A President to Be Proud Of? 3 | Issue Letters

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Issue 1005
April 08, 2008

Kirchick's Anti-Obama Hit Piece

In his article "A President to Be Proud Of," James Kirchick wrote: "McCain loathes the religious right, and the feeling is mutual. A notoriously stubborn man, he will probably not feel the need to appease the antigay wing of his party... Evangelical leader James Dobson has already said he will not support McCain." If McCain loathes the religious right as Mr. Kirchick would have us believe, why then does he actively pursue the endorsements of unsavory, apocalyptic fundamentalists such as John Hagee (who preached that Katrina was God's punishment for a gay event that had been scheduled in New Orleans) and Rod Parsley (who called on Christians to "wage war" against the "false religion" of Islam)? It's remarkable that Mr. Kirchick would overlook these relationships while railing against Barack Obama's association with "the hateful ex-gay" Donnie McClurkin. Mr. Kirchick concluded that "McCain will not win over single-issue gay voters. But if you're concerned about Obama's foreign policy naïveté or his proclivity for raising taxes, give McCain a serious look." I am not a single-issue gay voter. I think McCain and his supporters are wrong on a variety of issues: health care, poverty, and especially foreign policy ("Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran..."). It seems strange to me that Mr. Kirchick would appeal to fears of a tax hike while failing to address this extremely expensive war, or his candidate's remark that we could still be fighting it 100 years from now. Mr. Kirchick may proudly support McCain, but actually I found his ham-handed attempt to pass an anti-Obama hit piece off as thoughtful political analysis rather shameful.

Brandon Riley
Richmond, Va.

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