…but is allowed way too much TV time…
Pat Robertson is yet another of way too many religious zealots working desperately to further distort the U.S. political spectrum and give religion in this country a bad name. It would appear that now this senior spokesman for a host of Bad Ideas has really and truly gone off the deep end.
For quite some time he’s been publicly (i.e., on television!) praying for openings on the Supreme Court so that Our Fearless Leader™ can appoint some God Fearing Good Guys™ to further the cause of saving us from ourselves. While it is hardly uncommon to wish to replace our political foes with allies, it’s a bit tricky in the case of the Supreme Court since the only two ways out are retirement or death. (Well, you can also be declared unfit, but that seems unlikely in a universe where Robertson still has his job.) So it seems just a wee bit ghoulish for Robertson to be praying for vacancies, and a less generous soul might draw comparisons to things like Khomeini’s call for the death of Salman Rushdie. But I wouldn’t do that. Really. Not even think about it. (We were living in in the U.K. when all that went down, and it was uber creepy.)
Not content with a little anti-democratic religious fundmentalism on his home turf (just what the founding fathers were hoping for), Robertson has now gone international, and in the process gone completely gone ’round the twist. Yesterday, on his depressingly popular TV show “The 700 Club”, he publicly called for the assassination of Hugo Chavez, the elected leader of Venezuela (but not so terribly popular in Shrub Oil circles back here):
If he thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It’s a whole lot cheaper than starting a war. And I don’t think any oil shipments will stop.”
(as quoted by the New York Times).
Simply amazing, ain’t it? You know he’s really gone too far when even the Bush White House and other “Conservative Christians” felt the need to distance themselves from the remark. This is, of course, the very least that we should expect from our leaders in such a situation. As Bernardo Ã?lvarez, the Venezuelan ambassador to the United States, put it quite succinctly:
Mr. Robertson has been one of the president’s staunchest allies. His statement demands the strongest condemnation by the White House.
It’s a sad sign that the poor saps at CBN don’t pull Robertson from the airwaves, or provide any sorts of disclaimers on their web site (as of this evening). Robertson’s remarks are so clearly inappropriate and unacceptable that CBN’s continued tolerance them speaks volumes to how little the ideals of open and informed discussion and debate must count for in that organization.
Sigh…
Props to WeatherGirl (and The Daily Show) for tapping me into this story.
