Power Corrupts. Again

If you hadn't noticed the low level of public discourse coming from Republican New Hampshire lawmakers, the Catholic League, fortunately, has.

What is more disturbing is that what goes around comes around.

A rigorous examination of that sordid period

I try to go to early morning mass everyday and as my parish does not have a Sat AM mass I go to Epiphany where Monsignor Powell is at. I thought his Letter to the Editor though provoking and so I share it here. I must go along with his suggestion of

"A rigorous examination of that sordid period (beginning — about 1965 — and ending — about 1985) should be even-handed and unsparing, to public and private institutions and the underlying culture."

 I think that we who participated and had much influence during this period will have much to answer for in the generations to come...

Off Their High Horses

What happened to the kinds of editorials once so common in American newspapers? You know the sort: "It's high time So-and-so realize s/he isn't above judgment. S/he had better start realizing it before s/he gets knocked of her/his high-horse. After all, every one of will have to face a time of reckoning, if not in this world then in the Next."

This goes, in particular, for elected representatives of our government on both sides of the aisle. I am not asking for "citizens' arrests" of some kind or another. Rather, I am speaking about the kind of common sense that once not only prevailed in American society, but was, in a sense, its hallmark; a trait we see in a diffuse, unfocused way in the rather unfortunate phenomenon known as "Tea Parties" these days.

The trouble with Tea Parties is that politicians have become too sophisticated in the ways of media exploitation and manipulation, quickly (and all too easily) branding them "racist" or other accusations that turn sympathy away from them and toward their (supposed) "victim". The trouble with this cool, snarky bit of sophistry is that it lends itself to that kind of hubris we now see in our present-day politicians in office.

I would simply like to see newspaper editorials once again appeal to a moral authority beyond that of focus groups or the set of values of any - ANY - group right or left, Democrat or Republican, etc.

I had better not hold my breath.

Katz - Pink Slip the NYT

Here is a perfect example of the veracity of Jon Katz's dictum: "If cultural anthropologists could write, a lot of journalists would have to find other work. And if journalists were given the time, education, and training anthropologists receive, we might better grasp some of the complicated problems we face."

By the way, I found the text of Father Raniero Cantalamessa's homily highly featured - and inexcusably torn out of context - by the NYT. He is an extremely astute and knowledgeable homilist who utilizes mimetic theory as an instrument of the magisterium of the Church. From his homily:

In 1972 a famous French thinker launched the thesis according to which "violence is the heart and secret spirit of the sacred."[2] In fact, at the origin and center of every religion there is sacrifice, and sacrifice entails destruction and death. The newspaper "Le Monde" greeted the affirmation, saying that it made of that year "a year to mark with an asterisk in the annals of humanity." However, before this date, that scholar had come close again to Christianity and at Easter of 1959 he made public his "conversion," declaring himself a believer and returning to the Church.

This enabled him not to pause, in his subsequent studies, on the analysis of the mechanism of violence, but to point out also how to come out of it. Many, unfortunately, continue to quote René Girard as the one who denounced the alliance between the sacred and violence, but they do not speak of the Girard who pointed out in the paschal mystery of Christ the total and definitive break of such an alliance. According to him, Jesus unmasks and breaks the mechanism of the scapegoat that makes violence sacred, making himself, the victim of all violence...

Read it all here. Then ask yourself: How on earth could the NYT have written the above story and so idiotically misconstrued Fr Cantalamessa? How can anyone believe the New York Times is NOT scapegoating the Catholic Church given these facts?

Ultimately, one must ask oneself: Who am I going to trust? I've made my decision. But I, for one, would not want to be in the shoes of those who so glibly cast doubt into the hearts of those who need Christ's holy Church for salvation.

F-bombers in the Club House

Time was, when was it? Probably during Harry Truman's presidency, getting caught saying this to one's commander-in-chief would have been a scandal and true embarrassment. Now, it is presumed that the f-bomb is de rigueur among such Poobah movers and shakers. Particularly when it's end-zone dance time, baby!

Hey. What's good for Enron is good for the country. Right? Right?

Blue Dogs in the Bunker

Ht: Mark Shea. Apologies for the overlap.

Kinda makes sense don't you think?

Conservatism AND Liberalism Dead?

