Happy 90th birthday, Rev. Billy Graham

Enlighten me. I don't remember those statements. If there are, it doesn't negate a lifetime of helping people and ministering to their spiritual needs --- not that you ever needed them, being, you know, perfect and all.

 

Hondo,

I don't hate Billy Graham. I just think he's an evangelist nut who had an awful lot of trouble remembering his anti-semitic rants with Richard Nixon until the audio tapes were released in 1992. Sure, he apologized. Almost 25 years later.

 

Billy Graham is about as far on the other end of the spectrum from "evangelist nut" as one could get in that line of work, I suspect.

Can you hold one private comment about "Jews" up against a lifetime of service?

Well, like the old joke says, "You fuck one goat and you're a goat-fucker forever."

*****

William Buckley, on the topic of Graham's comments to Nixon:

The words were spoken in the private company of the president of the United States. It is a human tendency to humor chiefs of state, and one way of doing this is to sort of go along with their moods and line of thought. Students laugh at headmasters' jokes. If President Nixon was going on about the Jews (as we know he sometimes did), you would expect the courtier impulses of his intimates to piggy-back along. Leonard Garment and Henry Kissinger, if ever they are detected as having laughed at an anti-Semitic presidential joke, should be thought of as socially self-abnegating, rather than as anti-Semitic, always leaving room for the possibility that it was a good joke.

*****

And, after all, Graham's boss is a Jewish carpenter.