John McCain threw Hagee under the bus today, which was either (a) politically wise or (b) a disgraceful bit of pandering, not even to his own base, but to the New York Times and Co.  (and, yes, I know that his desire to placate the NYT is a problem, but every Republican this year seems to be suffering from NYT’s placati-itis).  Be that as it may, I still think it’s important to point out that Hagee is not the vile anti-Catholic hate-monger that he’s being portrayed as being in the anti-McCain, pro-Obama, pro-Jeremiah Wright MSM.

I’ve already linked to Dennis Prager’s column defending Hagee against the calumnies made against him. JoshuaPundit has also reacted strongly to the horrible claims made against Hagee. He points out, as did Prager, that Hagee did not say what Frank Rich and the HuffPo peopled said he did. He used the phrases “Great Whore” and “Catholic Church” in the same speech, it is true, but he didn’t say that they were one and the same.

Further, unlike Wright, who used “Zionists” and “evil oppressors” in the same speech with the clear intent that they be understood as comparable terms, Hagee, when he realized that his words had been taken out of context in order to smear Catholics, apologized. He met with Catholic leaders. He discussed doctrine with them. He apologized and they accepted his apology. Prager said this too.

JoshuaPundit goes a step further than Prager to discuss the way in which Hagee and his church have paired their actions with their beliefs, actions that I’m sure all of you will approve:

Pastor Hagee’s Crossroads Church, among their other numerous good works raised $8.5 million dollars to rescue Jews from the Soviet Union and to help them to settle in Israel.

And Pastor Hagee and his Church are the linchpin behind Christians United For Israel, one of the most diligent and uncompromising supporters of Israel and the Jewish people anywhere. They rival AIPAC when it comes to manning the trenches in Congress to lobby for the nation Jeremiah Wright famously referred to as ‘a dirty word’.

As you all know, being Jewish, Pastor Hagee’s doctrinal stance is alien to me.  Further, since I’m in some gray area between atheism and agnosticism, much of what he says seems either silly or pointless to me.  What I do know, however, is that this is a good man who does good things.  That he thinks Hitler may have been Biblically prophesized — well, I think that’s a bit silly, because I don’t read the Bible as the literal word of God (my apologies for my skepticism to those of you who do).  Whether logical or not, though, Hagee has taken his Biblical understanding and turned it into a series of good, moral acts.  His interpretations, whether you view them as wacky or reasonable, stand as the framework for a life of humanism.  How can one castigate that?

One of Mr. Bookworm’s colleagues asked for my opinion of the “10 Things” list MoveOn.org did attacking John McCain. I fired off an email in response that is not polished (and is a little disorganized), but I think it hits the main points. What do you think?

1. John McCain voted against establishing a national holiday in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Now he says his position has “evolved,” yet he’s continued to oppose key civil rights laws.

As for voting against MLK day, so what? Personal federal holidays had always been about Presidents. This vote involved jettisoning a 150 year tradition to accord a signal honor to someone who was not an elected leader. That MLK was a man greatly to be respected did not make him a President, and there was no good reason to turn precedent on its ears. I wouldn’t have voted for it either, not out of a lack of respect for MLK, but because it was stupid political posturing. That it’s now become a political hot potato is something entirely different.

As for the “key civil rights laws,” that’s a bit disingenuous to say the least. The first law referenced is one to make it easier for employees to sue their employers – it’s a plaintiff’s attorneys rights law. As for affirmative action, I am deeply opposed to affirmative action. I believe that (a) it is un-American to have preferences and racial quotas and that (b) it is harmful to minorities who either end up in institutions that destroy them because they are not prepared for the place or, if they are prepared, their qualities go unrecognized because people assume – and why shouldn’t they? – that they achieved their position only through affirmative action, not merit.

The disproportionate number of minority children in prison might be better addressed, as Bill Cosby and even Barack Obama concede, by examining much of minority culture, which honors thugs, dishonors education, and sees it as selling out to try to achieve through the system.The government can only do so much, and it’s worth noting that, up until Johnson’s Great Society legislation, black crime rates were dropping and black incomes going up. (Keep in mind that this is separate from the horrors of Jim Crow. This is simply examining statistics about blacks. See John McWhorter’s Losing the Race : Self-Sabotage in Black America which, I believe, discusses these statistics.)

