My advice to former Speaker of the House Gingrich would be: caveat emptor - buyer beware. Politicians, especially those with presidential aspirations, ought to learn a bit about the people they choose to hang around with, lest they become associated with Jew-bashing conspiracy theorists who grapple with cat-demons.  

Though you, dear reader, may not be aware of it, exorcism in America is really quite common these days, ubiquitous even. Indeed, in early 2001, at his inaugural prayer service at the National Cathedral, newly installed President George W. Bush received the blessing of a well-practiced exorcist who a few years earlier had endorsed the theory that the early 1990's downturn in the Japanese stock market happened because the Japanese emperor had ritual sexual intercourse with a sky-goddess who, as the theory went, may have been a succubus.

The same pastor has helped launch a movement that's creating a whole new exorcism-based health care paradigm via an international network of so-called "healing rooms" which purport to be able to turn gays straight and cure everything from migraines and cancer, to ingrown toenails and hemorrhoids, by faith healing and the casting out of demons--a growing national craze on the evangelical right that's referred euphemistically as "deliverance", which once upon a time was known as "exorcism".

But, why does Gingrich need John Hagee?

Well, Newt Gingrich hasn't yet had as many wives as did Henry the 8th, but he seems healthy enough to last a few more years, if not decades, so who knows? Gingrich's conjugal profligacy represents a bit of a liability in terms of his relationship with the evangelical right, which arguably now represents the core base of the Republican Party.

So, Former Speaker of the House Gingrich is courting evangelical kingmaker and avowed exorcist John Hagee--who seems to possess the special moral-absolution faerie dust to sprinkle over Gingrich and make him palatable to the conservative demon-casting evangelical  base.  

We've been here before.

In the 2000 election GOP primaries, Senator John McCain repeatedly attacked Christian right icons such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson as "agents of intolerance" and, as a consequence was badly beaten by George W. Bush, who some say was a washed-in-the-blood born-again believer but at the very least knew how to speak the lingo. By 2005 John McCain, with an eye to the upcoming 2008 presidential election, was pursuing evangelical kingmakers such as Falwell and Robertson. Having won their favor, McCain went after Hagee like a dog in heat.

By January 2008 McCain, who had by then kissed enough evangelical fundament to win rising evangelical leader John Hagee's favor, announced Hagee's political endorsement, at a nationally televised press conference. Four months later, McCain dropped Hagee's endorsement like a very hot potato--which it in fact was.

What happened? Well, in May 2008 I posted a three and a half minute video, featuring an audio clip from a late 2005 John Hagee sermon, that went viral and wound up being featured in media around the world including on Iranian state television.

In the Hagee sermon audio clip, pastor Hagee claimed that God had sent Adolf Hitler, a "hunter" according to Hagee, in order to chase Europe's Jews towards Palestine--the place, according to Hagee, where God wanted Jews to live. This proved to be politically toxic. As the New York Times described,

"McCain repudiated the Rev. John Hagee, a televangelist, after a watchdog group released a recording of a sermon in which Hagee said Hitler and the Holocaust had been part of God's plan to chase the Jews from Europe and drive them to Palestine.

[...]

Audio of the sermon, from the late 1990s, was first posted last week by the Web site Talk to Action, which scrutinizes the Christian right, and then reported by The Huffington Post.

In the sermon, which is also available on the church's Web site, Hagee said the Bible prophesied Hitler's brutality. "How is God going to bring them back to the land? The answer is fishers and hunters," Hagee said, referring to how Jews ended up in the modern state of Israel. "A hunter is someone who comes with a gun and forces you. Hitler was a hunter."

Hagee continued: "That will be offensive to some people. Well, dear heart, be offended: I didn't write it. Jeremiah wrote it. It was the truth and it is the truth. How did it happen? Because God allowed it to happen. Why did it happen? Because God said, 'My top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel.' "

 John Hagee, I might add, also claims that God has cursed (and doomed) America because of support for reproductive rights and the teaching of Evolution in public schools. As I wrote in the April 30, 2008 story linked above,

"According to Hagee, in the case of curses humans speak against each other, "[if] you are not protected by the blood of Christ that curse will stick. It can follow you and your family for generations." The implication is that Christianity alone confers special protection against curses, which slide off Christians but stick to people of all other faiths and beliefs. In a later book, Hagee has described a terrible, permanent divine curse upon Jews for worshiping idols. To work and to sweat, explains Hagee, are the curses of men while menstruation and childbearing are curses of women.

[...]

America is also collectively cursed for specific reasons, such as legalized abortion and a Supreme Court decision against sectarian Bible classes in public schools but also, more generally, for rebelling against God. As a consequence of America's disobedience and rebellion, according to McCain-endorser John Hagee, God's has cursed America and that curse has caused American military defeats, in Korea and Vietnam, plagues such as AIDS and social blights like violent crime. God's curse on America has also led "hundreds of thousands" to secretly sacrifice children to the devil."