Is President Obama actually a harbinger of the Apocalypse?

Well, according to a couple of the US’ most prominent religious wingnuts, he might well be. In the following video – excerpted, of course, from America’s last bastion of sanity, the Fox News channel – Tim LaHaye, an extremely successful evangelical preacher, actually drops the A-bomb. Watch it and weep.

Do not adjust your monitors: this clip really did go out on a major television news channel in the United States. A man really did just equate Obama’s ‘raw socialism’ with ‘the Apocalypse’, and he really does believe in a correlation.

LaHaye has long been one of windiest right-wing evangelicals in the US. His Left Behind books, a series of politically queasy thrillers about the Rapture and biblical end times, have sold 60m copies to the credulous of America. It is a (badly written) phenomenon, and highly entertaining in a grim, rubbernecking kind of a way.

He is also a total fruitloop, as this extended video will demonstrate – not only is he a great friend of Ronald Reagan, he is also fully convinced that Apocalypse is just around the corner. You can practically see him dribble with anticipation when he’s talking about World Empires and prophetic omens.

Mike Huckabee, meanwhile, finished third in the race to become Republican nominee for president in 2008. He has since retired from politics, but he was at one point one of the most senior politicians in America. He is also an evangelical Christian, but he has a rock band called Capitol Offence, so I can’t bring myself to be as mean to him.

LaHaye has previous on this: he recently also suggested on his blog Edge of Apocalypse Today that Elena Kagan, Obama’s otherwise benign nominee for the Supreme Court, ‘presents a danger as old as the book of Genesis’. Honestly, he wrote that.

You’ll note that LaHaye, who according to Wikipedia has pointed ears, stops slightly short of using the word ‘Antichrist’ in relation to his dear president, but if it isn’t on the tip of his tongue, I’ll be damned. If ever you wondered why political discourse in the US is currently so backed up, here’s your answer: his opponents literally believe that Obama is the herald of the end-times.

Image credit: Getty.

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