NEW YORK (ABP) — Former "Saturday Night Live" cast member and conservative Christian comedienne Victoria Jackson said in a Fox News interview March 9 that President Obama is a communist and that what America needs is the Bible.
"My motivation is gone, because [Obama] will punish me if I'm successful," said the 49-year-old entertainer, best known for playing ditzy blonde characters on the hit NBC comedy show from 1986 to 1992, to interviewer Sean Hannity. "That's how you start communism, is just take — Cuba! Obama wants to be Castro."
Jackson said she would like to see Hannity run the country, along with conservative radio commentator Rush Limbaugh and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the failed GOP vice-presidential nominee.
Jackson, a vocal evangelical Christian who has appeared on the Christian Broadcasting Network's "700 Club" and who spoke at a major Southern Baptist gathering in 2004, said she wasn't interested in politics before the last election. Last year, she supported the GOP presidential nominee, Arizona Sen. John McCain, and opposed one of her former "SNL" colleagues, Al Franken, who ran as a Democrat for one of Minnesota's two Senate seats.
"Well, I've never been involved in politics, 'cause it's just 'neh neh neh, neh neh neh,' but all of a sudden it was, it was: 'Oh, Hillary Clinton is a socialist, she wants to socialize medicine. Well, I'll have to vote against her.' And then all of a sudden a communist appears! Out of nowhere! And that's when I started to get involved."
At that point Jackson said she did research and found that "black liberation theology, his church, is Marxist, and his professors are Marxist."
"He says, 'Redistribute the wealth,'" she said.
It isn't the first time Jackson has called Obama a communist. Last year on another Fox News program, "The O'Reilly Factor," she said she was supporting McCain because she thought Obama was a communist.
"My husband said; 'Don't use that word. Say 'radical' or 'Marxist.' But you know, Karl Marx wrote the book The Communist Manifesto, so I don't see why people are afraid to say the word 'communist.'"
She said her research included reading George Orwell's book 1984 — twice — and said seeing Obama's picture on the cover of every magazine in an airport bookstore reminded her of "Castro, or the guy in China."
"I think we've already started sliding into socialism," she said. "The liberals are controlling all the TV channels. I mean the only one telling the truth is yours. This is the only one we watch."
Jackson explained in a recent "700 Club" interview why she began speaking out.
"The last couple of months I've been involved in giving political speeches, because I passionately have Christian values that I'm afraid I might lose," she said. "So I started speaking out, and people are now asking me to give political speeches." She then blurted out: "Yeah Sarah Palin!"
"I'm so proud of Sarah Palin," she said. "I was praying, 'God please help our country return to — I have all our founding fathers' speeches of how they loved Jesus and God."
She said David Barton's Wallbuilders website, for example, "proves our country was founded — hello! — on Christianity."
"I was praying, 'God please let us retain our freedom to have Christian radio and not be persecuted like Christians are in other countries. Please God help this election.' And all of a sudden Sarah Palin dropped out of the sky. I'm like, 'You're kidding me! A Christian?' It was a miracle."
Jackson grew up in a conservative Christian home and dropped out of college to head for Hollywood. Eventually she received a theater degree at Palm Beach Atlantic University, a Southern Baptist school in Florida.
In 2004 she spoke at an "Elevate" conference sponsored by the Southern Baptist Convention's North American Mission Board. The event aimed to help college students and young professionals merge faith with daily life.
As time ran out on her most recent Fox interview, Jackson pulled out her Bible and held it aloft. "This is what our country needs, the Bible," she said. "I didn't get time to get to that."
In a March 11 post about Jackson's appearance on the left-leaning blog Crooks and Liars, David Neiwert termed Jackson's ranting "idiocy."
"Back when she was a cast member of 'Saturday Night Live,' I didn't find Victoria Jackson particularly funny. I thought her ditzy-blonde routine was too over the top and demeaning; nobody could really be that idiotic, I thought. Later, I came to realize that it wasn't just a routine," Neiwert wrote.
He concluded, "Is this is the face of the new conservatism? The average, Fox-watching, Limbaugh-loving American? If so: Wow."
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Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press. Robert Marus, ABP's managing editor and Washington bureau chief, contributed to this story.