Is the country so divided that the right wing can’t support the crisis and devastation in Haiti? Is there anyone on the right being truly compassionate? This is a serious question here. Pat Robertson, back, you know, he has a long history of talking weird. Here’s Pat Robertson on Hugo Chavez for example:

“You know I don’t know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we’re trying to assassinate him I think that we really oughta 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.”

So this a man of god, a man who’s made a billion dollars being a man of god calling for the murder of a foreign head of state who was democratically elected twice at the time that that speech was given, or that comment was made.

So yesterday Pat Robertson, it got even weirder. You’ll recall his conversation with Jerry Falwell back after 9/11 where he said, ‘you know god lifted the veil and allowed us to see that because of homosexuality and other sins in America that we were all, God allowed 9/11.’ I mean this was Pat Robertson’s position, that, you know, God hit this country with 9/11, that god would sanction the murder of Hugo Chavez. And now he’s saying this:

“Something happened a long time ago in Haiti and the people may not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French, uh, you know, Napoleon the third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, 'we will serve you if you’ll get us free from the French'. True story. And so the devil said' 'okay it’s a deal'. And they kicked the French out of, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other.”

This guy, here’s, here is Pat Robertson, remember when Ariel Sharon, the prime minister of Israel, had a stroke? Here’s Pat Robertson on that:

“God has enmity against those who 'divide my land' and for any prime minister of Israel who decides he’s going to card it up and give it away, God says, 'no, this is mine'. Now Ariel Sharon, who was again a very likeable person, a delightful person to be with, I prayed with him personally, but here he’s at the point of death, he was dividing God’s land.”

Don’t do what God doesn’t like or God will get ya. God’s an angry murderous psychopath and Pat Robertson’s his official spokesperson. I mean, shouldn’t this give us all some pause? And shouldn’t it cause us to say, 'do we really need to, why am I paying for the fire protection and police protection for Pat Robertson? Why am I paying for his highways? Why am I probably even paying the property tax on the house he lives in ‘cause I’ll bet he’s calling it a parish and saying that it’s, so it’s tax deductible?' Why are we allowing a billion dollar, a billion dollar empire that Pat Robertson runs. Why are we allowing this thing to exist without paying a penny in taxes?

This, you know, I saw, you know, this clip yesterday and last night, Eugene Robinson on Keith Olbermann’s program made the comment of you know this guy is old and senile and the woman on with him should have just let him off when he started on these things about the French made a pact with the devil, but this is not, this is not new. This is something that’s been going on for some time with Pat Robertson. Probably his entire life. He’s probably one of these magical thinking super, hyper superstitious, you know, one step away from the worst kind of voodoo people who really and truly is into this horrible frightening wrathful god that if you say and do the wrong thing, if you don’t have the right politics, Hugo Chavez, then people should kill you in the name of god. If you do the wrong thing in your own country, trying to bring about peace, Ariel Sharon in Israel, look out, God’s gonna get ya. If you allow gays to get married in the United States, if you allow civil unions in Vermont actually was what had happened, God’s gonna cause 9/11, he’s gonna take out your office building and kill 3000 innocents. This guy is nuts.

Now going from nuts on the right, and Pat Robertson is unabashedly a major force in the Republican Party, and a major part of the whole right wing crazies, going from the nuts on the religious right to the nuts on the political right, here is what Rush Limbaugh had to say yesterday about this:

“Yes I think in the Haiti earthquake, ladies and gentlemen, in the words of Rahm Emanuel, we have another crisis simply too good to waste. This will play right into Obama’s hands, humanitarian, compassionate, they’ll use this to burnish their, shall we say, credibility with the black community in the both light skinned and dark skinned black community in this country, it’s made to order for him. That’s why he couldn’t wait to get out there.”

Yeah he just absolutely couldn’t wait. Oh come on. And then he, this drug addled idiot added this to this:

Limbaugh: “Okay back to the phones or to the phones. We’re gonna start in Raleigh, North Carolina, Justin you’re first today, great to have you with us, hello.”
Justin: “Mega Rush Baby, dittos. My question is why did Obama, in the sound bite you played earlier, when he’s talking about if you want to donate some money you can go to Whitehouse.gov to be directed. To direct you how to do so. Why would, if I want to donate money to the Red Cross, why do I need to go to the whitehouse.gov page and look at that propaganda.”
Limbaugh: Yeah. Exactly, would you trust that the money is going to go to Haiti?
Justin: no!
Limbaugh: But would you trust that your name is going to end up on a mailing list for the Obama people to start asking you for campaign donations for him and other causes?
Justin: Absolutely!
Limbaugh: Absolutely right.
Justin: That’s the point.
Limbaugh: Besides we’ve already donated to Haiti, it’s called the US income tax.

Yeah, yeah, the US income tax. And the International Republican Institute which we’re going to be talking about in the 3rd hour of our program with Max Blumenthal, he laid the whole thing bare and Salon back in 2004 how they went into Haiti and engineered a coup against Jean-Batiste Aristide because, 'oh my god this guy was a liberal, he was a leftist, he was talking, he was talking liberation theology'. And this entire empire, this entire idea, this neoliberalism idea that has come out of first Milton Friedman out of the think tanks of University of Chicago in the 1930s and then Tom Friedman popularized with the "Olive Tree and the Lexus" ,the Republican Party has embraced. Libertarians have been there all along, and the Ayn Rand crazies, the objectivists, this is the air that they breathe is 'to hell with democracy, forget about what the people need. We don’t need no stinking social safety net, FDR was totally wrong when he said that a necessitous man is not a free man. If somebody is starving to death, so what, they’re free! They’re free if they have no medical care and they’re laying on the street but they’re free, they didn’t have to pay taxes to support a national healthcare system.'

This kind of insanity was inflicted on Haiti hugely back over the last 30 years with the IMF loans and the World Bank and when we forced them, and we forced them, make no mistake about it, when we forced them to stop their tariffs on sugar cane. I mean, Haiti used to produce half the world’s sugar cane. In the late part of the 19th, early part of the 20th century, it was one of the most prosperous nations in the western hemisphere. And when we forced them to drop their tariffs to protect their domestic industries and then in the 1980s when we forced them to drop their tariffs on rice, and their rice farmers all went out of business, great big huge American agribiz companies started wiping out the Haitian farmers, literally, wiping them out. What do they do? They go to the cities. And so now you’ve got, and the last time I was in Port au Prince was in 1985 or ’86 and it was a disaster area. I mean, it was, it just, this giant sized, empty sewers down in the middle of streets and pigs running around and dogs running around eating garbage, and kids literally drinking out of pools of fetid water and now this.

Transcribed by Suzanne Roberts, Portland Psychology Clinic.