Thoughts While Shaving: GOP Presidential Candidates from Shaving Cream to Toweling Off and Patting Face Dry.

      Applying Gillette Shaving Cream from Squirt Top Can.  Funny but for a guy who values absolutes, I’m absolutely uncertain as to whom would be ideal to beat Obama….especially now that Pres is benefiting from a mild upsurge following the Lame Duck.  Unlike me to be like this.  In 1979 after a 3-hour lunch at O’Hare with then private citizen Reagan I got sold on him quickly and stuck with it during the hard times…his early primaries losses, the firing of my friend John Sears (as campaign manager), the replacement by Bill Casey (a needed change although I was very close to Sears) and so on.   That was my most decisive year.  Why is it so difficult now to settle my mind on an acceptable candidate who my gut tells me he/she can win?

       Taking the protective shield off the blade and beginning to hack, drawing it smoothly from the hairline on the right side, over the jowl to the neck.  Well, the choice was easier in 1980.  I couldn’t be for G.H.W. Bush, who struck me—rightly—as an elitist preppie and who was a pro-abort at the time (he switched to pro-life overnight when chosen for veep)…John Connally who the Quaker management team supported but not me because he was pro-abort… but who I always pictured as LBJ’s illegitimate son, complete with Texas swagger…

         …Howard Baker, pro-abort and a liberal and hence unacceptable to me  but whom I knew for years when ol’ Ev Dirksen touted him as son-in-law…Phil Crane, pro-life and bright enough but who always surprised me by his inactivity and passivity in the House…Bob Dole, pro-life but a waffler with whom I had a disagreeable experience over an honorarium payment…and believe it or not  Harold Stassen, terminally optimistic, liberal, pro-abort and four years older than Reagan which meant he was 73.  Easy choice there.   No sweat: Reagan all the way.  Not nearly so easy to choose now.

        Pulling the razor up along the same territory—right side—to catch all the surviving beard follicles.  Now…and this tells you something…every candidate is pro-life.  Romney has been adjudged the likely choice since Republicans usually follow primogeniture—but he’s awash in contradictions with RomneyCare in Massachusetts.  He can’t very easily escape that.  Then Huckabee…

      Moving to the left side of the face, starting at the hairline, taking long downward strokes over the jowl to the chin.  There’s much about Huckabee I like.   I feel for one thing that the person who runs against Obama has to be able to speak—and when I last saw Huckabee in person at the Illinois Family Institute whereas I came into the hall as a doubter, I was edified at his ability to spellbind.  But his Baptist preacher softness on releasing criminals from jail where some of them went out and killed others dismays me. Still if it does come down to Huckabee he’s likely to make Obama look tongue-tied.  But there’s a kind of Junior Gilliam Hee Haw the TV show about him that kind of makes me see him in bib overalls.  

         Pulling hard down the chin (the chin being the most resistant). Exactly the same with Haley Barbour except he’s far less eloquent than Huckabee.   The Mississippi Citizens Council thing makes him an easy foil for Obama and I wonder if Barbour wouldn’t be struggling to get the Deep South flavor sublimated.  The simplistic news media…average reportorial age 38…. would picture this as reenactment of the civil rights days of the `60s which was enacted long before most of  them were born.    Also Barbour said he wants to set aside social issues—a sure tipoff to me that my prime concerns will be ignored.

         Now up the chin being sure to scrape it thoroughly.  Long ago I decided Palin isn’t right for the presidency because of her Calamity Jane style—although paradoxically I love it (not her screeching way of delivering speeches though).

          Lord knows, she has a gutsy record as governor the media don’t and won’t recognize, starting when she was at one time the darling of Alaska Democrats when she took the governorship away from Frank Murkowski whom she labeled as a charter member of “the corrupt bastards club”…her brilliant fight with the oil companies which regarded her as a traitor…her devising a new system of splitting the oil profits she called “Aces”…her courageously paring down a list of pork projects, selling the governor’s jet, dismissing the private cook, returning the state limo, declining use of most of the state security force since she packed heat herself, ordering Exxon to either get started  drilling on Point Thompson which it held under lease for 30 years or she’d revoke it.   But when all’s said and done the screeching does it for me.

