By Chris Floyd - The Moscow Times March 8, 2002.
"G.
W. Bush credits Graham with "planting the seeds" of
fundamentalist faith in his pre-presidential person during a
family gathering in 1985. Graham was visiting the Bush clan's
luxurious compound in Maine, mooching free meals and sucking
up to the sitting vice president, Daddy Bush. (Well, what else
should a disciple of Christ be doing? Breaking bread with the
poor or something? Get real.) "
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Picture this: The skulking ruler of a corrupt
and vicious regime, hunkered down in his palace, besieged by the forces of
good as he plots to unleash weapons of mass destruction on his "satanic"
foes across the sea. Accused of war crimes and military aggression, he
cynically turns to religion, often calling in the leader of the country's
largest fundamentalist sect to lend "moral" support to the criminal
regime. Together, the ruler and the holy man engage in frenzied diatribes
against the enemies of the state, especially that sinister conspiratorial
power lurking behind every eruption of evil in the world -- the
Jews.
A portrait of Saddam Hussein, raging
desperately as he braces for the final reckoning at the hands of history's
avenging angel, George W. Bush? No, it's just our ole pal Tricky Dick --
Nixon, that is, not Cheney -- back from the dead in White House tapes
released this week: yet another star turn from the Founding Father of
modern U.S. politics.
In the tapes, recorded in early 1972, we find
Nixon hankering to hurl his nuclear thunderbolts at Vietnam -- standard
Cold War ranting for the apostate Quaker, who first suggested nuking 'Nam
back in 1954. More relevant to the current scene is the Jew-bashing duet
Nixon shares with the American elite's favorite fire-breathing
evangelical, the Reverend (sic) Billy Graham.
Graham has -- not to put too fine a point on it
-- sucked from the teat of U.S. power for more than 50 years, lending his
"moral authority" to various presidents (usually when they're in political
hot water) then leveraging the resultant publicity into boffo box office
for his stadium harangues around the world. He is perhaps best known in
recent years for a miracle that changed the course of human history --
saving the soul of the aforementioned angel, G.W. Bush.
Bush credits Graham with "planting the seeds"
of fundamentalist faith in his pre-presidential person during a family
gathering in 1985. Graham was visiting the Bush clan's luxurious compound
in Maine, mooching free meals and sucking up to the sitting vice
president, Daddy Bush. (Well, what else should a disciple of Christ be
doing? Breaking bread with the poor or something? Get real.)
At that time, of course, young George was in
wastrel mode, boozing it up and losing millions of dollars of other
people's money in the oil companies Daddy's friends gave him to play with.
But the meeting with Graham struck a chord in the lost soul, as Bush
himself (or rather his ghostwriter) tells it, in properly hagiographic
tones: "[Graham] sat by the fire and talked. And what he said sparked a
change in my heart. I don't remember the exact words. It was more the
power of his example. The Lord was so clearly reflected in his gentle and
loving demeanor."
That divine emanation was somewhat occluded in
the Nixon meeting, where Graham heatedly denounced "satanic Jews" and
warned Nixon that the "Jewish stranglehold" on the national media "has got
to be broken or the country's going down the drain." The Lord-reflecting
preacher then gently and lovingly described how he turned the Jews'
two-faced perfidy against them with wily Christian deception of his
own.
"A lot of Jews are great friends of mine,"
Graham begins with gentle, loving sarcasm. "They swarm around me and are
friendly to me, because they know I am friendly to Israel and so forth.
But they don't know how I really feel about what they're doing to this
country, and I have no power and no way to handle them."
Graham chortles heartily when Nixon's toady and
enforcer, H.R. Haldeman (the Karl Rove of his day) tells him to "wear a
Jewish beanie" at an upcoming meeting with Time Magazine editors. And he
yearns for a Nixon re-election later in the year: "Then we might be able
to do something" about those nefarious Hebrews, says Graham.
As with Bush, Graham's potent spiritual seed
found fertile ground in Nixon. "It's good we got this point about the Jews
across," the president says after the meeting. "The Jews are an
irreligious, atheistic, immoral bunch of bastards."
This week Graham issued a most Nixonian reply
to the taped revelations, saying he had "no memory" of the occasion, but
even so, he "deeply regretted" comments he "apparently made" during the
meeting. "Apparently?" Perhaps those "satanic Jews" doctored the tape, eh,
Billy? As it says in the Gospels: "When the sins of thy past confront
thee, always use a weasel-word to squirm thy way out."
These days, the elderly Graham is too frail to
whack the Bible leather on the road anymore. His place has been taken by
his son, Franklin, who runs the racket along the same old lines: hell-fire
for the common folk, political cover for the high and mighty. Indeed,
Franklin was called upon by the skulking ruler of yet another corrupt and
vicious regime in January 2001, when he showered the Lord's blessing on
the illicit inauguration of the unelected wastrel whom Daddy Graham put on
the road to glory all those years ago.
Meanwhile, Bush is still faithful to his Imam's
teaching. He believes Jews are damned to eternal torment, unless they
adopt his own pinched and primitive fundamentalist faith, an opinion that
once landed him in hot water with his less jihadic mother. Alarmed at her
son's ignorant intolerance, she called -- who else? -- Graham to set
Junior straight. Graham's response? "I happen to agree with what George
says."
Well, he would, wouldn't he?
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