Almost as if acting on orders from their Republican overlords, the Media Research Center is going on the attack against the Rev. Raphael Warnock, the Democratic candidate in one of the Georgia Senate races that will help determine control of the body for the next two years.
Scott Whitlock went on a misleading anti-Warnock tirade in a Nov. 18 post under a headline laughably calling Warnock “Radical Raphael”:
Journalists have already shifted from attack dogs for Donald Trump to cuddly puppies in how they cover Joe Biden. But they’ve been strangely quiet on the background of a man who could help the Democratic Party win the U.S. Senate in a Georgia runoff election.
Raphael Warnock is facing incumbent Republican Kelly Loeffler,. He is also a radical leftist who has condemned serving in the military and trashed America’s ally Israel. Yet ABC, CBS and NBC have shown no interest in these incendiary beliefs that could torpedo his campaign and Democratic control of the Senate.
Here are some of the shocking things Warnock has said or been connected to. Network journalists should do their jobs and investigate, something that cable outlets have at least attempted.
As Fox News reported, Reverend Warnock told church parishioners in 2011 that one could not serve in the military and be a good Christian: “America, nobody can serve God and the military. You can’t serve God and money. You cannot serve God and mammon at the same time. America, choose ye this day who you will serve. Choose ye this day.”
No, Scott, Warnock did not claim that “one could not serve in the military and be a good Christian.” In full context, Warnock was fleshing out the old “cannot serve God and mammon” Bible verse and was speaking out against militarism, not military service.
In his Nov. 20 column, Tim Graham declared Warnock to be an “acolyte” of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whom the right-wing media spent years inveighing against for his links to Barack Obama. Graham also took Warnock’s remarks about God and the military out of context, listing it as among his allegedly “extreme sermons” (even though it’s based on a Bible verse) and sneering, “If that’s about violence, he hasn’t claimed nobody can serve God and Planned Parenthood.”
Since Warnock once said something nice about Wright, that gave the MRC license to bring up all the old attacks on him, including the notorious “God damn America” quote. When someone pointed out that the remark was taken out of context and that the right-wing outrage against both Warnock and Wright seemed to stem in part from the fact that both are black, Mark Finkelstein retorted in a Nov. 23 post that “When it comes to attempting to explain away the unexplainable, nothing’s more hackneyed than claiming the offensive statement was ‘taken out of context,'” then insisting that Loeffler wasn’t being racist by attacking black pastors: “If Warnock had been defending a pastor of pallor who made the same despicable statement cursing our country, Loeffler would surely be bringing it to the attention of Georgia voters in a similar way.”
Graham returned in a Nov. 30 post for yet another nitpicky meltdown against a fact-checker for checking facts. He whined that PolitiFact ruled that Warnock’s statement that Loeffler is for “getting rid of health care in the middle of a pandemic” was “half true,” huffing, “By the extremely literal logic that PolitiFact often applies to the GOP, it could be interpreted that ‘getting rid of health care’ means ‘closing all the hospitals and forbidding doctors to work.'” Of course, getting rid of the Affordable Care Act, as Loeffler wants to do, without a replacement option means that you are, in fact, getting rid of some people’s health care, at least in the form and at a price they’re familiar with.