Well, we won't have Rick Warren's presidential Civil Forum to kick around anymore.
Or, at least not this election cycle as Saddleback Church's Purpose-Driven pastor cancelled a follow-up to the 2008 Barack Obama–John McCain Civil Forum because the campaigns of The Chosen One and The Stiffly One are being, well, uncivil.
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It doesn't take a weatherman to see the current political climate won't allow for “a place where people of goodwill can seriously disagree on significant issues without being disagreeable or resorting to personal attack and name-calling,” explains Warren (via the Christian Broadcasting Network).
Heading into the November, “I've never seen more irresponsible personal attacks, mean-spirited slander, and flat-out dishonest attack ads, and I don't expect that tone to change before the election,” Warren adds. “It would be hypocritical to pretend civility for one evening only to have the name-calling return the next day.”
And that's a shame, according to the Lake Forest mega-church leader, because “the TV networks were eager to cover it again since it garnered one of the largest viewing audiences of that election.”
Warren claims the campaigns of the president and Mitt Romney “were both favorable to participating.”
At least they could agree on that.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.