Will Lieberman Skip Hagee Event?

Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut is scheduled to appear as the featured speaker at a July conference in Washington for a group run by the Rev. John C. Hagee, the televangelist whose controversial statements led Senator John McCain to disavow Mr. Hagee’s endorsement of his presidential campaign.

Last week, Mr. McCain, of Arizona, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, rejected the support of Mr. Hagee, among the highest-profile evangelicals to back him, saying several of Mr. Hagee’s remarks were reprehensible. Mr. McCain had been under pressure for weeks to renounce Mr. Hagee, who had said that God created Hurricane Katrina to punish New Orleans for its sins and that the Catholic Church conspired with Hitler.

But the comments that finally caused Mr. McCain to break with Mr. Hagee were in an audio tape that surfaced last week in which the pastor had preached that, “Hitler and the Nazis were sent by God, to chase Jews back to the land of Israel.” He added that, “The Holocaust was a gruesomely inefficient system of divine ‘persuasion’.” Mr. McCain said the remarks were “crazy and unacceptable.”

Mr. Lieberman, who was the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 2000 but was reelected to the Senate in 2006 as an independent, is both a close friend and political supporter of Mr. McCain. Asked Tuesday whether he still plans to speak at the event, his spokesman, Marshall Wittmann, declined comment, saying that Mr. Lieberman left for Asia in the early morning and could not be reached en route.

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/will-lieberman-skip-hagee-event/

If he doesn't, then he's SERIOUSLY nuts.

The influence of hate-preachers in mainstream American politics seems quite scary to an outsider. Though we have it to a far more limited extent: Northern Ireland politics has been badly warped by the extremism and hate-preaching of the revolting Ian Paisley.

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"A dovish pro-Israel lobby wants U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman to cut ties with the Rev. John Hagee.

J Street, the recently established dovish pro-Israel group, launched a petition drive Tuesday to get Lieberman (I-Conn.), the first Jew selected for a realistic spot on a national ticket when he was Democrat Al Gore's vice presidential nominee in 2000, to distance himself from Hagee.

U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, last week rejected the endorsement of the founder and leader of Christians United for Israel when it emerged that in the 1990s Hagee had espoused a theology that depicted Adolf Hitler as a "hunter" spurring Jews to return to their ancestral homeland.

Lieberman (I-Conn.), who backs McCain for the presidency, remains close to Hagee and is scheduled to speak at his organization's Washington conference this summer.

"With McCain's renunciation of Hagee last week following his remarks that Hitler was just doing God's bidding, the new campaign takes Sen. Joe Lieberman to task for continuing to stand 'shoulder-to-shoulder' with the pastor and to vouch for his 'pro-Israel' credentials," a J Street blast e-mail said. "This, despite the fact that the primacy the pastor places on Israel has everything to do with his apocalyptic vision of the hereafter and nothing to do with Israel's best interest in the here-and-now."

http://www.jta.org/cgi-bin/iowa/breaking/108790.html