The FundamentaList: This week in the religious right:

[Joanne98]

1. Gaffes, God, and Demagoguery

Compare and contrast: Samantha Power, who has devoted her career to ending genocide and war, calls Hillary Clinton a "monster" and is banished from Barack Obama's campaign. John Hagee, who has devoted his career to disseminating conspiracy theories about Satan, secular humanists, feminists, environmentalists, LGBT people, Armageddon, Muslims, and Catholics, and on top of that advocates starting yet another war in the Middle East, endorses McCain for president. All McCain can muster is, "I repudiate any comments that are made, including Pastor Hagee's, if they are anti-Catholic or offensive to Catholics." Later, McCain maintained that Hagee's anti-Catholic remarks had been "taken out of context."

The Catholic League's Bill Donohue, who led the charge in calling on McCain to condemn Hagee's anti-Catholic statements, including calling the church "the great whore," has now issued a statement that McCain did the right thing and, as far as he is concerned, "this case is closed."

What about all the other stuff? Well, never mind. After all, Donohue has a history of big-heartedness toward non-Catholics.

Rest assured McCain will not reject and repudiate the whole Hagee package. Hagee has too big a following and is too connected with the neoconservative foreign-policy brain trust for McCain to risk alienating. The neoconservative elites -- who rely on evangelical grassroots support -- are now, as Gregory Levey reported last week in Salon, engaged in a full-throttle lobbying and PR campaign to undermine the assessment of the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that Iran abandoned its project to assemble a nuclear weapon in 2003.

Hagee's Christians United for Israel (CUFI) announced similar lobbying intentions shortly after the NIE was made public, when its executive director, David Brog, told CUFI members that "rest assured that we in CUFI will not be fooled or deterred by the headlines about the NIE. We've read the rest of the story. And we're more worried now than ever. We intend to redouble our efforts to secure economic sanctions on Iran. This remains the only way short of war to avert a tragedy."
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_fundamentalist_031208_

What's Hagee going to use as proof the NIE is wrong? The Bible?

[Ian David]

1. I thought we already had economic sanctions against Iran.

Otherwise, why were my parents stuck buying Russian caviar for my bar mitzva?

[Bluenorthwest]

2. Only one opinion about Hagee really counts

What does Donnie McClurkin think of him?
Sorry, but this shoe is on both feet currently. A Democrat hired McClurkin to speak for him, McClurkin attacked gays, and there was no apology.
But yeah,it is terrible when the GOP uses preachers to attack GLBT people. What kind of people are they?