Get well soon, Pat Robertson

By Vince Guerrieri
210 west Managing Editor [send email]

"I tremble for my country when I realize that God is just."
-Thomas Jefferson

One of the perks of my job as a sportswriter is an ability to play Monday-morning quarterback. After the pressure’s off, I get to sit in judgment of players and coaches and figure out what they did wrong.

But even that gets old, so today, I’m going to play doctor, and not in the fun sense. I’m going to look at someone and make a snap diagnosis. (I haven’t taken a biology class since I was 15 years old, but my parents are both nurses and my brother’s an EMT (sometimes). And besides, if a real doctor like Bill Frist thought that Terri Schiavo wasn’t in a persistent vegetative state, then I’m smarter than he is.)

I think sometime in the past six months, Pat Robertson had a stroke. The Virginia-based televangelist has said some things in the past six months that lead me to believe that all of his neurons aren’t firing.

First off, the reverend (and unlike me, who found a Web site that will ordain you no questions asked, he actually went to school for it) suggested that Hugo Chavez, the president of Venezuela, be assassinated.

“I don't know about this doctrine of assassination,” Robertson said on Aug. 22, “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."

Once upon a time, assassinations of foreign leaders by CIA operatives was a matter of course. However, the Church Hearings in the 1970s gutted that provision, as well as took a big bite out of the power of intelligence-gathering organizations. Today, with the increased demand for intelligence, that move seems like folly, but back then, it made perfect sense. Richard Nixon just left office in disgrace, and did we really want a president that could listen in on ordinary Americans’ conversations? (Wait…)

I’m not saying Chavez’s whacking is a bad idea. That’s for minds bigger than mine to ponder. All I’m saying is that if someone were to bring it up, I’d rather it not be one of the founders of an organization called the Christian Coalition.

Chavez, for his part, decided to do Americans a favor, offering heating oil and diesel fuel to big cities. Either he’s a better Christian than is Robertson, or he’s committing the best PR move of all time.

Moving on, Robertson also suggested that the people of Dover, PA, abandoned God when they threw out a school board that supported the idea of intelligent design.

"I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover,” Robertson said on Nov. 11, “If there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city."

Now, the idea of intelligent design isn’t a bad one on its face. The idea, simply, is that this world – indeed, this universe – is far too complex to have just happened. The idea is that some creator made this world. It’s not a difficult idea to get behind if you believe in any concept of a higher power.

But the idea has been corrupted by people who believe they’re doing the Lord’s work/ City Hall, one of Al Pacino’s most underrated performances, he quotes Fiorello La Guardia. The Little Flower, former mayor and Congressman from New York City, said “Whenever someone has a good idea, why do the good people step in and mess everything up?”

They think that God created the world in six days (on the seventh day, he watched football) 10,000 years ago. These are the same people, as Tina Fey on Saturday Night Live put it, who believe that Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs to church.

A majority of these true believers were elected to the school board in Dover, part of the Big T in Pennsylvania. Jim Carville, the political strategist who cut his teeth on the gubernatorial campaign of Robert Casey Sr., said that Pennsylvania consisted of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia and a big T in the middle that was Alabama. Lynn Swann is hoping that enough Steelers fans combine with conservatives in the Big T who’ll vote for a black man to become governor.

The idea of intelligent design was added to the science curriculum, but a lawsuit broke out. The board members that promoted this were voted out in November, disproving H.L. Mencken’s idea that we get the government we deserve. According to Robertson, they were all running on the God platform, and since they were voted out, so was God.

Most recently, Robertson suggested that Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon’s stroke was divine retribution. Personally, I don’t buy it. If divine retribution existed, why is Art Modell still walking the earth?

Robertson suggested that Sharon was stricken down with a severe stroke because he was trying to split the Holy Land between Israelis and Palestinians. He went on to suggest that former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated for the same reason.

To be fair, Robertson backed off from some of his statements, offering a clarification. He said he was merely trying to accommodate Chavez, who had suggested that the United States was already making efforts to assassinate him. Robertson suggested that perhaps we should turn to Charles Darwin for help instead of God, that we can’t keep sticking our finger in God’s eye.

Robertson’s been known to say stupid things for many years. But three galactically dumb things in so short a span? It sounds to me like the statements of a man who might have had a stroke.

Not that it's divine retribution or anything.