McCain: I would vote for Muslim president
Wow! What an open-minded guy!
GOP presidential hopeful Senator John McCain, R-Arizona, says he feels religion should play a role in one’s selection of a presidential candidate. “I think the number one issue people should make [in the] selection of the President of the United States is ‘Will this person carry on the Judeo Christian principled tradition that has made this nation the greatest experiment in the history of mankind?’”
McCain made the comments an in interview with beliefnet, a website that covers religious issues and affairs.
“I just have to say in all candor that since this nation was founded primarily on Christian principles, personally, I prefer someone who has a grounding in my faith,” he said when asked about a Muslim candidate running for president.
Um, CNN? That sounds distinctly like a guy who would not vote for a Muslim candidate. In fact, that’s almost exactly what he said, is that he wouldn’t vote for a Muslim candidate. Did you forget the “n’t” in the headline, or what?
Mr. McCain contacted beliefnet after the interview to clarify his remarks. “I would vote for a Muslim if he or she was the candidate best able to lead the country and defend our political values,” he said.
“The Senator did not intend to assert that members of one religious faith or another have a greater claim to American citizenship over another,” Jill Hazelbaker, McCain’s communication director told CNN when asked for clarification on his comments.
Ms. Hazelbaker said this in an extremely hoarse voice, which she ascribed scratchily to “screaming at my boss for twenty minutes until I got him to call beliefnet back.”
Then again, maybe the blog title writer is really trying to screw McCain over, since there’s a large portion of the wingnut base who wouldn’t vote for a guy who would vote for a guy who had ever been in the same room as the Qu’ran.
As demonstrated by Free Republic. Read the responses to a version of the article before the “clarification.” My favorite, for some idiosyncratic reason:
The writer of this article better take a better look at the [Constitution].
The writer says “There is no mention of God, Jesus or Christ in that entirely secular document”
At the bottom of the document, it reads
“Done in convention by the unanimous consent of the states present the seventeenth day of September in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty seven and of the independence of the United States of America the twelfth.”
I guess the writer doesn’t think LORD is God.
Just a technical point.
Hey buddy, are you familiar with the concept of “winning the battle and losing the war”?
I wonder if he thinks signing a letter “Yours truly” represents a pledge of one’s life. It would certainly explain that restraining order Publisher’s Clearing House took out.
He’s definitely a man who believes in honesty-in-signatures:
(ISLAM AND DEMOCRATS ARE THE ARMY OF SATAN. THEY ARE AL-MUFSIDOON (CRIMINALS BOUND FOR HELL.))
I’m pretty sure McCain wasn’t going to get guys like him, anyway. This is definitely a Tancredo man.
Two tangents from the Week That Was Imus Week:
I miss Lars-Erik Nelson, O great Zeus on Olympus by Gojira’s cleansing fiery (and minty!) breath how I miss Lars-Erik Nelson. Yesterday, Editor and Publisher ran an item about Nelson’s column on — get this — Imus’s long bilious trail and (for extra added bonus points) Joe Lieberman’s sanctimonious hypocrisy. The column was written in 1995. Nelson died of an apparent stroke on November 20, 2000. His last published piece appeared in the December 21, 2000 issue of the New York Review of Books; it was a typically eagle-eyed takedown of a fawning biography of Henry “Scoop? Jackson, the father of today’s “liberal? hawks. You know how exasperated I used to get on my old blog whenever I read Richard Cohen or Peter Beinart? Right? Well, Nelson was basically the opposite of those guys. Whip-smart and constitutionally unhoodwinkable. It’s no surprise to learn that Nelson was the person to break the silence and explain to Gwen Ifill why her colleagues thought that Imus “had a problem? with her:
I was covering the White House for this newspaper in 1993, when Mr. Imus’s producer began calling to invite me on his radio program. I didn’t return his calls. I had my hands plenty full covering Bill Clinton.
Soon enough, the phone calls stopped. Then quizzical colleagues began asking me why Don Imus seemed to have a problem with me. I had no idea what they were talking about because I never listened to the program.
It was not until five years later, when Mr. Imus and I were both working under the NBC News umbrella — his show was being simulcast on MSNBC; I was a Capitol Hill correspondent for the network — that I discovered why people were asking those questions. It took Lars-Erik Nelson, a columnist for The New York Daily News, to finally explain what no one else had wanted to repeat.
“Isn’t The Times wonderful,? Mr. Nelson quoted Mr. Imus as saying on the radio. “It lets the cleaning lady cover the White House.?
I can’t confirm this, but I believe that at the time, Rush Limbaugh blamed Imus’s “cleaning lady? remark on soul music, noting that Betty Wright had recorded the song “Cleanup Woman? in 1972.