Economic dependency and crime accelerated wildly in the 40 years after the government encouraged a welfare system that made black men redundant and, indeed, financially problematic in a family. Most studies show that the single greatest indicator of whether a young man will end up in prison is whether there is a father around. The American government has, for 40 years, ensured that black fathers are unnecessary. I could go on, but you can see that what MoveOn .org considers to be a series of failures, I consider to be virtues.

2. According to Bloomberg News, McCain is more hawkish than Bush on Iraq, Russia and China. Conservative columnist Pat Buchanan says McCain “will make Cheney look like Gandhi.”

Great. Although you won’t read it on the front page (and perhaps it was removed from the front page because the media didn’t want to concede that things are going), things in Iraq are, in fact, going quite well. Al Sadr’s army is in retreat, Al Qaeda is on the ropes, and fully 70% of all Iraqis in the last poll are optimistic – which is a nice change from America’s 20% optimism vote. Perhaps the difference is that we read the NY Times and they do not.

Be that as it may, the bottom line is that, in war, when you have the momentum, you don’t stop. You keep moving forward. Even if one concedes for the sake of argument, that it was wrong to go into Iraq, the fact is that we are now in Iraq. We don’t get a do-over on 2003. All we can do is deal with the here and now, and the here and now is that, when things are going well, you don’t throw up your hands, admit defeat, and leave Iraq to turn into a bloodbath that will make the killing fields look like preschool.

3. His reputation is built on his opposition to torture, but McCain voted against a bill to ban waterboarding, and then applauded President Bush for vetoing that ban.

McCain has a tortured approach to torture. I don’t deny it. However, considering that organizations like MoveOn have been complaining that prisoners in Gitmo are tortured because the guards handle their prayer books without first washing their white gloves, I’m kind of unimpressed by this whole thing. It’s not a deal breaker for me, and I don’t think the MoveOn and Code Pink people have any credibility on the subject. Also, it’s worth noting that the Bush Administration stopped any form of waterboarding or like tactics aeons ago when there was an uproar. By the way, this is torture; Gitmo probably isn’t, as even honest opponents of Bush concede.

4. McCain opposes a woman’s right to choose. He said, “I do not support Roe versus Wade. It should be overturned.”

I’m still pro-choice, but McCain is right that Roe v. Wade is an appalling bit of judicial legerdemain. Had it been better decided, we might have a more coherent abortion rights policy, as well as less heat on the subject. The Constitution does not grant anyone a right to privacy, and there is nothing in the Constitution, one way or another to support federal abortion rights. It’s a state’s rights thing. It’s been a problem for more than 30 years that the Supreme Court made up a new “federal right” out of whole cloth. It’s a reminder that, when you have judges who make it up as they go along, you end up with problems at the end of the day. In any event, given that even if McCain wins he’ll still have a Democratic Congress with which to contend, I wouldn’t worry too much about this one.

5. The Children’s Defense Fund rated McCain as the worst senator in Congress for children. He voted against the children’s health care bill last year, then defended Bush’s veto of the bill.

I don’t like the government controlling access to health care, and this bill was freely acknowledged by its supporters to be a wedge-bill on the way to fully socialized medicine. This was an especially silly bill, because the primary beneficiaries would have been children in middle class homes. Indeed, the poster family that the Dems advanced to support the bill (the Fosters) turned out to be a very, very middle class family that owned two homes, quite expensive cars, and a family business. When things were rosy, and despite having children, the parents had elected to stock up on material things, rather than insurance. Their goal was for you and me to insure them. I don’t think so.

A much better plan would be to knock down people’s taxes so that they would have more money to enter the market and select their preferred insurance. And do keep in mind that there are people who decide to gamble. Young people, for example, who are pretty sure they’ll live forever, or people like that poster family who are hoping against hope that the taxpayers will take care of them.

6. He’s one of the richest people in a Senate filled with millionaires. The Associated Press reports he and his wife own at least eight homes! Yet McCain says the solution to the housing crisis is for people facing foreclosure to get a “second job” and skip their vacations.