       Here’s the touchy part: the upper lip, being very careful not to flick the blade so it cuts…ouch! There I did it.  I was very much interested in Mitch Daniels because he’s so anti-charismatic, short, bald but all brains and a good economist as well—a guy you’d hire for president. But he up and said let’s shelve social issues and concentrate on the big things—the budget.   Can’t go it.  He’s tried to repair it but he’s not conning me.  What he said he meant: and that means one thing to me…Country Club.  One guy I’d like to meet is Pawlenty because of how he tamed the public unions.  I like his blue-collar approach.  Probably the most exciting is Newt but he botched Speaker so badly, viewing himself as a prime minister makes me think coupled with all that brilliance is a disaster.   (They said that about Churchill, though, remember.  Thirty years ago when I was a Fellow at St. John’s College, Oxford I sat at High Table with an old guy who was a member of his war cabinet who said Churchill would come in to meetings with seven ideas every morning—three were impractical, two were out and out crazy, one was not logistically possible and the remaining one was brilliant. “It was our job,” he said, “to knock the others down and consider the brilliant one which was likely a gamble that could well either win the war or defeat us.”).   Sounds exactly like Hyde’s description of Newt—50% genius, 50% nuts and the trick is to decipher which was which.

         Now applying a wet cloth to the bleeding upper lip, then carefully…c-a-r-e-f-u-l-l-y concluding. John Thune has no right to be considered. Nor does Rick Santorum. Ron Paul?  Too old but I’d like to see somebody running who applies the moderate non-interventionism of Bob Taft—but not go to extremes as Paul and want to abolish our CIA, saying like the Left  “what we got on 9/11 was our fault!”  That’s rank sedition and unpatriotic.

       Patting dry with a fresh towel. You know,  I’m really coming to the view that we’ve got to have a large dose of excitement on the ticket.  A really large dose.  Like a 280 lb. governor of New Jersey Chris Christie!  Don’t know if his going to Disney World in the snowstorm was fatal but of all of them I’d like to hear him more.   He’d be fun.   Yeah, I think he’d be my favorite for now.  For now. See, I told you I’m undecided—but I’d really feel good if Christie got into the race.

HEY, CLINTON! Danny Davis Says “Don’t Let Sundown Come With Your Chalky White Ass Campaignin’ for Rahm, Heah Boy?” More.

                                             Danny Boy.

       Congressman Danny Davis, the bass-baritone-voiced,  slow-movin’, drawlin’, amblin’ easy-goin’ look-alike to Academy Award Winner James Baskett playin’…er, playing…the unforgettable white-thatched Uncle Remus in Disney’s 1946 hit “Song of the South”…orders the 42^nd president of the United States not to campaign for Rahm Emanuel on account of that’d be racist…I say “RACIST”…when he—Danny Boy—is running er runnin’. 

       Earlier Davis declared regarding Gery Chico that a Hispanic  ain’t goin’ to be elected mayor.  This effrontery, my friends, is what white guilt has given us in the form of affirmative action producing a legion of race racketeers (for which dating back to the Nixon administration I  am partially complicit).  Good potential black mayor candidates…Terry Peterson,  John Clark…are all engaged in profitable private sector pursuits, leavin’ the posture-pedic types like Davis and Moseley Braun  to play race politics.   

          There’s one exception I will make to racial protest in behalf of a candidate —and that’s the kerfuffle produced in front of the Sun-Times against Neil Steinberg for a column he wrote ridiculing Moseley Braun. Nothing wrong with the column but Steinberg deserves opprobrium just for being obnoxious and on general principles for his longstanding anti-Catholic bigotry coupled with his officiously wise-guy (wannabe) squandering of good will.   The ragtag group somehow produced Leon Finney from yesteryear.  Good seeing you there Leon although I remember when you demonstrated for more worthy projects—but, hey, so long as you do it to Steinberg, the least of my brethren…and I mean the very least…you do it for me.

                     Matthews, Abercrombie:  No Good Deed etc.?

          MSNBC’s Chris Matthews just might be the worst thing that ever happened to the Obama White House. Yesterday he advised the Obama people to end the whole birth certificate mess by getting Obama to demand the hard-copy version from Hawaii and releasing it.  I can imagine what Axelrod screamed at Matthews’ visage on the TV when he viewed it:  Shuttup you idiot! We’ve put this thing to bed with the aid of the compliant liberal media!  Now everybody believes that to demand the hard copy is symptomatic of a sick mind! Your running your stupid mouth will blow the case!

