buy go directly to fund the Chinese Communist government and its 3-million man army.” This is grammatical nonsense (but typical of the “English only!” types, whose energies devoted to making English the “official” language of the United Sates tend to rise in inverse proportion to their own command of it): what Bauer means, of course, is that the revenue generated by the sale of Chinese-made products to the unwary American consumer goes “directly” into weapons procurement.

This is a wholesale fabrication. What Bauer doesn’t mention is that China spends roughly between $55-150 billion annually on defense—that’s between 1.7 and 2.2 % of GDP (the United States spends in the range of $700 billion). Additionally, Chinese banks hold some 699 billion dollars worth of US Securities—“treasury debt, U.S. agency debt, U.S. corporate debt, and U.S. equities.” To re-write Bauer from the perspective of the reality-based community:  the dollars spent by US customers on Chinese manufactured goods goes indirectly towards funding two-plus years of our own merry adventure in Iraq, or would if we were in fact paying for the damn thing rather than stuffing the bills behind the couch cushions. Far from all that moolah going to China’s military, it’s actually servicing US debt, the bulk of which is accrued by our own military. This does not even deserve the name economics—it’s voodoo politics–and the fact that this crap is trumpeted  by a McCain endorser should give you pause, especially considering that Big John himself recently admitted that he “really don’t know much about economics.” 

Of course, Bauer is no more an economist or foreign affairs expert than is John McCain. Bauer’s real vocation is that of a Scold, and his real area of expertise is homosexuality—you know, how it’s contracted, how it can be prevented, how it can be cured, and why it cannot be tolerated. Scientific stuff that lesser minds like yours and mine probably can’t comprehend. Bauer has spent a lot of time on these matters, and if you ever feel like you are developing symptoms of gayness, or have in fact experienced a full-blown breakout—it happens—you might wish to contact him. Of course, this obsession is one he shares with most of the “values” bigwigs, the heirs of Falwell and Robertson. But unlike Tony Perkins and the monstrous James Dobson, Bauer broke pretty early for McCain, jumping on the bandwagon as soon as the Great White Hope Mitt Romney decided he’d thrown enough of his money away at this particular table and wandered on back to … hey, where’d you go, Mitt? This represented a real break with some other distinguished bigots—the even more powerful Dobson, for example, refuses to sanction Candidate McCain for a number of reasons, the most interesting of which is that Angry John “often uses foul and obscene language.”  

It’s the End of the World as We Know It (Not Feelin’ Too Good Myself)
 

While Bauer has remained in the same dungheap out of which he carved himself a profitable little hole decades ago, keeping up John McCain is proving both exasperating and exhausting. At a time when most candidates are starting to get that furtive, dark-rimmed mien that characterizes the average politico staggering  down the stretch, the old gasbag displays frightening energy in his ability to pull an ongoing series of screeching u-turns this close to the finish line. He’s been especially tricksy when it comes to that little matter of the war—McCain told us at the outset it would be a cakewalk, and now advises us that anyone who said it was gonna be a cakewalk was a knave and a fool. This is what passes for straight talk in the McCain universe; it might be better called, in the terms employed by Bauer’s Bible, “The spirit of whoredoms.”

Speaking of whoredom, the ol’ maverick isn’t quite so picky about who turns up in his bed these days, and no, I’m not talking about the fetching and sportive Vicki Isington, but rather, I’m looking over the number of lunatics (Tom Coburn), bigots (Haley Barbour) and felons (Ollie North) whose encomia are trumpeted on his own web pages, which have begun to take on the look and scent of a Roman bath the morning after a Felliniesque orgy. Some endorsements didn’t make the site:  Sly Stallone, displaying in his all-too-obvious dotage some very real difficulty distinguishing reality from fiction, thinks the whole thing is a movie: “I like McCain a lot. A lot. And you know, things may change along the way, but there’s something about matching the character with the script. And right now, the script that’s being written and reality is pretty brutal and pretty hard-edged like a rough action film, and you need somebody who’s been in that to deal with it.”  (Stallone was recently busted attempting to smuggle Human Growth Hormone, which he recommends to everyone over forty, into Australia; McCain, who was so so deeply “disappointed” in Roger Clemens alledged use of the same, expressed nothing but pleasure at Sly’s support).

Sadly, not all of the Senator’s backers are as plainly ludicrous or downright irrelevant as Rambo, or even Ollie North for that matter, and in any case anyone who sees the world as a “rough–edge action film” is either too young to vote or already voting for McCain, who’s indubitably  got the World of Warcraft demographic sewn up tight.

But we all know who he doesn’t have.  Not yet, and not entirely, anyway.

That would be those hardcore “conservatives,” notably the Old Testament literalists, neo-Know-Nothings, and Tom Clancy devotees who still aren’t sure whether they’re dealing with John 2000 McCain, John 2006 McCain, or the New, Improved McCain.  While I don’t share their ideologies, I genuinely sympathize with their frustration, since I’m damned if I know either. And I understand the Senator’s dilemma as well; as any marketing consultant will tell you, re-branding a known commodity is always a dicey proposition—the lessons of “New Coke” are not apt to be lost on those responsible for turning the Straight-Talkin’ Maverick into a Real Team Player, important as it is to ensure all who matter that he is fact a true member of Team Bush, Team Tancredo, and Team Jesus.

If we are judged, as the proverb reminds us, by the company we keep, then we would do well to look closely at our presidential candidates’ stablemates. You can do your own background on the Democrats. There’s not much of interest, aside from the Grateful Dead (a most amiable ensemble), Clinton’s campaign manager Mark Penn, and all of the megacorporations who dump all they’re permitted into the candidate’s coffers thereby allowing the candidates to buy media time in which to trumpet their radical independence from  … megacorporations; and, of course, Obama’s Pastor, the suddenly notorious Reverend Jeremiah Wright. About whom more later.

Senator McCain’s posse is another matter entirely—Gary Bauer and his minions are but the tip of the infernal phalanx. Just let this sink in for a moment:  President George Bush is in fact among McCain’s saner and stabler endorsers.

That in itself is cause for very serious concern. Especially in light of the fact that the President, who until recently came across as simply a crude Pinocchio dancing to Cheney’s tune, seems, of late, to have lost his mind.