So what? He married well. He actually isn’t rich, because he and his wife keep their money separate. He’s medium wealthy. In this, he is distinct from John Kerry (billionaire through his wife); John Edwards (multimillionaire plaintiffs’ attorney), Hillary Clinton (who shares $121 million dollars earned with Bill since their White House years); Al Gore (multimillionaire, money earned going green, which may be a problem as people starve and inflation increases because of biofuels); Nancy Pelosi (multimillionaire); Harry Reid (multimillionaire through fairly dirty land scandals in Nevada); Barack Obama (who got a “gift” from a political supporter of a $300,000 price break on a property adjacent to his own property, massively increasing the value of both); etc.

By the way, all these millionaires and billionaires have ideas about money too. They’re not giving up their own money – they simply want to raise taxes on you. Also, I don’t recall MoveOn being perturbed by Kerry’s billionaire status. I guess it depends who’s piloting that private jet.

I’d also like to point out that a lot of the people who are having trouble now shouldn’t have been borrowing in the first place. The mere fact that you can own nine homes doesn’t mean that you should buy nine homes when you have no money – and then expect people like you and me to bail you out.

7. Many of McCain’s fellow Republican senators say he’s too reckless to be commander in chief. One Republican senator said: “The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine. He’s erratic. He’s hotheaded. He loses his temper and he worries me.”

Sure, he has a temper, but there’s no indication that this leads him to erratic behavior. Also, keep in mind that a lot of Republicans don’t like him because they don’t consider him “pure” enough – an indication that he’s sufficiently moderate to make a lot of regular Americans fairly happy.

8. McCain talks a lot about taking on special interests, but his campaign manager and top advisers are actually lobbyists. The government watchdog group Public Citizen says McCain has 59 lobbyists raising money for his campaign, more than any of the other presidential candidates.

Yeah, it’s politics. It’s not nice, but I really don’t care, when it’s balanced against the other stuff. Obama has a few problems of his own with those close to him.

9. McCain has sought closer ties to the extreme religious right in recent years. The pastor McCain calls his “spiritual guide,” Rod Parsley, believes America’s founding mission is to destroy Islam, which he calls a “false religion.” McCain sought the political support of right-wing preacher John Hagee, who believes Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment for gay rights and called the Catholic Church “the Antichrist” and a “false cult.”

Okey-dokey. The Parsley thing is smoke and mirrors, tied to a generic “religious guide” speech McCain gave the first time he met Parsley, who introduced him at a meeting filled with various religious people. This dishonest – and it is dishonest – attack is meant to deflect attention from the actual 20 year, very close relationship, Obama had with the problematic Wright.

The same thing holds true for the Hagee thing. Hagee has no close ties to McCain. This is an ordinary political support deal, with a prominent religious leader looking at two presidential candidates and endorsing one over the other.

Specifically with respect to the alleged Catholic slur, Hagee didn’t say what he is accused of saying. Here’s the best statement of what Hagee actually said – and we should care about what Hagee really said, both because it tells a lot about Hagee/McCain and a lot about those who will say a lot of things that are distance relatives of the truth to try to bring McCain down to Obama’s level in terms of religious relationships. By the way, this is not the first time that Dems have sought to misrepresent religious statements in an effort to drive a wedge between Catholics and Protestants. The same thing happened in the Jindal campaign.

10. He positions himself as pro-environment, but he scored a 0—yes, zero—from the League of Conservation Voters last year.

I would love to see us get off oil flowing from fields in lands ruled by tyrants, so I’m not profligate with energy, and wouldn’t mind a useful alternative. As for the rush to green, though, given that the climate is actually in a cooling trend, that biofuels may create more pollution than they solve, and that we’re facing mass starvation, in part because food fields have been given over to biofuels and in part because the lack of alternative fuels, coupled with increased demand, has dramatically raised existing fuel prices, there may be a virtue in McCain’s unwillingness to rush into anything here.

McCain is far from perfect, but these attacks are either baseless, or stupid, or they fall into the “I don’t care” category, or I agree with McCain’s positions. MoveOn should be able to come up with something better than lies and misrepresentations to attack McCain’s character, history and policies.

UPDATE: Thanks to the Webloggin editor for correcting my original erroneous facts about Obama’s profit from the Resko dealings on his property.

