Yesterday, hard-line conservative Pastor John Hagee, founder of Christians United for Israel, endorsed John McCain. Hagee said that McCain “is a man of principle, [who] does not stand boldly on both sides of any issue.” McCain, who had been courting the endorsement for over a year, said that he was “very honored by Pastor John Hagee’s endorsement.”

Demonstrating how wildly out of the American religious and political mainstream Hagee’s views are, McCain’s acceptance of Hagee’s endorsement was condemned today by conservative William Donohue, president of the Catholic League. Calling Hagee a “bigot,” Donahue said the right-wing pastor has waged “an unrelenting war against the Catholic Church” by “calling it ‘The Great Whore,’ an ‘apostate church,’ the ‘anti-Christ,’ and a ‘false cult system.’”

Hagee holds many other radical beliefs. In a 2006 address to CUFI, Hagee declared:

The United States must join Israel in a pre-emptive military strike against Iran to fulfill God’s plan for both Israel and the West… a biblically prophesied end-time confrontation with Iran, which will lead to the Rapture, Tribulation, and Second Coming of Christ.

Speaking to the 2007 AIPAC conference, Hagee compared supporters of a two-state solution in the Middle East to Nazis. Hagee also echoed right-wing Israeli politician Binyamin Netanyahu, telling the audience that “Iran is Germany and Ahmadinejad is the new Hitler.”

Paging Tim Russert: Someone should ask John McCain if, unlike Hagee, he supports a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine, and whether he believes that a military strike against Iran would “fulfill God’s plan for…a biblically prophesied end-time confrontation” as Hagee does.

UPDATE: Faith in Public Life has more.

UPDATE II: Hagee’s tv show, “John Hagee Today,” is also broadcast on Cornerstone Television. In 1999, McCain wrote to the FCC on behalf of campaign contributor Lowell “Bud” Paxson, urging a deal that would have made $17.5 million for Cornerstone.

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Yesterday evening, House Democrats were forced to pull an ethics reform proposal after widespread opposition by Republicans, as well as a few Democrats. Several lawmakers insisted that the current system “is working” and there is no need for an independent, bipartisan Office of Congressional Ethics. In an effort to scuttle the office, senior House Republican aides have drawn up a hit list of Democratic lawmakers to target with investigations.

At the time, I found the great McCain-Feingold dispute of 199X-2001 incredibly baffling. On the one hand, you had a lot of reformers and liberals lining up behind a law that pretty plainly wasn’t going to make any kind of meaningful difference in the casual corruption of the political process. On the other hand, you had a bunch of conservatives treating John McCain’s heresy on the misguided-but-meaningless piece of legislation as if he were personally performing abortions for married lesbian couples on the Senate floor. George Will, in particular, was just vicious and, as you can see with today’s column, still harbors an immense distaste for McCain that I find hard to square with the two men’s respective ideological positioning. That said, Will does us all a service in reminding the world of an under-covered aspect of McCain’s career:

In 2001, McCain, a situational ethicist regarding “big money” in politics, founded the Reform Institute to lobby for his agenda of campaign restrictions. It accepted large contributions, some of six figures, from corporations with business before the Commerce Committee (e.g., Echosphere, DISH Network, Cablevision Systems Corp., a charity funded by the head of Univision).

Unlike his efforts to manipulate the public financing system, this particular McCainite gambit is pretty unambiguously legal, but that very legality and McCain’s eagerness to exploit it mostly seems to me to underscore the hollowness of commitment to political reform. Now who knows, maybe Cablevision just felt really strongly about “soft money” contributions to political parties, but it sure seems pretty unlikely.

During this week’s National Governors Association meeting, Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-MN) proposed modest goals for states to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Pawlenty — long considered a potential running mate for Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) — faced immediate opposition from coal- and oil-producing state governors who oppose any measure to combat climate change. Robert Novak writes:

But at a “governors-only” session that opened the meeting on Saturday, Pawlenty encountered adamant opposition. Barbour led the way for governors from energy-producing states…The issue of greenhouse gases was “set aside,” Pawlenty told me, “because we realized there was no consensus.”

Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) — who has said he “[doesn't] know what the science is” on global warming — joined Barbour in opposing Pawlenty.

Later that night, McCain met with those same governors, where he heard “more of the same” opposition to emissions reductions. McCain has made his “straight talk” on climate change a centerpiece of his campaign. He brags on his website that he has been “a leader on the issue of global warming with the courage to call the nation to action.”

Yet instead of standing up for the Pawlenty’s proposals, McCain abandoned these modest goals in an effort to woo the far right of his party:

Governors from coal- and oil-producing states spelled out their problems with McCain’s energy policies, and he was responsive.

In its recent National Environmental Scorecard, the League of Conservation Voters gave McCain a rating of zero — the lowest score — for 2007. McCain boasts a lifetime rating of only 24 percent.

During the GOP primaries, McCain was certainly better on global warming than the other candidates. But now that he is trying to consolidate the conservative base, McCain’s “leadership” on climate change is increasingly sounding like a third Bush term.

Yesterday on the Colbert Report, former White House Press Secretary Tony Snow defended Bush’s 19 percent approval rating, saying the public once “hated” Lincoln:

COLBERT: Latest polls have his approval rating at 19 percent, which is low for a President but very high for a fetish.

SNOW: Ouch. … They actually hated Truman. They hated Lincoln. Lincoln as late as late-1864 was telling his guys to get ready the next incoming administration of George McClellan.

Watch it:

Former White House staffers have adopted the Bush-Lincoln comparison as a talking point. Karl Rove said Bush has a Lincoln-like ability to “get to the nub of the thing.” Alberto Gonzales also recently compared Bush’s presidency to Lincoln’s.

UPDATE: Atrios notes, “I’m sure plenty of people did [hate Lincoln], but he did manage to win the 1864 election by 10 points.”

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In a new book titled The Three Trillion Dollar War, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes argue that President Bush massively understated the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Combined with interest on debt, future borrowing, cost of continued military presence, and veterans health care, they estimate a potential cost of up to $5 to $7 trillion.

Unwilling to accept what Stiglitz calls a “very conservative” $3 trillion projection, the White House is smearing Stiglitz — President Clinton’s top economic adviser — saying he “lacks courage“:

“People like Joe Stiglitz lack the courage to consider the cost of doing nothing and the cost of failure. One can’t even begin to put a price tag on the cost to this nation of the attacks of 9/11,” said White House spokesman Tony Fratto, conceding that the costs of the war on terrorism are high while questioning the premise of Stiglitz’s research.

In recent interviews, Stiglitz said Bush’s war accounting practices “are so shoddy that they would land any public firm before the Securities and Exchange Commission for engaging in deceptive practices.” “We had to use the Freedom of Information Act to uncover things that we never would have known,” he said.

The White House has a sensitive spot for assessments of the wars’ costs. In October, the CBO conservatively said the wars may cost $2 trillion over the next decade. White House Press Secretary Dana Perino retorted that the CBO’s estimate was “pure speculation” and “wildly premature.” When the Joint Economic Committee said the “hidden” costs of the wars totaled $1.5 trillion, OMB Chairman Jim Nussle derided it as “clearly partisan.”

While the White House says it is “not worried” about the price tag of war, they should be. The war costs are the “hidden cause of the current credit crunch” and housing crisis, Stiglitz’s book argues.

UPDATE: In a hearing with Stiglitz today, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) said he is “tremendously disappointed” in the White House’s attack:

I was also tremendously disappointed to read in the paper today that the White House has disparaged Prof. Stiglitz and the work he has done. It is the height of hypocrisy for an administration that has been so secretive, so unwilling to face the truth and the true costs of their policies and this war to disparage the courage and conviction of someone like Professor Stiglitz.

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To revisit yesterday’s Pierre Trudeau post, I should say that I don’t actually think an Obama/Trudeau analogy sheds any light on anything in particular. Canadian politics is very different from U.S. politics. The Canadian language issue and the American racial issue are both important and longstanding sources of division, but they’re not actually similar in any of their particulars. So you can make an analogy, but it’s necessarily going to be very superficial and not really enhance anyone’s understanding of anything.