[url=http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080501_church_state_and_campaign_08/]Church, State and Campaign ‘08
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By Bill Boyarsky

When Adolf Hitler came to power, he said, “I am not going to do anything in my lifetime that hasn’t been done by the Roman Church for the past 800 years. I am only going to do it on a greater scale and more efficiently.”

This comes from the Rev. John Hagee, a hugely popular televangelist who is an important supporter of Sen. John McCain, the prospective Republican presidential nominee. Hagee’s congregation in Texas has 19,000 members, and he appears on more than 150 television stations, 50 radio stations and eight religious networks. Although Hagee is not McCain’s personal minister, Hagee gives McCain an entrée to the Christian right, a group that has considered McCain too liberal.

Could anything be more bigoted and inflammatory than Hagee saying the Roman Catholic Church inspired Hitler when he crafted the Holocaust? Certainly it ranks with or exceeds the ranting of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Sen. Barack Obama’s former minister. McCain’s religious nut is every bit as destructive as Obama’s.

Considering the importance of Hagee to McCain, I would think such an outburst of anti-Catholicism would have created a frenzy of stories and comments by political journalists and their cousins, the cable news network analysts. Yet Hagee’s words have disappeared into the limbo of news not hot enough for prime time.


McCain’s his man: The controversial Rev. John Hagee
stands behind Sen. John McCain in his run
for the presidency