Murder in the name of Christ

THOU SHALT NOT KILL*

* unless thy victim shall have sympathies with Fidel Castro, and/or the 5th-largest petroleum reserves on the planet, and/or a disagreement with the man whom God Himself installed as your leader here on Earth.

It seems that alleged televangelist Pat Robertson has taken it upon himself to amend the Ten Commandments. And you thought they'd stop with trying to amend the Constitution! Ha!!

You see, Pat Robertson has decided, in his infinite godly wisdom, that the right and moral and Christian thing for the United States to do, in order to promote our moral leadership around the world, is to assassinate the democratically elected President of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez. I'm not talking "democratically elected" in the fashion of Saddam, Stalin, Mao, or Bush; I'm talking about someone who actually legitimately won a fair election. Maybe you don't like the policies he pursues. That's your right, and as an American you are free to voice that opinion. However, unless you're a Venezuelan citizen, that's the extent of your rights in the matter, and even if you're Venezuelan, you still don't have the right to assassinate him.

This isn't some little sexual pecadillo, like getting busy with prostitutes in a cheap motel while preaching sexual fidelity in monogamous marriage. We're talking big-time hypocrisy here. If Jimmy Bakker was defrocked for his Sins, then, boy howdy, Pat Robertson has no business ever calling himself "Reverend" again.

Of course, before I got this message posted to my blog, there's that rapscallion Jon Stewart telling you all about it on television, so let me give you a bit more background.

In 2002, there was a coup d'etat (or, in French, "coup d'état") in Venezuela. The United States government, or at least some minor functionary named George Walker Bush, immediately congratulated the right-wing junta that seized power from the legitimate government. There's also the ever-so-slightly inconvenient fact that the Bush administration encouraged and supported the coup even before the fact, not to mention that Chávez was returned to power only two days later. President Chávez has the audacity to accuse the U.S. government of trying to get rid of him by force, just because it's true! Shameful! Dare I say it — sinful!!

And so along comes a man of the Cloth, a man with a direct uplink to the mind of God, Pat Robertson. (It has been my pleasure to ridicule Pat Robertson in private for over thirty years, ever since I first saw The 700 Club on the CBN's station in Dallas, KXTX [no longer a CBN affiliate]. They were so committed to their Christian principles that they wouldn't show six episodes of the original Star Trek series due to "Satanic content." [Wolf in the Fold, Catspaw, And the Children Shall Lead, Where No Man Has Gone Before, and two others lost in the fog of a time portal just the other side of Alpha Centauri.] But now it will be my great pleasure to watch earnest right-wing so-called Christians trip over themselves, trying to pretend that Pat Robertson is either sane or Christian, much less both.)

You know, I don't know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he [Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez] thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war, and I don't think any oil shipments will stop. ... We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability. We don't need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator. It's a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives [like Valerie Plame?] do the job and then get it over with. — "Reverend" Pat Robertson, "Christian" Broadcasting Network, Monday, August 22, 2005

As you've no doubt noticed by now, I'm a bit of a math geek, so, Let's do the math! One human life (foreigner, probably Catholic but clearly not a "true [Republican] Christian") is worth about $200 billion? Or is that only because he's a foreign leader? Where do I plug the value of the oil supplies into the equation? Should I use simple algebra or something fancier? I mean, if Robertson has a direct line to God, then we should at least use something a little more sophisticated than x + y = z. Mr. Psi, fire up the bra's and the ket's and get ready to go quantum!

Well, either that or Pat Robertson is a bat-shit insane servant of Satan for even suggesting such a thing.