August 18, 2008, - 6:00 pm
On Rick Warren: What Neither Candidate Said @ the Saddleback Church
By Debbie Schlussel
Everyone watching the Presidential race is talking about the “debate” at Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church.
But no one and neither of the candidates said what should have been said. And that’s that John McCain had no business being at a church of a man who legitimizes and panders to the same country he says he will not: Syria and its leader, Bashar Assad.
Rick Warren not only went to Syria, he praised it as a moderate country and expressed his admiration of it. Maybe next he’ll do the same for Myanmar and Sudan.
While his performance there was impressive, McCain is supposed to be the guy who says we’re fighting in Iraq so we don’t have to fight terrorists here–a completely fraudulent argument since the terrorists are already here and while we’re fighting them there, we’re capitulating to them here.
So what the heck was he doing at the church of a left-wing pseudo-evangelical who reaches out to terrorists–who reaches out to terrorist host-state Syria, where sundry Islamic terrorist groups have their headquarters, where Nazi war criminal Alois Brunner lives in freedom and sanction, where Munich Olympic terrorist Jamil Al-Gashey lives in peace and sanction?
Why did John McCain not say no to Rick Warren? Or if he felt compelled to participate in this “debate,” why did he not say anything about it? He could have scored a lot of points by saying at some point during the debate that he thought it was wrong for a prominent American Christian pastor to legitimize this awful Nazi-like regime in Syria. But he said nothing.
That nauseates me. It shows me that, like Barack Hussein Obama, John McCain has no qualms about the company he keeps. And you can’t tell Obama you object to his ideas of dealing with terrorist states like Iran and Syria with no preconditions, and at the same time elevate the Christian minister who does exactly that when he gives the evangelical seal of approval to a mass murderer–Bashar Assad.
Any preacher or minister that fetes a man who barbarically tortures democratic dissent–as Assad does–and who is involved in the rape of another country, as Assad and his father, Hafez El-Assad did to Lebanon (not to mention the flattening of their own population in Hama), does not deserve the presence of a future President.
We know where Barack Obama stands on “outreach” to these despots. We thought we knew where John McCain stood.
With this Rick Warren confab, perhaps we were wrong.
***
By the way, I do not believe for a second that Pastor Rick Warren represents the thinking of most Evangelical Christians in America. Most of them are against pandering to and legitimizing Syria and the Assads. But, by appearing at Warren’s church and not pointing this out or voicing a tad of an objection, McCain helped elevate this left-wing pandering to Syria.
Those who preach and don’t live what they are preaching don’t exist for me.
And Rick Warren is one of them.
I have too many issues with him and people like him.
That’s why I didn’t watch that “show.”
I was watching a movie that seemed more realistic than the fictitious “pastor” and his company.
Independent Conservative on August 18, 2008 at 6:23 pm