About Time

It sure took long enough, but John McCain finally realized that there is no upside to seeking out John Hagee's endorsement and publicly rejected it. With the megachurch pastor's constant sermons attacking Catholics, Jews, Muslims, gays, and indeed anyone not white and Protestant, any votes McCain won by sucking up to the Christian fundamentalist wing of the GOP were more than offset by votes lost from all the people whom Hagee offended.

The straw that finally broke the camel's back was the discovery of an audio recording in which Hagee proclaimed that Jews "specifically do not have living souls." And if that wasn't enough, he also insisted that in slaughtering the Jews of Europe, Hitler was actually following the will of God as a means of getting them to move to Israel:

"And they the hunters should hunt them," that will be the Jews. "From every mountain and from every hill and from out of the holes of the rocks." If that doesn't describe what Hitler did in the Holocaust, you can't see that.

Theodor Herzl is the father of Zionism. He was a Jew who at the turn of the 19th century said, this land is our land, God wants us to live there. So he went to the Jews of Europe and said "I want you to come and join me in the land of Israel." So few went that Herzl went into depression. Those who came founded Israel; those who did not went through the hell of the Holocaust.

Then God sent a hunter. A hunter is someone with a gun and he forces you. Hitler was a hunter. And the Bible says - Jeremiah writing - "They shall hunt them from every mountain and from every hill and from the holes of the rocks," meaning there's no place to hide. And that might be offensive to some people but don't let your heart be offended. I didn't write it, Jeremiah wrote it. It was the truth and it is the truth. How did it happen? Because God allowed it to happen. Why did it happen? Because God said my top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel.

Even by his standards it was a bit much.

After the storm broke, an unapologetic Hagee claimed he was "intentionally mischaracterized" and refused to back off his earlier statements. That sure didn't work; McCain finally kicked him off the Straight Talk Express. (For his part, Hagee's PR firm sent out a press release saying he actually dumped McCain and not vice versa. You say potato, I say potahto.)

In for a penny, in for a pound: McCain also dumped Rod Parsley, who in some ways makes Hagee look like a Boy Scout:

• "America was founded, in part, with the intention of seeing this false religion [Islam] destroyed."
• "There are some, of course, who will say that the violence I cite is the exception and not the rule. I beg to differ. I will counter, respectfully, that what some call 'extremists' are instead mainstream believers who are drawing from the well at the very heart of Islam."
  
• Parsley's Center for Moral Clarity says adultery should be prosecuted as a felony.
• "You know who their [Planned Parenthood's] biggest fans must be, that must be the Ku Klux Klan, because the woman who founded this organization detested black people."

While jettisoning Hagee and Parsley is a welcome development, I should point out that McCain did so only after the mainstream media finally started paying attention to their raving bigotry. He was apparently just fine with it as long as it wasn't front-page news and Fox/CNN/etc were pounding on Jeremiah Wright, but once it became that, he got rid of them damn fast.

Kevin Drum of Washington Monthly put it succinctly: "[McCain] only cared when it showed up on network TV and became an embarrassment to him. So much for a different kind of politics."