One of those endorsers who made the news for a few moments recently is John Hagee. That’s the Reverend Hagee to you, and if you are a Catholic, deist, Jew, Muslim or god forbid a sec-you-er-list he may matter more than you knew. Hagee made headlines last month when he stood with John McCain and showed him some love, creating a small firestorm when Bill Donahue, Defender of the [Catholic] Faith, waddled into the lovefest barking that the presumptive Republican nominee should think twice before embracing a man who casually refers to Holy Mother Church as “the whore of Babylon.”   McCain straight-talked his way around this by declaring that accepting an endorsement does not mean accepting all of the endorser’s views. The media shrugged, as they understood they are obliged to do in the presence of a gee-whiz actual WAR HERO, and went after Obama instead for his cordial relations with a Reverend not half so mad and not nearly so dangerous as Pastor Hagee.  Of course, it’s no surprise that family-values fanatic Hagee shares Bauer and McCain’s own tastes: like McCain, another champion of decency, Hagee is divorced—on grounds of his own philandering—and was as a result defrocked.

It might have been more interesting had someone sought clarification on just which views of Hagee’s  McCain does agree with, since most of the Reverend’s pronouncements are downright batshit crazy and, worse yet, seriously incendiary.
Hagee, you see,  is a Pretribulational premillenarianist, as well a Dominionist and a Christian Zionist—labels which, if you are a member of the reality-based community, will mean nothing, and in ordinary times and a normal world would be best left that way. I won’t get into the nitty-gritty of  pre-and post millenarianism; what’s important is that those subscribing to these particular myths believe—and quite devoutly at that—that  The Second Coming of Christ will occur at pretty much the same time as the apocalyptic battle of Armageddon foretold in Revelation. Which may strike you as about as meaningful as my own Irish forbears’ obsession with the Siddhe, Banshees, and so on, except that these folks, in their psychosexualized  obsession with “The Rapture”—that‘s where everyone in Alabama gets lifted bodily into Heaven while the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse run wild o’er New York, Boston, and San Francisco—these folks want Armageddon sooner rather than later; they understand that it will occur in Palestine; and they are thus hell bent on 1. arming Israel to the teeth, 2. fomenting whatever trouble possible in the middle east, 3. letting “the Jews” and opposing armies duke it out, preferably with the extensive use of nuclear weapons, and, as a result, meeting the Lord Jesus in person at some point over the next President’s term. Hagee’s followers, that is, not the Israelis, who, having done their part to bring about the End of the World, will not be exchanging high-fives with the Nazarene, but will be cast into the same lake of fire as godless Russians and the residents of Brattleboro, Vermont. But not before the seals are broken, trumpets blasted, valleys fill with blood and all that sorta thing.

McCain’s acceptance of the sulfuric embrace of the Reverend Hagee was the culmination of a long courtship and the climax of a pulsing desire he’d suffered with all the yearning of Borat for Pamela Anderson. And his emergence on the national stage is enough put to the lie Obama’s famous words from his keynote address at the 2008 Democratic Convention. The Senator, you recall, roused his audience with cloying inanities along the lines of,

We worship an “awesome God” in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

Leaving aside the fact that many of us up here in the Blue States don’t worship any god whatsoever, “awesome” or otherwise, and can say so without the fear of the very real lynching you might get for giving vent to the same opinion in Hagee’s neck of the woods, most folks up here, including the Believers, do not hold with a theology that predicts—with utter certainty—that Armageddon is right around the corner, and one that explains, very precisely, how it’s all gonna come down. John McCain’s swell new BFF Hagee is the master of said theology: a genocidal cocktail of Old Testament prophecy, Christian Zionism, militant, even savage, anti-Islamism, and state-of-the-art End Times mythology, with a bit of technothriller mumbo jumbo and the requisite splashes of the horrors promised by the Book of Revelation thrown in for effect where desirable. 

So this is how it all plays out. Once upon a time….

According to the Reverend Hagee, an Israeli intelligence operative by the name of “unnamed source” has already confided in him as to the existence or near-existence of Iranian nukes, as well as to an Iranian plot to destroy seven American cities via nuclear suitcase bombs or “electromagnetic pulse devices.” Electromagnetic pulse devices! In suitcases! Just what I need, one more thing to worry about on the Silver Line to work each morning. And that’s the sane part. Now pay close attention, because it gets complicated. Israel will take it upon itself to attack Iranian nuclear facilities, leading the Arab states to unite—and I think it’s about here that the shrooms started to kick in—under oil-hungry Russia. Which incidentally must in the interim have somehow settled that nasty business in Chechen with the Muslim inhabitants thereof to everyone’s satisfaction. While things don’t look so good for our nuclear-armed ally, never fear, for God will rain down both fire and pestilence upon the armies of the night.

According to Hagee,Pestilence may refer to biochemical weapons—weapons not, however, launched by Israel: “I can easily imagine a scenario where they fire biological weapons upon Israel, but God miraculously turns the anthrax-laden missiles or causes them to misfire, so that the invaders are destroyed by their evil intentions!” (The Battle for Jerusalem, 134).  “Fire” probably refers to Israel’s use of nuclear weapons—a scenario that becomes more and likely with every peaceful overture by Tel Aviv (“with every inch of territory Israel gives away in the name of peace, it is being backed into a corner from which it would have no choice but to defend itself with nuclear weapons”). In any case, Hagee claims that will destroy Israel’s enemies  “with shock and awe” no less (a phrase prompting Sarah Posner’s wry summary, “lending either a divine quality to the Bush administration phrase or a Bush-like quality to God’s wrath.” I am deeply indebted to Ms Posner’s ongoing coverage of the Reverend Hagee, which predates the McCain consummation and extends to the whole of the religious right. She’s good; read her).  The enemy will suffer an 84% casualty rate—that’s Ezekiel again—and “the bloated bodies of the enemies of Israel will be a banquet for buzzards. The beasts of the field will have a feast unlike anything since dogs ate the body of Jezebel” (BfJ, 158).

This only a prelude the real shitstorm, however. Soon after, the Antichrist arrives—in the person of the head of … The European Community! Posing as a person of peace, he’ll establish his reign in Jerusalem. Hagee notes that not everyone agrees with ths interpretation, and that others have compiled their own llsts of potential perps, including “Saddam Hussein, and Bill Clinton, with Hillary as the False Prophet” (BfJ, 206 [2001]).