Steven Hayward in today's Washington Post Op/Ed has a piece that asks, "Is Conservatism Dead? No - Just Brain Dead." He writes,

The best-selling conservative books these days tend to be red-meat titles such as Michelle Malkin's "Culture of Corruption," Glenn Beck's new "Arguing with Idiots" and all of Ann Coulter's well-calculated provocations that the left falls for like Pavlov's dogs. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with these books. Politics is not conducted by Socratic seminar, and Henry Adams's dictum that politics is the systematic organization of hatreds should remind us that partisan passions are an essential and necessary function of democratic life. The right has always produced, and always will produce, potboilers.

Conspicuously missing, however, are the intellectual works...MORE>>

Hayward elsewhere dismisses the tea party phenomena as "unfocused" and, as per above, sees Malkin and Beck as not sufficiently "intellectual" to warrant attention (he may have a point there).

Mr. Hayward sees only "Happy Meal Conservatism," which will, he posits, melt away very soon with the morning mist. What he fails to see is the "Happy Meal Liberalism" that he himself espouses. In the doubling rivalry in which he is caught, he fails to see that his stance is the equal and opposite of the conservatism that he and the WaPo scorn and flail at with incessant effort.

If Mr. Hayward wants to find true intellectual vigor, he will have to look to what he and other supposed gatekeepers of public discourse rejected and abandoned long ago; namely, the thinkers and writers of the Catholic Church. One could do worse than the likes of René Girard, recent inductee into L'Académie français, or the Holy Father, Benedict XVI.

But that would take a paradigm shift for Mr. Hayward, not to mention peeling his eyes off of his mimetic rival dance-partner, "conservatism".

Short-sighted Pop Culture Sends Off "Lion"

It is amusing, and a bit sad, the way denizens of the hall of mirrors stoke the flames of the funeral pyre for one of their lions, and feel hurt because the Holy Father hasn't matched their laudatory eulogies.

It speaks reams about the non-Catholic (and cafeteria Catholic) mentality. They simply don't grasp that the Church thinks past individual politicians and the mainstream media's take on them. The Church ponders long and lengthy about the events of millennia ago as though they are part of recent history, and honors the players in the "theo-drama" of salvation history with a voice today as though their votes still count (they do).

Chesterton's "democracy of the dead," however, is reserved for those who strove on Earth to live in accordance with the teachings of the Catholic Church and her magisterium. This is precisely what pop culture, bipartisan politicians, and denizens of the mimetic swirl want no part of.

Pity. Senator Kennedy may have wanted to get to heaven, and he may. But he was no saintly wannabe by the standards set by the Church. He only qualifies as a saint by the standards established by the secular humanist left. He was their kind of saint.

He had his 47-year tenure on that stage and is honored for it. But in eyes of the Church, it was but a wisp of time. For the Holy Father, Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos looms much larger, and more eloquently for the needs of our time, than the senator who had a perfect score from NARAL.

It's Everywhere - Must See

Bill Whittle pulls back the curtain on the truth about iconography and lemmings.

Of course, there is a much more powerful icon that tells a far greater truth about all humans - including false messiahs - here.

Chaput - Health Care Reform

Archbishop Charles Chaput:

God, or the devil, is always in the details. As Scripture says, “You will know them by their fruits” (Mt 7:20). The test of White House and congressional honesty about seeking “common ground” will be the details of the health care plan being worked on this summer and fall. The whole meaning of “health care” would be subverted by any plan that involves mandated abortion access or abortion funding. The reason is obvious. Killing or funding the killing of unborn children has nothing to do with promoting human health, and including these things in any “health care” proposal, no matter how shrewdly hidden, would simply be a form of lying. More>>>

Common sense has so long been rejected and subverted that sacrifice of unborn children is once more the characteristic of a conventional self-satisfied, pagan culture, anthropologically speaking. The influence of the the Church's gospel is reaching its lowest ebb. Family is nearly however you desire to define it. "Heteronormativity" is verboten in curricula. Down is up and up is down.

The good Archbishop Chaput is like the Baptist. A lone voice crying in a wilderness.

Paglia - I just don't get it

A broken clock is right two times a day:

... who would have thought that the sober, deliberative Barack Obama would have nothing to propose but vague and slippery promises -- or that he would so easily cede the leadership clout of the executive branch to a chaotic, rapacious, solipsistic Congress? House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whom I used to admire for her smooth aplomb under pressure, has clearly gone off the deep end with her bizarre rants about legitimate town-hall protests by American citizens. She is doing grievous damage to the party and should immediately step down.

