Pat Robertson woke up in a fighting mood and hit his usual "I wuz misinterpreted" notes on his show this morning. After the show he apparently reviewed the tape from Monday and said, "Oops. Senior moment. I really did say we should assasinate Hugo Chavez."
So now he is sorry.
Sort of.
On his website he acknowledges that it's not nice to assasinate someone. Most of the time. He takes pains to note that trying to assasinate Hitler was God's work and reinterates his stand that Chavez is really really bad. But since he apologized for advocating extreme prejudice for Chavez, apparently he doesn't qualify. For anyone playing Who Would Jesus Whack at home, bear in mind the apparent gray area between Chavez and Hitler.
While Pat apologized (mostly) for the comment, a few other apologies were notably absent.
-He has yet to apologize to the news media in general and AP in particular for saying that they misinterpreted his remark.
-He has yet to apoligize to his glassy-eyed followers loyal viewers for, well, lying his Christian ass off this morning. Given his penchant for saying outrageous things, then denying it, such an apology would diverge sharply from Pat's usual post-gaffe arc.
-Finally he hasn't apologized to anyone for characterizing Chavez as a dictator. Hugo Chavez is the popularly elected president of his country. And not elected at gunpoint like Saddam was elected -- he is genuinely popular and won elections observed by international monitors. And it's not like Pat doesn't know what a dictator looks like -- after all, he has broken bread with Charles Taylor of Liberia and Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire. Yet Pat insists on using the term dictator. Unapologetically.
RIP, JOHN OLESKY
5 months ago
1 comments:
I think Robertson was just being nostalgic for a simpler time in American foreign policy when the only criteria used to evaluate whether to support or oppose a foreign leader was how friendly they were to America. Criteria such as opinions of citizens (or treatment of citizens) in the country were somewhat less relevant. Some of our biggest problems can be seen to stem directly from some decisions that were made this way (c.f. Iran, 1953 and support for a certain S. Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980's for two of the clearest examples).
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