I've been reading Reddit.com a lot lately - it's a great aggregation site (news, and pretty much everything else under the sun) with unpredictable, quirky content and a young-ish, smart reader base.

Today I noticed a heavily recommended submission attacking attacking the Huffington Post for (allegedly) not being a real news site. Then I noticed a less-well recommended submission with the title of Has the Huffington Post actually ever broken a story?

Well, Huffpo sure has.

In May 2008, a wrote a post titled

Audio Recording of McCain's Political Endorser John Hagee Preaching Jews Are Cursed and Subhuman. It contained audio I'd found from a 2005 sermon (which I initially dated as "late 1990's" to be on the very conservative side) in which Texas megachurch pastor John Hagee, whose political endorsement presidential candidate John McCain had been after "like a dog in heat" (as I put it in a March 2008 post) declared that "God sent Hitler... Hitler was a hunter."

About a week later, Sam Stein of the Huffington Post noticed my post and covered it, in a story prominent on the Huffington Post's front page. From there Keith Olbermann's Countdown picked it up, and pretty soon scandalous audio, from a 2005 sermon, had seriously damaged presidential candidate John McCain's already shaky relationship with the evangelical right, his key base of electoral support.

[below: Keith Olbermann, on Countdown, covers "God sent Hitler."

Within 48 hours of when Olbermann showcased my audio clip of John Hagee bellowing about how God had sent Hitler, a "hunter", to chase Europe's Jews towards Palestine, the clip was being played on news stations worldwide. And, within about 48 hours, John McCain had a national press conference in which he rejected his endorsement from Hagee and denounced pastor Hagee's statement.

This was a blow to the McCain campaign, because in the 2000 election GOP primaries John McCain had repeatedly attacked evangelists such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell as "agent of intolerance." McCain, of course, lost to George W. Bush, who had close ties (or better) with American right wing evangelicals.

McCain began advance work patching things up with Robertson, Falwell and the evangelical right somewhere around 2005, and it took McCain a few years to get to Hagee, who had by 2008 emerged as a major evangelical kingmaker. The McCain-Hagee rift was a blow to McCain's relationship with a major chunk of his GOP electoral base, and it arguably help tilt his campaign advisers towards their choice of Sarah Palin as McCain's VP running mate pick. That, in turn both electrified McCain's evangelical base and scored away independent and moderate voters. The rest is history.

Below is my writeup of the affair, which I did for my user profile on this website.