Will The GOP Field Ignore Another Pastor Who Says God Sent Hitler To ‘Hunt’ Jews?
Has the GOP primary gone off the rails before the first vote has even been cast?
In 2008, Sen. John McCain rejected the endorsement of John Hagee, a far-right pastor who had called the Catholic Church the “Great Whore” and said that Hitler was sent by God to be a “hunter” of Jews who had not yet moved to the land that would become Israel. McCain wasn’t exactly running as a moderate – look who he chose to be his vice president – but he knew, at least this time, that a line had been crossed.
Today’s GOP presidential candidates seem to have no such scruples.
Compare Hagee’s statements to this passage from a 2004 sermon by Mike Bickle, megachurch pastor, big-time evangelical, and star speaker at Rick Perry‘s August prayer rally-cum-campaign launch. In a video found by Brian Wilson of Talk to Action, Bickle prophesies that in the End Times 2/3 of all Jews “will die in the rage of Satan and in the judgments of God.” He goes on to discuss a disturbing and ultimately dangerous theory of the Holocaust even more outrageous than that pushed by Hagee:
The Lord says, “I’m going to offer two strategies to Israel, to these 20 million.” He says, “First, I am going to offer them grace, I am going to send the fisherman.” Do you know how a fisherman lures? I mean do you know how a fisherman does their thing? They have the bait in front, luring the fish. It’s a picture of grace. … And he says, “And if they don’t respond to grace, I’m going to raise up the hunters.” And the most famous hunter in recent history is a man named Adolf Hitler. He drove them from the hiding places, he drove them out of the land.
Mike Bickle is not just any radical pastor preaching End Times scripture. He was a key organizer of Perry’s The Response rally this summer, lending a number of staff members of his International House of Prayer (yes, IHOP) to the event and emceeing the proceedings himself.
Bickle has a history of outrageous claims. In the lead-up to The Response , for instance, People For the American Way’s Right Wing Watch reported Bickle’s theory that Oprah Winfrey is the precursor to the Antichrist. Asked about the extremism of Bickle and other The Response leaders before the rally, Gov. Perry said, “I appreciate anyone who’s going to endorse me, whether it’s on The Response, or whether it’s on a potential run for the presidency of the United States. Just because you endorse me doesn’t mean I endorse everything that you say or do.” That’s true. But Perry did more than accept Bickle’s help: he trotted him out to promote the event that served as a de facto launch of his presidential campaign.
Asked about Bickle’s more recently uncovered anti-Semitic rant, a Perry spokesperson performed a similar dodge:
Gov. Perry initiated the Response event for the sole purpose of bringing our nation together for the common cause of praying about the challenges confronting us. Those participating did so because of that common cause, and the issue you refer to has nothing to do with the goal and purpose of that event.
Only in today’s GOP does “bringing our nation together” entail hosting an event for the nation’s most vitriolic opponents of pluralism.
We need not even go as far as Bickle to see how much the GOP has changed in just a few years. Invited to speak alongside the controversial pastor at Perry’s marquee event was Hagee himself.
Neither Bickle nor Hagee has officially endorsed Perry. In fact, it’s the other way around: by placing them on the stage at a nationally televised event, you could say that Perry endorsed Bickle and Hagee. While McCain rejected the endorsement of someone who demonized people of other faiths, Perry is actively working to throw such people into the spotlight.
As Perry has embraced and promoted these proponents of religious prejudice, his fellow candidates have stood by in silence. Even when Perry endorser Robert Jeffress repeatedly called Mitt Romney‘s Mormon religion a “cult” and called Catholicism a “counterfeit religion” created by “Satan,” only one candidate (Jon Huntsman, a Mormon himself) challenged him directly — and Perry kept the endorsement. Even Mitt Romney, who tries to come across as the most reasonable of the bunch, has accepted the endorsement of prominent anti-Muslim advocate Jay Sekulow.
These candidates, of course, are entitled to their personal religious beliefs. But they are running to be the president of all Americans. If they stand by silently while people like Bickle, Hagee and Jeffress peddle bigotry against non-Christian religions, and even against other types of Christians, they’re giving us a hint of how they would approach their presidencies. It’s a frightening vision, and one that the American people are smart enough to see before they go to the polls.
