Today’s the Feast of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton.*
David the Deep, Very Deep.
You always need a pop culture glossary to follow the columns of Maureen Dowd in the Times. Sometimes it’s annoying but on occasion fun. This ultra-liberal world’s oldest teenager (she’ll be 59 Jan. 14) has started to diss…gasp!...Barack Obama, most notably for the administration’s failure in the Northwest Airlines situation where an al-Qaeda bomber got on the plane without passport or bags and paid in cash. We somehow thought Obama had it all together, she writes, to make this country as smoothly running as a Philip K. Dick scenario. (Philip K. Dick is a late science fiction novelist known to not you; certainly not me, but Maureen).
While Maureen has temporarily fallen off the boat of Obama worshipers, be assured that one Times columnist decidedly has not: the onetime A.B. student at the University of Chicago. David Brooks. He’s the Times’ resident philosopher thumb-sucker who lost his bearings early in the campaign when Obama told him he has an affinity for the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. David whose forte is playing Deep, Very Deep Intellectual, told The Times readership last weekend that America is far too overwrought about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Then the dispassionate Brooks gave some advice to his Idol Obama on how to handle this crisis. The president should go on TV and say…get this… “Listen, we’re doing the best we can but some terrorists are bound to get through.”
Gee, I thought that was exactly the message Obama conveyed when he didn’t respond to the near-tragedy for three whole days. “[W]e shouldn’t imagine that these centralized institutions are going to work perfectly or even well most of the time,” writes the starry-eyed idealist Brooks. One wonders if he would have such a broadminded view if this had happened under George W. Bush whom I suspect has not read Niebuhr. If another square block of real estate blows up in either New York or Chicago would the Socrates of the Op Ed page and PBS’s News Hour with Jim Lehrer (pronounced Lah-rah) say “take it easy, folks; slipups are bound to happen”? I think not.
The issue to be Deep, Very Deep about, long-range live-and-let-live for this brooding faux intellectual, is climatology and global warming. Meaning: point out the long view, citing that the past two million years we underwent no fewer than 60 glaciations or ice ages and in the previous 120,000 years we’ve experienced 20 global warmings where most of the time temperatures have escalated by as much as 18 degrees within 20 years…so what’s the buzz about awarding developing nations $100 billion of our largesse each year to ostensibly correct what is a natural condition. But that’s exactly where Brooks is not calm. Airliners being sabotaged yes, not global warming.
Being panicky about terrorism wouldn’t secure Brooks’ niche…as the one-time conservative-turned Obama adulator…at The New York Times or to hold down his seat across the table from Jim Lah-rah, would it?
Jim Warren Forecasts GOP Senate Defeat.
There was pronounced a very likely death sentence on Republican chances for the U.S. Senate by the elfin-like columnist Jim Warren Friday. Warren, having lost his job at The Tribune and obviously not being successful at finding comparable employment, heads up the throw-away Chicago Reader and benefited from a liberal philanthropy to fund a group of liberal journalistic retreads to write Chicago stuff for The New York Times, the articles appearing on Friday and Sunday in Times papers distributed here. Sometimes they’re pretty good; but Warren’s commentaries are always from the Left.
Warren thinks what happens in the Illinois senatorial election later this year could well be redundant because the GOP is on the way to…you’ll pardon the expression…blowing it. You see, the Republicans are already on the way to booting it because Andy Martin assailed Rep. Mark Kirk for allegedly being gay…with no proof attached. Republican State Chairman Patrick Brady waited far too long to rebuke Martin, writes Warren who has written nothing about Obama’s getting off his golf cart for three days after a near catastrophic failure of airline security. Hence Illinoisans could very well reject the dilatory action of Brady and other Republicans by defeating Kirk and torpedoing the GOP. Conceivably Warren sees thousands of indignant gays marching to the polls to rebuke the party. Thousands of gays? Probably in his dreams.
What nonsense. But appropriate for The New York Times.
To appreciate the tone of this commentary, remember that Warren is a not inconsiderable follower of the new civic religion that has taken command of most old-fashioned news media. It has made names but it is essentially Ultra-Toleration. And it has a catechism.
The catechism of our new civic religion Ultra-Toleration requires complete understanding of all opinions but traditional ones. It indemnifies in strongest terms against those who oppose abortion. They are bigoted Puritan prudes. Warren calls pro-lifers “diehards [who] appear to believe anything is fair game when it comes to preventing what they deem murder.” Repeat: “what they deem murder.” Uh-huh. The heresy of this new religion is this: rather than America suffering from intolerance, it suffers from excessive Toleration—refusal to distinguish between good and evil, virtue and sin (which it does not recognize); between patriotism and globalism which blames America.
Now assuredly there are sinful absolutes with this new civic religion.
Their cardinal sins are three—racism, sexism, homophobia.
(1) Racism pertaining to include those who criticize Obama on any governmental issue and oppose continuation of affirmative action: who are all, of course, haters to be cast into an unforgiving Hell to join the decedents Sheriff Jim Clark of Selma, Alabama, Eugene (Bull) Connor, chief of safety at Birmingham, Alabama and Sen. Theodore Bilbo (D-Ms). Limbaugh, Beck and Palin are already there—not because they said anything racist but because Ultra Tolerationist religionists feel they should be. And yes, their Hell is integrated: composed of non-decedent Enablers Tom Sowell, Walter Williams and soon to be designated: Bill Cosby.