Meanwhile, the pathetic Americans, who, having been emasculated by the Homosexual Agenda and infantilized by Militant Feminism, and refusing to join Israel in its battle against swarthy Muslims and sullen soviets, will pay a price for it’s liberal-led  treason, and, as Ezekiel explained a few millennia ago, will experience “fire” upon both its coasts—Hagee likes to point out that 55% of the US population lives on the coasts (uh-oh, there go the Blue states!). Ultimately Jesus—“no weak-wristed, smiling Jesus come to pay earth a condolence call,” but a “furious Christ, ready to confront the gathered armies of the world on a plain called Armageddon,” having had it up to here with all this damn and incredibly complicated nonsense, arrives on a white horse and tosses all the evildoers into a lake of fire. Literally.  As for the aftermath, Hagee cites Ezekial, summarizing the Russian position—“I am against you, O God”—and concludes, “As the news cameras of the world survey millions of bloated bodies lying in the  hot middle eastern sun, this comment will go down in history as one of the great understatements of all time” (BfJ, 157), and “The people of Israel will set about burying the dead in a mass grave eerily reminiscent of the huge trenches the Nazis used to bury Jewish dead in the Holocaust” (BfJ, 159).

But wait! If any remaining latte-drinkers thought the coastal firestorms were bad, just wait till Jesus kick-starts his ensuing thousand-year reign. In Hagee’s own words,  “When Jesus comes back, he’s not going to ask the ACLU if it’s all right to pray, he’s not going to ask the churches if they can ordain pedophile priests and bishops, he’s not going to ask if it’s all right to put the Ten Commandments in the statehouses. He’s not going to endorse abortion, he’s going to run the world by the word of God.”  He’s also going to put a quick end to what Hagee scorns as “the knowledge explosion,” which has produced “a generation that is dying of AIDS, abortion, enslaved by drugs, homosexuality, and witchcraft.” And here we thought that young people were apathetic. Who knew?

Now it could be that being an undeniable beneficiary of the aforementioned “knowledge explosion,” my own wits have been addled by psychedelics, drag queens, Voltaire, and sorcery, but in any case I have to admit being a tad confused by all this, because I can’t quite tell what’s writ in stone and what’s based on an “if / then scenario.” In Hagee’s view, Ezekiel—who, for what it’s worth, transcribed his nightmares around 500 BC while a captive in Babylon—seems to have anticipated the United States standing idly by, and hence suffering God’s indignant firestorms; Jeremiah, on the other hand, apparently predicts a happier outcome, a nuclear war between a reinvigorated America and those damn Persians. (Jeremiah was around when the Babylonians first took Jerusalem, around 620 BC. According to the charming Wikipedia entry, “Jeremiah made extensive use of performance art … walking about in the streets with a yoke about his neck and engaging in other efforts to attract attention”).  I suspect that Hagee’s prophecies have evolved over time—I just finished reading The Battle for Jerusalem, published in 2001, but his latest bestseller, Jerusalem Countdown, apparently  places far greater emphasis on Iran, and the need to destroy it, and pronto (I am indebted to the good folks at talk2action.com for valuable synopses of JC and other works).

None of this is to be feared. “War,” quoth Hagee, “is the whip God uses to chastise rebellious nations.” And he quotes another “Christian prophecy teacher,” one Chuck Missler: [Jesus]’ll issue in a time of trouble for Israel the likes of which have never occurred at that time, nor ever would happen again. And those words echo in our ears as think of Auschwitz, Dachau, the horrors of Europe in the thirties and forties, and realize that what Jesus is saying is that its’ going to be worse next time around … if you have friends, if you have a heart for Israel, you can’t help but feel pain for them because they have no idea what’s coming” (BfJ, 227). But, what the hell: “Let’s not forget the benefits of suffering,” Hagee cheerily advises, citing St. Paul. Because when the dust settles, God, in his infinite mercy, is actually going to give the Jews one final chance to recognize the “need for repentance and salvation” (BfJ, 229).

Now, this is not run of the mill Protestantism. This is not even standard 21st century evangelism—as Bill Moyers has pointed out, plenty of evangelical leaders reject Hagee’s insistence on Israeli domination: “Look at this letter to President Bush from evangelicals who don’t belong to CUFI: `We affirm your clear call for a two-state solution… Historical honesty compels us to recognize that both Israelis and Palestinians have legitimate rights stretching back for millennia,’ and… `Israelis and Palestinians must both accept each other’s right to exist.’” Hah—not in Hagee’s world they don’t. In any case, there is no way around it: the Reverend John Hagee is neither more nor less than the leader of a suicide cult, and that the Republican candidate for commander-in-chief would seek his kiss says more all you need to know about the truly depraved state of today’s GOP. And that Citizen John McCain would seek this madman’s approval says all you need to know about the Senator’s “character,” a phrase chirped so often but substantiated by so little. A man who will stoop so low as to beg a Hagee for his vote, and the vote of his suicidal cult, is not a man of character, of principle, or of courage; it is that of a man of crazyass ambition, of amoral opportunism, and of a hollow core.

This is incendiary stuff. It leads to bad things. We’ve seen it lead to very bad things when it springs from the east, but Muslim (or Hindu, or Jewish) fanatics hardly have a corner on hankering after a bloody death but a most excellent afterlife. Fundamentalists are the same wherever you turn; compare Hagee’s eschatology, for example, with that of his Islamic counterpart, and his own personal Satan, Iran’s  President Ahmadinejad,  Hagee’s personal bete noir, as summarized by the Telegraph:

Listen carefully to the utterances of Mr Ahmadinejad, and there is another dimension, a religious messianism that, some suspect, is giving the Iranian leader a dangerous sense of divine mission….All streams of Islam believe in a divine saviour, known as the Mahdi, who will appear at the End of Days … [who] is said to have gone into “occlusion” in the ninth century, at the age of five. His return will be preceded by cosmic chaos, war and bloodshed. After a cataclysmic confrontation with evil and darkness, the Mahdi will lead the world to an era of universal peace.This is similar to the Christian vision of the Apocalypse …

Similiar indeed. And they match each other in the seriousness with which they pursue their chiliastic fantasies—the energies and monies devoted by Hagee to promoting this message, and his success at it, are proof of his gravitas, and should serve to underscore the fact that he’s not about to jump into bed with anyone displaying any lack of backbone when it comes to detonating a 40 megaton payload over downtown Tehran one nice summer afternoon.

Which is why these matters are not just bad dreams, not simply Disney on the brown acid. Why is they are scary.

