The best analysis of what led to the virtual tie between Kirk Dillard and Bill Brady comes to me from a number of people who seem to agree with Rich Miller’s Capitol Fax. All along the smart prognosticators were saying it’s going to be knife-edge between Dillard and Andy McKenna. Brady was regarded as not being sufficiently funded etc. True: then McKenna started in with the very negative ads zeroing in on Dillard and Jim Ryan.
The ads were too tough coupled with the fact that Andy was unwilling to go to many debates to fight for himself but let the negative commercials with a deep rolling baritone voice-over do his work for him. So psychologically many TV viewers got a bad taste in their mouths for both Dillard and Ryan. Then after examining who was sponsoring the TV spots and seeing it was McKenna, they drew a bad conclusion about the negativity. So in their winnowing out the list of recipients for their support, they dropped (a) Dillard, (b) Ryan and chose (c) Brady who didn’t run many commercials but who didn’t say anything bad about anybody.
Which if you follow that rationale means that Bill Brady owes a whole lot to Andy McKenna—or rather Big Andy, Sr. who bankrolled the kid’s campaign and paid for the commercials.
Interesting, what?Excruciating Gay Pressure to Repeal DADT in Wartime.
If you think gay rights doesn’t have clout, think again. Feb. 2nd’s presentation of Fox News’ Special Report had the entire panel…which usually tilts rightward…supporting President Obama’s State of the Union pledge to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) which bans outwardly professing homosexuals from serving in the military. Charles Krauthammer, andWeekly Standard columnist Stephen Hayes…usually opposed to radical social experimentation—especially in the military—especially in wartime—all joined in an anvil chorus to support the innovation. Why?
I can understand the bending of the secretary of defense and chairman of the joint chiefs for this gay pressure: they are, after all, minions of the president who has himself patronized every exotic left-wing species of “movement politics” there is so as to be elected and reelected. It was for that reason that Colin Powell, a creature of a more conservative president, opposed…and rightly so…the gay lobby.
But Krauthammer and Hayes?
Why are they so professedly allied with the illogic poured forth for the change? From the laudable very understandable preservation of sexual privacy that is now existent… to support for announcement of professed homosexuality as an acceptable alternative to heterosexuality—a key goal of liberationists.
Illogicality from Krauthammer, particularly, is a rare failing.. Here he is explaining his “reasons”:
“I think it’s a good idea and I think the administration’s approach, which is a gradual approach, is the right one: which is to study how to do it over a year and then implement it over years.”
Here Krauthammer tips his hand to probably his real feelings—“study it over a year and then implement it over years.”
Continuing: Remember when the armed forces were racially integrated in `48: it was over five years. Now I don’t think these are equivalent entities…”
You bet your bottom dollar they’re not, Charles. There is no comparison whatsoever between ends discrimination against one’s race which actually strengthens the human condition in the military…equipping the military to fight in behalf of one another as brothers and sisters and the contention that it is advisable to change the moral under-girding of Judeo Christianity which has endured for 5,000 years. This attempt by the gay lobby has very little to do with the military per se but to use this to change the history religious condemnation of homosexual activity. Racial distinctions are God-given; perverted sexual activity, no matter how activists aver to the contrary, is in no way indissoluble as is race. What is it then?
Homosexual sexual attraction to members of the same gender is at least partly due to the peculiar makeup of certain individuals. As such by itself without being acted out on the stage of human conduct, it is not sinful: indeed may be occasion for greater spiritual attainment. But it is a result of our fallen condition which includes every kind of impulse. To even allude to a similarity between anti-racial discrimination and acceptance of same-sex engagement on the spurious argument that to oppose this is a form of “hatred” is to yield to the materialistic nuances of this age: the expression of exhilaration for unbridled exaltation of sex.
Apart from the violation of the moral code that has existed for thousands of years, such permissiveness would be result in the corrosion of the canons of honor in the military which reflect divine moral laws.
Back to Krauthammer: “But, look, the mores of the country have changed, certainly in the last 16 years and certainly among the young. I think it’s a form of discrimination that’s sort of outlived itself.”
