Our American Cousins
Good old days over for Old Man McCain?
Old Man John McCain has joined the 'Pastors in the Closet' school of American politics by having a religious zealot get him into a spot of bother. Sharing resonance with the bump in the road that rival Barack Obama's campaign found itself having to get over after similar religious campaign involvement caused controversy, McCain was today forced to drop the backing of a Church leader who was discovered to believe that Hilter had done "God's will" in chasing the Jews from Europe.
The comments made by Rev. John Hagee were made in the 1990s but were recently dug up by a US news website. McCain was forced to reject the priest as being 'crazy and unacceptable' after it was revealed that other comments had been made to do with Hitler's treatment of the Jews, the Catholic Church being a whore, and Hurricane Katrina being God's retribution for homosexual sin.
The most disturbing thing about the news is that it serves to demonstrate the incredibly close ties between religion and politics in the US, which are definitely a little too close for comfort. Regardless of the extremity of the religious beliefs of those involved, it seems that the 'shareholders' of most US political campaigns come in the form of religious institutions and bodies, all of whom will feel it their right to influence the 'companies' that they are supporting. Hagee and Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama's pastor, may be extreme cases, but those who have not yet been unveiled could still be considered as being a threat to world peace, all the moreso because of their surreptitious natures.
The news marks the end of a tough week for McCain, yesterday he was pressured to release over 400 pages of personal medical records in order to allay public concerns that, at 72 years old, he will still be healthy enough to live out his term in office should he win the election in November. With all this against him, perhaps we can feel even more confident about placing our bets on Obama to be next in line for the White House.
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1 Comments
"Hagee and Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama's pastor"
I feel that yoking these two names together is slightly disingenuous. McCain deliberately set out to court and win the endorsement of Hagee as a purely political move, whereas Wright is, and has been since before Obama got into politics, Obama's pastor. Both men have said things which are politically insensitive (although as far as I can tell Wright's indiscretions amount to suggesting that the USA's foreign policy has caused the resentment that is currently felt in the Arab world, and that racists exist in the US - things which I believe could reasonably held to be true?).
However I would suggest that Wright has no interest in "influencing" Obama's "company" - which is not to say that he won't take advantage of Obama's position to spread his views to a far wider audience than he would otherwise reach. Cynical opportunism, sure. But a calculated political move that resembles Hagee's actions, no.