McCain Pursued Hagee Like a Dog In Heat

Posted by Bruce Wilson, AlterNet at 4:53 PM on March 23, 2008.

As someone who was over a year ago covering McCain's snuffling after the power that issues from John Hagee & his fundament I feel a special glee that pastor Hagee has opted to reopen the controversy, over his endorsement of McCain, by getting interviewed by a New York Times Magazine reporter concerning Hagee's views on gays, the Catholic Church and other hot-button positions. It's like watching nude mud wrestling, while a mob tries to catch a greased pig, at a monster truck rally.

The under appreciated Greg Mitchell, of Editor and Publisher Magazine, has just reported on an interview Pastor John Hagee has granted, due to show up this Sunday in the New York Times Magazine, that will confirm the obvious - that John McCain pursued John Hagee's political endorsement like Hagee was a bitch in heat called politicized apocalyptic fundamentalism. As readers would have picked up last year, in February, had they read my Talk To Action post on the McCain-Hagee tie. Mitchell showcased one critical point: Barack Obama didn't call a national press conference to trumpet a political endorsement from his ex-pastor, Reverend Wright. McCain chose to splash Hagee's endorsement across the national media landscape and therein lies all the difference. Vive le difference, and one day our mainstream media may just get up the jeuvos to underline that point.

Recently, I interviewed George E. Lowe [short video with audio clip of interview], a man who worked with John McCain's father, Admiral John McCain who, Lowe told me, "would be turning over in his grave" at his son's pursuit of political endorsements from men like John Hagee. Lowe says he and Admiral McCain were in a secret navy intelligence "cabal" which fought would-be fascists of the day, both religious and secular, and this does not mean that Admiral McCain was somehow a liberal. Far from it. It's simply that he would have been appalled, Lowe tells me, at his son's courtyard of people like Hagee (whose "thrilling worldview" I've covered at length). John McCain's father was, among other things, a man of this century and would have been sorely disappointed, it seems, at his son's apparent choice to regress, politically and culturally speaking, hundreds of years - back to the Sixteenth Century.

Now, if the apocalypse were a dog in heat chained up somewhere in Madison Wisconsin, John Hagee would no doubt be able to smell it from clear down in San Antonio. That's his predilection. By the same token, John McCain could smell the odor of power, wafting from John Hagee's perspiring forehead and quivering, powerful wattles as the good pastor whooped and hollered before his Cornerstone flock and called for them to brandish their dollar bills to the heavens, from all the way across the country in Washington DC, even swaddled in an air conditioned Capital Hill office and laid low with a bad head cold.

McCain's got a nose for power, it's his predilection. John Hagee is flush with the sort of power McCain lustfully sniffs out and Hagee has come by that power the good old fashioned way - he's earned it by building up a huge flock of pseudo-Israelites at Cornerstone (which is organized into 12 subdivisions each named for one of the Tribes of Israel, as if Hagee fancies himself Moses - Joe Lieberman has in fact compared Hagee to Moses), erecting his own broadcast network (no self-respecting word-faith preacher is without one), then building his own personal political machine, CUFI, which in its own fashion could be likened to this decades' answer to the Moral Majority of the 1980's or the Christian Coalition of the 1990's except that CUFI is, as an innovation, quite unique ; it's the first non-lobbying lobby group (CUFI, a nonprofit, merely teaches its members to lobby) organized to foment war and reduce large swaths of the Mideast to vitrified glass in order for the Christian Zionist fundamentalist Christian faithful to be vacuumed up to heaven with God's mighty hoover which has an "on" switch called The Apocalypse (sometimes the Tribulation too) and an "off" switch called "Mideast peace".

Hagee, is a man of many appetites - known to be an artful showboat of a fundamentalist word-faither with a firm lust for publicity, power and, not the least, money. And food. Anecdotal reports from one San Antonio resident, who reported watching the spectacle of Hagee and his family, who all tend towards the stout end of the spectrum except for Hagee's wife who, it seems, is watching her figure or simply possesses a faster metabolism, suggest John Hagee and his kin can pack away astonishing (or appalling) amounts of all-you-can-eat buffet.

Hagee simply has a lust for life but not of the Iggy Pop style. Rather, Hagee's lust for life is in the fashion of Baudelaire and except that Baudelaire did not also lust for ICBM's to rain down fiery death upon much of the Earth's surface area, and especially upon gays and Catholics, liberals and liberal Jews, atheists, Buddhists, Muslims, and more or less anybody else who doesn't conform to the jolly pastor's ideological stricture. Watching Hagee try and make nice with, of all things, a New York newspaper is truly, hideously delightful.

Gregg Mitchell's laconic cover of the impending New York Times Magazine interview masterfully captures the utter absurdity of Hagee trying to wiggle through the eye of the needle that leads to the mainstream respectability which the rotund pastor so obviously craves.

But Hagee, as a camel, would not be at all slender let alone slim and the farce of his attempt to jamb his magnificent bulk through the framework of decades of what in many countries (but not so much in the US) would be considered "hate speech" is both awesome and ridiculous to behold. Like a sumo wrestler, in loincloth, at an anorexic debuttant ball, or a fish on a bicycle, Hagee is cringefully out of his element among the world of the cooked. Hagee is raw and probably should make his peace with that.

It is an entertaining thing, as Mitchell puts it:

"unlike McCain, Obama has not stood on stage with Wright and accepted his accolades this year.

Interviewed by Deborah Solomon, Hagee refused to discuss his statement that Hurricane Katrina was God's punishment for a gay rights parade in New Orleans, calling it "so far off-base." He claims, "Our church is not hard against the gay people...

He also said that charges that he had bashed the Catholic Church ("false cult system," etc.) have been "grossly mischaracterized....

Tagged as: religious right, mccain, hagee

Bruce Wilson writes for Talk To Action, a blog specializing in faith and politics.