Posted 9:58 AM by Scoobie Davis

Pastor John Hagee's Right-Wing Bloggers
John Hagee is one of those people who, at least until recent years, avoided mainstream media scrutiny because he had operated in fringe circles (I only heard about Hagee in the 1990's because I watched him on the Trinity Broadcasting Network--run by Paul Crouch and his Tammy Fay wannabe wife Jan for ironic enjoyment of Hagee's bombast--see addendum; I have written about Hagee before he made the national news with the McCain endorsement--click here, here, here, and here).

When Hagee's anti-Catholicism, anti-gay hate, bigotry against Muslims, and warmongering were given widespread media exposure after McCain enthusiastically accepted Hagee's endorsement, one thing I noticed was that the right's blogosphere was uncharacteristically silent. This is in sharp contrast to when Hagee gave a speech at AIPAC a year ago. I was one of the only people to note Scott Johnson hilariously cloying response to Hagee's bellicose speech. Johnson wrote: "[Hagee's] speech had me crying." In his post on the Hagee speech, Johnson cites another right-wing blogger, Pamela Geller of the Atlas Shrugs blog. Johnson embedded a video of part of Hagee's speech on his blog and noted that Geller was the person who recorded it. She is also the person on the audio portion of the video who can be heard repeatedly shouting, "I Love you! Woo Hoo Hoo!"(below is the video in question). Also, if you go to around the 4:00 mark on the video, Hagee has a message for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: "I have something to say to the president of Iran: 'Mr. Ahmadinejad, don't threaten America!" You can hear Geller shout in applause, "Yeah, baby! Woo Hoo Hoo! I love it! [in a redneck voice] Kiss my Grits![unintelligible]"



Addendum: Gone Camping Were it not for the fact that fundamentalist buffoons like Hagee, the late Jerry Falwell, and Hal Lindsey have been taken seriously by policymakers, they would be good fodder for camp enjoyment, much like crushed velvet paintings of The Last Supper found in Tijuana bazaars.

I realize that many of your reading it consider my intellectual slumming unattractive. It does seem kind of smug for me to have enjoyed Hagee's sermons for their unintentional hilarity. I acknowledge that mocking the uneducated is unseemly. But at least you know where I stand. Let me ask this: what is worse: an ironic, snarky hipster or someone with an Ivy League degree like Johnson who takes a dangerous extremist like Hagee seriously and gives him credibility.