This time he encouraged the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. His quote is hilariously impotent, the meandering ramblings of a blind, deaf and dumb pseudo-patriot whose kill-all-foreigners mentality has been frustratingly buried under decades of enlightened thought. The background for his statement is that Chavez is paranoid about secret US-led assassination attempts: "If he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability."

Nice job, Christians. Another one of your elected media leaders managed to embarrass himself and the entire country once more. Oh, I know, Christianity is so fragmented and compartmentalized these days that he doesn't speak for your church. And yet, somehow he sits atop a media empire - worshipped by millions - at the forefront of our nation's craziest of crazies, the Christian Coalition.

And lest we forget, this is the same small-minded ass who, along with Jerry Falwell, announced that God didn't just "stop" the 9/11 terrorist attacks with a snap of His Mighty Fingers because He had decided to punish the US for, among other things, homosexuality, material pleasures, and taking the Bible out of the classroom.

He's even taken to repeating himself: he made a similar pro-assassination comment on the 700 Club, that bastion of free thought and civil discourse, back in 1999... so don't buy his lame apology that he spoke out of frustration or out of context. This is what this jerk actually believes. In 1992 he suggested that white South Africans' votes ought to count more than black South Africans' votes. In 1997 he turned the entire recorded history of the United States on its ear by claiming that it was the Muslims who captured Africans and sent them to the States as slaves, not the good white Americans of the time.

And, just to make absolutely sure that he alienates at least 50% of the American population: "I know this is painful for the ladies to hear, but if you get married, you have accepted the headship of a man, your husband. Christ is the head of the household and the husband is the head of the wife, and that's the way it is, period."

After 9/11, I recall a lot of public opinion that Arab-Americans and all other wonderful, beautiful American citizens with ties to the Middle East ought to "call home" and tell their friends and family over there that Americans aren't all that bad. That the average American has no interest at all in their country or resources or traditions and we just want to capture those responsible for taking down the World Trade Center. The gist of the argument is a plea from the common man to the other common man: do something about the few fanatics in your country, stand out against them, let's work together.

Somebody needs to tell the Christians of America to stand up against bigoted, hateful maniacs like Robertson, Falwell, Pat Buchanan and the rest. Stop propping them up. Stop listening to their rhetoric. Stop letting them speak for you from the biggest bully pulpit in the country. Stop letting them influence our politics. Are there no Christian leaders to rise to the top that aren't frothing with fearmongering, racism, and insensitivity? Are there no Christian leaders who live in this century?