January 14, 2010

Pat Robertson's an idiot…

By: Sonny Bunch

…and a number of people have said as much! Just looking at my own meager Twitter feed, I’ve seen about a half dozen comments from people saying that Robertson — who said that the Haitians had this coming because of a pact with the devil, or some such nonsense that I’m not even going to bother reading or linking to — needs to sit down and shut the hell up. For example, Jordan Gerkhe asked “So what pact w/the devil did the US make that we get stuck w/Pat Robertson making an ass of himself all the time & how do we get out of it?” Andrew Breitbart said “I’m going to try to be diplomatic here, Rev. Robertson. No more apologies. Please go away.” There were other, less diplomatic responses, but you get the point.

This isn’t enough, however, for Adam Serwer, of The American Prospect, who Tweeted “Somehow I must have missed all the GOP calls for Pat Robertson to resign.” As Mike Riggs replied, the question to be asked in return is “resign from what”? Robertson runs a private church/business; he’s not a Republican official. Is it not enough to ignore him most of the time and and then condemn him when he says something stupid? It’d be one thing if you had people going on the air and saying “The Reverend Robertson is right: Those poor Haitians had it coming.” Or, say, a Republican presidential candidate had been a member of Robertson’s church for 20 years where he routinely said horrible, racist things while said candidate sat in the pews, nodding along.

(Oops, can’t talk about the religious figures that presidential candidates associate with, can we? It’s poor form…)

So yeah. Pat Robertson’s an idiot. I condemn what he says. I dare Serwer (or anyone else) to find someone in the non-loony right (World Net Daily, for example, doesn’t count as the non-loony right, just as PETA doesn’t count as the non-loony left) who supports what Robertson said.