Graham's Jewish comments: the commentaries are in
It looked like evangelist (and Christianity Today founder) Billy Graham was going to get a pass on his 1972 Oval Office statements about the Jewish "stranglehold" on America. For the first few days after the statements were revealed on tape, the only commentaries were Graham's apology, the Anti-Defamation League's calling the comments "chilling and frightening," and a column on a liberal site Weblog hadn't even heard of before.

Now mainstream outlets are weighing in. Thankfully, no one is calling Graham an anti-Semite; they're simply saying that he forgot his spiritual calling for a while. "Graham, the preeminent Christian preacher of the day, could have set the president straight and told him that his crude conspiracy theorizing about Jews was part of a paranoid style that might lead to his downfall someday (as it did)," a Boston Globe editorial said Tuesday.

Graham might even have suggested that the president, instead of stereotyping his critics in the media, might have turned the other cheek. But Graham did no such thing. … [The tapes] help explain why Nixon so long persisted in his dark dividing of the world into enemies and friends. He was encouraged to do so by a religious leader he had been friends with since he served as vice president in the 1950s. Given a chance to speak truth to power, Graham spoke garbage.

Columnist Cal Thomas similarly laments Graham's actions, then ties them into the case he made in his book Blinded by Might. "Graham is no bigot, although he sounds like one on the tape," he says in yesterday's column.

On the tapes, one hears Graham compromising his principles in order to please Nixon. … Graham gives in to the lower nature in us all, possibly ...