          Sticking to the script, Clarence Page of Tribune prattled obediently that releasing the paper copy would not silence the nutty right. But Matthews as a certifiable left nut job can give birthers cause to reiterate the appeal and quote Obama’s No. 1 sycophant for support.

          Then as if that wasn’t sufficient, liberal Hawaii Gov. – Elect Neil Abercrombie followed suit saying he wants to end the controversy.  But Abercrombie can’t get  the hard copy because Hawaii’s privacy laws bar release of a certified birth certificate to anyone who in the state’s opinion doesn’t have a tangible interest.  Last year Hawaii’s health director said she saw the original birth certificate.

       Matthews has said what “birthers” have long said: If you’re right that we’re nuts, let Obama go ahead and request it and display it!   Had he done this when the controversy first began, it would have died in the bud.   

      Don’t expect the politically correct media to take up Matthews’ cry. To echo this would be…er, um,  racist.  

III. Ask Me Your Questions and I’ll Tell You No Lies.

           Q.  The biggest issue before the Catholic Church in 2010 was priestly pedophilia.   Do you feel the Church has made any progress?

          A.  Yes but as with everything else in the Vatican I feel there’s a great gap between the Pope’s brilliant analysis of the problem and the Italianate  comme si, comme sa dilatoriness to get things done.  Eternity means nothing to a Roman.  If we don’t get to it in the 21^st century, it may be accomplished in the 22^nd.

          Q.   Why do you say that?

           A.   All you have to know about the Vatican’s tending to detailed matters  is  the almost daily embarrassment ofL’Osservatore Romano.  It is  either the official newspaper of the Vatican or it isn’t. .  It gets first dibs on all the official news which other papers don’t, which tells you it’s the official paper; but it has a variant theology of its own in contradiction to the Church’s as to the pesky details as to when to pull the plug on life… as well as a predilection for listing the Top 10 rock and roll albums of all time which tells you it isn’t.

          Q.  …which means?

          A.  Which means if the Pope as Bishop of Rome, the  Vicar of Christ on earth and the Visible Head of the Church can’t get the issue of the Vatican newspaper clarified can we imagine the Church will get to seminarian formation?   Let us pray he will.  Anyhow I started thinking about this in a strikingly unusual way.

          Q.  How do?

         A.  With the very revelatory article written by John  Allen in of all things The National Catholic Reporter.  I admit it’s strange for an authenticist Catholic to begin there.  

         Q.  Good grief man, are you mad?

         A.  Not that I am aware.  Allen contrasts two views—Benedict’s and that of Dominican priest Thomas Doyle who has been studying the crisis for years.  Benedict is indubitably right.  He goes straight to the heart of the problem—in “priestly formation” i.e. the theology taught in seminaries and lays the blame where it belongs on the heretical dogma of relativism which by downplaying good and evil and in Allen’s words “treating morality as a matter of weighing consequences” the door was opened to “justifying gravely immoral behavior including the sexual exploitation of minors.”   Allen you see ran a seminar on the issue with George Weigel. 

          Q.  Of the two I take it you favor Weigel.

         A.   Wrong.  Weigel is a brilliant writer but far too much a Company Man.  His biography of John Paul is well-written but at the same time is evasive.

          Q.  Evasive?  How so?

         A.  In that Weigel never examined thoroughly the anomaly of John Paul’s appointment of so many substandard bishops.  Weigel is a very good writer of an authorized biography.   I’ve had some experience with him in at least one address where both Henry Hyde and I felt he was too much a shill for the bishops.  Of the two I’d rather believe Allen. Weigel has a better spiritual formation but he’s still a Company Man. 

          Q.  And what is Doyle’s approach?

         A.  It’s procedural which is correct as far as it goes but is unsatisfactory since it doesn’t pinpoint the root cause: the faulty theology beginning in the `60s that permeated the seminaries.  He complains that Benedict hasn’t met with a sufficient number of victims, that the Church accuses the media too much, seems to shift uneasily, assailing Jeff Anderson the personal injury lawyer for allegedly seeking to prosper with the lawsuits, blaming the duplicitousness and manipulativeness of Church legal counsels.  As a Chicagoan who has seen professional parsing carried to its highest pinnacle,  I have no doubt he’s right but it doesn’t begin to rectify the situation as the Pope’s analysis has.  But while I think the Pope’s analysis is the right one, no one has come out with the brutal facts.

