ARTICLES FROM CURRENT ASTROLOGERS

John McCain’s pastor problems are the opposite of Obama’s. Far from filling in the gaps in a thin biography, McCain’s courting of the fundamentalist right is an attempt to rewrite his history and shore up weak support from an important GOP constituency.

In early 2008 the McCain campaign actively sought, and was pleased to receive, the endorsement of John Hagee, pastor and founder of the 19,000-member nondenominational evangelical Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas. Hagee is also the president and CEO of John Hagee Ministries, which provides programming carried on more than 160 TV stations and 50 radio stations across the country, reaching 99 million homes weekly. The endorsement was an important beachhead on the fundamentalist shore, but almost immediately McCain found himself parsing the distance between Hagee’s endorsement and his extreme views, stating on the very next day, at a town hall meeting in Houston, “Yesterday, Pastor John Hagee endorsed my candidacy for president in San Antonio, Texas. However, in no way did I intend for his endorsement to suggest that I in turn agree with all of Pastor Hagee’s views, which I obviously do not.”


Pastor John Hagee

And who could? Among Hagee’s assertions are that Hurricane Katrina was divine retribution for “a level of sin that was offensive to God” and proof “of the judgment of God against the city of New Orleans,” citing a “homosexual parade” that had been scheduled for the day the Big Easy flooded, a parade no one else seems to have been aware of (perhaps Hagee is on their mailing list).

He has termed Catholicism “the Great ****,” a biblical reference to the book of Revelation, where
this unidentified, allegorical character figures prominently in the rise of the Antichrist and Armageddon.

Of Islam, he has stated that devout Muslims have a clear “scriptural mandate to kill Christians and Jews,” and on a more pragmatic note has estimated that even if just 15% of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims adhere to this agenda, that represents 200 million people “that want to come to America or invade Israel to crush it,” comparing that number favorably with the threats posed by Hitler and the Axis powers in World War II.