this Harpers article has a good rundown on Ted.
Soldiers of Christ I

He was always on the lookout for spies. At the time, Colorado Springs was a small city split between the Air Force and the New Age, and the latter, Pastor Ted believed, worked for the devil. Pastor Ted soon began upsetting the devil’s plans. He staked out gay bars, inviting men to come to his church; his whole congregation pitched itself into invisible battles with demonic forces, sometimes in front of public buildings. One day, while he was working in his garage, a woman who said she’d been sent by a witches’ coven tried to stab Pastor Ted with a five-inch knife she pulled from a leg sheath; Pastor Ted wrestled the blade out of her hand. He let that story get around. He called the evil forces that dominated Colorado Springs—and every other metropolitan area in the country—“Control.”
Sometimes, he says, Control would call him late on Saturday night, threatening to kill him. “Any more impertinence out of you, Ted Haggard,” he claims Control once told him, “and there will be unrelenting pandemonium in this city.” No kidding! Pastor Ted hadn’t come to Colorado Springs for his health; he had come to wage “spiritual war.”

It makes you feel great knowing that someone who anoints a street intersection with cooking oil has weekly access to the president of the United States.
Also, he has a nice, slimey showcase in the documentary “Bible Camp.”

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Nov 2 2006 23:11 utc | 3

Buy that man a drink!

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Nov 2 2006 23:30 utc | 5

It’s things like the idea that a repellant yob-rag like the Currant Bun might actually have a hand in steering the ship of state that keep my idyll of Blighty in true perspective. Although the idea of Blair as a sock-puppet with equivalent status to the Page 3 girls allows a sort of hideous schadenfreude. I can’t wait to live in a country without too much input from Mr Murdoch. Berlusconi, though…?

Posted by: Tantalus | Nov 3 2006 1:57 utc | 7

The Christian right has a new slogan: PTL!
yeah, I know Robertson used that one already…
but this time it means Pass The Lubricant.
I cannot take credit for that one, but I had to share it.

Posted by: fauxreal | Nov 3 2006 4:13 utc | 9

How does an evangelical preacher hold his liquor?
-By the ears!!!

Posted by: ralphieboy | Nov 3 2006 7:06 utc | 11

Haggard is going down.
The acting senior pastor at New Life, Ross Parsley, told KKTV-TV of Colorado Springs that Haggard admitted that some of the accusations were true.
“I just know that there has been some admission of indiscretion, not admission to all of the material that has been discussed but there is an admission of some guilt,” Parsley told the station.
ummm…. I DID NOT snort meth with that gay hooker?
Wolcott: Teabagging the apocalypse.
Pastor Ted v. Richard Dawkins via YouTube. (South Park has the wrong one in bed in the Go, God. Go! Part II ep.)
Since the Christian Rightwingers have created a corporate/political entity out of trying to proscribe others’ sex lives (now spending my taxpayers dollars to teach abstinence to consenting adults!) these current outings are karmalicious.
If all the gays and lesbians who are closeted in the church would just simply come out and accept who they are, the entire world would be better off, it seems. who knows, we might even have world peace…makes you wonder if the flip side, the islamic fundies the fundies love to hate, aren’t also punishing the world for their own repressed emotional lives. Imagine, world peace through a bath house…
Should we start a betting pool on who will be outed next? just guessing, maybe they’re not gay, but…Ralph Reed? Karl Rove? Where’s Jeff Gannon when you need him for a little waterboarding confessional?
I do hope the Denver Post has the goods on this guy. Since his own asst. pastor admits some truth in the accusations, can “rehab” be far behind?