(2) Sexism, curable by Feminism, the campaign to set up women as competitors with men in every activity, including the future possibility of male-female Suma wrestling, anything so long as women are dissuaded from their originally physically designed role of wives and mothers.
(3) Homophobia, a new invention not included for 5,000 years among the ordinary Capital Sins. It’s definition encompasses all criticism of the homosexual practice taken from scripture or Christian tradition while Christ-advocated love-the-sinner, hate-the-sin, is dismissed as illusory. This is where Warren is coming from with his commentary. Those who maintain condemnation of the practice does not equate with defamation of homosexuals as persons are not believed and labeled miscreants. The label is explicit: Any criticism of gay lifestyle is identical with homophobia.
Understand, for a politician, any sexual behavior outside the marital norm carries with it the possibility that blackmail could affect the subject’s congressional or administrative behavior. Heterosexual as well as homosexual dalliances are equally subject to blackmail as well, as we know when Henry Hyde rejected such importuning from the Man with Bad Breath who said if Hyde continued with plans for impeachment, a rumor would be unleashed about a 40-year-old affair that would embarrass him in front of his family. Hyde continued and paid the price. The Man with Bad Breath is still operative and at a high station. Warren pays no heed to the blackmail possibility because he is either a boob or enslaved by political correctness, you take your choice.
But all this is tempest in a teapot. All would have passed all but unnoticed if Warren and his liberal media sob sisters had not made so much noise about it. The fact is their amplification of it will likely portray Kirk in sympathetic tones. This sophisticated view has not eluded either the media or Kirk supporters but they—particularly the media and Warren (that is, if he understands it)—have not owned up to it.
So weep not for Kirk in this matter—whom heterosexual or homosexual, I will not vote for anyhow. (Why not? See below). The best case history on how to benefit from a charge was made in Illinois by, who else? Rahm Emanual.
Emanuel was slithering ahead as an interloper from New Trier suburbs, a new arrival in the north side’s 5th district. It was once Polish but is now a polyglot of Old Town, fashionable Lake Shore drive and Wrigley Field. He challenged for the Democratic nomination State Rep. Nancy Kaczak, a Polish woman, lifelong resident and popular state lawmaker. A supporter of Kaczak, without knowledge just hearsay, alleged that Emanuel had dual citizenship in Israel, an inaccuracy. Emanuel turned on his campaign’s propaganda wind machine to project himself as victim of anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism? Is dual citizenship with Israel ipso facto anti-Semitic? No matter, Rahm alleged it was and so it was taken up by the media as such.
Posing as a victim of anti-Semitism immeasurably helped Emanuel gain sympathy with a lavish free media spread. In fact, Emanuel’s road warriors were trumpeting the untrue charge themselves to stir up grassroots passion. Kaczak apologized time and again for the goof-up of her supporter but Emanuel wasn’t satisfied. Along with 200 Water Department taxpayer-paid “volunteers,” the gaffe led to his defeating the much better qualified Kaczak in the Democratic primary.
The Warren contention that not responding immediately to the Martin allegation will doom the GOP is a case of the wish being mother of the thought and contrived nonsense. Although by the time the election is held and Warren’s assessment is disproved, likely he will have moved on to some other employment or new trend lefty propagandistic venue.
In the future many candidates may bid for Andy Martin to attack them, hoping to gain sympathy thereby.
(Why won’t I vote for Kirk? Time was when he stood for something, albeit a mixture of bad and good. Bad: Ineffably wretched anti-life issues, support for partial birth abortion and embryonic stem cell experimentation by the feds. Good: a strong record on defense. That intermixture made it at least an intellectual project to determine whether or not a conservative can in good conscience vote for him. But when Bush’s numbers cratered and he launched the Surge in Iraq, Kirk formed an anti-Surge caucus in the House to save his skin in the 10th. Now that the Surge worked and he’s running for the Senate, Kirk’s reverted to the same-old, same-old pro-Surge Hawk and is soliciting the endorsement of Sarah Palin. The man has no shame. Conclusion: he stands for nothing save his own political advancement. That’s why I’m voting for Patrick Hughes.)
Rahm Emanuel to Quit? Naw.
At the windup of Fox News “Special Report” Friday came a prediction by Bret Baier, the anchor, that Rahm Emanuel will quit his chief of staff job, race back to Illinois and file for the Democratic U. S. Senate job for the February primary…this because no Democrat has convinced the White House that he/she is strong enough to win. That may be true but Emanuel coming here now would be truly bizarre and will not happen because the deadline has passed. Emanuel will opt out of the White House, of that there’s no doubt as he’s responsible for much of Obama’s failed presidency—but he’s not going this way.
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*: St. Elizabeth Ann Seton [1774-1821], a widow with 5 children, a convert ostracized by her family for becoming Catholic, was founder of the Sisters of Charity and the first American-born saint.
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