         Q.  …which are?

        A.   The lavender seminaries which is the root of the problem. The Pope has identified it somewhat when he talks about spiritual formation that has been lacking.   While not all homosexuals are same-sex pedophiles, all same-sex pedophiles are homosexuals.  Thus the job is to fight this trend in the seminaries even though the fashion in this country is to regard all criticism of homosexuality as homophobic.

         Q.  How can this reform be accomplished without being assailed in this world of cultural ferment?

          A.   It can’t.   That’s why the reform is not for bishops who wish to be loved by all.  When you get a bishop who wishes to establish the reform and is willing to be assailed in the secular media he will recognize It can be fought in two ways—first , forthright denial of the heretical Fundamental Option theory that unless one totally rejects God no mortal sin can be committed.  On this premise no sexual immoralist can commit grave sin unless he abjures God.   Second the reaffirmation that any misuse of the sexual function outside the marriage bond is a mortal sin. That goes for sin committed in private—masturbation. Human sexuality pertains to marriage in the context of procreation and mutual love in the physical relationship.

          Q.  So in summary you say the Pope has identified the solution.

         A.  He has indeed.  Fr. Doyle runs away from it. I don’t think Allen faces up to it and Weigel doesn’t really want to tread in this deep water. But Benedict has the vision if he will only carry it out. Pronouncements aren’t enough.  I am confident this can be done but then I look at L’Osservatore Romano, remember the Italianate and Roman procrastination and maneuvering (perhaps some Cardinal’s nephew is involved) and grow despondent.

Weak Sister Catholic Bishops: How Many Can You Name? Here’s One—Wuerl.

           You’re Invited to Submit Your List—With Reasons Given.

            There are far-far more Weak Sister Catholic Bishops than courageous ones—that’s a given.   My candidate for Weak Sister of the week is the newly-appointed red hat holder, the archbishop of Washington, D. C.—His Eminence Donald Cardinal Wuerl.  Watch how he bobs and weaves, how he parsed when interviewed on Fox News Sunday on the Church’s stand on don’t-ask-don’t-tell. 

         News reports portray him saying, parsing, dodging, evading—as did Fox News which interpreted his stand to say that “the Catholic church is not in a position to evaluate the impact of gay service members on military readiness.”    His statement added a great deal of confusion due to his flaccidity and inability to hit the issue with directness.  That’s because to criticize homosexuality is politically incorrect you know. 

       On the impact on the military, he said “That is a question that has to be worked out politically.”  Oh it does, does it?  “…and there isn’t a specific Catholic Church position.”   Oh there isn’t, is there?

           The Church’s stand is clear and un-reversible.  Guided by divine Revelation and her authority to interpret Natural Law, the Church has always taught that the sexual function has its true meaning and moral consequence only in true marriage.  The main contributor to the sin of sodomy is the claim that sexual union can be justified before marriage…which means that a man and woman can have sexual fulfillment independent of the purpose for which God created the two genders.

         Heterosexual cohabitation either excludes the possibility of children via contraception which is base selfishness or provides grave detriment to the well-being of children born of such a union who need the stability that comes from lifelong commitment of mutual love from married parents, also selfishness.  Homosexual relations obviates children while taking pleasure from the sexual act from which no children can be born.  The Church’s  verdict on homosexual union is uncompromising: homosexual sexual relations lacks the essential and indissoluble purpose—that which belongs to married people to cooperate with God in the begetting of children and to express their mutual love for one another.

            Does this mean that homosexuals should be persecuted, ostracized?   No.  They should be treated with love and compassion in the hope that they can overcome their personal difficulties.  But…and this is important given the fashion of the liberal media to advocate…neither does it mean  that those who oppose homosexuality on moral grounds are sick, infected with homophobia.

          There are two reasons to oppose homosexual relationships—the Natural Law and reason. Natural Law we’ve gone into.    The rational grounds are the harm caused to human society by practice of homosexuality as history shows homosexuality undermines the foundation of the family; and that homosexual behavior is a primary means to spreading such epidemic diseases as AIDS.