That is the weakest argument for change that Charles Krauthammer has certainly ever made in the long stretch of time in which I have been following his usually very reasoned, historically literate judgment. To my mind the weakness of his so-called argument reflects pressure from a group that may well have exerted on him as it seeks on others a threat, a punishment, a retribution. Look back on his specious “argument” and see how flaccid and weak it is—as if its protagonist is half-hearted and unbelieving of it in toto. First he uses the baseless example of racial integration of the military. Then he says young people are different, meaning I suppose, more permissive than in the past and so this change should be honored. Essentially: these arguments are so bad as not to be worthy of a man of his intellectuality.
Krauthammer again: “The British and Australian and Canadians who have serious armies have already begun this. I think we ought to study how it should be done in the most reasonable [sic] way but I think it’s a good idea to get it underway and get it started.”
Ah, that’s a powerful argument is it not? The British, Australian and Canadians do it…no evaluation of its basic rightness or wrongness…but because they are doing it, we should “get it underway and get it started.”
Then Hayes adds his view—very powerful and convincing: “And I also think personally that it’s an idea that has outlived its usefulness. I don’t think there is a reason a proud, patriotic gay or lesbian American shouldn’t be able to serve, shouldn’t be able to choose to put his or her life at risk in order to defend the country.”
In other words, these homosexuals are such creatures of copulative passion that in order to be full and complete, they must be able to advertise their adherence to practices which by ancient moral prohibitions are so culture-bound that they are no longer applicable to contemporary life—practices which are abhorrent to the far greater majority of the military. Thus with this in mind, they should be accepted on patriotic grounds—their eagerness to serve.
These so-called “arguments” are so impotent that their advocates…Krauthammer and Hayes…can hardly be taken seriously. They can only be adjudged to be mouthing reasons that have no intellectual basis. No reference is made to the 1993 law passed under Clinton that maintains open homosexuality is incompatible with military service because it destroys the ethos with which the military applies to its duties, vital to attain success in war that is in the last analysis the reason for a military in the first place.
No, there is something in their unison of agreement that lies behind the issue itself—because no one in right mind can accept these watered down platitudes without basis as having any seriousness whatever.
I’d like to know what ungodly pressure has been put on these usually forthright conservative individuals to bow to this fiction that flies in the face of the many cases where homosexuals have been treated and freed from their morally and intrinsic disordered compulsions. But…you see…even to say this—even to say that people are “cured”…is to be berated for homophobia! I tell you it’s a super-powerful lobby to have cowed such otherwise affirmative conservatives as these. And of course there is all too little support for my point of view from the churches: more’s the tragedy.
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*: Feast of St. Andrew Corsini [1302-73]. He was bishop of Fiesole, in the region of Florence and the province of Tuscany. After a dissolute youth he was rudely shaken up by his mother who told him of her dream—that she saw him change from a baby to a wolf which ran into their church and turned into a lamb. Accordingly after thinking things over and praying seriously for the first time in his life, he became a Carmelite friar in 1318 and was ordained priest in 1328. He fled from his family to celebrate his first Mass apart from them because he did not want the usual familial celebration—so he lived at a monastery seven miles out of town. He then studied with his uncle, Cardinal Corsini and returned to Florence where he was named prior of his monastery. He had the gift of healing and conversion of hardened souls.
When the bishop of Fiesole died in 1349 the chapter chose him as bishop. With great modesty he fled to avoid the honor but a child discovered where he was and informed the monastery. Thereupon he accepted the honor. He had the unusual gifts of avoiding and discounting flatterers, avoiding women (whom he regarded as source of temptation).
He served the poor, made his bed a mass of vine branches strewn on the floor. And he had another great gift—of being a superb diplomat where he could end quarrels and set everybody returning to their tasks happily. Pope Urban V sent him to Bologna where the nobles and people were warring and by the time Andrew left, they were all resolved in unity. He took ill while singing Mass on Christmas 1373 and died on the following Epiphany at the age of 71. Immediately the people pleaded for his canonization which was granted and he is buried in the Carmelite church at Florence, and Pope Clement XII ordered a chapel to be built in his honor in the Lateran basilica.
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