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Originally Posted by roachboy
i dont think anyone in their right mind would confuse the raving of this tedious fundamentalist protestant tele-evangelist fuckwit with all of christianity.
you would have to have an understanding of christianity that is a crude and one-dimensional as, say, the american right's "understanding" of islam to reach such a ridiculous conclusion.
or you would have to actually believe the claim that floats from the right from time to time that it and it alone represents christianity by representing its extreme protestant reactionary fringe.
this in the face of all evidence and reason but it sometimes appears that contemporary conservative politics is not encumbered with a terribly tight relation to evidence and reason (they believe that hayek was describing something that acutally existed for example)
on the other hand, the extreme protestant right was and remains a significant element in the far right coalition fashioned by the republicans across the 1990s (all of which is a kind of colossal unintended consequence of the clinton/morris "triangulation" strategy)....so it seems to me that this kind of statement being associated with that coalition is not unreasonable...in fact, you would think that folk from the right woudl try to own up to iteven as it is embarrassing rather than whining about some fantasy left media conspiracy. robertson is your boy, conservatives---you use him and his influence when it is convenient and then try to distance yourselves when he says something embarrassing.
if this kind of statement is in fact an embarrassment and if it runs counter to the reality of the conservative coalition out there, then what one would expect to see is a distancing from the religious right on the part of the republican party.
have you seen any evidence of this?
i havent.
so it follows that embarrassment generated by people like pat robertson is a function of the way the right has constructed its social power.
so there seems to be no basis for distancing.
which explains bizare reactions like those posted earlier by matthew330---no other choice for the far right on this matter.
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The reason the Republicans won't distance themselves from Robertson is because he gets them votes. If they distance themselves, they risk losing votes. The same as how Democrats don't distance themselves from their nutcases (the dems nominate their nuts to head the DNC).
And it's humourous that you would say it's ridiculous to associate Robertson's views with all of Christianity, but have no problem associating those views with all Rebublicans/conservatives. It seems you must see conservatives everywhere, flying in black helicopters, shadowing people down dark alleys, sending thought-stealing rays at peoples' heads, etc. Not everything is some grand, conservative scheme for world-domination, nor are liberals somehow exempt from doing wrong.
And more on point, I used to think that Robertson had at least some redeeming values, but stuff like this makes it really hard to logically keep to that belief.