Overnight, sky gazers were able to enjoy a rare and beautiful sight: a so-called “blood moon” in which Earth’s shadow completely covers the moon
It wouldn’t have occurred to me to connect this to politics in any way, but as Brian Tashman noted this morning, WorldNetDaily manages to “fit criticism of President Obama into nearly everything it publishes, including its story in Monday’s lunar eclipse.”
Citing the president’s comments from January — “I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone” — about using executive orders and executive actions in the face of congressional obstruction, right-wing pastor Mark Biltz told WND today that the “blood moon” is a divine warning to Obama that God has “more than a pen and a phone in his hand.”“In the book of Joel it mentions three times about the sun and the moon going dark and in context it also mentions Divine wrath against all countries that want to divide or part the land of Israel,” Biltz said, touching on a frequent Religious Right claim that Obama administration efforts to broker a Mideast peace deal will lead to divine punishment.“Like Pharaoh the leaders and pundits of today will realize when it comes to crossing the red lines of the Creator of the universe he has more than a pen and a phone in his hand.”
The WorldNetDaily piece, which I assure you was not published as satire, added a quote from the pastor that “blood moons” carry “great historic and prophetic significance,” adding, “I believe the moons are like flashing red warning lights at a heavenly intersection.”
To be sure, both blitz and the publishers of WorldNetDaily are welcome to believe whatever they wish about astronomical phenomena. Their interpretations of eclipses are their business, whether the beliefs seem amusing or not.
But I remain more interested in the political connections to WorldNetDaily than in the political connections to shadows on the moon.
Objective observers can probably agree that WorldNetDaily publishes some pretty nutty stuff — which is their right, of course, but doesn’t negate the nuttiness.
The larger question for me, however, remains the same: given how far on the fringes WorldNetDaily really is, why in the world do Republican members of the United States Congress treat the deeply strange website as a legitimate outlet?
There are, for example, plenty of strange, liberal websites out there. Perhaps one of them published content several years ago connecting eclipses to the Bush/Cheney administration’s foreign policy.
What we didn’t see, however, were prominent Democrats doing interviews with those strange liberal websites.
And yet, here we are. WorldNetDaily is comfortable telling readers that the blood moon may be related to President Obama’s agenda, and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), among others, is comfortable talking to WorldNetDaily about some his more mystifying conspiracy theories.
It’s a reminder that the left and right appear to be playing by very different rules.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."