On Monday's broadcast of The 700 Club, Christian Coalition founder, televangelist, '88 presidential candidate, and friend-o-Bush Pat Robertson unloaded on Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, saying, "We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability," and accusing Chavez of intending to create a "launching pad for communist infiltration and Muslim extremism" in Venezuela.
"We don't need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator. It's a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with ... You know, I don't know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war ... and I don't think any oil shipments will stop," said Robertson.
President Gerald R. Ford forbade political assassination in an executive order in the mid-'70s.
State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Robertson's remarks were "inappropriate," adding, "This is not the policy of the United States government. We do not share his views."
Our reporting and commentary:
Pat Robertson: Worse Than We Thought?
Apologists say that televangelist Pat Robertson’s recent remarks were an aberration; in reality they were only scratching a darker surface. Mr. Robertson has a long career of what most Americans would call despicable behavior. Consider the following: Robertson's support...
Posted to Politics by John Bill on August 30, 2005 07:46 AM
Robertson and Jackson: Who Speaks for America?
When two self-proclaimed religious leaders set out American foreign policy from opposite sides of the fence, America is the real loser. Last week the Rev. Pat Robertson told a worldwide audience that the U.S. should assassinate Venezuelan President Hugo...
Posted to Politics by Hank McCoy on August 29, 2005 07:12 PM
Notable Quotables 8/28/05
Quotes of Note that reflect what conservatives think. Or are up against. ~~~~~~~~~~ Two Different Views-Cindy Sheehan From Ann Coulter: Call me old-fashioned, but a grief-stricken war mother shouldn't have her own full-time PR flack. After your third profile on "Entertainment Tonight,"...
Posted to Politics by Patfish on August 29, 2005 04:45 AM
Venezuela wants Pat Robertson
Venezuelan Pesident Hugo Chavez follows Robertson's stupid comments with some of his own. When will it stop?
Posted to Politics by Mark Adams on August 29, 2005 02:03 AM
![Biography - Pat Robertson: Preaching Politics [VHS]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51RMW3K3N9L._SL120_.jpg)
Article comments
— go to most recent comments1 - Keith
Gee that was a nice "Christian" statement to make now wasn't it?
All in the name of God right?
What a load of crap!
2 - Marc
Gee I'm shocked!
I felt sure this thread would be populated by an entire squad of leftists saying how Eeeeevil the Republicans are and how Robertson is a Rove puppet.
I must have come early to the party.
3 - Eric Olsen
Marc, start clicking on the posts linked to from here
4 - Maurice
It is important to assassinate any world leader that appears to be the Anti-Christ. I say 'assassinate early and often'.
5 - Eric Berlin
I'm sure JC would be 'right behind you,' M.
6 - Bruce
Gee. I wonder what the MSM, and other pundits, would say if Howard Dean had made the same comment?
I think I can hear the deafening silence already.
7 - Lono
Christian = terrorism
between Robertson and Dobson > this is how the world sees us.
Remember when Robertson did the prayer vigil for god to kill off two supreme court judges last summer?
8 - Eric Berlin
Bruce -- That's hilariously silly. If the DNC advocated assassinating foreign leaders, it would be a 24/7 media frenzy of unforeseen proportions.
9 - Nancy
Yeah; Smirk's PR flunkies would make sure to try to create a circus if anyone not on the far right said anything similar.
10 - Eric Berlin
I think it's more that anyone in public life that makes such a statement should and would get called out for being a complete ass.
11 - Eric Olsen
I think Pat, 75, forgets he's on TV sometimes. One of these days he's going to give away his PIN or something
12 - Nancy
It would be hilarious to see him do something really awful (as if this weren't bad enough) like expose himself on TV. That would be priceless.
13 - Eric Berlin
If you watch the remarks, it was no off-the-cuff aside. He deliberately went on television to make this announcement.
Some slight alarm bells went off in my brain thinking he might be trying to take some heat off the Bush Administration? But his comment about "not needing another $200 billion war" doesn't really vibe with that.
Plus, that would just be kind of crazy. Which brings us back to the Crazy Factor and PINs, I suppose.
14 - Eric Berlin
May I suggest as a Robertson follow-up piece header:
Needles and PINs
15 - Eric Olsen
guffaw!
