Freedom's Fire, Brightly Burning

Robertson apologized, after first denying that he really meant assassination - simple kidnapping would do:

On Wednesday, he initially denied having called for Chavez to be killed and said The Associated Press had misinterpreted his remarks.

“I didn’t say 'assassination.’ I said our special forces should ’take him out,”’ Robertson said on his show. “’Take him out’ could be a number of things including kidnapping.”

This NRO editorial on CBS News offers an interesting take on Robertson's relevance:

To many on the right, Robertson's most important role today seems to be as the maker of those crackpot comments, which give liberals the opportunity to hang the offending words — and Robertson himself — around conservatives' necks.

There is some truth to that, but there is also some evidence to suggest that Robertson is not quite as marginalized a figure as conservatives would like to believe. His main forum, the television program The 700 Club, is available in nearly all of the country on the ABC Family Channel, FamilyNet, the Trinity Broadcasting Network, and some broadcast stations. According to Nielsen Media Research, The 700 Club, aired each weekday, has averaged 863,000 viewers in the last year. While that is not enough to call it a popular program, it is still a significant audience. It is, for example, more than the average primetime audience for CNN last month — 713,000 viewers — or MSNBC, which averaged 280,000 viewers in prime time. It is also greater than the viewership of CNBC and Headline News.

(snip)

So these days, Robertson makes news only when he says something outrageous. And he has done that more than a few times. In early 2004, Robertson claimed divine inspiration as he predicted a Bush landslide in the presidential election. "I really believe I'm hearing from the Lord it's going to be like a blowout election in 2004," he said on The 700 Club. "It's shaping up that way."

In 2003, discussing a book critical of the State Department, Robertson said, "If I could just get a nuclear device inside Foggy Bottom, I think that's the answer. I mean, you get through this [book], and you say, 'We've got to blow that thing up.'"

In 2001, shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks, Robertson nodded in agreement as fellow televangelist Jerry Falwell said the attacks were God's punishment for the sins of "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way — all of them who have tried to secularize America."

(snip)

And now Robertson has advised the United States to assassinate the president of Venezuela. (He later released a statement saying that he didn't really mean Chavez should be killed.) Conservatives would like to dismiss him as a has-been and an embarrassment. To some extent, that's true — but not to all those viewers of The 700 Club.

The LA Times has a few more examples of Robertson's outrageous statements from the past.