Whatever our differences we should all, at least, be able to agree that Hitler was not sent by God to convert Jews to Christianity; that Catholicism, Mormonism and Islam like all religions are protected by the Constitution; and that Oprah Winfrey is not the Antichrist. Will Perry or any of his fellow candidates stand up and contradict Bickle, Hagee and Jeffress? Can’t we at least start there?
By: Michael B. Keegan, President, People For The American Way, Published in The Huffington Post, November 4, 2011
Don’t Blame The GOP For Mitt Romney’s Flip-Flops
As former Gov. Mitt Romney gets battered by the likes of George Will, expect to hear a lot more arguments along the following lines.
It’s not Romney who is the flip-flopper. It’s the conservative movement. It was only three years ago that Jim DeMint was praising the Massachusetts healthcare plan. Post-2009, conservatives have flip-flopped on individual mandates, they have flip-flopped on monetary policy, in these cases they have adopted ever more extreme positions.
Yes Romney has had to shape-shift to keep pace, and that’s unfortunate. But don’t blame him—blame them.
God bless David, but this is too cute. It’s impossible to deny, at this point, that the idea of an individual mandate emerged from the right. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich was forced to admit this onstage in the primary debate in Las Vegas.
But that hardly means the conservative movement has flip-flopped on the issue.
Sure, it was a feature of the Senate Republican alternative to Hillarycare, but that was spearheaded by Sens. Lincoln Chafee and Bob Dole. If Frum would like to make the case that those guys were emblematic movement conservatives, he can go right ahead.
I was around Capitol Hill in the late-’90s and, truth be told, I don’t remember hearing much about the mandate at all.
After Hillarycare unraveled, the healthcare debate came to focus on the late Rep. Charlie Norwood‘s “patients’ bill of rights.”
It was a genteel, middle-of-the-road proposal, sure to appeal to women voters (guaranteed access to OB-GYNs was a frequent talking point). It rattled around for a few years, garnered bipartisan support, but most Republicans were happy to see it wither.
On substance, conservatives pointed out, rightly, that the bill wouldn’t do anything to increase access to insurance. And so they proposed market-friendly solutions (“association health plans,” for example) that would have reduced the number of uninsured citizens by a few million.
That the patients bill of rights did nothing for the uninsured was always slightly embarrassing for Democrats to admit—but this was the safe, piecemeal strategy they had embraced until 2009, when they got regulations of that sort on insurance companies and coverage for most of the uninsured, the costs for which would have to be borne by healthy people not paying into insurance pools (hence the need for an individual mandate).
Look: I’m not denying that some Republicans have been more than a little squirrelly on the mandate. I’m just saying it was never an issue that movement conservatives seriously fought for, to the extent that they thought about it all.
Now, onto Michael Gerson, who praises Romney’s pragmatism and downplays the risk that he’ll flip-flop away from the movement after Inauguration Day. Moreover, Gerson argues that Romney’s “multiple choice” reputation will actually strengthen the movement’s grip on his presidency:
Precisely because he has a history of ideological heresy, it would be difficult for him to abandon his current, more conservative iteration. He has committed himself on key conservative issues. Having flipped, he could not flop without risking a conservative revolt. As a result, conservatives would have considerable leverage over a Romney administration.
This is interesting, I’ll admit.
I would agree with Gerson that the chances of Romney switching back to pro-choice on abortion is vanishingly small. Ditto for embryonic stem-cell research. There really is no plausible way for Romney to climb back from these positions.
And when Romney said recently that “the idea of spending trillions and trillions of dollars to try to reduce CO2 emissions is not the right course for us,” I was inclined to believe him. I can’t see his administration spending a penny on climate change.
The problem with Romney isn’t that he’s changed his mind on this or that issue. Every politician not named Rep. Ron Paul has done this.
The question Gerson and movement conservatives should be asking themselves about Romney isn’t whether, having checked the right box now, he’ll uncheck it later. It should be: Do you think he’d spend political capital or risk his presidency on any issue that you care about?
Put another way: Do you believe that Mitt Romney is more than nominally pro-life? Will he fight to change the status quo on abortion?
I suppose Gerson’s assurance depends, too, on what constitutes a “key issue.” Does the building of a border fence count? If so, does Gerson really believe that President Romney is going to build a “high-tech fence” to “secure the border”?
How about gays in the military? Romney’s most recent position on the issue is that he didn’t think “Don’t ask, don’t tell” should have been interfered with. Does Gerson think Romney, a la former Sen. Rick Santorum, will fight to reinstate the policy?
