Thoughts While Shaving: It’s Important Ben Bernanke be Confirmed by the Senate—and Guess Why?...It’s Great Scott Brown Won but Don’t Get Too Attached to Him.

   Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul* 

          

                                                Bernanke.

          This torturous fiddle-faddling by the Senate over whether or not to reconfirm Ben Bernanke as head of the Fed is ridiculous—led by the  Democratic Left.  I’m not nuts about Bernanke although he was named by George W. Bush (in fact not nuts about the  Fed itself since it exists without much audit and is in fact a 4^th branch of government until and unless its powers are trimmed and is compelled to stop jiggling with interest rates creating boom and then bust)…but let’s be clear about one thing.

          If Bernanke isn’t confirmed can you imagine whom the Messiah would appoint to that most important of all economic jobs?  Well, guess.  Let’s see: Somebody guilt-ridden about our “moral debt” to support the 3^rd world, somebody who feels the TARP spending was too low, somebody who relishes beating up on big business, someone who believes strongly in income redistribution via high taxes.  

           That would morph into Paul Krugman, 58, professor of public and international affairs at Princeton, a Nobel Prize winner in economics for analyzing trade cycles, a very visible and public-voiced liberal who writes a weekly column for The New York Times.  Krugman’s academic luster and high popularity with the Left would get him confirmed by the Senate unless and until there’s a filibuster—but his appointment  might very well be the death knell for any substantial recovery.

                        About Brown: Don’t Get Too Attached!

           Bill Bradley, the last commonsense Democrat of national stature, was as you know not just one of the greatest basketball players of all time (with the New York Knicks) but a superb New Jersey senator, a former Rhodes scholar and mathematician who ran unsuccessfully for his party’s nomination in 2000 when his commonsense support of tax reform and Reagan budget-cutting caused him to lose to…ahem…Al Gore. Bradley tells about a time when he was in a slump with the Knicks and goofed up three free-throws in a row whereupon the Knicks lost a bid to the championship.

         As soon as he got home…this being before the days  of e-mails…a messenger came to his door with a telegram.  It was from an angry fan who signed his name.  It said: 
          “Bradley, the next time you botch a free-throw like that, I’m going to shoot your dog!”

            Shoot your dog!

           Bradley sent the guy a return gram and cautioned him to grow up and be an adult.  The game is just a game.  No use being so dracon or taking it out on a poor little dog.  “Besides,” Bradley said, “for your information I don’t have a dog—so grow up!  So you can’t shoot my dog but even the concept is sickening to me!” 

            The next day two messengers came to Bradley’s door and delivered an expensive crate with air-holes punched in. Once it was opened there was a roomy cage and inside, eager to get out, was a beautiful russet-haired cocker spaniel to whom Bradley’s kids took to with whoops of delight. While they frolicked with the spaniel, Bradley opened the note attached. It was from the same guy and said…

           “Bradley, don’t get too attached to this dog!”

          In the same spirit, I ask conservatives who along with me thrilled to the Scott Brown victory in Massachusetts last week, not to get too attached to him.  It’s wonderful that we have a 41^st vote; I’m ecstatic that the Senate has another member who is against health care, sealing its doom, against cap and trade et al.   But don’t get too attached to him.   Especially for heaven’s sake don’t start talking him up for the presidency.  He’s only 50. Let him simmer.  Don’t repeat what Democrats did to another supposed glory boy, Obama.  For the closer you get to Brown and learn more about him, the less you may like him…or some members of his family.

            Scott Brown has all the impediments that one is expected to have who comes from a chaotic family.  Remember Bill Clinton whose mother was nothing more than a gambling tramp?  Whose imbroglio with a boy friend made young Clinton get up in the middle of the night and have to mediate between his mother and a raging boy friend?  You think that experience doesn’t do something to a guy?  Well, just look at Clinton and the bimbo eruptions.

