Now that John McCain has rescinded endorsements he previously exhorted from John Hagee and Rod Parsley a question emerges.

One of the big incentives along with holding the religious right voting bloc intact, hoping he will get the same kind of boost from it that George W. Bush had previously, was the financial clout that such big buck televangelists bring to a presidential campaign.

We learn about the forbearance that McCain and other rightist Republicans displayed toward Texan Hagee and Ohioan Parsley.  

Even after Hagee had revealed that New Orleans received the tragic jolt of Hurricane Katrina because the city was slated to stage a gay pride parade and that Catholicism represented the great whore, he continued to be defended by McCain and Texas U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison.

As Sean Hannity and others make clear, the Republicans would like to toss all the real issues away and run against Barack Obama's former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

One point needs to be abundantly clear to Hannity and all the other right wing propagandists exploiting the "Wright issue."  These well paid zealots harp on an extreme compilation of over 30 years of Wright sermons into a 10 to 15 second sound bite.  Even they needed to be taken out of context to deliver the intended resounding message.

It is necessary to take nothing out of context to analyze the McCain spiritual advisers that he continues to retain in his ranks.  John Hagee calls Catholicism "the great whore" and asserts that New Orleans residents had been punished by God for having scheduled a gay pride parade.  He looks forward to what he sees as a God-ordained nuclear war known to the reverend and his followers as "rapture."

Reverend Rod Parsley of Columbus, Ohio is another McCain spiritual adviser who speaks in harsh, raging tones of doctrinal self-righteousness.  Parsley fashions himself as something of an historian as well as he informs listeners blisteringly that "one of the reasons" why America was created was to "destroy Islam."  

With the mainstream media's steady firepower being directed basically in one direction, one would think that the big story of this presidential campaign season revolve around statements made by Reverend Jeremiah Wright of Chicago and how they politically impact on Barack Obama.

How essentially silent this same media has been concerning the statements of Reverend John Hagee of San Antonio.  The only recent definitive study I have seen done on Hagee came from Hagee's fellow Texan Lou Dubose in the excellent political journal he edits and writes for, The Washington Spectator.

Here is how the mainstream media has handled the Hagee matter when it has focused on it at all.  There were two infamous statements that were discussed.  

One dealt with Hagee's explanation that Hurricane Katrina involved an act of vengeance wreaked on the city of New Orleans by an angry God because the city had scheduled a Gay Pride Parade.  Hagee later backed away from the statement when pressured for an answer by media sources.

Better late than never, this week's posts about the religious right from The Greater Blogosphere are as concerning, thought provoking and even inspiring as ever. This week there are notable posts on taking action on a number of fronts: including how better contend with aspects of the politics of the religious right in the GOP; refuting the revisionist history in a highly touted Bible study program marketed to schools; debunking a religious right talking point on stem cell research --  and a hair-raising expose of the unholy alliance between Christian rightists and Democrats against medical privacy in Texas.