Chicago Daily Observer

Since both John McCain and Barack Obama purport to be persons of faith and prayer, I have devised a little prayer for both of them. It goes:

“Lord, save me from my friends—I can cope perfectly well with my enemies.”

Oddly enough, some of the friends plaguing or having plagued both candidates are themselves persons of faith and prayer.

We need no further reminders, do we, of Rev. Jeremiah Wright and more recently Father Michael Pfleger and the varying degrees of damage they have inflicted on Obama?

“Poof!” declares Obama, quite wisely, “they are no longer my friends.”

Then there are the Reverends John Hagee and Rod Parsley. Until very recently they were McCain’s newest best friends of convenience, vigorously courted to calm the qualms of the fundamentalist evangelical constituency so necessary to Republican victory. Trouble is, their historic histrionics seriously offended other necessary constituencies.

“Poof,” declares McCain, quite wisely, ... Read More...

On May 13, John McCain supporter John Haggee issued an apology to the Catholic League for controversial anti-Catholic comments he’s made in the past. “Catholic League President William Donoghue [sic] accepted the apology,” noted Washington Post’s Michael D. Shear in the midst of his 8-paragraph story published the following day.

Shear closed by noting that ”[n]ot all Catholics were mollified” by Hagee’s letter of apology, citing “Alexia Kelley, executive director of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good.” Shear failed to label Kelley nor the Alliance as liberal, although a visit to their Web site makes it pretty clear their political agenda skews in favor of liberal Democratic social welfare initiatives.

But more telling is this: Kelley used to work for the DNC during the Kerry campaign as Director of Religious Outreach. Catholic or no, it’s not all that surprising that the former liberal Democratic Party staffer would refuse ... Read More...

Pastor John Hagee sent a letter today [click here] to Catholic League president Bill Donohue that effectively ends the dispute the two men have had. Donohue comments as follows:

“After weeks of meeting with various Catholic leaders, and accessing scholarly literature on Catholic-Jewish relations, Pastor John Hagee has demonstrated an improved understanding of the Catholic Church and its history. In his letter to me, Hagee says, ‘I want to express my deep regret for any comments that Catholics have found hurtful.’ He specifically cites his emphasis of ‘the darkest chapters in the history of Catholic and Protestant relations with the Jews,’ and has pledged to provide a more complete and balanced portrayal going forward that will not reinforce mischaracterizations of the Catholic Church. And while he stresses that his invocation of terms like ‘apostate church’ and the ‘great whore’ were never meant by him to describe the Catholic Church, he ... Read More...

Jeremiah Wright is still a stone around Barack Obama’s neck and his supporters want to lay the same weight on John McCain by using Rev. John Hagee, televangelist and pastor of a Texas mega church who endorsed McCain at McCain’s request.

Jeremiah Wright has made it impossible to pretend that he was quoted out of context so Obama’s supporters have given the candidate a pass and taken to attacking those who told you the truth about Wright in the first place.

Frank Rich writes, in the New York Times, his belief that white people are attacking Wright/Obama and giving a pass to Hagee/McCain. Today in the Sun-Times Andrew Greeley repeats that Hagee hates Catholics.

I hear the same thing from some callers and e-mailers to my show on WLS in Chicago, hometown to Wright and Obama. Rich and the callers are wrong in their belief that the ... Read More...