The End Times Hits Primetime

"Now where was I? Oh right, our complete annihilation at the hands of fundamentalist Arabs. I was thinking about this on August 22nd, and some very smart people -- even smarter than me -- thought it was very possible that Iran or one of those other merry pranksters in the Middle East could have made a big move and vaporized every one of us. But August 22nd has passed, and that hasn't happened. Yet... Hezbollah could push the "Launch" button while I'm enjoying some chips and dip and watching that cantankerous House on TV. Maybe it won't happen, but you never know. And by won't happen, I mean the Hezbollah/launch part, not the chips and dip part. Me, some French onion and a bag of Ruffles is so happening." -- Glenn Beck, talk show host, CNN Headline News

Beck is the new hotness in the world of O'Reilly-Hannity-esque shrieking TV windbags; a former drug addict who is a late convert to Mormonism, Beck's shtick is that he's a conservative but not a Republican, allowing him to claim a kind of objectivity while he does things like fantasize about murdering Michael Moore and call Michael Berg's dad a "scumbag." His TV come-on is part comic, part carnival barker, and one if his favorite themes is End Times -- he's a strong believer in the literal second coming of Jesus and, between cornball jokes, never wastes any opportunity to remind his audience that the end is nigh.

Coupled with the horrifying on-air persona of Headline's eight-chinned Court TV exile Nancy Grace, who gives periodic angry news updates during Beck's program (Grace was apoplectic when John Mark Karr was allowed to wear regular clothes on his flight to Colorado), Beck's 7 p.m. slot on Headline has to be one of the weirdest news programs in American history.

Or is it? There have been indications lately that this whole End Times business is fast becoming more than a crazy hobby among the mutant-evangelist set, and is actually playing an important role in Middle East politics, specifically in guiding America's Israel policy.

End Times had its coming-out party in the mainstream media via a now-notorious editorial penned in the Wall Street Journal on August 8 by former Princeton scholar Bernard Lewis. In it, Lewis posited that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was planning a "cataclysmic event" on August 22 (the same date Beck was focused on), because that was the date that corresponded, on the Islamic calendar, with the 27th day of Rajab of the year 1427, said to be the date when Muhammad flew on a winged horse to heaven and back.

That seemed to start the ball rolling on the Aug. 22nd front. From there, a whole host of ostensibly serious commentators started appearing on American television braying horrible warnings about the coming end of the world. Worse still, some of them claimed real ties with the White House. Chief among those was probably John Hagee, a San Antonio pastor whose End Times credentials have already been reported in many outlets (among others, by Sarah Posner of Alternet).

The significance of Hagee is that he chairs a group called Christians United For Israel (CUFI) which believes that the U.S. must unite to launch a pre-emptive strike against Iran to precipitate Armageddon, followed by the more desirable Second Coming of Jesus. Hagee would be just another sweating evangelist lunatic if it weren't for the fact that his group has the ear of the White House. RNC chair Ken Mehlman took time out from bashing Ned Lamont to speak at CUFI's inaugural banquet in Washington in July, and both Sam Brownback and Rick Santorum also addressed the group. Meanwhile, Hagee at the banquet reportedly read out greetings from Ehud Olmert and George W. Bush himself, who apparently said, "God Bless and stand by the people of Israel and God Bless the United States."