Posted by: fauxreal | Nov 3 2006 14:30 utc | 13

step right up, step right up
the hooker failed the polygraph test during his radio show appearance. The show host doesn’t think this is conclusive, however. But, we all know the right wingers will run with this, just as the left runs with the other pov.
and speaking of, this is interesting, too. From http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_4594767“>The Denver Post:
Whitworth [a gay activist leader] said that [] about a decade ago, he received a 10- to 12-page letter that accused Haggard of having a sexual affair with a man. Whitworth said it was not his policy to use unsubstantiated claims, and he believes he threw the letter away.
“The interesting thing is Ted Haggard called me and asked me if I had received such a letter, and we had a conversation. I said, ‘Ted, I don’t go for character assassination.”‘
It was the second time in a week that a religious leader in Colorado Springs stepped down from the pulpit. The Rev. Benjamin Reynolds resigned as senior pastor of Emmanuel Missionary Baptist Church on Sunday, a few weeks after telling his congregation he is gay.
So then I sez- hmmmm. The religious right got that list of closeted gay men. maybe it’s a purge. Haggard apparently was a moderating influence among the evangelicals concerning the Colorado anti-gay upcoming vote.
when I was a teenager, I knew a gay kid from my fundie church whose parents were devastated by this fact and literally moved around the country to remove him from his boyfriends. Maybe he’s a minister now too.
I despise the religious right for what they do to kids.

Posted by: fauxreal | Nov 3 2006 16:36 utc | 15

Jeff Sharlet, who wrote about Haggard in Soldiers For Christ for Harper’s, and who also wrote about evangelical Republican men who advocate “Hitler” or “Stalin-like tactics” to get what they want in Jesus Plus Nothing (also in Harper’s) also wrote this piece for Nerve called Sex As a Weapon. in which he talks about evangelical teachings about sex. This Sharlet paraphrase of their philosophy is a classic:
Women can’t get enough of good headship, but a man must be careful; a woman’s hunger for his headship may lead him to abuse its potency through the sin of anger. A few years ago, I learned in an evangelical magazine what to do in such a situation: push your anger down and store it inside your heart, where Jesus will work it over it until it is ready to be “released,” transformed into “white-hot brother love.”
Christian men love some brothers more than others.
[]the fact that so much of the language used to discuss Christ is homoerotic is no coincidence. The first miracle of Jesus to believers is that his appeal crossed so many boundaries of the ancient world.
[on Dobson]
The culture’s spokesman paints a lurid portrait of today’s world, in which boys typically look at pornography depicting women “hanging from trees, and being murdered with knives, guns, ropes, etc.”; in which “it its legal for a father… to have a homosexual experience with his son”; in which women are called to combat in a time of war, because men are not up to the job. “I miss John Wayne,” laments Dobson.
The focus here is, as always, not on women, but on men, Jesus and John Wayne on the one hand, those whom C.S. Lewis — who privately enjoyed being dominated by his wife — called “men without chests.” That is, “homosexuals.”
I place “homosexuals” in quotes to suggest that the very term itself — so often referred to with code such as Lewis’ — is itself a kind of code within the Christian men’s movement.
[]The oversexed female as public enemy has been replaced by the oversexed male; and in the worst case scenario, he is gay.
[]Ask Pastor Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, and good cop to Dobson’s bad cop at the top of the evangelical world, and he’ll offer a more nuanced answer. Like most fundamentalists, Haggard believes that sexual sin is among the worst; he also knows it is the most common. Evangelicals, he’ll say, aren’t more obsessed with sexuality these days; rather, homosexuals are, somehow, more homosexual. The official line is that gay marriage marks a tipping point (Haggard, like many evangelicals, is a fan of Malcolm Gladwell’s book of that name) into wholesale hedonism. The unofficial line, among leaders such as Haggard and Dobson is that it’s a fight their side has already lost.
Step Right Up (Tom Waits’ lyrics version)
News version: Haggard admits to buying meth and getting a massage…but not sex with this prostitute.
Haggard: “I bought it for myself but never used it,” he said. “I was tempted, but I never used it.”
Haggard, a married father of five, said he never had sex with Mike Jones, a 49-year-old male prostitute who sparked the scandal when he told a radio station he had had a three-year sexual relationship with the minister. He said he did get a massage from Jones after being referred to him by a Denver hotel.
…an oral massage? was Haggard the bottom, so that means “he never had sex with that prostitute?”
pick up…trucks, huh, b?

Posted by: fauxreal | Nov 3 2006 20:09 utc | 17

@fauxreal
Tom Waits – Step Right Up April 18, 1977
Teabagging the apocalypse….lmmfao!!!LAUGING MY MOTHERFUCKING ASS OFF
Okay, I need a new keyboard now thanks…lol

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Nov 3 2006 20:20 utc | 19