Scary because this is an extremely influential. minister—his newest scheme, “Christians United for Israel,” boasted, at it’s kick off, Republican Party head Kay Mehlman, Senators Brownback and Santorum, and a greeting from President Bush. And Hagees’ a heavy-hitter on the Hill: according the Dallas Morning News, who interviewed him “in his  book-lined study at Cornerstone Church,”  Hagee claims that “4,500 evangelicals representing every congressional district lobbied Capitol Hill last summer, and he hopes to have 7,000 next summer.”

And scary in that his cause du jour, and one he pushes relentlessly, is war with Iran: at that same session, he announced that “The United Sates must join Israel in a pre-emptive military strike against Iran to fulfill God’s plan for both Israel and the West,” noting in a follow-up article that this attack must be carried out with nuclear weapons.

And scary because, unlike Farrakhan’s irritating endorsement of Obama, which the Senator “denounced” and “rejected,” McCain has actively courted the madman. Sarah Posner reported way back in January 2007 that McCain and Hagee sat down to an “extended breakfast” that month, after which Hagee was happy to respond that McCain is “solidly pro-Israel.”

And scariest of all because Hagee’s take on Iran is all-too-similar to McCain’s own. Couple his embrace of the number one proponent of nuking Iran with McCain’s own infamous “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb bomb Iran,” and his own weird notion that “Islamofacism is the transcendental threat” of the 21st century, which is rather like declaring in 1908 that Cy Young’s Boston Americans were the team of the twentieth century. Add his recent wholly inaccurate statements about Iran’s support for Al_Quaeda, so embarassingly wrong that Joe Lieberman had to lean over and correct McCain when he was venting away in Jordan the other day—but so determined is McCain to make the case, any case, against Iran, that he’s  working straight out of the Bush playbook on Iraq—throw out whatever accusations you want—something will stick.  All Hagee is doing is providing the cultish theosophical foundations for an airborne lark that will make Bush’s most excellent adventure in Iraq look like a freaking picnic. And then there’s this sweet little admission, made to Tim Russert in April 2006 and cited by Bruce Wilson on his excellent talk2action web site:

TIM RUSSERT: So we could have two wars at once?
SEN. McCAIN: I think we could have Armageddon.

Yeah. That’s what I want in a President. Someone who can do the straight-talk thing about Armaggedon, and with a straight face, because he thinks he can WIN. McCain on a white horse, Cambridge in flames. Yee hah.

God’s Boundless Love for the Jewish People

That phrase “solidly pro-Israel” means one thing coming from the Anti-Defamation league, another from AIPAC—but something altogether different when it comes from “Christian Zionist” Hagee, where being pro-Israel leads ineluctably to its destruction and that of its non-Christian inhabitants. (Incidentally, according to Posner, Hagee sent his supporters an e-mail after that 2007 shakedown of McCain, noting that, “We discussed [McCain’s] positions on other matters that I will share with you when I speak with you in person. This newsflash goes to the ends of the earth and I don’t want to read it in the media tomorrow”).

Jews themselves appear to be a little cagier around the Christian Zionists than is loosey-goosey John McCain. The leadership is understandably more than happy to make nice with this useful idiot (one of Hagee’s own articles begins, “Former prime minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu and I sat in my office in the fall of 2004 discussing the geopolitical realities [italics mine] of the Middle East….”; and Hagee has in fact met with all recent Israeli PMs). Why not?  The trouble would appear to be that while a good many Jewish people share with the Hagees a certain affection for Israel—especially, you know, those living there—that’s about all they share, the Israeli Defense Force having done an eyebrow raising job since 1948 of demonstrating that whatever else they may be, Israelis are NOT suicidal, are not yearning for the afterlife. Rather far from it. The difference between your average sane Jew and your psychopathic southern fundamentalist is summed up nicely in this little vignette describing the interraction between the two:

Burt Siegel, director of the Philadelphia JCRC, recalled a friendly conversation that turned sour when an evangelical equated Palestinian suicide bombings “with the terrorism that is perpetrated on the fetus.”

Yeah.  Israeli high school students grabbing a slice of pizza in Tel Aviv have their limbs blown off, and this, from the viewpoint of McCain supporters, is the equivalent of dropping a tab of RU-846.

So you can see where Hagee & Company have their work cut out for them. Especially if their Jewish brethren have caught wind of some of Hagees’ other racial-cultural-religious pronouncements. For example, Hagee wants it known that Jews—like the inhabitants of Massachusetts—are guilty of “repulsive, insulting and heartbreaking to God” style behavior—bad enough, in fact, that God—and I swear, it’s hard for me to transcribe this—sent  the Nazis to drive the Jews back to Israel! Because he so loved them! Yes!  It was all part of a plan, you see, a plan so mysterious and yet so-wonderfull that Hagee is totally blown away: contemplating the magical beauty of of Belsen and Buchenwald:

The Prophet Jeremiah… paints a vivid picture of the human agents God intended to use to bring the Jewish people back to Israel: ‘But now I will send for many fisherman’, declares the Lord’, ‘and they will catch them. After that I will send for many hunters and they will hunt them down on every mountain and hill and from the crevices of the rocks.’
I believe this indicates the positive comes before the negative…..
First, God sent the fisherman to Israel. These were the Zionists, men like Theodore Herzl who called for the Jews of Europe and the World to come to Palestine and establish the Jewish state. The Jews were encouraged to escape while there was still time…. [Then] God sent the hunters. The hunter is one who pursues his target with force and fear. No one could see the horror of the Holocaust coming, but the force and fear of Hitler’s Nazis drive the Jewish people back to the only home God ever intended for the Jews to have-Israel…. I am stricken with awe and wonder at his boundless love for Israel and the Jewish people…( “Jerusalem Countdown”, paperback edition, pages 132 and 133—my thanks to talk2action.com for the reference )

I’m not making this shit up—if you’ve never heard this type thing before, welcome to the wonderful world of what Karl Rove calls the “GOP base,” where demented logic like this is the order of the day.  Yes, “the base,” the heart and soul of the Party. Obama apologizes for Wright, and yet these folks, far from being anywhere near the fringes of the Republican Party, ARE the damn Party.
Of course, worst of all—need I even mention this?–are non-Orthodox, non-Conservative Jews, who have traded in the Word of God for a “liberal agenda”—“they want men to marry men and women to marry women.” Not “want to allow,” of course—nope, what they’re doing in that nice Reformed synagogue down the street is encouraging their daughters to “marry women.” Thank you, Texas, for explaining Brookline. I had no idea. 

