Topic: NewsBusters
Now that it doesn't matter all that much, Tim Graham uses a June 7 NewsBusters post to raise questions about John McCain (now-rejected) endorser Rev. John Hagee's sincerity in retracting his anti-Catholic comments:
Hagee had made viciously anti-Catholic comments, which he retracted completely (and sort of mysteriously) in a dialogue with the Catholic League. It's mysterious that a minister could hold the classic fundamentalist view that the Catholic Church is the Whore of Babylon in the Book of Revelation, and then say, oops, I misspoke a little.
As we detailed, Graham and the rest of the MRC were loath to denounce Hagee in early March when his comments became public; he was more concerned about downplaying the similarities between Hagee and former Barack Obama pastor Jeremiah Wright by claiming "there’s a huge difference between someone’s selected pastor of two decades and a new endorser." He does that here too, of course, claming a difference between "Obama’s problem with Jeremiah Wright, his own minister of 20 years, with John McCain’s problem with two evangelical preachers who he sought out for an endorsement, but have never been his pastor." But doesn't the fact that McCain specifically sought out the endorsements of Hagee and Rod Parsley (whose anti-Islam rantings Graham doesn't specifically address) in fact show a problem with the kind of people McCain chooses to surround himself with and actively seeks endorsements from?