16 - Silas Kain
Poor Pat says he was misinterpreted once again by the mainstream media. Um, Reverend Robertson? It is you who have misinterpreted the Word. I said it before and I'll say it again: A-U-D-I-T!
17 - yezbok drahcir
Pat Robertson is testing the microphone for the Bush Administration.
As the Secretary General of the United Nations has stated, the UN controls the airwaves.
If the UN does not demand that Mr. Robertson make a public formal apology to President Chavez of Venezuela, then the democratic world is permitted absolute free speech and open dialogue " even on the airwaves. No more libel. No more laws or restrictions to impede free speech that will debunk the liars who need the veil of censorship.
Praise God! Thank you Bush and Robertson.
18 - Steve S
Pat Robertson is testing the microphone for the Bush Administration.
By sticking his head up his ass? Is he working on some echo chamber angle or something?
If the UN does not demand that Mr. Robertson make a public formal apology to President Chavez
Mr. Robertson is a private citizen, the UN cannot just demand anything of any citizen in the world, so what enforceable power does it have here? None, sorry.
There are many of us praying feverishly though, for his early retirement.
19 - Silas Kain
Fallacio: Pat Robertson speaking into a microphone. Every time he wraps his lips around the microphone, the fallacies come flying out of his cake hole. Does the 700 Club have a Board of Directors? It's time to fire the twit.
20 - Jackbox
What would it take for someone on the right to say “whoop! Sorry ‘bout that”? Bush and company are, of course, totally incapable of saying mea culpa (and W, undoutably, can’t spell it). Made-up war-reasoning, continued oil obsession in light now self-evident global warming, mass murderer Bin-Ladin still on the loose, and a degree of insensitivity that blames a dead soldier’s mother for a fucked up vacation all add up to a pretty nifty tally.
Of course, Pat Robertson is not really, officially attached to the Bush administration. Not in any “according-to-Hoyle” sort of way. No, he is one of those figures who exist in the shadows, behind the curtains, doing the moral dirty work on the front lines of the screaming, lunatic fringe of the right. Just as Fox is not an “official” instrument of the right’s agenda, Pat Robertson and his ilk (Fallwell, Reed, take your pick) stand on the oblique sidelines of the political process, getting to act like maniacs for their cause, doing their damage, then slipping back under their veils of “private citizen.”
Meanwhile, actual private citizens like Cindy Sheehan are pilloried mercilessly as though they were some incorporated bulldozer ready to roll over unborn fetuses. The worst thing she did, of course, was to use the Christian cross in her protest. The right, as we know, has proprietary rights to the use of the symbol, therefore, it is not sacrilegious that some cowboy clown blazed over them in his massive, Saudi-oil powered SUV. Whoa to the feckless PETAphile who accidentally snags a Birkenstock on a similarly themed right wing sponsored vigil. There’d be no pitch too hot for little Moonglow.
The right’s great weapon of recent years has been a kind of “shock ‘n awe” kind of overreaction to anything that smacks of criticism of political status quo. If Bill Mahr questions why US Soldiers are ill-equipped in the theatre of war, then the right-wind congressman will simply label the comedian’s comments as treasonous. If Chris Mathews questions the whack-job senator (who happens to be some kind of democrat, evidently) as to whether accusations made against former Presidential hopeful John Kerry’s war record are true, that senator must then challenge Mr. Mathews to a duel… so he can kill him, obviously. Thus, when the grieving mother of a solider killed in Iraq decides to go to the vacation Shangri La of our poor, exhausted leader, to gain an audience, the thing for the right to do is to go ape-shit, organize, make tee-shirts, and assume Sheehan is the head of some neo-pagen, vegetarian conspiracy to make sure flags are burned at regular intervals and that Christian children are forcibly placed with lesbian parents.
My thought is that the right reacts this way not because they are particularly concerned about the specific event " Cindy Sheehan protesting the war, for example " but because they link the protest to a broader, more symbolic cultural conflict. Let’s face it, they do enjoy tarring the left with a fairly broad brush. You cannot, for example, be an anti-war supporter of the NRA. You cannot be pro-choice and pro-war, etc. The narrative is too difficult for the far-right. I am sure the left does the same thing to those on the right " all right wingers are anti-choice, pro-gun, know-nothings. That, in a nutshell, is the real problem with America: an inability to accept a more complicated, more nuanced narrative.
