Mike Huckabee was giving a speech to the NRA on 05/15/08. He heard a loud noise backstage and joked "That was Barack Obama, he just tripped off a chair and someone pointed a gun at him and he dove for the floor.”
You can read more about this infamous moment here.
Pretty sad, no? How much judgment do you have to lack to even think that this might be a funny joke? And to think that this guy may be McCain’s running mate for Vice President…
Of course, McCain gladly accepted the Reverend Hagee’s endorsement. John_Hagee is a ‘Christian Zionist’ who believes in a very popular interpretation of the Book Of Revelations, made famous in the ‘Left Behind’ series of novels, written in part by Tim LaHaye, the co-founder of the Moral Majority. Hagee, in a 2006 interview on NPR’s ‘Fresh Air’, said that Hurricane Katrina was visited on New Orleans as God’s way of punishing New Orleans for its upcoming Gay Pride Parade. According to Hagee, planners of the parade had announced that this parade would be the most sexually explicit in the history of New Orleans, and God, who of course never misses a newspaper article or TV news broadcast, picked up on this and punished New Orleans.
Now this statement by Hagee, in an interview and in sermons, wasn’t enough to alienate his good friend, McCain. In fact, it wasn’t enough to alienate his good friend, George Bush, either. According to Scott McClellan, Bush’s ex-Press Secretary, and former member of Bush’s inner circle, Hagee is one of a handful of fundamentalists who has significant sway within the White House.
What did finally alienate McCain from Hagee? The publicity surrounding Hagee’s praise of Adolf Hitler as a great hunter. Mind you, the sermon in which these statements appear was made by Hagee to his congregation in the late 1990s, quite a while prior to Hagee’s relationship with McCain and Bush.
This is from MediaMatters.org:
In a May 21 Huffington Post article, reporter Sam Stein wrote that Hagee "argued in a late 1990s sermon that the Nazis had operated on God’s behalf to chase the Jews from Europe and shepherd them to Palestine." From Stein’s article:
John Hagee, the controversial evangelical leader and endorser of Sen. John McCain, argued in a late 1990s sermon that the Nazis had operated on God’s behalf to chase the Jews from Europe and shepherd them to Palestine. According to the Reverend, Adolph Hitler was a "hunter," sent by God, who was tasked with expediting God’s will of having the Jews re-establish a state of Israel.
Going in and out of biblical verse, Hagee preached: " ‘And they the hunters should hunt them,’ that will be the Jews. ‘From every mountain and from every hill and from out of the holes of the rocks.’ If that doesn’t describe what Hitler did in the holocaust you can’t see that."
He goes on: "Theodore Hertzel is the father of Zionism. He was a Jew who at the turn of the 19th century said, this land is our land, God wants us to live there. So he went to the Jews of Europe and said ‘I want you to come and join me in the land of Israel.’ So few went that Hertzel went into depression. Those who came founded Israel; those who did not went through the hell of the holocaust.
"Then god sent a hunter. A hunter is someone with a gun and he forces you. Hitler was a hunter. And the Bible says — Jeremiah writing — ‘They shall hunt them from every mountain and from every hill and from the holes of the rocks,’ meaning there’s no place to hide. And that might be offensive to some people but don’t let your heart be offended. I didn’t write it, Jeremiah wrote it. It was the truth and it is the truth. How did it happen? Because God allowed it to happen. Why did it happen? Because God said my top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel." [italics in original].
Now I’m not saying that Obama is all that and a bag of chips, and his relationship with his Reverend Wright is not exactly non-controversial. However, if you listen to what the Rev. Wright says about Black Liberation Theology, I don’t think it’s insane or an untenable view point for a person of color to have. You should listen to his interview on Fresh Air, here, to make up your mind.
But Hagee, who I’ve heard interviewed (you can listen to the interview here), is a real looney tune. The fact that McCain would gladly receive his endorsement and praise Hagee says something about McCain and his judgment, much less that he didn’t have his staff go back and read Hagee’s sermons prior to accepting his endorsement.
Anyway, what a ticket–McCain with his friend John Hagee, and Huckabee with his jokes about Obama getting shot.