            Scott Brown’s background is just like Clinton’s only worse.  His mother and father were each married three times.  Scott Brown at age 9 had to get up in the middle of the night and prevent a male visitor to his mother’s bedroom from cutting her ear-to-ear with a butcher knife. Trying to pay his tuition to law school motivated Brown to pose semi-draped for Cosmopolitan.  Call me a sexist but women who model and pose do what women have done for two millennia.  A man who does so looks and indeed is…well…unmanly.  Can you imagine this revelation made of a candidate 20 or 30 years ago?  The fact that it was sloughed off…by the media…and more noteworthy by us…indicates the decadence caused by the slime in which we live and breathe.

            Now…there’s more.

            Remember election night when Brown appeared on stage with his two gorgeous daughters?  He declared the younger one, the one who nearly won American Idol “available” at a rally covered by the national media. Why was the younger girl…on the stage with her family in mid-winter in Boston (and having lived for a year in Cambridge I can tell you those winters rival Chicago’s)…why was this younger girl on stage in a strapless evening gown with bare shoulders when everyone else was sweater-clad, buttoned up in woolies to the chin?  Why didn’t her mother, the Boston television reporter Gail Huff, check her kid out before her appearance on Victory Night?

           And about Gail Huff…the media covering Brown were exceedingly friendly. They didn’t cover the shoddy, sleazy film she made as a young actress years before…a film in which she was celebrated performing simulated male masturbation.  I’ve seen it on YouTube. A forgiving God was working for Brown during the campaign else that film could have caused national repercussions and have easily lost the election.  Nauseating. What sort of woman would make this thing?  What sort of mind-set?  

           Enough.  Paraphrasing the words the Knicks fan used on Bradley: Don’t get too attached to Brown…or his family.

          

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     *: Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul [AD 34].

       This story is one of the greatest ones in history of the Church…how he was a Jew of the tribe of Benjamin, born between AD 5 and 15…how on the eighth day after his birth at his circumcision he received the name Saul…born at Tarsus in Cilicia (modern-day southeastern Turkey), by privilege a Roman citizen. How his parents sent him to Jerusalem where he was instructed in the law of Moses by Gamaliel, a learned Pharisee whereupon  Saul became a Jew of the strict observance, embracing the party of the Pharisees, of all the most severe. He became a tent-maker, a trade that he continued on occasion even after his apostleship. You have read how he participated in the stoning of Stephen, the first Christian martyr, taking on the task of watching the discarded garments of the young men who hurled the stones…discarding their garments so as to have more freedom in hurling the huge stones at the kneeling, praying Stephen.  Augustine wrote: If Stephen had not prayed in his moment of death, the Church assuredly would not have had St. Paul.

          In the fury of his zeal, Saul applied to the high priest for a commission to arrest all Jews at Damascus who were flirting with Christianity.  In fact he was one of a company on their way to Damascus to confirm that appointment when he was felled by a Great Light.  Then of them all, only Saul heard the voice: “Saul, Saul, why persecutest  thou Me?” Saul, blinded, cried out: Who are you?  The answer: “Jesus of Nazareth whom thou persecutest. It is hard for thee to kick against the goad.” Meaning by persecuting My Church you are harming yourself.  Saul: “Lord, what wilt Thou have me do?”  Christ told him to arise, continue to Damascus where he would learn what was expected of him.  Blind in Damascus at the home of Ananias…Ananias trembling at having as houseguest the notorious Saul the Christian killer...being told by Christ: “…[H]e is a vessel of election to carry My name before the Gentiles and kings and the children  of Israel and I will show him how much he has to suffer for My name.”

         Ananias placed his hands on Saul, saying “Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus who appeared to thee on thy journey has sent me that thou may receive thy sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.” 

        The rest you have heard in the books you have read…and the readings of Paul’s epistles at every Mass. He was executed the same day as was St. Peter, in the same city—Rome—in AD 67 according to St. Eusbius, by beheading according to Tertullian.