Of course, Pat Robertson is not really interested in a complex narrative, unless, of course, it is his own. After calling for the death of Chavez, he back pedals in a way that recalls Bill Clinton’s eroto-linguistic hair-splitting during the Lewinsky scandal (and aren’t you feeling a little bit nostalgic for that feel-good era?). The difference is that in the case of Robertson, we have a record of what he actually said because he said it on television in his own words. To quote today’s Washington Post:
>>But a video of Monday's telecast shows that Robertson's exact words were: "You know, I don't know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war, and I don't think any oil shipments will stop."
He continued: "We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability. We don't need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator. It's a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with."<<
I guess Pat is attempting to spin the word “it” as being taken “out of context”. I guess I don’t know too much about the way Southern Baptists use their pronouns but if it’s the same way we Hollywood Pagan Liberals use it then “it,” in this context, replaces the previous proper noun, and that is “the doctrine of assassination.”
Ok, Pat is a total idiot but that’s not what’s important here. What is important is some consideration of why the right would want this particular messenger out there running wild. Simple: Chavez is sitting on an oil reserve that might mean salvation in these post-Saudi-Oil-peak era. As Saudi Arabia starts down the road of reduced output (10-15 years?) and the trickle-spout that is the Anwar oil refuge is shown to be what it is (trickle-spout), then we need another oil sponge that we can push around or at least play nicely with. That would be Venezuela. Sadly, we don’t have a friendly on the ground there. Chavez is too social a democrat. He is too friendly with Castro (who, for some bizarre reason, we continue to have a hard-on for 40 years on. Pfizer and Glaxo should figure out how to bottle whatever is making this foreign policy so turgidly vertical), and he is too beloved of the poor (only in Caracas do anti-government protestors show up with manicures and leave in Jaguars). But, of course, the time is not right for a new demonization. We still have Iraq, we have Iran in our sites, and let’s not forget North Korea (but do forget about Bin Ladin. He’s not currently on the radar and his presence just complicates things). If Chavez’s policies continue into the next several years (provided he is still in power and some locally grown thug doesn’t return power to the 1% of the population who actually own land), then we might start considering how to best handle the situation in South America. Right now, Pat’s comments are seeds, or trial balloons, of what narrative might be forthcoming.
21 - Mark the Sane and Sensible
"(and W, undoutably (sic), can’t spell it)."
I'd be careful about condemning others for their spelling, Jackass, er ah, Jackbox.
"Simple: Chavez is sitting on an oil reserve that might mean salvation in these post-Saudi-Oil-peak era."
Our salvation is on our own property ... ever hear of ANWR?
22 - yezbok drahcir
Pat Robertson has a history as a preacher always standing on the side of the status quo. He has always been right in there with people like Jerry Falwell, furthering oppressive causes such as segregation, censorship and other inequities hidden by a veil of purity " not to mention subjecting non-believers to illegal slander, provoked hatred, and violence.
If a fundamentalist Moslem leader is a terrorist for condoning violence in the name of Allah, then so is a fundamentalist Christian leader for condoning violence in the name of God. If Pat Robertson didn't speak in God's name, then he would have been divided from God and speaking with the devil's tongue. There’s no in between - as he himself would argue this point. “Either with us or against us.”
As Venezuela's Vice-President Jose Vicente Rangel said, “religious fundamentalism is one of the great problems facing humanity in these times”.
23 - yezbok drahcir
Evidently some people get pissed off and become troll-like when they feel unable to provide a rational argument.
24 - yezbok drahcir
Oops!
I tried to cancel my last post, which seemed kind of trollish in itself, but it got through.
25 - splat
Comment 20 posted by Jackbox on August 24, 2005 06:12 PM:
We don't need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator.
200 Billion dollars to fight a war. Theres another lie out of his mouth. He ment to say 200 billion into one of his friends pocket, Because the troops are not getting it.
A strong arm Dictator. Hmmmmm I thought that President Chavez was elected by the people of his country and reelected in the recount also. I guess like a Lot of Americans these days (NOT ALL) that they have become so GOD LIKE that they now can call for the execution of an elected President. I guess that like ROME and Germany and a couple others that they feel that everyone one else is benethe them, and if they do not agree with BUSH'S policies then they can call for their execution also. Why don't we just drop the bomb on everyone that doesnt agree with Bush and then in about 100 millions years or so when all the radiation goes away maybe. Maybe man might walk the earth again and start over.