By ERIC MARGOLIS
Sun, August 28, 2005
Reverend Pat Robertson took time off last week from promoting a new protein pancake mix and scourging “ungodly” sodomites, Muslims, and Democrats to suggest the U.S. should assassinate Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chavez.
Unveiling a new bogeyman of far right paranoia, Robertson claimed Chavez was masterminding a sinister Muslim-Communist conspiracy against Christian America.
The bombastic Chavez seriously bugs Washington by badmouthing President George Bush and U.S. policy towards Cuba and Iraq. He compares “capitalismo” to Dracula and Jack the Ripper.
However, Chavez is not a communist but a democratic populist demagogue like Argentina’s Juan Peron. Venezuela is America’s fifth-largest supplier of oil. In 2002, the Bush administration mounted an anti-Chavez coup that fizzled.
A huge international rumpus followed Robertson’s comments, forcing him to apologize. The ravings of a religious crackpot wouldn’t merit note, except that Robertson is a former presidential candidate and speaks for many members of the Christian evangelical right.
A shrewd businessman, he founded the 2-million-member Christian Coalition, America’s most influential right-wing protestant group. His Christian Broadcasting Network raked in a reported $200 million in donations last year, which calls to mind George Carlin’s quip: “If God is so all-powerful, why does he always need money?”
Robertson is even right, sometimes. He warned Bush that God had told him Iraq would be a mess.
But Ayatollah Robertson’s latest “fatwa” brought embarrassed silence from the president and most evangelical leaders. The best the White House could come up with was lamely calling his ravings “unfortunate.”
Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld piously noted, “We do not assassinate foreign leaders.” I guess trying to kill Saddam Hussein and his family by a Pearl Harbor-style surprise bombing attack in March, 2003 does not count.
Robertson’s call to murder cast a spotlight on the growing power of the loopy religious far right, grouped under the banner of the Christian Coalition, which has grown into one of the most powerful political lobbies in America.
Robertson’s supporters are the single largest block of pro-Bush supporters and a core constituency for the war in Iraq. Nine out of 10 evangelicals voted for Bush.
The Coalition has largely intimidated the weak-kneed U.S. Congress. Christian fundamentalists now control a third of all national Republican state committee posts, and 41 of 51 Republican senators received a 100% approval rating from the Coalition.
Not all evangelicals belong to the hard right. Many blasted Robertson. But many think pretty much like Rev. Pat — and believe the U.S. must become a Protestant fundamentalist theocracy and impose dominion over the globe by military force. Such militant cultists often sound just like the most extreme Islamic fundamentalists.
These “Christian Zionists,” who are allies of the Israel’s hardline settler movement, also urge expansion of Israel and in gathering all Jews to the Holy Land. When this happens, they believe, the “end of days” will occur and the Earth will be destroyed (along with Jews and other non-Christians).
For these cheery folk, there’s no reason to worry about growing deficit, environmental destruction or resource depletion. Who cares? The world will soon end with a big bang.
We rarely see these militants because most are hidden away in deepest Bush Country: Trailer parks, the backwoods, NASCAR tracks, remote suburbs, and strip malls. But they now seem to have replaced fat-cat country club golfers as the Republican Party’s leading voter constituency.
Source: torontosun.canoe.ca/News/Columnists/Margolis_Eric/2005/08/28/1191015.html