Does Gerson think that Romney will try to dismantle Obamacare in its entirety—or just the “worst aspects” of it?
Romney isn’t just a flip-flopper. He’s just downright weaselly.
By: Scott Galupo, U. S. News and World Report, November 2, 2011
Who’s Paying For The GOP’s Plan To Hijack The 2012 Election?
Over the past six months, someone—or a group of someones—has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund an effort to change the rules of the 2012 presidential election to make it very difficult for President Barack Obama to win reelection. But the shadowy lobbying group mounting this campaign hasn’t disclosed its donors—and under current law, it doesn’t have to.
In two states, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, GOP legislators have introduced bills that would change how electoral votes—a candidate needs 270 of the 538 to win the presidency—are awarded in a presidential election. Under the current system, the winner of the statewide popular vote receives all of the electoral votes from that state.
If the Republican plan becomes law in either Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, those states would change how electoral votes are awarded. The new plan would allot electoral votes on the basis of vote totals within congressional districts. If a candidate wins a congressional district, he or she would receive one electoral college vote. Whoever does best in the statewide race would receive two electoral votes.
Because Republicans will draw the boundaries of the congressional districts in both states, the new rules would mean that Obama could win the states but still receive fewer electoral votes than his Republican opponent. Should a Republican split the states’ electoral votes with Obama (even if Obama draws more votes), that could provide the GOPer with the margin of victory in a close race. (Under the US Constitution, it is up to the states to allot electoral votes as they see fit.)
In Pennsylvania, a secretive nonprofit group called All Votes Matter has been pushing the electoral vote scheme since May. All Votes Matter has close ties to the Pennsylvania GOP—it hired a number of former top state Senate staffers-turned-lobbyists. “It was pretty much the Senate GOP All Star Lobbying Team and [former state House Democratic Counsel Bill] Sloane,” Peter DeCoursey, the bureau chief for Capitolwire, a newswire that’s read religiously by Harrisburg insiders, explained in September.
Between April and June, the group spent $77,700 to lobby state officials to support legislation to implement this scheme. By early September, GOP Gov. Tom Corbett and the state House and Senate leaders, Mike Turzai and Dominic Pileggi, both Republicans, had all expressed their support for the idea. It was “the best $77,700 anyone ever spent on potential legislation,” DeCoursey wrote. “The entire state governing wing [was] for a bill that [hadn’t] been introduced yet.”
A week later, though, the landscape had changed significantly. Mother Jones and other national media outlets drew widespread attention to the story, and the state GOP chairman and the vast majority of its congressional delegation came out against the plan.
All Votes Matter wasn’t fazed. It kept lobbying. Charles Gerow, a spokesman for All Votes Matter, told DeCoursey that the group had raised $300,000—and already spent $180,000. But Gerow wouldn’t tell reporters where the money was coming from, saying only that “civic-minded citizens” had provided the dough. This week, the group filed new lobbying disclosure forms revealing that it spent $186,882 on lobbying between July and September.
All Votes Matter doesn’t disclose its donors “as a matter of policy, per the request of many of them,” Gerow told Mother Jones. “It’s their legal right not to have it disclosed, and they don’t want it disclosed so they’re not subject to media calls and other potential harassment,” he added. All Votes Matter has “fully and completely complied with the law and will continue to do so,” Gerow said, and “if those who don’t agree with the law want to change it, it certainly is their right to do that.”
There’s no law that says All Votes Matter has to disclose where its money comes from. But opponents of the electoral college changes are outraged that voters are being kept in the dark about who’s behind such a potentially consequential reform. “This is an effort to fundamentally change the way Pennsylvania conducts its presidential elections, in my view to rig the election,” says Democratic state Sen. Daylin Leach. “They raised an awful lot of money very quickly—$300,000 in just a few days. We’re all curious where that level of funding comes from.”
Carolyn Fiddler, a spokeswoman for the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, which assists Democrats in state-level races around the country, says: “Given the potential impact of this measure this group is lobbying for, not just for Pennsylvanians but for presidential politics and Americans in general, the public has a right to know who’s behind it.”
