MB Civic

Link here (click)
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/11412417/the_low_post_gop_hitches_2006_hopes_to_apocalypse_horsemen/print

Everyone should be paying more attention to the craziness that’s getting peddled out there in cable TV land…CNN included. Not many among us know that an End Times-style novelist is showing up as a TV commentator..and has the ear of the White House. An excerp:

End Times had its coming-out party in the mainstream media via a now-notorious editorial penned in the Wall Street Journal on August 8th by former Princeton scholar Bernard Lewis. In it, Lewis posited that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was planning a “cataclysmic event” on August 22nd (the same date Beck was focused on), because that was the date that corresponded, on the Islamic calendar, with the 27th day of Rajab of the year 1427, said to be the date when Muhammad flew on a winged horse to heaven and back. Why that means anything, you’ll have to ask these people: None of this stuff ever makes any fucking sense to me at all.

Anyway that seemed to start the ball rolling on the August 22nd front. From there, a whole host of ostensibly serious commentators started appearing on American television braying horrible warnings about the coming end of the world. Worse still, some of them claimed real ties with the White House. Chief among those was probably John Hagee, a San Antonio pastor whose End Times credentials have already been reported in many outlets (among others, by Sarah Posner of Alternet).

Taibbi, the new Rolling Stone political guy, is one of the best new writers out there – funny and sharp. This is a MUST READ.
– MAB