Down Goes Parsley

There's a whole lotta renouncing going on over at John McCain's joint. Now he's rejected the endorsement of end-timer Rod Parsley, and he really seems shaken up by any possibility of having to play defense in the fall. In the past week, we've got 5 lobbyists, 2 ministers and a crapload of health records (tightly controlled and showed to reporters, not doctors) left by the wayside. The Parsley story was on Good Morning America the other day, but it was not yet what you would call "mainstream." It was wrong of McCain to seek out the endorsements of these religious right figures in the first place, and just cutting them loose as soon as anyone discovers what they have been preaching all these years is duplicitous as well. The idea that Parsley calling Islam inherently violent is novel among a certain strain of fundamentalist preachers is nonsense. McCain knew better at the time, he just panicked when word got out.

And for that, we have to credit Bruce Wilson at Talk2Action for willing this story into the national debate. He uncovered the Hagee sermon about Hitler performing God's will that was the catalyst for his sacking, and he's been tireless at making this story so big that it couldn't be ignored. A D-Day tip of the chapeau to him.

The right never stopped using Jeremiah Wright as a "judgment" issue. The media will certainly try to turn tail on this, but we shouldn't stop using Hagee and Parsley. Bruce Wilson will be at the head of that line.

Open Mouth, Insert Foot

I don't know how many times John Hagee has to say something ridiculously inflammatory before John McCain is forced by the whole of civilized society to renounce him. This one sounds like writers in a sitcom room trying to come up with the most offensive anti-Semitic statement:

Going in and out of biblical verse, Hagee preached: "'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."

He goes on: "Theodore Hertzel 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 Hertzel 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." (Listen to the audio below.)

Bruce Wilson has been doing amazing work on this story, by the way.

Hagee is claiming that his statement was mischaracterized, but as usual I don't think conservatives or religious nuts know the meaning of that word. They think "mischaracterized" means "don't print what I actually said, give me the benefit of spinning it," and thus the mischaracterization is theirs.

Can we just tell it like it is here? McCain needed the fundie vote, so he went out and found some people to endorse him, and they are predictably crazy because this kind of hate is routinely practiced from the pulpits of the religious right. Rod Parsley, another McCain endorser, has called Islam a conspiracy of spiritual evil. They are not interested in how this language endangers the world, they are fighting their own holy wars, and John McCain got sucked into it.

J Street has a petition calling on McCain to renounce Hagee. You should sign it.

More On McCain's Bind

I hear that Barack Obama went after John McCain on his flip-flop on taxes. That's great, and I hope we'll see more of it, but you can't really expect the Democratic candidates to have a major focus on McCain right now. They have to run against one another right now. In a way, getting hundreds of thousands of new Democrats to register in Pennsylvania is more effective than making some statement against McCain, so I'm not so concerned about that. And considering that labor will be going all in to define McCain right now, I'm even more unconcerned by the negatives of an extended campaign.

The AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest labor union organization, will announce plans Wednesday for a $53 million effort to elect a Democrat to the White House.

John McCain greets employees at Savvis Inc. during a campaign stop in St. Louis, Mo., Tuesday. (Associated Press)
The AFL-CIO will rely on one of the oldest strategies in the political playbook: Define your opponent before your opponent defines himself. The labor organization will launch its “McCain Revealed” campaign to paint McCain as anti-worker and to tie him to the economic policies of President Bush. The AFL-CIO, which is an umbrella group for dozens of large national labor unions, has tailored messages about McCain for each of its member unions. Members of the American Federation of Teachers will get information about where McCain stands on education, for example.

That'll be important in old labor states in the Rust Belt. Meanwhile, McCain is still in a tremendous bind. He is being defined by Democratic groups as the same as Bush, and yet people like Tony Perkins are demanding that he move further to the right, which only validates these Democratic claims. And the result of that bind is relationships with people like this:

Senator John McCain hailed as a spiritual adviser an Ohio megachurch pastor who has called upon Christians to wage a "war" against the "false religion" of Islam with the aim of destroying it.

On February 26, McCain appeared at a campaign rally in Cincinnati with the Reverend Rod Parsley of the World Harvest Church of Columbus, a supersize Pentecostal institution that features a 5,200-seat sanctuary, a television studio (where Parsley tapes a weekly show), and a 122,000-square-foot Ministry Activity Center. That day, a week before the Ohio primary, Parsley praised the Republican presidential front-runner as a "strong, true, consistent conservative." The endorsement was important for McCain, who at the time was trying to put an end to the lingering challenge from former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, a favorite among Christian evangelicals. A politically influential figure in Ohio, Parsley could also play a key role in McCain's effort to win this bellwether state in the general election. McCain, with Parsley by his side at the Cincinnati rally, called the evangelical minister a "spiritual guide."

The leader of a 12,000-member congregation, Parsley has written several books outlining his fundamentalist religious outlook, including the 2005 Silent No More. In this work, Parsley decries the "spiritual desperation" of the United States, and he blasts away at the usual suspects: activist judges, civil libertarians who advocate the separation of church and state, the homosexual "culture" ("homosexuals are anything but happy and carefree"), the "abortion industry," and the crass and profane entertainment industry. And Parsley targets another profound threat to the United States: the religion of Islam.

In a chapter titled "Islam: The Deception of Allah," Parsley warns there is a "war between Islam and Christian civilization." He continues:

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.

I know that the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock with the expressed purpose of defiance against Allah. That just the kind of religious freedom they sought.

McCain's really in trouble. He uses the rhetoric of a progressive reformer while accepting the sludge of lobbyists and evangelical nutcases. Further, he doesn't even UNDERSTAND the rhetoric he uses.

In general, (Theodore) Roosevelt does not seem to think, as today's conservatives tend to, that the government is a necessarily inefficient and generally counterproductive force best used only in cases, like the national defense, where there is no workable alternative. He agrees with today's progressives, who tend to think that while of course the government should be made as efficient and flexible as possible, used well, it can help us to set the terms of economic activity in ways that benefit everyone, and ameliorate some problems that we, as a people, decide we should not have to live with. He seems to see government as an essential tool for achieving some collective goals; and while he seems quite clear that that tool must be used wisely and with skill, he does not seem to think that our efforts to use it will inevitably be counterproductive. To judge by this speech, he would have been baffled by Ronald Reagan's quip: "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'"

If McCain wants to sign on to the idea of using government to ameliorate social problems, requiring employers to insure their employees against illness, unemployment, accident, and age, providing a living wage, and keeping people from falling too far into want and penury, it's news to me.

These discrepancies are going to come out in the fall. Trapped in a vice, needing to excite base conservatives and simultaneously run away from them, dozens of contradictions and unfortunate partnerships are going to come to the surface.