The Obama Diary

Alex Pareene (Salon): Mother Jones writes about Rep. Michele Bachmann’s connections to Olive Tree Ministries, an evangelical Christian operation founded by a former Jew for Jesus and longtime friend of Bachmann’s named Jan Markell. Olive Tree Ministries … is obsessed with Israel because it believes we are living in the end times. Bachmann’s been on Markell’s radio show multiple times, attended an Olive Tree Ministries conference, and left a testimonial on its website. As MoJo says:

“…in 2005, the then-state senator denied any knowledge of Olive Tree Ministries. However, Markell tells Mother Jones that she’s known Bachmann off and on for 35 years, and says she spoke about Israel at Bachmann’s church in the late 1970s. “My hunch is that they misquoted her,” Markell says. “She’s been at my conference. Why she would have said otherwise, I don’t know.”

….So Bachmann stands with Israel because she needs the Jews to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem so that Christ can return, rapture the Christians up to Heaven, convince the Jews to worship him during the Tribulations, and then rule over the Earth from Israel for 1,000 years. (This is what these people believe, very, very literally.)

….in 2006 she was a member of the Salem Evangelical Lutheran Church of Stillwater, which belongs to the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod. WELS is one of the very conservative “confessional” Lutheran denominations that maintains that the “antichrist” is the pope. You know, the leader of the Catholic Church? That pope….

…In 2008, as I’m sure you remember, Michele Bachmann repeatedly called Barack Obama “anti-American” because of his “mentor”, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. And here is Bachmann’s good friend and minister Bradlee Dean calling the pope “that devil disguised as a minister of righteousness.”

It seems more than fair to ask whether Michele Bachmann is anti-Catholic, and whether, should she be elected president, she’d purposefully sabotage a Middle East peace deal in order to bring about the Second Coming. Or whether she’d launch some sort of tactical strike against Vatican City. I think she would. Look who she pals around with!

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