Hagee, not incidentally, has nothing but kind words for Yigal Amir, who gunned down Yitzakh Rabin. Because if there’s one thing all these reverends-on-the-far right are agreed on, it’s any Jew that advocates giving up one inch of territory, nay, who doesn’t pursue the eventual incorporation of all of so-called “Greater Israel” under the star of David, is an apostate Jew and thereby deserving of assassination. Rabin, in Hagee’s view, got exactly what he deserved. “Land for Peace” does not, cannot, make sense in Hagee’s theological house of cards—the point isn’t peace, dammit, the very point of Israel is as harbinger of Armageddon!  Craig Unger cites Itamar Rabonivitch, Israeli Ambassador to the US during the Rabin and Peres administrations (1993-1996): “I was ambassador for four years of the peace process, and the Christian fundamentalists were vehemently opposed to the peace process. They believed that the land belonged to Israel as a matter of divine right. So they immediately became part of a campaign by the Israeli right to undermine the peace process.”

To be fair: I noted that the Israel lobby is more than happy to do business with these people—who can blame them?—but plenty of sensible Jewish groups have condemned this unhappy catechism. Would that they were as vociferous as their Catholic counterparts in objecting to McCain’s Judas kiss: the San Antonio chapter of the B’Nai B’RIth made Hagee their first ever gentile “Humanitarin of the Year.”

OK, Time for a Break. Enjoy. Enjoy, especially, Holy Joe Lieberman cite Torah and compare Hagee to Moses; enjoy, especially, at 5:08, the crowd’s reaction to Hagee’s demand for war on Iran. This clip  comes from Max Blumenthal’s Web site—Max is a young Jewish guy who has made an avocation of attending—and filming—religious right conferences, and he’s done some outstanding work in that vein over the years—truly one of my favorites. In his own words, “I have covered the Christian right intensely for over four years. During this time, I attended dozens of Christian right conferences, regularly monitored movement publications and radio shows, and interviewed scores of its key leaders. I have never witnessed any spectacle as politically extreme, outrageous, or bizarre as the one Christians United for Israel produced last week in Washington. See for yourself.”

 

Reverend Rod and Manifest Destiny for a New Millenium

Hagee and Bauer are not anomalous, of course—now that McCain has the cat sewn up firmly in the bag, the lizards are scampering out en masse from their “Rocks, Caves, Lakes, Fens, Bogs, Dens, and shades of death.” Recall that a few weeks ago, brave, principled John McCain derided radio talk show host Bill Cunningham for emphasizing Barack Obama’s middle name at a rally.  We’ll have none of that, said the Senator, dissing the bigot they’d invited to do just what he did. What passed largely unnoted (though not by David Corn, who did a nice piece in Mother Jones) was the gentleman standing by McCain’s side: that would be the Reverend Rod Parsley, a televangelist whom McCain had referred to as a “spiritual guide” when they took the stage together in February. In addition to run-of-the-mill gaybashing and etcetera, the Reverend Parsley advises that “Allah was a demon spirit,” that “that what some call `extremists’ are instead mainstream believers who are drawing from the well at the very heart of Islam,” that “Islam is responsible for more pain, more bloodshed, and more devastation than nearly any other force on earth at this moment,” and that it therefore must be eradicated:

“I cannot tell you how important it is that we understand the true nature of Islam, that we see it for what it really is. In fact, I will tell you this: I do not believe our country can truly fulfill its divine purpose until we understand our historical conflict with Islam. I know that this statement sounds extreme, but I do not shrink from its implications. The fact is that America was founded, in part, with the intention of seeing this false religion destroyed, and I believe September 11, 2001, was a generational call to arms that we can no longer ignore.”

Parsley, not coincidentally, sits on the Board of Hagee’s CUIF. So, not coincidentally, does family values champion and erstwhile presidential candidate and ladies man … Gary Bauer! What does Gary Bauer make of all of this eradicating-Islam talk? Well, Mr. Bauer was not pleased with President Bush when General Jerry Boykin went on record as stating that the war in Iraq was between the forces of Christianity and those of, umm, … Satan. Because rather than backing up the General and agreeing, that, yes, that black cloud in the reconnaissance photos really was the hand of Satan—yeah, a United Sates General said that with a straight face, and the Bible Belt nodded as one—the President instead shared some of his profound theological insights with us, insisting that Islam is a religion of peace and that maybe not all Muslims needed to die. Bauer wasn’t hoodwinked :

“I worked in a White House, so I understand that the president feels he has to be president of all the people — but nothing requires him to make the kind of statements he is making praising Islam,” Bauer says. “It just doesn’t make any sense. He continues to speak glowingly of Islam, describing it as a religion of peace, in spite of all the evidence around the world that it’s not a religion of peace at all.”

These sentiments were seconded at the time by another outraged man of god, the Reverend Ted Haggard, who put his own deep thoughts on divinity on the public record in declaring that “The Christian God encourages freedom, love, forgiveness, prosperity and health. The Muslim god appears to value the opposite. The personalities of each god are evident in the cultures, civilizations and dispositions of the peoples that serve them. Muhammad’s central message was submission; Jesus’ central message was love. They seem to be very different personalities.” You will recall that shortly thereafter the godly televangelist was popped for exploring love, freedom and submission, along with copious amounts of meth, with man-whores. 

“Is this of thy whoredoms a small matter?”

What’s most bothersome about McCain is his willingess to “stink to please.” To embrace what amounts to nothing but sheer hatefulness, of a variety I know for a fact that the Senator does not share, but which he refuses to condemn or even acknowledge.  Which would be fine were his nickname Tricky Dick, but which sticks in the craw as he struts about boasting of his principles, his honor, and his straight talk, which is clearly a load o’crap. For example: in addition to endlessly rehearsing the follies of Islam. Hagee and Parsley and their ilk are among the most vile of homophobes, as evidenced by a Media Matters report on another insightful piece of work by Hagee, bearing the  Cosmo-cover style title “What Every Man Wants in a Woman.”

