Politics makes strange bedfellows, especially when the bed contains Newt Gingrich. Despite his belief that marriage is an institution between one man and three women in rapid succession, Newt has been warmly embraced by the Republicans' family values crowd. Now, the Baptist-turned-Catholic Gingrich is seeking the support of Pastor John Hagee, who once called Newt's new faith "a false cult" and "the whore of Babylon."
But for both men, the odd courtship may a match made in heaven. After all, Pastor Hagee and his End Times followers believe the U.S has a biblically required role to strike Iran. And by all appearances, President Newt Gingrich would be only too happy to oblige.

As you'll recall, during the 2008 campaign John McCain sought and later rejected Hagee's endorsement. (McCain cut the cord only after Hagee's past statements about Adolf Hitler's divinely mandated role in driving European Jewry to Israel became public.) But now, as Mother Jones reported, Newt Gingrich is following in McCain's footsteps:

Three years later, Hagee is once more involved in Republican presidential politics. Later this month, he'll host former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a 2012 aspirant, at Cornerstone Church in San Antonio. For the candidate and the pastor, the summit is a chance for two controversial figures to help each other back into the spotlight--though a Hagee spokesman says the pastor has no plans to endorse Gingrich.

As you may also recall, Pastor Hagee and his group Christians United for Israel (CUFI) have been at the bleeding edge of a Christian Zionist movement seeking to hasten the Second Coming of Christ and the final battle in Israel. Hagee and his allies in the radical religious right see Israel and end-of-times conflict with Iran as the fulfillment of biblical prophesy contained in the Book of Revelation. (Their Armageddon acceleration program has included the so far unsuccessful effort to breed the "red heifer," the perfect calf that will signal the Second Coming.)
In 2007, Hagee, whose book Jerusalem Countdown sold over 500,000 copies, warned:

Ladies and gentlemen, we are reliving history. It is 1938 all over again. Iran is Germany. Ahmadinejad is Hitler. And Ahmadinejad, just like Hitler, is talking about killing the Jews."

The previous year, Pastor Hagee told the 2006 CUFI conference that American policy towards Iran was already made clear in the Bible:

"The United States must join Israel in a pre-emptive military strike against Iran to fulfill God's plan for both Israel and the West...a biblically prophesied end-time confrontation with Iran, which will lead to the Rapture, Tribulation, and Second Coming of Christ."

On that score, John Hagee has a friend in Newt Gingrich.
While John McCain joking sang "Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran," Gingrich has been humming that tune for some time.

Last year, Gingrich summed up his policy towards Tehran: "Replace the government." For years, he has warned of a second Holocaust if Iran succeeds in developing nuclear weapons. (When the CIA concluded in a 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that Iran had suspended its nuclear program four years earlier, Gingrich called it "a deliberate attempt to undermine the policies of President Bush" which "can only be understood as a bureaucratic coup d'état.") And in a 2010 address to the American Enterprise Institute, Gingrich lamented that while Bush hadn't gone far enough in taking down Tehran, a President Gingrich would:

I think that in a sense, President Bush came very close to defining this twice. First was in the "Axis of Evil" speech, January 29, 2002, in the State of the Union, where essentially I believe he was right but in fact could not operationalize what he said. That is, it was an axis of evil; Iran, Iraq, North Korea. Well, we're one out of three. People ought to think about that. If Bush was right in January of 2002 - and by the way, virtually the entire Congress gave him a standing ovation when he said it - then why is it that the other two parts of the axis of evil are still visibly cheerfully making nuclear weapons? That's because we stood at the brink, and looked over, and thought too big a problem.
If Harry Truman had done that, the world today would be communist. If Franklin Roosevelt had done that in '41, either the Japanese or the Germans would have won. If Lincoln had done that, we would've become two and then multiple countries. I mean there are moments in history when you have to stand up and say, okay, tell me the size of the problem, I'll go get a solution of same size. I will overmatch the problem. That's what Americans are all about; we overmatch problems with energy, creativity and drive.

Or, as Gingrich often likes to put it, with passion.
And as he was quick to tell us last week, Newt Gingrich knows something about passion. As he explained his devotion to America if not his wives, "There's no question at times of my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate." And that passion, Gingrich insisted four years ago, was something he shared with Pastor John Hagee. He stood in lockstep with CUFI, Newt suggested:

Because this group is made up of people who believe, they understand the passion that comes from belief.

Belief, that is, in attacking Iran.
For more on John Hagee and Christians United for Israel, see the reports by Bill Moyers and Max Blumenthal. For video of Newt Gingrich's 2007 address to CUFI, visit here.