Transparency advocates say it’s not enough to just know who is doing the lobbying—voters should also know who is paying the bills. “The old adage is that actions speak louder than words, and deeper pockets allow for more action,” says Michael Beckel, a spokesman for the Center for Responsive Politics. “Without disclosure, the public is unable to fully hold accountable the companies and organizations that have hired these lobbyists in the first place.”
In Wisconsin, it’s even less clear who’s behind the electoral college shenanigans. The Wisconsin Democratic party has alleged that the bill there, sponsored by GOP state Rep. Dan LeMahieu, was written by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative group funded by the billionaire Koch brothers, among others. But so far, the Dems haven’t been able to produce any evidence to back up their charge, and emails from LeMahieu’s office Mother Jones obtained via an open records request showed no evidence of any outside involvement in the drafting of the law.
Democratic state legislators are worried that the Pennsylvania and Wisconsin bills are part of a broader effort. If GOP legislatures in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and other states where Democrats typically win presidential elections pass the electoral college changes All Votes Matter is proposing, it would mean “the end of competitive presidential elections and certainly people’s confidence that the process is fair,” Leach maintains. “To think that some secret group somewhere is rubbing their hands together and putting millions of dollars into this effort—and we can’t even know who they are—I think that’s obscene.”
By: Nick Baumann, Mother Jones, November 2, 2011
“Divided And Undisciplined”: The GOP Circus Is In Town
Even Republicans have to be laughing at the circus sideshow the GOP presidential candidates are putting on. The Mitt-Rick-Herman act was so comical this week it looks concerted, almost like they collaborated with the Democratic National Committee. Team Obama is grinning so hard its ears are hurting, because 10 weeks out from the Iowa caucuses, the Republican Party is divided, the candidates are undisciplined and the voters don’t love any of them. Just in time for the real ugliness to begin a few weeks from now.
The marquee moment belongs to Texas Gov. Rick Perry, of course, indulging in birtherism on Monday night so that he could step on Tuesday’s rollout of his flat-tax plan. Sure, Perry tried to discount the birth-certificate controversy — sort of — while throwing some greasy scraps to the Trumpsters who still believe a U.S. president has actually released a fake certificate.
“I’m not really worried about the president’s birth certificate,” Perry said in an interview with CNBC. “It’s fun to poke at him a little bit and say, ‘Hey, how about, let’s see your grades and your birth certificate.’ ” Perry made sure to mention that Donald Trump recently said he didn’t think the birth certificate was real. And he said it’s “a good issue to keep alive.”
Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney could have jumped all over that — if he hadn’t been busy shooting himself in the foot in the battleground state of Ohio. Yes, Romney decided a fresh flip-flop was in order, despite the fact that his critics are happy to savor his many others. While at a Republican call center in Ohio, he refused to comment on an Ohio law limiting collective bargaining that he had expressed support for months ago. After being pummeled by conservatives, Romney reiterated his, um, previous support.
Herman Cain, who tops the GOP field in a new CBS/New York Times poll, spent the last few days telling reporters who asked tough policy questions that he needed a little more time to think of an answer. He learned the hard way by saying on CNN that abortion is a family’s choice. Whoops — better to leave details out of this whole thing. Cain still can’t really be found on the campaign trail. No, the motivational speaker was in Texas selling books and giving a speech. And despite Perry’s attempt to beat Cain at his 9-9-9 game with a flat-tax plan, Cain-world still scored much buzz with a weirdo Web ad featuring his campaign manager Mark Block smoking into the camera. It already has more than 387,000 hits on YouTube.
With that kind of juice, who needs to endure the icy winds of the door-to-door campaigning Iowans demand of their caucus winners? If Cain continues to surge without leaving the book tour, then we will know that talking to voters in town-hall meetings and asking for their support is no longer necessary. In fact, perhaps televised debates aren’t, either. Perry told Bill O’Reilly in an interview on Fox News on Tuesday that while his debate performances have been disappointing, the debates themselves are a mistake. “If there was a mistake, it was probably ever doing one of the campaign [debates] when all they’re interested in is stirring up between the candidates instead of really talking about the issues that are important to the American people.” His campaign said Perry will attend one more in Michigan, but beyond that he might be a no-show.
That’s understandable. Questions at debates about serious policy matters — like what his response would be to the Taliban gaining control of Pakistani’s nuclear weapons — just aren’t Rick Perry’s idea of “fun.”
By: A. B. Stoddard, Associate Editor, The Hill, October 26, 2011
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