The Cosmo view on What Every Man wants can be pretty much summed up in a line from the magazine’s sagacious article, “Four Things He Doesn’t Dare Tell You” : “So treat oral sex like a vitamin, and give it to him once a day. He’s sure to repay the favor.”  Advice which I somehow doubt appears in Reverend Hagee’s similarly titled how-to book, though when you get right down to it, so to speak, Hagee’s views are not so different: “[Woman is ] by instinct, a manipulator of the situation. Fallen women will try to dominate the marriage. The man has the God-given role to be the loving leader of the home…”; he also cites Meir Zolotowitz—“Woman’s punishment is measure for measure. She influenced her husband and he ate at her command. Her punishment was that she would now become subservient to him.” Both Cosmo and Hagee, strangest of bedmates, have determined that a woman’s place is on her knees. What’s a feminist to do? Well, speaking of feminism, here’s the charming Reverend having his own Beavis and Butthead moment, courtesy of Sarah Posner: “Do you know the difference between a woman with PMS and a snarling Doberman pinscher? The answer is lipstick. Do you know the difference between a terrorist and a woman with PMS? You can negotiate with a terrorist.” Forget what I said about Republicans exiting the country clubs into the noonday glare of the twenty-first century—apparently McCain et al took one peek at the millennium and turned tail and decided to make it 1955 all over again).

Anyway, Hagee on gay marriage, which:

“…will open the door to incest, to polygamy, and every conceivable marriage arrangement demented minds can possibly conceive. If God does not then punish America, He will have to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah…. It is impossible to call yourself a Christian and defend homosexuality. There is no justification or acceptance of homosexuality…. Homosexuality means the death of society because homosexuals can recruit, but they cannot reproduce.”

Hagee also told NPR’s Terri Gross (September 9, 2006) that Hurricane Katrina was the good Lord’s response to New Orleans’ tolerance for homosexuals:

All hurricanes are acts of God, because God controls the heavens. I believe that New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to God, and they are — were recipients of the judgment of God for that. The newspaper carried the story in our local area that was not carried nationally that there was to be a homosexual parade there on the Monday that the Katrina came. And the promise of that parade was that it was going to reach a level of sexuality never demonstrated before in any of the other Gay Pride parades. So I believe that the judgment of God is a very real thing. I know that there are people who demur from that, but I believe that the Bible teaches that when you violate the law of God, that God brings punishment sometimes before the day of judgment. And I believe that the Hurricane Katrina was, in fact, the judgment of God against the city of New Orleans.

While it is reassuring to me that Southey will not allow an ostensibly gay group to march in the St. Patricks’ Day parade up here in Boston, thereby forestalling a similar fate for Boston, I can’t help but wonder what “reaching a level of sexuality never demonstrated before” entails, exactly. In reality, that is, not in Hagee’s fevered dreams.
 

McCain, on the other hand, has called the Federal Defense of Marriage Act “un-Republican,” declared that Tempe Mayor Neil Giuliano’s sexual orientation was a non-issue, and has stated that he would be comfortable with a gay President. Indicating that on a few issues, the Republican leadership shows signs of lurching into the 21st century. In all seriousness, it was based on statements like these that I developed a VERY begrudging and quite limited respect for McCain. But again, this was the old McCain, the maverick, a man unwilling to sacrifice principle for power. The guy who, even if you disagreed with him, you figured he was standing up for what he believed was right. That man is dead, and instead we get the re-animated corpse, fueled not by principle but by the lust for power and the willingness to shamelessly indulge whatever piece of putrefied flesh wraps its forelegs around his own jiggy middle. Its’ sad. And I mean that. And it has to be a very, very  sad to be a Republican today—who the hell can they look up to? 

Additionally,  Senator McCain himself does not strike me as suicidal. Vindictive, sure, in a ferret-with-a-long-memory kind of way, but more apt to level a few biblical cities for the sheer thrill of it than with an eye towards establishing the New Jerusalem. McCain, rather, strikes me as someone who’d like nothing more than to bomb the living hell out of yet another desert state and win. Recall his own version of Vietnam: the United States lost the war because it didn’t prosecute it vigorously enough.  Really. Robert Scheer, writing in 1999, noted that a year previously, thirty years after Tet, McCain was still bemoaning the fact that the United Sates had not unleashed sufficient hell from the air: “Like a lot of Vietnam veterans, I believed and still believe that the war was winnable,” he said. “I do not believe that it was winnable at an acceptable cost in the short or probably even the long term using the strategy of attrition which we employed there to such tragic results. I do believe that had we taken the war to the North and made full, consistent use of air power in the North, we ultimately would have prevailed.” This from the same man who “acknowledged that  Operation Rolling Thunder, which unloaded 800 tons of bombs a day over North Vietnam, caused more than a million deaths and injuries in Vietnam each year from 1965 to 1968.” Yep: each year. That’s 3 million deaths between 1965 and 1968 alone—and McCain feels that not nearly enough devastation was created? God help Iran. God help us all.

Now, let’s be fair. McCain wants you to know that his was not an unqualified acceptance of Hagee’s endorsement, and that his initially unqualified acceptance does not imply an unqualified endorsement of “all” of Hagee’s views, which is code for “why the hell didn’t somebody tell me that Hagee hates the goddamn Catholics?” McCain himself didn’t utter the words “whore of Babylon” once in regard to the Catholic Church, at least not publicly, and in any case even that sounds too tame for the famously vulgar Senator. After being called to the carpet by Catholic Leaguer Bill Donahue, McCain wants everyone to understand that he “disagrees” with Hagee over “some issues.” Meaning, yeah, the Catholic business, NOT the four horsemen of the apocalypse wreaking havoc on the Jersey Shore, firebombing downtown Seattle, and blasting the west coast from Baja to Sacramento with electromagnetic pulse waves; not the need to wipe Tehran from living memory; not the image of some bespectacled, well-tailored  Belgian bureaucrat leading the hordes of darkness against the stout men of the west; not Jesus enthroned in the same Oval Office where once Bill Clinton entertained a Magdalene of his own, not even Jesus on a white horse. And not “The fact is that America was founded, in part, with the intention of seeing this false religion destroyed.” Nope.

McCain’s own words are not those of a sane man lambasting criminal insanity, or a man of peace dissing nuclear warmongering, or a tolerant man disassociating himself from hateful anti-Muslim and homophobic slurs. The sort of thing you’d expect from a maverick; the sort of thing we might call “Straight Talk.” Nope, those days are over for Prince John: he courted Hagee for the vote, and he dissed Hagee, as much as need be—you can be sure the Rev understands—to ensure himself of the Catholic vote:  “Republican presidential candidate John McCain on Friday repudiated any views of San Antonio televangelist John Hagee, who endorsed him last month, `if they are anti-Catholic or offensive to Catholics. I sent two of my children to Catholic school. I categorically reject and repudiate any statement that was made that was anti-Catholic, both in intent and nature.’”
Unfortunately, this “I do not necessarily agree” business smells of praising Mussolini for making the trains run on time while maybe rolling your eyes at some of Il Duce’s less savory political allies, you know, like those operating out of the Reichstag. “If they are offensive to Catholics”—hell, the slight to Catholics is nothing, what of the sheer offensiveness to gays, Muslims, and sane people? The question is, assuming that the Senator does not concur with Hagee in regards to the round heels of the Catholic Church in full Whore of Babylon garb, a la Louise Brooke enacting Salome’s Dance of the Seven Veils for a trembling, salivating Pope Benedict, just what the hell does he agree with?