There is plenty of blame to go around. Obama's aggressive endorsement of a healthcare plan that does not even exist yet, except in five competing, fluctuating drafts, makes Washington seem like Cloud Cuckoo Land. The president is promoting the most colossal, brazen bait-and-switch operation since the Bush administration snookered the country into invading Iraq with apocalyptic visions of mushroom clouds over American cities.

You can keep your doctor; you can keep your insurance, if you're happy with it, Obama keeps assuring us in soothing, lullaby tones. Oh, really? And what if my doctor is not the one appointed by the new government medical boards for ruling on my access to tests and specialists? And what if my insurance company goes belly up because of undercutting by its government-bankrolled competitor? Face it: Virtually all nationalized health systems, neither nourished nor updated by profit-driven private investment, eventually lead to rationing.

I just don't get it. Why the insane rush to pass a bill, any bill, in three weeks? And why such an abject failure by the Obama administration to present the issues to the public in a rational, detailed, informational way? The U.S. is gigantic; many of our states are bigger than whole European nations. The bureaucracy required to institute and manage a nationalized health system here would be Byzantine beyond belief and would vampirically absorb whatever savings Obama thinks could be made. And the transition period would be a nightmare of red tape and mammoth screw-ups, which we can ill afford with a faltering economy ...

And what do Democrats stand for, if they are so ready to defame concerned citizens as the "mob" -- a word betraying a Marie Antoinette delusion of superiority to ordinary mortals. I thought my party was populist, attentive to the needs and wishes of those outside the power structure. And as a product of the 1960s, I thought the Democratic party was passionately committed to freedom of thought and speech.

But somehow liberals have drifted into a strange servility toward big government, which they revere as a godlike foster father-mother who can dispense all bounty and magically heal all ills. The ethical collapse of the left was nowhere more evident than in the near total silence of liberal media and Web sites at the Obama administration's outrageous solicitation to private citizens to report unacceptable "casual conversations" to the White House. If Republicans had done this, there would have been an angry explosion by Democrats from coast to coast. I was stunned at the failure of liberals to see the blatant totalitarianism in this incident, which the president should have immediately denounced. His failure to do so implicates him in it. More>>>

Rep. Anh “Joseph” Cao

Have you heard of Rep. Anh “Joseph” Cao, (R-New Orleans), the first Vietnamese-American congressman and a Catholic?

“At the end of the day if the health care reform bill does not have strong language prohibiting the use of federal funding for abortion, then the bill is really a no-go for me,” said Cao, who spent time in formation to be a Jesuit priest.

“Being a Jesuit, I very much adhere to the notion of social justice,” Cao said. “I do fully understand the need of providing everyone with access to health care, but to me personally, I cannot be privy to a law that will allow the potential of destroying thousands of innocent lives,” he explained to the Louisiana newspaper.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee announced that Cao will be one of seven Republican members of Congress targeted with radio ads that will play on radio stations with largely African-American audiences, urging him to support Obama's health reform efforts.

“I know that voting against the health care bill will probably be the death of my political career,” Cao said, “but I have to live with myself, and I always reflect on the phrase of the New Testament, ‘How does it profit a man's life to gain the world but to lose his soul.’”

Cao is the first native of Vietnam to serve in Congress and the first Republican to serve in his district since 1890. He won in a district that usually votes overwhelmingly Democratic.

The poorest member of Louisiana's delegation, and a devout Roman Catholic, Cao served as a board member for Mary Queen of Vietnam Catholic Church's Community Development Corporation which assists Vietnamese-Americans with hurricane relief, and is a member of the National Advisory Council of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. More>>>

Cao's viewpoint is something that cafeteria Catholics will not understand. But the early martyrs, our faithful brothers and sisters who died rather than avow Caesar's divinity, most certainly would.

Two-Stepping to Hell

From Verum Serum, via Gil Bailie:

Now I realize that the editors at these MSM institutions are probably following some style-guide which tells them that a baby inside a mother is fetus and a fetus in the hospital is a baby. What this case points out so clearly is that it’s a distinction without a difference. If we wanted to lay aside the style-guide we’d have to admit it was a baby when it was kidnapped and it was a baby when it was discovered alive in the hospital. Calling it a fetus didn’t change anything about it except its implied location. So why do it? I think the answer is obvious. You don’t have to look any further than yesterday’s NY Times hagiography of George Tiller for an answer. From the Times story:

[T]he other 2,800 abortions involved viable fetuses. Some had serious but survivable abnormalities, like Down syndrome. Many were perfectly healthy.

