THIS MODERN WORLD

I probably should be surprised by this completely insane remark by Pat Robertson, but it seems like par for the course for a political operative who’s been disguising himself as a religious man for more than forty years now. (via Atrios) :

There was a popular coup that overthrew him [Chavez]. And what did the United States State Department do about it? Virtually nothing. And as a result, within about 48 hours that coup was broken; Chavez was back in power, but we had a chance to move in. He has destroyed the Venezuelan economy, and he’s going to make that a launching pad for communist infiltration and Muslim extremism all over the continent.

You know, I don’t know about this doctrine of assassination, but 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. But this man is a terrific danger and the United … This is in our sphere of influence, so we can’t let this happen. We have the Monroe Doctrine, we have other doctrines that we have announced. And without question, this is a dangerous enemy to our south, controlling a huge pool of oil, that could hurt us very badly. We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability. We don’t need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator. It’s a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with.

Now think about this for a second…Pat Robertson – the founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network and the Christian Coalition – is calling for the murder of another human being. I cannot imagine how any honest Christian can look at this man and not come to the conclusion that he’s, at the very least, a complete fraud. The fact that the more devout members of the WWJD? crowd would follow Robertson rather than decry him as the anti-Christ tell you all you need to know about the personality-driven nature of “mainstream” (read : overbearing, xenophobic, paranoid, mass-media based subset of) Christianity in America.

This sort of thing makes my blood boil. I hate Christian sects that insist that their interpretation of the Bible is the only “true” Christianity, but I feel rather justified in saying that anyone who actively supports Pat Robertson’s ministries at this point is a “bad” Christian. There is no way you can reconcile Pat Robertson’s apparent bloodlust with the teachings of Jesus Christ. Period. Even attempting to justify a remark like this is tantamount to putting “thou shalt not kill” and “love thy neighbor” behind less important teachings like “thou shalt cover they televangelist’s ass”.

As far as the political aspects of a remark like this, I think it’s high time that the Democratic party borrow a page from the Republican playbook and insist that high-profile conservatives like George Bush, James Dobson, Bill Frist, John McCain, Rick Santorum, Tom DeLay and the like go on record about whether or not they agree with Pat Robertson’s call for the killing of Hugo Chavez. Do you agree that Chavez should be assassinated or not? Since you’ve been so willing to speak for Jesus in the past, do you think he’d support sending someone to murder the democratically elected leader of a foreign country?

Here. Because of this. (More here.) And it was amazing.

Sometimes it’s good to have the right friends. Thanks, Louis.

Probably won’t be much here from me for a few days. Not sure if anybody else with keys to the site will be popping in or not.

Jack Hitt, sporadic contributor to this site, will be guest-hosting Majority Report tonight. I’ll be on the show at around eight o’clock. Merriment will be had.

Update: Looks like I’ll be on closer to 7:30.

This site has been critical of Maureen Dowd on occasion — there are too many times when she phones it in, too many forced pop culture metaphors (the sort of thing I had a little fun with here). But you have to give her props — when she’s on, she’s on:

As W.’s neighbors get in scraps with the antiwar forces coalescing around the ranch; as the Pentagon tries to rustle up updated armor for our soldiers, who are still sitting ducks in the third year of the war; as the Iraqi police we train keep getting blown up by terrorists, who come right back every time U.S. troops beat them up; as Shiites working on the Iraqi constitution conspire with Iran about turning Iraq into an Islamic state that represses women; and as Iraq hurtles toward a possible civil war, W. seems far more oblivious than his father was with his Persian Gulf crisis.

This president is in a truly scary place in Iraq. Americans can’t get out, or they risk turning the country into a terrorist haven that will make the old Afghanistan look like Cipriani’s. Yet his war, which has not accomplished any of its purposes, swallows ever more American lives and inflames ever more Muslim hearts as W. reads a book about the history of salt and looks forward to his biking date with Lance Armstrong on Saturday.

The son wanted to go into Iraq to best his daddy in the history books, by finishing what Bush senior started. He swept aside the warnings of Brent Scowcroft and Colin Powell and didn’t bother to ask his father’s advice. Now he is caught in the very trap his father said he feared: that America would get bogged down as “an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land,” facing a possibly “barren” outcome.

It turns out that the people of Iraq have ethnic and religious identities, not a national identity. Shiites and Kurds want to suppress the Sunnis who once repressed them and break off into their own states, smashing the Bush model kitchen of democracy.

At long last, a senior Bush official admits that administration officials can no longer cling to their own version of reality. “We are in a process of absorbing the factors of the situation we’re in and shedding the unreality that dominated at the beginning,” the official told The Washington Post.

They had better start absorbing and shedding a lot faster, before many more American kids die to create a pawn of Iran. And they had better tell the Boy in the Bubble, who continues to dwell in delusion, hailing the fights and delays on the Iraqi constitution as “a tribute to democracy.”

The president’s pedaling as fast as he can, but he’s going nowhere.