hummingbird wrote:

aka: "Wake up America, your government's been hijacked by loons"


[amazing reading - these are the nutjobs some of our loons support]

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060814/new_christian_zionism

Washington, DC -- 8th August 2006

"Over the past months, the White House has convened a series of
off-the-record meetings about its policies in the Middle East with
leaders of Christians United for Israel (CUFI), a newly formed
political organization that tells its members that supporting Israel's
expansionist policies is "a biblical imperative." CUFI's Washington
lobbyist, David Brog, told me that during the meetings, CUFI
representatives pressed White House officials to adopt a more
confrontational posture toward Iran, refuse aid to the Palestinians
and give Israel a free hand as it ramped up its military conflict
with Hezbollah.

The White House instructed Brog not to reveal the names of
officials he met with, Brog said. [I wonder why? - hummingbird]

CUFI's advice to the Bush Administration reflects the Armageddon-based
foreign-policy views of its founder, John Hagee. Hagee is a
fire-and-brimstone preacher from San Antonio who commands the nearly
18,000-member Cornerstone Church and hosts a major TV ministry where
he explains to millions of viewers how the end times will unfold. He
is also the author of numerous bestselling pulp-prophecy books, like
his recent Jerusalem Countdown, in which he cites various unnamed
Israeli intelligence sources to claim that Iran is producing nuclear
"suitcase bombs." The only way to defeat the Iranian evildoers, he
says, is a full-scale military assault.

"The coming nuclear showdown with Iran is a certainty," Hagee wrote
this year in the Pentecostal magazine Charisma. "Israel and America
must confront Iran's nuclear ability and willingness to destroy Israel
with nuclear weapons. For Israel to wait is to risk committing
national suicide."

Despite his penchant for extreme rhetoric, or perhaps because of it,
Hagee endeared himself to key members of the Israeli right. With the
help of former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who once spoke at
a massive pro-Israel fundraiser at Cornerstone Church, Hagee has
raised at least $8.5 million for Israeli social work projects. And as
a result of Hagee's influence in the Lone Star State, reflected by his
enormous wealth--he reportedly rakes in more than $1 million a year
from his television ministry--and his close relationship with the
previously omnipotent and now disgraced former House majority leader
Tom DeLay, Washington's Republican leadership is just a phone call
away.

Hagee recently united America's largest Christian Zionist
congregations and some of the movement's most prominent
figures--including the Rev. Jerry Falwell, Gary Bauer and Rod Parsley,
an Ohio preacher instrumental in launching Republican Ken Blackwell's
gubernatorial campaign--under the banner of CUFI, creating the first
and only nationwide evangelical political organization dedicated to
supporting Israel. Hagee says he would like to see CUFI become "the
Christian version of AIPAC," referring to the vaunted pro-Israel group
rated second only to the National Rifle Association as the most
effective lobby in Washington.

But while Hagee is the public face of CUFI, he remains tethered to
his ministry in the Texas plains, far from the wheeling and dealing of
inside-the-Beltway culture. To advance his agenda on the Hill, Hagee
has tapped David Brog, a seasoned and articulate lawyer who has been
Republican Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter's chief
of staff, and who boasts myriad connections in Republican Washington.
Besides Brog's political acumen, there was another characteristic
Hagee found appealing: He is Jewish.

"I think while there are some differences between us as far as our
religious views," Brog told me about Hagee, "what matters more, and
what is of much deeper significance, is everything that we share.
We share a love for Israel and a love for America. And we share an
understanding of the war on radical Islamic terror, and that makes
us brothers."

As Hagee's political point man, Brog has instantly emerged as an
important operative on the Christian right and an effective advocate
shielding the movement from institutional Jewish criticism whenever an
evangelical leader makes a gaffe. After a series of wildly impolitic
remarks by Pat Robertson, including the suggestion that Israeli Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon's descent into a comatose state was God's
punishment for the Gaza withdrawal, Brog used an interview with the
conservative National Review to defend Robertson as "a good man."
When Anti-Defamation League president Abraham Foxman lambasted the
Christian right as a dire threat to America's Jewish community, Brog
scolded Foxman in a lengthy Wall Street Journal op-ed. "There are very
serious threats facing American Jews today, and they have nothing to
do with social conservatives," he wrote.

They should be. Since the only thing that is true about
the Bible, either New or Old Testement is that loons attract
goons.