Month: January 2010

This is an updated repost of an article originally published in 2006.

Pat Robertson’s decree on Jan. 6 that the 7.0 earthquake that struck Haiti on Monday was a curse from God may be his most bizarre attribution of God’s vengeance yet:

As Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive said “well over” 100,000 people may have died in the natural disaster, Robertson took to the airwaves Wednesday on his show and said that the country has been “cursed by one thing after another” since they “swore a pact to the devil.”

“Something happened a long time ago in Haiti and people might not want to talk about,” Robertson said Tuesday.

“They were under the heel of the French, you know Napoleon the third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said ‘We will serve you if you will get us free from the prince.’ True story. And so the devil said, ‘Ok it’s a deal.’ And they kicked the French out. The Haitians revolted and got something themselves free. But ever since they have been cursed by one thing after another,” Robertson said.

Keep in mind that as Robertson said this, as far as anyone knew, tens of thousands of people were trapped and dying under collapsed buildings in Port au Prince.

It’s hard to say whether this utterance from Robertson tops his take in 2005 on Hurricane Katrina, which he attributed to God’s retribution for legalized abortion:

“I was reading, yesterday, a book that was very interesting about what God has to say in the Old Testament about those who shed innocent blood — But have we found we are unable somehow to defend ourselves against some of the attacks that are coming against us, either by terrorists or now by natural disaster? Could they be connected in some way?”

A year later, Robertson predicted that God would punish Oregon and Washington state because their coastal enclaves were populated by liberals:

Robertson says God has told him that storms and possibly a tsunami will hit America’s coastline this year. The founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network has told viewers of “The 700 Club” that the revelations came to him during his annual personal prayer retreat in January.

“If I heard the Lord right about 2006, the coasts of America will be lashed by storms,” Robertson said May 8. He added specifics in Wednesday’s show. “There well may be something as bad as a tsunami in the Pacific Northwest,” he said.

But Robertson’s record at foretelling the weather is as lousy as his record for prophesying heavenly damnation. In 1998, Robertson predicted all sorts of disasters would smite central Florida:

After Orlando … city officials voted in 1998 to fly rainbow flags from city lampposts during the annual Gay Days event at Disney World, Robertson issued the city a warning: “I don’t think I’d be waving those flags in God’s face if I were you. … [A] condition like this will bring about the destruction of your nation. It’ll bring about terrorist bombs, it’ll bring earthquakes, tornadoes and possibly a meteor.”

But it was Robertson whom God smote. A few months after he called down God’s wrath on Orlando, God hurled Hurricane Bonnie directly at Robertson’s compound on Virginia Beach:

Overnight, Bonnie drifted out into the Atlantic southeast of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina … Rough surf pounded the Atlantic coastline as far north as New England, while 12- to 15-foot swells were reported along the Virginia coast. Winds as high as 90 mph snapped ship mooring ropes and left hundreds of thousands of people without electricity on Friday in the Virginia Beach-Norfolk area.

God’s reason for punishing Robertson is unclear. Perhaps it was in retaliation for Robertson’s propensity for passing judgment on others despite the biblical edit, “Judge not, lest ye be judged” — or maybe it was Robertson’s practice of shaking down elderly women for donations to his “Operation Blessing” and then using their “widows’ mites” to fund transport operations for the lucrative diamond-mining operations he owned in Zaire.

Only God knows the truth.

On Jan. 11, FreedomWorks — the corporate-funded, Washington-based community organizers behind the astroturfing of the Tea Bagger movement — put up a petition demanding that Democrats allow the media to cover health-care reform negotiation.

On that same day, organizers of next month’s Tea Party convention announced that, except for a small group of hand-picked propagandists, the media will not be allowed to cover their meeting at a luxury hotel in Nashville:

Word from Nashville on Monday was that the First National Tea Party Convention next month will be closed to the press, other than for a limited number of “selected” journalists. No word on who or how many.