Well, we know he agrees with the Reverend Parsley when the latter proclaims that :

“Americans must be ‘Christocrats’ — citizens of both their country and the Kingdom of God”; “And that is not a democracy; that is a theocracy”; “That means God is in control, and you are not.”

Since in McCain’s own words,

“I would probably have to say yes, that the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation.”

A statement from which one can only conclude that Senator McCain lacks even a passing familiarity with the Constitution, which established no such thing, of course, I mean not even “arguably,” as may be the case in, for example, the somewhat ambiguous Second Amendment (whose ambiguity suggests to McCain that the Founding Fathers would not have approved of waiting periods for assault rifles purchased at gun shows,  that Congress shall make no law forbidding the sale of armor piecing bullets, and that the District of Columbia shall make it lawful for all citizens to carry concealed handguns. America’s urban mayors must really love this clown. Sorry: I live in a big city. And the last thing this town needs is me and everyone else on the Red Line packing serious heat during rush hour. Especially in late July. Especially in late July following a key Sox loss). Even the lunatic fringe doesn’t claim that there is any such establishment clause in the Constitution itself, since, in fact, quite the opposite is the case. Only an out-and-out liar or a pitiable ignoramus would make such a claim, and only a horde of gullible jabbering idiots would nod in agreement. 

What else is there to agree with? Nothing. There is nothing to Hagee and Parsley but hatin’, and the call to action, and a certain thermonuclear-type action at that,  based on that hatin’.  And, apparently, there is nothing to McCain, under that “honorable” façade, except the urge to incessant pandering: the same impulse that led to him to ditch his first wife for the cunning millionairess capable of funding his political ambitions, that led to his neck-deep involvement with Charles Keating, that led to his mysterious liaisons with foxy Vicki Islinton and her boss,. And that led to finding himself happily firmly sandwiched between the sweaty bodies of the piggish Reverends Hagee and Parsley.

Men whose stench even he once found unbearable. “An honorable man,” they tell us. “A maverick!,” they call him. Sadly, there was a moment when I bought into that, back in 2000 when candidate McCain tore into the Hagees and Parsleys and Bauers and called them “agents of intolerance,” and I thought, damn, wouldja listen to that—a Republican talking sense and taking the yahoos on mano a mano! I sat up at that, you better believe it, and I started listening to the man.

Well, pity the fool I was. The yahoos had their revenge, ceding South Carolina to born-again George and ruining McCain’s chances. So much for ol’ Maverick. McCain got the hint and started remaking himself a few years ago, meeting up Falwell and pronouncing him a swell dude, delivering an address at Liberty University, in fact—that’s where they have the 500 year old dinosaur fossils on display. “Maverick?” Toady is more like it, a lickspittle who’ll crawl through whatever gutter it takes to satisfy his appetites and his vanity. 

What’s so funny about McCain is that he’s running on the very thing he lacks.

Hell, John McCain is the closest thing the GOP can provide to the Clintons.

Strange Fruit for a New Century

What’s been most disturbing about the reaction to the Hagee endorsement has been—well, first of all, it’s lack, and second, its focus. There hasn’t been enough made of these psychopathological love-matches, and where there is, the wrong damn things are highlighted.

While the news media devote endless hours to forcing Obama to jump through hoops explaining how he could have had such close relations with Jeremiah Wright for so many years while apparently remaining clueless as to the Reverend’s true feelings about race, politics, history, culture, and anything else that could help derail a presidential campaign, they’ve let McCain off the hook almost entirely—but for those few who took umbrage at the fact that Hagee’s tossed a few dusty canards Catholicism’s way.

Which hurt no one. Calling the Catholic Church the Whore of Babylon isn’t going result in the USAF  obliterating the Vatican some afternoon McCain’s feeling particularly ornery. The important stuff is glossed over, as it usually is; lacking entirely, in mainstream media’s accounting, is this essential electoral demographic’s inarguably psychotic fixation with the wholesale massacre of jews, muslims, and coastal Americans. This kind of shit isn’t simple indecent, it’s downright obscene, and to cosset doddering John (you know, we all need to make some comprises to get elected … we have  a big tent) on this matter is to nonetheless acknowledge that it’s  acceptable to lavish praise on these animals, and if that’s what the Republican Party has come to, then god help those who don’t see through McCain’s avuncular mask and see not only the real face of the bloodymouthed weasel, but the faces of that particularly shameless brood vipers, the post-millenial GOP, who support him.

More than that: in highlighting what amounts to a meaningless insult to Catholics, the media—along with the Democrats—have ignored the obvious anti-Muslim bias, one of the dirtier little secrets of the campaign. For example: Obama is required to disassociate himself from his pastor’s “racially divisive” remarks, but he does not go overboard to try to prove that he is not black. Clinton has to “prove” that a woman is up to the job, but she does not have to deny her genetic constitution. But when it comes to Muslims, it’s a whole ‘nother matter: Obama’s campaign released a slick two- page brochure when the Senator went into Carolina emphasizing that when it comes to his religion, why, no one is more Christian than Christ-loving Obama. It’s considered insulting when Clinton uses Obama’s childhood to her own sickening ends, as in her recent response to a question as to whether Obama might be Muslim: “Not that I know of.” While I don’t think that either of these candidates are looking forward to obliterating Mecca with the same priapic excitation that McCain does, the fact that they “deny” these rumors is disgusting. It’s identical to “I’m NOT gay, no no no, NEVER been gay, not a gay bone in my body, ever ever ever—oh, uh, not that there’s anything wrong with being gay, of course.” And in perpetuating this bigotry, the kind that allows the United States to launch war after war after upon the peoples of the middle east, as did the English, as did the Germans, as did the French, without any of the qualms of conscience that might be stirred were we to wreak the same havoc upon, say, Ireland, is a bloody brand of opportunism. As Naomi Klein writes in The Nation, in an article pointedly titled “Obama, Being Called a Muslim is Not a Smear, “…Muslim civilians are not counted among the dead in Iraq  and Afghanistan; …Islam has been desecrated in US-run prisons … voting for an Islamic party resulted in collective punishment in Gaza,” and Muslims around the globe are justifiably afeared of a “virulent strain of Islamophobia in Europe in North America.”

