With Robertson, Giuliani Wins the Nutcase Primary?

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What a day for Rudy Giuliani. After Mitt Romney was recently endorsed by Paul Weyrich, a founding father of the religious right (and the Heritage Foundation) and John McCain got the thumbs up from Senator Sam Brownback, a social conservative champion, Giuliani nabbed one of the biggest fish in the Christian right ocean: Pat Robertson. And unlike Brownback or Weyrich, Robertson has a television network.

By accepting Robertson’s big wet kiss, Giuliani is excusing (or tolerating) Robertson’s long record of religious bigotry. As I wrote back in 2000 when Robertson endorsed George W. Bush, Robertson once

said Episcopalians, Presbyterians and Methodists represent “the spirit of the Antichrist.” He also maintained that “liberal Jews” were mounting “an ongoing attempt to undermine the public strength of Christianity.” He has repeatedly called Hinduism “devil worship.”

Media Matters also has kept track of Robertson’s rhetoric of bigotry.

But there’s something else about Robertson: He is nutty. I’m not merely referring to his belief that God sent a hurricane toward Disney World because the theme park had held a Gay Day. His conspiratorial view of global politics is–how to put it?–insane. He once claimed that President George H.W. Bush was doing the bidding of Satan. Literally. Here’s how I described it years ago:

In 1992, Robertson published a bizarre book called “The New World Order.” In this barely coherent tract, Robertson claimed there was a global (if elusive) conspiracy involving the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, other policy elites, secret societies and New Agers.

The goal of this nefarious coalition was to impose a new world order that would wipe out national sovereignty, foment a “complete redistribution of wealth,” and bring about the “elimination of Christianity.” The key to penetrating the plot, Robertson argued, was to see that the Gulf War [of 1991] that had been waged and won by President Bush was, in fact, “a setup.”

This was Robertson’s reasoning (using the word loosely): “Powerful people of the world wanted a situation that was so obviously dangerous to the entire world that all nations would join together to deal with it…[a situation] that would cause the nations of the world to forget for a time their own claims of sovereignty in order to submerge their interests into that of a worldwide authority such as the United Nations.”

See what was going on? The conspirators cleverly and covertly had orchestrated the origins of the Persian Gulf crisis and then used Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait as a pretense for the first step toward a world government that would eventually obliterate Christianity and bring about all the other horrors Robertson feared.

Robertson revealed that the term “new world order,” which Bush used to justify the Gulf War, has been for the past 200 years “the code phrase of those who desired to destroy the Christian faith … They wish to replace it with an occult-inspired world socialist dictatorship.”

Robertson based his unorthodox insights on his reading of the Bible. The anti-Saddam coalition, he observed, “was the first time since Babel that all of the nations of the earth acted in concert with one another.” And as God showed with the Tower of Babel, he is not fond of nations toiling together…

And who did Robertson peg as the primary force behind this dangerous, anti-Christian new world order? The devil himself!

According to Robertson, President Bush was, wittingly or not, “carrying out the mission and mouthing the phrases of a tightly knit cabal whose goal is nothing less than a new order for the human race under the domination of Lucifer and his followers.”

So Robertson called Daddy Bush a tool of Satan–a pawn for some dark, ultra-secret conspiracy. And he meant it.

Today, Giuliani said of Robertson:

Having him aboard gives us a great deal of confidence because he has a tremendous amount of insight into what the main issues are and how they should be dealt with. His advice is invaluable and his friendship is even more invaluable.”

Well, I can just imagine those conversations during which Robertson shares all his insights about global affairs with Giuliani–particularly when he tries to clue in Giuliani about the netherworld-born plot of secret elites that makes the DaVinci Code conspiracy look like a Sunday school picnic. By the way, does Robertson know that Giuliani’s chief foreign policy adviser is Charles Hill, who once was an aide to U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali? Could Hill be the hidden hand of Satan infiltrating the Giuliani campaign? Watch out, Pat!

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