This from the people who brought us last summer’s media-saturated Town Hall meetings…

Convention spokesman Judson Phillips informs us that most of the sessions are closed “at the request” of the presenters. “Given the media interest, I don’t want the sessions disrupted and overrun with the media,” he said…

If the secrecy sounds a little, well, un-American, Phillips has this explanation: It’s not a political convention, but a “working convention.”

It appears that sometimes the right of the people to peaceably assemble is best conducted out of view.

It is par for the course that there is a media blackout of the keynote speech by Sarah Palin on Saturday night, Feb. 6. But this event is sounding less like a grass-rootsy political affair by the minute. In addition to succumbing to the right wing’s irresistible impulse for secrecy and jackboot control of the media, tickets for the event in its fancy venue are priced for the elite at nearly $600 per person. (As this is being written, the convention website says tickets for the full meeting are sold out, but tickets for the Palin speech Saturday night are still available at $349.)

What this shows is that the new Tea Bag Party (TBP) is quickly taking on the qualities of a typical political party: Money-grubbing, dysfunction, hypocrisy and elitism.

Republicans are trying to gin up an equivalence between this comment about then-Sen. Barack Obama by Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid during the 2008 presidential campaign:

[Reid] was wowed by Obama’s oratorical gifts and believed that the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama — a “light-skinned” African American “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one,” as he later put it privately.

…And this statement by former GOP Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott during festivities at the 100th birthday party for Sen. Strom Thurmond in 2002:

LOTT: “I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years, either.”

But there is no fair comparison between calling someone a “Negro” — the appellation preferred by African-Americans 40 years ago — and suggesting that America’s ills can be laid at the feet of uppity black people.

After his gaffe, Lott was essentially fired as majority leader by Karl Rove, who preferred the more malleable Sen. Bill Frist for the job. In the current kerfuffle, Pres. Obama personally accepted Reid’s apology. Yesterday, however, GOP Michael Steele called on Reid to resign and accused Democrats of having a double standard. Since Lott had to resign, so should Reid, Steele said. Since then, all the usual Republican suspects have rushed to the cameras to ditto the demand that Reid should go.

While it is plain silly to compare these two gaffes by majority leaders, there is a relatively recent scandal in which a Republican majority leader suffered no repercussions after he insulted a fellow congressman by calling him a “fag.” The leader was Dick Armey, who now heads Freedomworks, the outfit that astroturfed the Tea Bagger movement:

The House majority leader, Representative Dick Armey of Texas, set off a dispute on Capitol Hill today when he referred to Representative Barney Frank, one of several openly homosexual members of Congress, as “Barney Fag.”

Mr. Armey said later that he had simply mispronounced Mr. Frank’s name. First privately and then in addressing the House, he apologized to Mr. Frank for the remark, which he had made in an interview with a group of radio broadcasters.

No one believed Armey’s assertion that he’d had a slip of the tongue, including Rep. Frank:

[In] an interview with reporters after he and Mr. Armey had spoken privately, [Frank] seemed clearly upset. He said the remark reflected “a climate of meanness and intolerance with the Republicans.” While he declined to undertake a full-fledged attack in response, he also refused to wholly accept Mr. Armey’s apology.

“I don’t think it was on the tip of his tongue, but I do believe it was in the back of his mind,” Mr. Frank said. “There are a lot of ways to mispronounce my name. That is the least common.”

Armey’s name-calling occurred in January 1995, just weeks after Republicans took control of the House for the first time in 40 years — since voters tossed them out on their ears in the wake of the GOP’s communist witch hunts and other scandals. Here’s what the majority leader said:

“[House Speaker Newt Gingrich is] a very patient fellow and able to handle a harangue going on around him better than I,” Mr. Armey said. “I like peace and quiet, and I don’t have to listen to Barney Fag — Barney Frank — haranguing in my ear…”

There is a double standard here, but has nothing to do with the gaffes by Sens. Reid and Lott. What this shows is that it is okay with Republicans if one of their leaders calls a colleague a “fag,” but it is outrageous — a fireable offense — if a Democrat calls a black person a “Negro.”