Focus on the fundies: fatwa diplomacy

This gets stranger by the day. After publicly criticizing Pat Robertson for his nutty fatwa on the president of Venuzuela, an evangelical leader has said he will fly to Mexico to try to meet Hugo Chavez and apologize personally. Ted Haggard, senior pastor of New Life Church in Colorado Springs (and the subject of a feature in Harper's earlier this summer), is the president of the National Association of Evangelicals, a loose association of fundamentalist churches.

Interestingly, there's no love lost between Robertson and Haggard. In a discussion of environmentalists gaining ground among conservative Christians, the following discussion took place between Robertson and U.S. Sen. James Inhofe (R. - OK.):

Sen. James Inhofe: You know, I was so excited that we were winning all of these things, and now we have this far-Left group coming in trying to capture the evangelical Christians. We can't let it happen, Pat.

Pat Robertson: Do you think Ted Haggard is a little naïve? Do you think he understands what he is getting into?

Inhofe: Well, I called him up. In the first article I saw, they mentioned the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) and I called up Ted Haggard, and he said quite frankly, well, I don't want to be part of a group like that. They also mentioned Chuck Colson and Jim Dobson. I called both of them up and they said, no, they are lying. We are not a part of that -- we are not for the global warming agenda -- that's the poster child of the far Left -- in fact, we know better, we preach against it.

So what we have here is a mainstream conservative, Haggard, pulling a hotdog play by trying to seem like the rational, reasonable fundamentalist, while Robertson is allowed to be a loose cannon. But what accounts for a U.S. senator kissing Robertson's ass like this, I cannot begin to explain.

Oh all right -- it's easy to explain. If you're from Oklahoma, that's where the votes are. Gee, that wasn't so hard to explain after all.

Previously:
Getting it down Pat
Robertson issues fatwa