Posted 9:13 PM by Scoobie Davis

Spiritual Brothers
JANUARY 6, 2006 UPDATE: I have an update on John Hagee. The idea that any news channel--even a bottom-feeding operation like Fox News--would hold up an ignorant nutjob like Hagee as an expert on Iran is inexcusable. This guy is scary. (Updated below also)

Original Post: Late last week, WorldNetdDaily.com added a new columnist whose rantings fit in perfectly with WND's paranoid worldview: John C. Hagee. Hagee is the pastor of a mega-church,Cornerstone Church in San Antonio and is the CEO of John Hagee Ministries. Hagee is a major-league right-wing nutjob. I became familiar with Hagee back in the 1990's when I saw his show on the Trinity Broadcasting Network but I had to go to the library to do some additional research on Hagee--the reason being that I often confuse the words and actions of Hagee with two other rotund Clinton-bashing right-wing preachers, Jerry Falwell and Billy James Hargis (more on them later). For those of you who come to this site because you generally agree with me, it would not surprise me if you had not heard of Hagee. Nevertheless, Hagee is a key player in the religious right and has had several bestselling books. One book from the 1990's, Days of Deception, has as the first two chapters, "Witchcraft in the White House," and "Who Killed Vince Foster?" (the latter chapter cites heavily from Christopher Ruddy and The Limbaugh Letter).

What causes me to confuse Hagee with the other two preachers is that all three have the same paranoid worldview regarding Bill Clinton. Most people reading this are familiar with Falwell's anti-Clinton conspiracies. Hargis was a radio preacher who was very influential in the 1960's. He was the forerunner of right-wing preachers like Falwell and Hagee. Hargis built a broadcasting empire along with a mega-church. He had a simple message that berated communists, liberals, feminists, and hippies (who were indistinguishable to him). In his book, Why I Fight for a Christian America, Hargis had stern words for the counterculture: "...[B]oys let their hair grow like a woman's, dress in clothing that we used to relate to tramps and bums, and engage in permissiveness on the lowest possible bestial level..." As luck would have it, soon after Hargis wrote those words, some interesting events occurred. Hargis had presided over the wedding of two of his Bible college students, who on their wedding night confessed to each other that each was not chaste at the time of the wedding. What made this particularly odd was that both bride and groom had been deflowered by the same person: The Reverend Hargis. It also came out that Hargis diddled members of his college choir, "The All-American Kids." When confronted about his penchant for buggery, Hargis took the biological determinism approach to homosexuality, attributing his behavior to "genes and chromosomes." Hargis fell from grace but later attempted to make a comeback. In the 1990's, I received his Christian Crusade newspaper in which Hargis wrote about the same Clinton conspiracies as Falwell and Hagee.

UPDATE II: Sarah Posner of The American Prospect has a revealing article on Hagee titled "Paster Strangelove." Also, presidential candidate John McCain had a secret meeting with Hagee. Scary stuff.

UPDATE III Mike Huckabee chills with John Hagee

UPDATE IV: The media's double standard over Hagee's endorsement of John McCain.