Someone Should Get the Net, Chase Robertson Around the Room and Capture Him

After Robertson’s announcement that Sharon’s stroke was punishment from God, that’s the only solution. Somewhere in his cranium there is defective wiring. I discovered it when he took me to lunch one day as a presidential candidate after touring his mammoth studio in Virginia Beach. We had an interesting discussion about a number of issues—all within the range of sanity—before I asked him about the hurricane that narrowly missed his installation. He said, “I knelt down and prayed as hard as I can telling the Lord that my operation was vital to His interest. The storm veered away and hit Front Royal.”

I said, “What about the people whose houses were destroyed in Front Royal?”

He said, “what do you mean?”

I repeated: what about the people whose houses were blown away in Front Royal, Pat?

“Well,” he said, “the Lord evidently made the judgment that--.”

Just then the waiter came with our food. “You’ll like these,” he said pointing to the plate, “scallops!”

This business about the Lord deciding what’s more important, the Lord supposedly determining to punish Ariel Sharon because he withdrew from Gaza and the West Bank and built a wall is not only goofy it’s bad theology. The Lord doesn’t often intervene in our projects but has given us free will to operate on our own. Can you imagine what would happen in the remote chance that this guy had made it, somehow, to the presidency? (And no, liberal readers, this is not the same as George W. Bush the born-again president praying for guidance). Sharon will find out soon enough if his gamble to bring peace to the Middle East was wrong or right. My view is that it was right.

I am fortunate to have met Sharon once, as result of an invitation extended by Mark Hornung, the then editorial page editor of the Sun-Times and my friend. Sharon was an out-of-power right-wing general who had saved Israel during the Six Day War and was in town to address a big Bonds for Israel rally. I had expressed admiration for him to Hornung. Hornung, well-schooled in Israeli politics and had gone over there many times, felt he was far too extreme. There was a luncheon in his honor at the Sun-Times hosted by one of the two crooks. Sharon’s speech there convinced me what I had really known before: that charisma goes not only serve the handsome or beauteous. Here was a dynamic grossly overweight guy who with a heavy accent signified decisiveness, just as he had as a famed military commander. Afterward, when we went down in the same elevator, Hornung introduced me to him, commenting that we were both of the same age and I was a Catholic. I will never forget what Sharon said.

“We [signifying Jews and Catholics] have the same problem. I have been reading about the debates in the Catholic church. You have trouble with nominal Catholics who are really secularists. In Israel we have trouble between the observant Jews and Jews who are really not observant but are secularists.”

I said, “if everybody were observant, in Judaism and Catholicism, there would be no trouble?”

He said, “that’s right, that’s right” and darted down the lobby with that fast stride of his that we’ve seen so often on TV, astonishingly agile for a man of his weight.

The irony is as the man who risked his life in battle for Israel and then sketched out a pathway to Middle East peace lies dying, he is called a heretic and non-observant by fundamentalist Christian Robertson who has made millions off God by insisting he has a direct pipeline to God. Read Krauthammer today for a real estimate of Ariel Sharon. And what can we do to throw the net around Robertson who is a laughing stock for the Christian community?