And in subliminally perpetuating the message that it ain’t okay to be Muslim, both Democratic candidates pander to the yahoos (no big surprise: they’ve already sold out gays, Palestinians, drug addicts, and union members). No, Obama: We are NOT “one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.”  We are an unhappily yoked patchwork of warring tribes. True, we rarely come to physical violence. When we do, it’s noteworthy that our bombings (McVeigh in Oklahoma, Atlanta), shootings (abortion clinics), and lynchings (Matthew Shephard) are carried out, by respectively, by Christian militiamen, antiabortion activists, and homophobes—all, interestingly enough, creatures indisputably essential to a Republican Party win in November.

There is a very definite and traceable thirst for blood that courses through more than a few integral segments of the Republican Party—these days, mostly the blood of what their spokespeople, the Limbaughs and Savages and Coulters, call ragheads, faggots, and wetbacks, in the kind of locker room talk that passes for political discourse among all echelons of the GOP. They’ll add to that list any other marginalized group they feel they can push around with impunity, since scapegoating minorities and turning the most powerless among us into satanic threats has been an effective tool for gaining and seizing power since around 1936 and a card the GOP has played with endless mischief since the postwar period, having run again and again on scary communists, scary black people, scary Asians, scary homosexuals, and now, scary Muslims and scary immigrants.  These are of course the same Republicans that scurry about wearing American flags in their lapels, chant “USA! USA!” like horny baboons when McCain walks into the room, and are all about livin’ in the “home of the brave.” More like the home of the scared shitless. 

And while I am neither Arab, nor gay, nor Latino, I’m pretty sure my blood’s on the menu too. And quite likely yours is as well. Anyone considering voting for McCain, and by extension his spiritual coteries, would do well to remember the man’s willingness to barter his soul for the support of the very, very worst America has to offer.

And to remember that that exchange comes with a price. I think that at heart John McCain is a somewhat more decent person than is the Reverend Hagee. But some unholy night, the White House phone will ring at 3 am. And the voice on the other end—a hushed and soothing Texas drawl—will remind President McCain that the time has come to uphold his end of the bargain.

And McCain will smile as he slips quietly into his slippers and robe.

_________________________________________________________________ 

NOTES

“…Bauer’s unseemly dalliance with a vivacious young staffer…”: Jake Tapper, “Bauer: I am Not a Slut,” Salon, September 29, 1999

 “Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of [McCain’s] top advisers intervened….”: “For McCain, Self-confidence on Ethics Poses It’s Own Risk,” New York Times, February 21, 2008

 “…Chinese banks hold some 699 billion dollars worth of US Securities…”: Morrison and Labonte, “Chinese Holdings of U.S Securities: Implications for the U.S. Economy,” Congressional Research Service, January 9, 2009.

 If you are unfamiliar with the players in, philosophy of, and influence of this particular brand religious right whackjobbery, definitely see Craig Unger’s slightly dated but nonetheless excellent “American `Rapture”’ (Vanity Fair, December 2005). Be sure to see the excellent resources provided by PublicEye, especially material compiled over the years by Sara Diamond and Chip Bertlet. There’s also a wealth of material on Millenium Sites.  Bruce Wilson has been doing an excellent job of tracking Hagee, among similar swine, at Talk2action. I’ve availed myself of much of his source material, and strongly encourage you to visit and bookmark his site. Sarah Posner wrote a lengthy and excellent analysis of Hagee’s theology and influence way back in 1996, in “Pastor Strangelove” (The American Prospect April 2006); see also her updated “Is the End Near for McCain?” (The American Prospect blog, February 29, 2008), along with “As Bush’s War Strategy Shifts to Iran, Christian Zionists Gear Up for the Apocalypse” (Alternet, January 18, 2007);   
Hagee’s views on Armageddon are succinctly summarized i “McCain courts Armageddon Advocate”  (RightWingWatch.com, February 6, 2008). Media Matters published a comprehensive account of Hagee’s halfwitted commentary in “AMC repeatedly noted controversial comments by Obama’s `allies’…,” March 14 2008. Must reading.  Max Blumenthal, also always good on the Christian Right, discusses Hagee in “Birth Pangs of a New Christian Zionism” (The Nation, August 2006)

Gershom Gorenberg discusses Hagee and Judaism in “Hagee and Sympathy for Israel,” The American Prospect (March 2008). The excellent Jews on First has a good set of stories on Hagee and similar lunatics including  “Christian Zionists,”   Dominionists, and Rod Parsley.

The Rod Parsley quotations are cited in David Corn’s nice dissection of Rod Parsley in “McCain’s Spiritual Guide: Destroy Islam” (Mother Jones, March 2008).
“McCain, on the other hand, has called the Federal Defense of Marriage Act “un-Republican…”: “Why John McCain Isn’t So Bad” (The Advocate, March 20 2008)

Also, to be fair, here’s some of Hagee’s stuff. His web site is surprisingly innocuous, though it demands to be seen, if only to bear witness, as they say, to the video that launches automatically on the home page, and upon which two escapees from The Lawrence Welk show pitch a splendidly bound volume celebrating “50 Years” of John Hagee in the ministry, including photos of the Rev never seen before (although to be honest I wouldn’t fork over the asking price of $100 anticipating any seven-virgins-and-a-mule type stuff). In any case, he saves the juicy bits for his books, which he also pitches on the site.
“Like a lot of Vietnam veterans, I believed and still believe that the war was winnable….”: Robert Scheer, “McCain’s Vietnam,” (The Nation, 1999)

“Listen carefully to the utterances of Mr Ahmadinejad….“: “Ahmadinejad and the Mahdi,” 
“, “if they are anti-Catholic or offensive to Catholics. I sent two of my children to Catholic school….”: “McCain backs away from Hagee:Candidate repudiates San Antonio pastor’s anti-Catholic views (Dallas Morning News, March 8, 2008)

“I would probably have to say yes, that the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation…”: “Groups criticize McCain for calling U.S. ‘Christian nation,’” CNN, October 1, 2007

Bill Moyer’s Journal Transcipt November 30, 2007: “Jews should embrace evangelicals despite their differences, group told,” (JTA, February 26, 2007)
“So treat oral sex like a vitamin…” : Cosmopolitan, “Four Things He Doesn’t Dare Tell You”