Speaking Of Nutcases Around McCain
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Senior_McCain_adviser_helped_arrange_to_0509.html
Senior McCain adviser helped arrange Rev. Moon coronation
Nick Juliano
Published: Friday May 9, 2008
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A bizarre Capitol Hill ceremony a few years ago in which the eccentric
conservative publisher the Rev. Sun Myung Moon declared himself the
Second Coming was organized with help from a senior adviser to John
McCain's presidential campaign.
Charlie Black, a Washington lobbyist and McCain confidant, lent his name
to the coronation ceremony and invited a few friends, according to newly
disclosed e-mails.
"What is clear from this email is that top Mccain advisor Charlie Black
is admitting that he helped plan, and would have attended, an event
where a convicted tax fraud would have been crowned King Of America and
declared himself the Messiah--all on U.S. Government federal property
(on March 23, 2004)," writes author Cliff Schecter, who published the
e-mails on his blog Friday.
In the e-mails, which were also obtained by RAW STORY, Black said he
became involved because of his relationships with executives at the
Washington Times, the conservative, Moon-owned newspaper, and its
charitable foundation.
"I think the dinner committee list included a number of us 'secular'
conservatives," Black writes in one e-mail to author John Gorenfeld, who
has explored Moon's influence in Washington in his book Bad Moon Rising.
Black said he did not know Moon personally and was unable to attend the
coronation ceremony, which Gorenfeld details here. (The full e-mails are
reprinted below.)
During the ceremony, Moon declared, "I am God's ambassador, sent to
Earth with his full authority," according to a contemporaneous account
in the New York Times.
Black's relationship with the event seems relatively tangential, but
this campaign season has shown that tangential relationships can cause
headaches for candidates. Moon is among the most controversial figures
on the right, although he gets relatively little notice in the
mainstream press.
Schecter, who recently published a book critical of the GOP nominee, The
Real McCain, outlines some of Moon's most outrageous views: that he is
the second coming of Jesus, that crosses and crucifixes undermine God's
message and that Jesus failed in his mission.
"One wonders," Schecter muses, "what many in the media would do if
Reverend Jeremiah Wright called Jesus a "failure," proclaimed he
(Wright) was the "Messiah" called in by God to clean up Jesus' mess and
staged mock funerals for Christian crosses."
Moon's Unification church is considered a cult by many observers.
Considering himself to be the Messiah, Moon claims to have communicated
with the dead, including Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, who he claims
to have "reformed" from beyond the grave. The church has been accused
money laundering, and Moon has used it to spread anti-Semetic and
anti-gay teachings.
Black has been a longtime player in Republican politics. His ties with
the Bush family go back to 1972, when he and Karl Rove were jockeying
for control of the College Republicans in a campaign so dirty that
George H.W. Bush, then head of the Republican National Committee, had to
step in and sort matters out. Black then worked for Ronald Reagan's and
George H.W. Bush's presidential campaigns from 1976 to 1992. He served
as an adviser to George W. Bush's campaigns in 2000 and 2004 and is
often quoted in news stories as an unofficial White House spokesman.
Until March of this year, Black served as the chairman of the lobbying
firm BKSH & Associates. The firm has represented AT&T as it dealt with
the fallout of its involvement in President Bush's warrantless
wiretapping program and coached Blackwater CEO Eric Prince before
congressional testimony regarding security contractors killing innocent
Iraqis. It previously worked with Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi, who was a
key source of faulty intelligence leading up to the Iraq war.
http://www.mydd.com/story/2005/8/31/9520/46323
