Blogoland

Noted crackpot Pat Robertson has been making news lately about who he wants killed. That's interesting. Even more interesting is the fact that scrubbed from recent accounts is Robertson's noted conspiracy-laced anti-Semitism (well documented by Michael Lind here and here, and in his excellent book, "Up From Conservatism"). A reminder:

..."[T]he founder and the leader of the Christian Coalition proposes that modern world history has been largely determined by a two-centuries-old conspiracy by Bavarian Illuminati, Freemasons, Communists, and Wall Street financiers. Central to the conspiracy has been a succession of Jews, ranging from eighteenth-century Rothschilds in Frankfurt to Moses Hess and the American banker Paul Warburg."

As Lind notes, even John Podhoretz himself had to acknowledge that Robertson was at the minimum guilty of trafficking in anti-Semitic conspiracies. But that didn't stop the right from rallying around Robertson. Now, of course, people like Brit Hume and Mort Kondracke sit on Fox News and dismiss Robertson as a washed-up old has-been. But that wasn't the feeling ten years ago.

Here's the New York Times's lede:

Pat Robertson, the conservative Christian broadcaster, has attracted attention over the years for lambasting feminists, "activist" judges, the United Nations and Disneyland.

Now Mr. Robertson has set off an international firestorm by saying on his television show that the United States should kill the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez, a leftist whose country has the largest oil reserves outside the Middle East.