Those were healthy babies Tiller dismembered. Babies. More >>

I would love simply to call the prevarication by the MSM on abortuarial murder cowardice: merely fear of losing advertizers, or readership, or viewers, or the like. But at heart it stems from a baser motive: fear of the rising tide of the primitive Sacred. That is, it is hypocritical turning away from human sacrifice, lest all of us face the horror of cultural collusion that became a staple of United States cohesion since Roe v. Wade. Or, perhaps it is one and the same after all.

If our country, like so many other western nations formerly informed by the Judeo-Christian ethos, faces cultural meltdown it will be because we turned our collective back on that Judeo-Christian ethos for a heinous, softcore, "professional" - even suburban - version of human sacrifice: an antiseptic, stainless steel and latex medical "procedure".

But is it hypocritical? I fear that our collective consciousness about abortion has truly changed. It is no longer horrible. It is now "routine" for a vast majority of Americans. It is clearly a political chit in the Washington "two-step" for all but a very small minority on either side of the aisle. And if we are so blinded to the abomination of abortion, what others have become "normalized"? (Fill in the blank.)

And so I say, batten down the hatches. I fully believe in the consequential judgment of God against idolatry and paganism. Particularly when those who knew better reject what once was espoused and cherished as God's revelation and truth.

Cool Reality Adaptation Presentation (CRAP)

Crap-o-meter - I gotta get me one of them! Ht: Karen Hall

Hocus Pocus

Matthew Archbold points out an essential illusion of today's faltering western culture:

The NY Times is doing a victory lap over the blogosphere today:

For the most part, the traditional news outlets lead and the blogs follow, typically by 2.5 hours, according to a new computer analysis of news articles and commentary on the Web during the last three months of the 2008 presidential campaign.

The finding was one of several in a study that Internet experts say is the first time the Web has been used to track — and try to measure — the news cycle, the process by which information becomes news, competes for attention and fades.

This is laughable because the media is ahead of the blogs only in what they choose to cover.

For example, look at the recent quotes that came to light concerning Obama's Science Czar John Holdren who endorsed mass sterilizations and forced abortions in a book he wrote in 1977. Those comments were discovered not by one reporter on a staff of hundreds on a large metropolitan newspaper. Those comments were discovered by a guy who runs a blog called Zombietime. And Holdren's comments launched 4,000 blog posts over the next three days. But not one mainstream media organization has looked into these comments.

So on this story, the blogosphere is uhmm...three days ahead of the MSM. And counting ... More >>>

What Archbold outlines (and Michelle Malkin, too - see the link) is the collusion that is part and parcel of today's out-of-control swinging pendulum of what Saint Paul calls "party spirit." Should you ever get a chance to listen to Gil Bailie's reflections on Dante's Inferno, I highly recommend his in-depth discussion of this particular circle of hell. (Sadly, Mr. Bailie's present Emmaus Road Initiative does not allow his greatest skill for such in-depth ruminations.)

René Girard has studied this phenomenon extensively - the "problem of the doubles" - and future generations will stand amazed at the way two-party politics in the United States of America foiled what was left of old Christendom.

In these meantimes, "Prez I Wun" in his hubris is the magician of magicians, the master of the sacred prestidigitation of collusion. I have never seen his better (sic.).

Nevertheless, the Holy Father has once again left us a trail of bread crumbs (Panis Angelicus), but it takes saints - and the aspiring saintly ones (wink, wink) - to strive, to struggle, to follow this trail far from the maddening crowd (would Thomas Hardy know this? I'll leave that to you to decide), and maybe fail miserably in the effort.

But you know what? I'll take that failure over the collusion smoke and mirrors of the MSM, Wall Street, and the Republic and Democratic parties. Any day.

USAToday - Follow the $$

Basic rule, for friend or foe: Always follow the money. Always. Alas.

"Change". Yeah - right ....

Ouch

Appeaser-in-chief gets nose swatted for showing a little - a very little - backbone.

Goebbelsdegook / ABC

Matt Drudge reports the marriage of ABC News and the Bureau of Propaganda: ABC TURNS PROGRAMMING OVER TO OBAMA; NEWS TO BE ANCHORED FROM INSIDE WHITE HOUSE

Rachel Maddow Shreds O Speech

Geez Louise. Is the MSM finally seeing through the tissue of political half-truths of I Wun?