Yesterday, I read Frank Rich’s most recent NYT’s column (to which I will not link), in which he tried to excuse away Jeremiah Wright’s hate-filled diatribes by saying that, because of John Hagee’s allegedly anti-Catholic rants, conservatives having placed themselves in a glass house and barred from criticism. My desire to write a blog boast on this column got sidetracked, though, when I wasn’t instantly able to find authority for the principle that Hagee didn’t say what he’s alleged to have said. I wasn’t absolutely certain that this last was the case — maybe Hagee really is a foaming at the mouth anti-Catholic — but I sure wasn’t going to take Frank Rich’s word for it.

Had I written that post yesterday, the main thrust of it would have been that one can’t compare Obama’s 20 year embrace of the race monger Wright to the fact that McCain received an endorsement from someone he may not even have known made anti-Catholic statements. Still, I didn’t feel that I could get to my central point without first establishing to my own satisfaction that, in terms of saying rotten things, Hagee and Wright are brothers under different colored skin.

It turns out that my instincts were correct, and that Frank Rich is completely wrong (not that a little thing like factually accuracy would bother him, I’m sure). Dennis Prager explains:

As for Rich’s attack on Hagee for the pastor’s “anti-Catholicism,” the Times columnist got his facts wrong. Hagee was not calling the Catholic Church “the Great Whore.” That is an eschatological New Testament term in the Book of Revelation. Hagee teaches that the “Great Whore” will be an “apostate church” and a “false cult system” made up of all those who claim Christianity yet reject the gospel, whether Catholic or Protestant. He has stated explicitly and publicly — and should continue to reassure Catholics — that he does not believe that the “Great Whore” of Revelation is the Catholic Church. For Hagee, the sure sign that a Christian has rejected the gospel is an embrace of anti-Semitism. In the video referenced by Rich, Hagee chooses his examples of “apostate” behavior — the Crusades, the Inquisition and a Hitler quote referencing the Catholic Church — not because they are Catholic, but because they are anti-Semitic.

But while Rich and others could have honestly, if mistakenly, believed that Hagee was referring to the Catholic Church in that video, it borders on slander to compare John Hagee with Jeremiah Wright. Hagee has been preoccupied with the suffering of the Jews at the hands of Christians. One would think that the preoccupation of a major Christian leader with Jewish suffering at the hands of Catholics and Protestants — Hagee has been just as critical of Martin Luther’s anti-Semitism as with that of the Church — would be welcomed by a liberal Jew such as Frank Rich. After all, liberal Jews and liberal non-Jews have been unsparing in their criticism of Christian, especially the European Catholic Church’s, oppression of Jews. But for Rich, pointing out historical anti-Semitism is apparently less important than exaggerating contemporary American racism.

On the liberal side of the American political world, one of the lingering horrors of the McCarthy era is “guilt by association.” Certainly that was the lesson I, a young liberal, took away from teachings about that era. As I learned it, it wasn’t that the HUAC hearings were aimed at discovering genuine Communist infiltration into the military, weapons development and politics. Instead, in the intense (and irrational) anti-Communist hysteria of the period, the hearings were aimed at discovering who talked to whom.

For that reason, as I was taught, if you were a victim of this witch hunt, your actual political beliefs didn’t matter. Instead, it was who you knew that was the determining factor in whether you would be destroyed. That is, even if you weren’t a Communist, if your best friend was, you were guilty by association.

This phrase, “guilt by association,” has been running through my head a lot lately in this latest election. The MSM tried tarring John McCain very hard because Pastor John Hagee, who is a friend of Israel (good), but not a friend of Catholics (bad), is a supporter and because McCain has not repudiated that support. In MSM land, this was obviously a sign that McCain is anti-Catholic, although he’s never given any indication by word or deed that this is so.

This “guilt by association” tendency isn’t limited to the MSM, of course. When Ron Paul’s candidacy looked as if it had legs, a lot of people in the blogosphere were very upset by the fact that White Supremacists were latching on to him. They found even more upsetting the fact that he didn’t disavow these people. The nail in the coffin, though — and something that distinguishes Paul from McCain — is the fact that the White Supremacists weren’t just picking up on subliminal Paulian code that appealed to them, they were recognizing one of their own.

