Conservative blogs promote NRO's apocryphal church “newsletter” to ridicule Hillary Clinton

Written by Katie Barge

Published

Radio commentator and National Review contributor Rob Long's “The Long View: A roundup of this week's Church bulletins” November 16 column (which will appear in an upcoming edition of the print version of the National Review) purported to quote a statement Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton gave to "'Light the Lamp!': The monthly newsletter of the Holy Flame Pentecostal Church of Little Rock, Ark." Conservative websites have since published the supposed Clinton quote across the Internet.

But Long is a “comic commentator,” and Media Matters for America found no evidence of a Holy Flame Pentecostal Church in Little Rock, Arkansas.

From Long's “The Long View” column in the November 29 edition of National Review, posted in part November 16 on National Review Online:

From “Light the Lamp!”: The monthly newsletter of the Holy Flame Pentecostal Church of Little Rock:

We welcome back to the area Senator Hillary Clinton (D., N.Y.), who has been spending so much time here in Little Rock lately that she's practically joined the church choir! “I'm here spending time at my husband's library,” she told the Lamp when we caught up with her after a Sunday camp meeting, “and of course, I always take time to worship God in as evangelical a way as is feasible, given time and location constraints. As you know, I consider myself an evangelical Christian, really a Christian conservative, if you want to know the truth, so it's nice to be 'home' again in the South, which I really consider my quote-unquote home even though I live in New York most of the time. Well, Washington, D.C., most of the time, actually, but if I'm not there I'm in New York, of course, but always thinking about being here, in the South, my spiritual home, where I shared so many wonderful evangelical ... moments and ... events. Can you read that back to me?”

The “Light the Lamp!” staff would like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that Christ loves all of us equally, and that God's house is open to all, even to senators from New York, so whoever is muttering stuff and saying mean things while pretending to cough can just quit it right now.

National Review Online contributor Catherine Seipp profiled Long in her July 1 “From the Left Coast” column when Long was hired as a commentator at Santa Monica, California, public radio station KCRW. According to Seipp, Long is a “comic commentator,” “sitcom writer and longtime National Review contributor” who “writes humorous essays about politics and Hollywood for the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and Newsweek's international edition.” According to Seipp's column, when Long's boss asked to send him to the 2004 Republican National Convention for the radio station, “he warned her, 'you do understand that I'm not a reporter -- I don't cover things.'” Referring to his four-minute weekly commentary pieces called “Martini Shot,” which are heard during KCRW's broadcast of National Public Radio's All Things Considered, Long said: “But even things that happened to me didn't really happen the way they did in these pieces ... Or at least, not in such a way that they're traceable to an actual person. They're tru-ish. I stand by the essential truth of them.”

Nevertheless, conservative websites and weblogs published the purported quote by Senator Clinton, with the following introductions:

  • From the anti-Senator Clinton website HillaryWatch:

    There should be no doubt in anyone's mind and there certainly isn't here at HillaryWatch that Mrs. Clinton has a definable deficiency in the “Values Voters” category.

    Evidently she is attempting to begin to try to bridge that gap.

    HillaryWatch is unconvinced.

  • From Kevin McCullough, radio host and a columnist for the conservative news website WorldNetDaily.com, on the conservative religious blog crosswalk.com:

    EVANGELICAL HILLARY?: I admit I nearly fell out of my chair laughing when I read the quote attributed to Hillary from an upcoming print edition of the National Review.

    HillaryWatch was the first one to bring it to my attention ...

    Speaking to a “church based” newsletter this week in anticipation of the opening of the Clinton Presidential Library, Mrs. Clinton made the following statements ...

  • From Blogs for Bush:

    Who The Hell-ary Does She Think She's Fooling?

    I'm sorry, but seriously, does Hillary Clinton think everyone is stupid? Kevin McCullough enlightened me to the latest scam by Hillary in anticipation of her presidential run: Evangelical Hillary!

    Apparently, while speaking to a “church based” newsletter, Hillary said the following: ....

  • From the right-wing blog Musing:

    A classic introduction to the upcoming metamorphosis of Hillary Clinton - from screeching liberal, pro-abortion, feminist harpy to down home southern, evangelical Christian. Hillary knows that a liberal/socialist, north eastern senator will not win the presidency, so she is starting to try and convince the world that she is more like Ronald Reagan than John Kerry.

  • The post on Blogs for Bush was later updated:

    UPDATE: Evidently, the source of the Hillary “quote” is in fact satire... That's what I get for not tracing the quote to the original source.. Kevin got it from HillaryWatch who got it from National Review's satire column...

    Nevertheless, we still expect Democrats have every intention to attract more of the evangelical vote. After their devastating loss on November 2nd, they've been running around blindfolded trying to figure out what they stand for. Democrats have a moral values deficit they want to overcome, and they will - trust me they will attempt to attract more of the evangelical vote.

    I guess the Dan Rather standard applies here... Fake, but accurate.