Bob Somerby's web site, Daily Howler, should be required reading for every liberal.  Monday through Friday, Somerby provides commentary on the sad state of today's mainstream media.  He focuses in particular on the ineptitute of many so-called "liberal" members of the press -- such as Maureen Dowd, Chris Matthews and Frank Rich, to name a few.  He shows how they often act as if liberalism were a form of self-entertainment for foppish individuals such as themselves rather than as a practical means of bringing about self-sufficiency and individual, but socially responsible liberty.

In his March 21st , March 24th and March 25th posts, Somerby turned his attention to Hillary's relationship with the Family and John Hagee's alleged anti-Catholicism. With regard to Hillary, he mentioned that Kathryn Joyce's and Jeff Sharlet's Mother Jones article was well worth reading, but rightly panned Barbara Ehrenreich's inane Huffington Post piece. He then made this astute observation on the recent raucous over John Hagee:

In this matter, we liberals are now taking talking points from Democrat-bashing public ranter William Donohue, the excitable head of the Catholic League. But Donahue's claims are often bogus, and we've been unable to find a clear source for his most colorful claim-the claim that Hagee has called the Catholic Church "the great whore." In Donohue's press releases, he has cited this remarkable YouTube clip  as the source for his colorful charge. We strongly suggest that you watch it, if only to ponder how strange Hagee's presentation is. But we'll admit, we don't have the slightest idea whether Hagee is calling the Catholic Church "the great whore" in this short sermon clip. Hagee told [Sunday New York Times Magazine reporter Deborah] Solomon that this charge is wrong. Again, Solomon made no attempt to evaluate this claim, and we don't really know how to judge it.

As we've read liberal posts on this matter, we've been struck by several things. First, we've seen many people citing Donohue's "great whore" claim-but we've found no one providing an actual quotation from Hagee. (Wikipedia can't even nail this one down. You know what to do-just click here.) In our view, based on a decade of work, making thunderous claims based on this kind of evidence is a good way to do bad journalism-and bad progressive politics.

Somerby raises a good point. Earlier this week Fred Clarkson and I discussed the Howler posts via E-mail. As Fred pointed out, it is often be hard, even for otherwise well-informed people to get the breadth and depth of the meaning of seemingly obscure references from the Book of Revelation.

On the face of it, Hagee has left himself just enough wiggle room for deniability-that is his video statements are not put within the context of his past writings. As I observed in a post from March 2007:

At page 114 of his recent book Jerusalem Countdown, he states:

Anti-Semitism is sin, and as sin, it damns the soul. Most readers will be shocked by the clear record of history linking Adolph Hitler and the Roman Catholic Church in a conspiracy to exterminate the Jews.

But if anti-Semitism is a sin, isn't anti-Catholicism? At page 116 he declares:

Nazi legality was immensely strengthened by the Concordant with the Vatican (July 20 1933), an agreement that the Catholic Church had refused to give the previous Weimer Republic. Hitler described the Concordant of Collaboration as an "unrestricted acceptance of national socialism by the Vatican."

Hagee clearly mischaracterizes the intended parameters of the 1933 Concordant with the Reich. First and foremost, the document was never defined by the Vatican as "Concordant of Collaboration:" that appears to be a description invented by Hagee. As Robert Krieg wrote in the Jesuit journal America:

Pius XI and Cardinal Pacelli (later Pius XII) judged that their first duty was to secure civil guarantees for the autonomy of ecclesiastical institutions and their activities. After the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1918, the Holy See had tried to sign a concordat with the Weimar Republic but did not succeed. The sticking point was the church's insistence on state support for Catholic schools and for Catholic religious instruction in the public schools. This stipulation was not acceptable to Weimar's parliament, especially to its Socialists, who held that it violated the separation between church and state. As the Vatican's nuncio to Bavaria (1917-20) and then to the Weimar Republic (1920-29), Eugenio Pacelli had arranged concordats with individual German states-namely with Bavaria in 1925, Prussia in 1929 and Baden in 1932. Given this history, Pius XI and Pacelli had reason to be pleased when Vice Chancellor Franz von Papen came to Rome on April 7, 1933, to negotiate a concordat with the Reich's new government.

There is a history to this kind of virulent anti-Catholicism and that it lives on in the work of many apocalyptically minded fundamentalists such as Hagee. For them, the code words the whore of Babylon, found anywhere near a discussion of the Catholic Church, make perfect sense and require no explanation. It is this hateful conspiracy theory that animates many in the Hagee wing of the religious right.

Somerby was on the right track by doing a Wikipedia search, focusing on John Hagee. But that is not where the answer is to be found. I went one step further and did a Wikipedia search for whore of Babylon and found the answer under the subheading of "Catholic Church":

Most Reformation writers and all Reformers themselves, from Martin Luther (who wrote On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church), John Calvin, and John Knox (who wrote The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women) identify the Roman Catholic Church with the Whore of Babylon.[3] This opinion influenced several generations in England and Scotland when it was put into the 1599 edition of the Geneva Bible.

Identification of the Pope as the Antichrist was written into Protestant creeds such as the Westminster Confession of 1646. The identification of the Roman Catholic Church with the Whore of Babylon is kept in the Scofield Reference Bible (whose 1917 edition identified "ecclesiastical Babylon" with "apostate Christendom headed by the Papacy") and pro-Reformation writings such as those of I.M. Haldeman, and it is kept alive by contemporary figures such as Ian Paisley and Jack Chick. The "drunkenness with the blood of saints and martyrs," by this interpretation, refers to the veneration of saints and relics and the Sunday sacredness, which is viewed by Reformers as idolatry and apostasy. Some Protestants commonly used the phrase "Whore of Babylon" to refer to the Roman Catholic Church.

When we apply this knowledge to the language Hagee uses in the infamous Youtube video-references to "the blood of the Jewish people" in relation to the Crusades, the Inquisition and the Holocaust--it is easy to see that Hagee clearly has Catholicism in mind when he talks about the great whore.

As I said in a recent post, Donohue got it half right. Based on his past behavior I speculated that part and parcel of Donohue's complaint is a dislike of Arizona Senator John McCain and his deviations from religious right orthodoxy on such issues as embryonic stem cell research and global warming. Although no one can read Donohue's mind, it is not difficult to imagine that the Catholic League president is looking past this November and instead to 2012.

But in closing, I for one am grateful to Bob Somerby. He reminded us not to act like the crackpots we so abhor, but instead to do them one better by presenting the best evidence possible.

Thanks Bob.