Fox News points out that Sarah Palin did not claim that “Saddam Hussein helped Al Qaeda plan the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon,” as The Washington Post reported. Fox also points out that Palin did not call the Iraq war a “holy war,” as ABC News implied.
However, here’s what Palin did say, as Fox reports:
Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right. Also for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God. That’s what we have to make sure that we’re praying for, that there is a plan and that that plan is God’s plan.
The McCain camp objected to ABC News’s treatment of the quote:
“Governor Palin’s full statement was VERY different” from the way Gibson characterized it,” read a statement circulated by McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds.
“Gibson cut the quote — where she was clearly asking for the church TO PRAY THAT IT IS a task from God, not asserting that it is a task from God.
“Palin’s statement is an incredibly humble statement, a statement that this campaign stands by 100 percent, and a sentiment that any religious American will share,” Bounds wrote.
Yet here it is Bounds who is performing the spin. The difference between saying that the Iraq war is “a task that is from God” and saying that we should pray that it is “a task that is from God” is pretty trivial. Palin clearly says that the war should be “God’s plan.” This gives a religious motivation to foreign policy, which should be grounded solely in the national defense of the United States.
Moreover, as I’ve pointed out, at the same event Palin also said she thought it was “God’s will” that she help build an energy pipeline, and she added that political reform “doesn’t do any good if the people of Alaska’s heart isn’t right with God.”
Palin clearly made the case that politics must be fundamentally based on religion.