Pat Robertson Redux

Forbes Magazine ^ | February 2, 2006 | James Brady

[son of caesar]

I do not share many beliefs with pat robertson. reading your post, it is apparent you simply dont like the man and use some kind of money angle to try to smear him. chavez is a dictator and as such he owns all of venezuelas oil. note that he does with it as he pleases. This simple fact would make him one of the richest men on the planet. Pat Robertsons money would be a pimple on chavezs ass.

[billhilly]

" Pat Robertsons money would be a pimple on chavezs ass."

And mine on Robertson's.

[Gamecock]

[wideminded]

A Liberal columnist writing his comments and using the New York Times as a reference. That's about as much credibility as MAD magazine.

I don't think Brady is accurately described as a "liberal columnist". I saw him speaking on C-SPAN2. It was quite fascinating. He is a Korean War veteran and recently went back to Korea to visit and write about the area where he fought. While visiting some U.S. generals, he pulled out the original military map he had used in 1951and showed then the hill he had been fighting for and said that he felt he had earned the right to go back for a visit. They were very interested and called in some Korean officers to look at the map. It turned out the hill is still a South Korean base and Brady was given permission to visit.

In response to a question from the audience, Brady also described his first hand knowledge of Pat Robertson during the Korean War and told how P.R. had had to back down from his lawsuit concerning a previous Brady article after Brady rounded up several other vets who recalled Robertson's statements and behavior on the ship to Korea.

[Malesherbes]

LOL! "Chavez should be assassinated again."

[Edit35]

Pat Robertson is a good man and a good American. Sometimes he speaks from his heart before engaging his brain.

I too used to feel sympathetic support toward Pat Robertson, having been raised a fundamentalist Christian myself. (I even sent him $$)

After hearing a dozen or more pompous statements where he claims to know the mind of God, I have concluded that Pat has become an egomaniac, believing himself to be appointed by God a modern day prophet.

Now, I think he does more detriment toward the evangelical (and conservative) movement than he does good.

In other words, I wish he would simply disappear into the graveyard of other blowhard TV evangelists who, by their own hand, (Swaggart, Jim and Tammy Fay Baker, etc), ruined their own reputation.

People at my local church (a fairly fundamentalist Baptist church at that) also agree. Robertson has become a liability.

[tkathy]

The last thing China (and the world) needs if 5 or 6 billion starving people.

[DTogo]

Sorry, I confused the televangelist networks of CBN (Pat) with TBN (Paul & Jan). Hinn is on TBN.

[Reagan Man]

So Pat Robertson is a good businessman. No problem with that. This is America after all. Pat hands out donated money, freely given by Americans and people from around the world, to needy people every where. Pat's ministries have educated thousands of people and taken care of their medical and spiritual needs. Pat Robertson lives a comfortable life, a life he has built for himself, his family and friends. Just like Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell. People of faith are human beings. They don't have to live in abject poverty to be people of God.

[A.A. Cunningham]

Robertson is a sanctimonious puke.

Brady On Media
Pat Robertson Redux
James Brady, 02.02.06, 6:00 AM ET

Each time the Rev. Pat Robertson mounts the considerable pulpit of his daily TV variety show, The 700 Club, to announce that God is about to punish someone with whom Robertson disagrees, old Marines ask, "Can you believe he’s shooting off his mouth again?"

These are usually Marine officers of Korean War vintage who served with Pat half a century ago when we were all young lieutenants heading to the wars. They know the Rev and are not at all reluctant to comment, as they did when Robertson used his show (which Nielsen gives an average daily audience of 828,000) to urge we assassinate bothersome Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, when he blamed terrorist attacks and Hurricane Katrina on the U.S. abortion rate, when he warned God might punish Pennsylvania for a school board that approved of Darwin, and, most recently, when he suggested Ariel Sharon’s stroke resulted from his "dividing God's land" of Israel.

A New York Times headline read: "Even Pat Robertson's friends are wondering…."

I can assure his friends that Pat hasn't flipped out or is suddenly feeling his age. The man began talking too much 55 years ago. I've alluded briefly to this on CSPAN2 and in a book published last May by St. Martin’s Press, The Scariest Place in the World, while another Marine officer and nine-term Republican congressman from California named Pete McCloskey devoted chapters to it in a self-published book called The Taking of Hill 610.

In January 1951, the battered 1st Marine Division had just survived a deadly battle against the Chinese up at the Chosin Reservoir in the wintry mountains of North Korea, and replacements were desperately needed. A young 2nd Lt. Marion G. "Pat" Robertson, the son of a United States senator, freshly trained at Quantico, shipped out for Korea aboard the troopship General J.C. Breckenridge as one of the 71 Marine officers and 1,900 enlisted men of the 5th Replacement Draft.

During the voyage, in wardroom bull sessions, Pat let it be known that "my daddy," the senator, would intervene to win his son a transfer to Japan. The other young officers sloughed this off as idle boasting, but sure enough, Pat and a handful of others (included as cover?) were posted to Japan while their comrades went into battle in Korea. And when one of the others, who truly wanted to get in the fighting, later volunteered all of them for Korean duty, Pat ended up at division headquarters (a relatively safe posting) as "liquor officer" and courier, traveling back and forth to Japan.

Cut to election year 1988. Touting himself not only as a man of God but as a Marine "combat" vet, Pat was doing very well in the Republican presidential primaries, with Super Tuesday coming up on March 8. But as some of the old "my daddy" stories of 1951 leaked out, and were talked about in Congress and in columns by Jack Anderson and Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, Robertson had to respond. He sued for libel one of his tormentors, McCloskey, a Marine officer of Pat's class but one who had actually fought in Korea, earning the Navy Cross, a Silver Star and two Purple Hearts.

His decision to sue would destroy Robertson's campaign. Until then, pundits were predicting he'd be a convention kingmaker, if not the nominee. But as decorated officers lined up to testify under oath for McCloskey, a federal judge, Joyce Hens Green, set a trial date of March 8, the same day as the big batch of primaries. Robertson was faced with the prospect of Marine officers parading into court as witnesses against him. The judge gave Robertson a choice: withdraw the libel suit against McCloskey or come to court to face those hostile witnesses.

On Monday morning, 24 hours before Super Tuesday's vote, Pat caved and withdrew his lawsuit. Green dismissed the case, and Pat agreed to pay McCloskey's costs. The following day his presidential dream died in the ballot boxes of 19 voting states.

Pete McCloskey is for fellow Marines a heroic figure. Out of office, he remains a Republican, teaches at Santa Clara University, and writes and lives with his wife Nancy in Woodside, Calif. In the book he sent me, Pete wrote movingly of Pat's tragedy:

"It's really rather a shame. Had Robertson survived a rifle platoon leader's experience…his manifest charm and leadership ability might have made him a great political leader, possibly even allowed him to reach the White House."

But the man talked too much.

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[Rastus]

Then let's fire up the brain suckers! In fact, let's lead a percentage of the newborn into the ovens now! Surely the option to not get pregnant in the first place just doesn't exist.

[moog]

That's vintage Robertson. Kind of sounds like a William Bennett comment too.