All of which gets me to the increasing number of stories about Barack Obama’s connection to a lot of unsavory (from my point of view) people: Jeremiah Wright, anti-Semite and anti-American; Tony Rezko, probable criminal; and William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, unrepentant, homegrown Leftist terrorists.

With each new revelation, the defense that both Obama and his followers offer is that Obama can associate with these people without either agreeing with or trying to advance their politics. In other words, Obama shouldn’t be brought down by that old McCarthyite bugaboo of “guilt by association.”

Obama made this point explicitly when he likened his friendship with Ayers to his friendly relationship with Tom Coburn. Since we know that Obama, despite his friendly relationship with Coburn, does not share Coburn’s extreme pro-Life stance (abortion should be illegal and abortionists should then be tried as murderers), why in the world should we assume that Obama, despite his friendly relationship with Ayers, Dohrn, Reszko and Wright shares their terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American, criminal viewpoints? Obama’s problem, he and his supports argue, if there is in fact a problem, is that he’s just too nice a guy.  [Update:  Here's a nice Dean Barnett piece on Obama's indiscriminate friendliness.]

I think Obama’s problem is bigger than just being indiscriminately friendly. Unlike McCain, who had not courted either Hagee specifically or anti-Catholics generally, Obama has actively courted people with noxious attitudes, and he’s courted a lot of them. In other words, Jeremiah Wright isn’t just a powerful pastor for whose political support Obama is grateful, since it will throw a lot of votes his way. Instead, Obama has had a close affiliation with him for more than twenty years — Obama has sought him out and explicitly identified him as a mentor. This is not a casual acquaintance with someone who has some interesting and, perhaps, distasteful eccentricities; this is someone whose intellectual influence Obama actively sought.

The same holds true for Obama’s association with the Ayers/Dohrns. A rising politician can’t always choose his fans, but Obama has had a much closer relationship than that and, on Obama’s side, it’s been one in which he or his wife has sought them out. After all, it was in their home that he launched his political career, and it was his wife who intentionally put them together on panels that would advance that career. Obama wasn’t just be a nice guy, friendly to random supporters; he was courting them. In the political world, one doesn’t go the extra mile to court someone unless one feels that there is a common cause.

Obama himself might challenge my argument by saying “But I didn’t know that Wright was anti-Semitic and anti-American [presumably having slept through all of Wright's sermons and tossed his newsletters]; and I didn’t know that Ayers and Dohrn were domestic terrorists [since I am ignorant of recent history and never bothered to listen to anything the two of them are still boasting about now]; and I had no idea Rezko was a crook [because I think it's normal to get sweetheart deals on valuable property when I'm a politician who can be of use to the person throwing the deal my way]. I’m innocent. I knew nothing. [A wonderful new use of the Sargent Schultz defense.]”

Even if Obama’s “I know nothing” defense is true (and it’s a very worrisome defense from someone who claims the intelligence and acumen to be leader of the free world), I still don’t think it changes the fact that we have to view him with suspicion because of those who are drawn to him. Even if he doesn’t embrace them, why do they embrace him?

It’s apparent that Obama’s political message — the real message, not just the vapid “change” stuff — is appealing to people who hate America, who hate Israel, who hate Jews, who hate capitalism and who hate to abide by pesky little things like laws. No matter what he says about them, or how he tries to disassociate himself from them, they continue to view him as a kindred spirit. And as a handy dandy chart on both Obama and Hillary demonstrates, quite a few of them see Hillary as a fellow-traveler too. (I know of no such chart that can be made for McCain, but please correct me if I’m wrong.)

No matter what Hillary’s and Obama’s best intentions are regarding terrorists and America haters, they’re sending a message that’s resonating with that crowd. And if it’s resonating with the hate America crowd, no matter how Hillary or Obama try to disavow seeking that crowd out, their message must be analyzed, in part, by considering their most defended fans.

UPDATE: Here’s another example of an unsavory character who feels that an Obama presidency will best serve his political ends. Whether or not Obama sought him out his irrelevant. This person’s desire to associate with Obama is significant in itself, and Obama’s passivity here doesn’t lessen what is, in my eyes, ideological guilt by association.

Oh, and another example just crossed my radar here.