Hagee's views on New Orleans are hardly controversial. Pre-Katrina NOLA was widely regarded as a moral cesspool, brimming with all sorts of iniquities: promiscuous/deviant sex of all kinds, gay/straight/bestial, political corruption, violent crime, drug abuse, etc.

This doesn't reflect an accurate synopsis of Hagee's statements on NOLA. He singled out a gay pride parade as the proximate cause for God to punish NOLA:

JH: All hurricanes are acts of God, because God controls the heavens. I believe that New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to God, and they were recipients of the judgment of God for that.

The newspaper carried the story in our local area, that was not carried nationally, that there was to be a homosexual parade there on the Monday that the Katrina came. And the promise of that parade was that it would was going to reach a level of sexuality never demonstrated before in any of the other gay pride parades.

So is it your contention that either or both of the following ideas is "Hardly controversial":

1) God hates gays enough to want to kill them with hurricanes

2) God punishes cities that displease him by bringing in giant storms that also kill and displace lots of people who had nothing to do with the sinful city

Any time I see him on the Clinton News Network I hit the mute button.

"Clinton News Network" is right wing crazy-speak and I detest seeing progressives take on and absorb right wing nonsense just because it happens to support their ends.

Find some other way to object to what you see as CNN's bias against Obama. Invent a fresh acronym if you must.

Thanks for taking that well and in the spirit it was intended.

cheers.

Cokie Roberts makes an excellent point on this morning's NPR news program: both Clinton and Obama are making themselves politically radioactive recklessly trying to outflank each other on the left, attempting to pander to their radical party base. They are freely generating rich material to use against whichever one becomes the Dem nominee. Even McCain, whose record is unfortunately inconsistent at best, will have no trouble mining this motherlode.

How do you manage to type with such a beam in thine own eye?

The rule of thumb is, if the right accuses the left of something, it's because they're already doing it. See also: election fraud, dirty tricks, ratfucking, constitutional violations, partisanzation of government bureaucracy, etc etc

Anyone who believes in nonsense such as "chakras" has no business commenting on anyone else's alleged stupidity.

Well Bush thinks an old man with a beard and white clothes in the sky told him to be President and invade Iraq. I would prefer even the most charicaturized granola crunching new ager over that.

At least Hippies don't hurt anyone.

I'm also reminded of Ronald Reagan consulting the fine true science of astrology for guidance on the timing of imporant decisions. When is a good day to sign a nuclear arms treaty? Saturn knows. Invading grenada on your mind? Let Mars tell you when.

Chakras are pre-scientific mumbo jumbo

Please, enough with the "I believe it so it must be true" nonsense.

I completely agree, my point was it's silly to get outraged about chakras when the ruling party in American is fully enthralled to its own different set of prescientific mumbo jumbo.

And yes, it really does impact policy, as many Bush comments attest to. Also, the left-behinders trying to speed the apocalypse by meddling in Israel.

Let McCain speak in defence of the absolute wall between church and state and then he can laugh about chakras.

It's just great. Kudos.

Implicit in neo-conservativism. I remember reading the original PNAC manifesto, and being struck by the aggrieved tone of self-entitlement they had about what they saw as the glaring deficiencies in America's military capacities.

I don't remember their specific complaints per se, but it was a list of potentially useful force projection weapons that are basically only useful once you have concluded the world is your rightful playground.

There is simply no where that should be beyond the reach of US forces by air, sea or land (or space). Utter strategic dominance is their goal.

Once you make that decision, then suddenly not having an 8th or 9th aircraft carrier in some faraway sea becomes a "hole" in your nation's defenses. Suddenly the inability to deploy attack helicopters in central africa in 48 hours or less is a "problem" to be solved.

You've missed the point.

I personally don't claim to know who is more right or wrong, better or worse in the very long (longer than 6 years BTW) struggle between FARC and the nominal Columbian government. I somehow doubt the Columbian government is some exemplar of freedom and liberal democratic principles.

I'm simply not taking Fred Hiatt's word for it. Neo-cons are consistently wrong about everything and never ever learn from their mistakes. That's not even hyperbole as every single foreign policy debacle shows.

Read the vanity fair article conservativeslayer posted. The most amusing nugget was the Fatah commander musing:

“You know,” he says, “since the takeover, we’ve been trying to enter the brains of Bush and Rice, to figure out their mentality. We can only conclude that having Hamas in control serves their overall strategy, because their policy was so crazy otherwise.”

The problem is that the Serious Adults who have been running US foreign policy since Vietnam have absolutely no credibility and Hiatt is not insignificant among them.