Obsolete

Every so often someone comes along and says that so and so should be killed. It's a pretty regular occurrence. Last year around the time of the US election, Charlie Brooker, who writes a column commenting on TV, covered the debates and wrote this:

On November 2, the entire civilised world will be praying, praying Bush loses. And Sod's law dictates he'll probably win, thereby disproving the existence of God once and for all. The world will endure four more years of idiocy, arrogance and unwarranted bloodshed, with no benevolent deity to watch over and save us. John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr - where are you now that we need you?

Not probably the smartest thing to write admittedly. However, Brooker is a satirist. He writes hilariously and harshly on TV programs, and his column is meant to be humourous. It wasn't meant as a call to arms. Despite this, as can be expected, the right wing lunatic blogger fringe found it and jumped up and down and got the Guardian to print a sort of clarification. Brooker is a journalist, and one pretty low-down the food chain. He's no Seymour Hersh. He doesn't inspire much militancy or garner that much attention in general. Yesterday however, one person who just can't stop saying ignorant and bigoted things stuck his foot in his mouth again. He is Pat Robertson, and he does have a large audience.

Mr Robertson, 75, said on Monday's edition of the 700 Club: "You know, I don't know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he 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."

A spokeswoman for the Christian Broadcasting Network told the BBC: "We are at a time of war and Pat had war on his mind when he made the comments."

Yeah, he had war on his mind. The war being the one between the part of his brain that knows he shouldn't say things he's going to regret later, and the other part the encourages him to spout drivel such as this:

"We have allowed rampant secularism and occult, et cetera, to be broadcast on television. We have permitted somewhere in the neighborhood of 35 to 40 million unborn babies to be slaughtered in our society. We have a Court that has essentially stuck its finger in God's eye and said, 'We're going to legislate you out of the schools, we're going to take your Commandments from off the courthouse steps in various states, we're not going to let little children read the Commandments of God, we're not going to let the Bible be read -- no prayer in our schools.' We have insulted God at the highest levels of our government. And, then we say 'why does this happen?' Well, why its happening is that God Almighty is lifting His protection from us."

That was two days after the September the 11th attacks. Note he doesn't blame fanatical suicidal terrorists, or any government. No, what he's attacking is society itself. We're bringing all this on ourselves with our decadence and our decision to separate church from state and not live our lives by a book that was written thousands of years ago, which has been mistranslated, and then badly interpreted by people such as himself.

The sad facts of this are that the US probably wants to assassinate Hugo Chavez. The CIA already tried to get rid of him through a shortlived coup in 2002. It failed when huge demonstrations demanded that Chavez be returned to power. He's since won referendums on his changes to the constitution, and attempts to remove him from power. It's surprising the US hasn't done anything to Venezuela in the last few years apart from try to support the opposition without getting overly noticed. Perhaps Robinson knows something we don't. Or maybe he's just a man slowly going senile with a world view that belongs to an era long gone. Whichever it is, don't expect for him to be condemned like Charlie Brooker was. After all, Chavez has won elections. Bush didn't the first time, and may not have done the second. But he sure has a lot more support from those who are important than Chavez does.