        A heretical purposeful misreading of “fundamental option” on this as with abortion has lured many Catholics to believe there is no mortal sin committed unless a person completely rejects God.

         Pro-gay Catholic advocates including the pols (mostly Dems and a few Repubs [see Judy Baar Topinka]) who trudge to Communion,  claim they do not reject God and insist that homosexuality is an expression of deep love for another person of the same gender.  This boils down to a root claim: that each person has the right to determine what is  morally good or morally bad, thus giving to each human the right that belongs to God alone, to determine what is virtuous and what is sinful.   Chicago’s No. 1 gay rights advocate, Carol Marin, insists she has the right to ascertain what is virtuous and sinful—and she blasts good bishops like Springfield’s Tom Paprocki for calling errant Catholic Pat Quinn (who misquoted Church teaching) to account.

       How dare Paprocki do this! wrote Marin.   He usurps church and state! 

        Back to the whirling Wuerl.   

         Finally as if dragged into it, Wuerl gets to the point “…the rest of Jesus’s message that human sexuality has a purpose. And this is not for simply personal satisfaction.  Human sexuality has to be seen in the context of the great gift of love, marriage, family.”  Wrapped up at the end after maximum parsing. 

         Gee with an advocate like red-hatted Donald Wuerl I feel so pumped up!  Talk about Weak Sister who just got Prince of the Church!  Still, he’s a half step better than the Bishop of Tucson, Gerald F. Kicanas and a full step better than his predecessor, Theodore Cardinal McCarrick, or Uncle Ted to his fey admirers. 

How’s the USCCB Doing? Lobbying for the DREAM Act but Not a Word Against DADT. Parse-Parse. What Else Is New?

         The only time in the New Testament when the apostles of Christ…later to become the first bishops… turned collegial came at Gethsemane after the chief priests and Pharisees arrived to arrest Jesus. The four gospels agree and say the same thing:

       “they all fled.”   [Hat tip: Michael Voris].

         Of course that was before the intercession of the Holy Spirit.  After the coming of the Holy Spirit most of them held so courageously for the Church they  went on to martyrdom.   Since then things have been, oh, so-so.   For example when England turned Protestant with a vengeance (sufficient enough to behead Thomas More) all the bishops fled…accepting the clerical domination of the King instead of the Pope,  except one—St.  John Fisher.  

         Introduction of the Red Hat for cardinals or princes of the Church is supposed to signify that they are to shed blood for the Church, as red as their hats.  How many cardinals have done so? Uh-uh-uh. I haven’t done that thorough a research job on it but I believe we’re still waiting for the first one.

         Martyrdom, schwartyrdom…forget the heads being lopped off: what are just a little offering of courage.  I mean taking a stand that because of political correctness might get you a bad notice or two in the secular press?   

        Let’s consider the most politically correct issue of the day—acceptance, indeed even glorification of homosexuals.  

          So what happened as the lame duck Congress considered repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”?  Not a word from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, nary a mention on  their website despite the fact that approbation of homosexuality attesting it’s just another lifestyle choice is antithetical to Catholic teaching and is a mortal sin.

          But when the DREAM Act was being considered…the bill that would reward illegal immigrants and motivate others to break the laws as well…the USCCB website was filled with pleas for passage and scores of bishops interceded with the Congress.   The difference?  Supporting rewards for illegal immigration is politically correct; opposing the sin of homosexuality is not.

       They all fled.

      There has never been a time in this writer’s long memory when the  Catholic bishops…with very few exceptions… have been as gutless and as spineless as they are now—imbued with Rotary Club pseudo p. r.  values instead of conscience. I think it’s caused by “collegiality” of sameness imparted by their trade association (the USCCB)…an organization perfected to a political instrument and staffed with political hacks by the most duplicitous of prelate of them all, Joseph Cardinal Bernardin. As his favored creation, it has advanced not just cowardice but decadence.  The details of Bernardin’s so-called “epiphany  of courage” with charges of sex-abuse volunteered by an ex-seminarian suffused with AIDS have been suffocated in ambiguity. They have been perfumed up for a speech by of all people Eddie Burke which should tell you something.

        But the denouement for me about Bernardin has always been this. 

        As his coffin was being wheeled down the aisle at Chicago’s Holy Name Cathedral you will remember the sacrilegious “Gay Men’s Chorus” sang his requiem—performing at his final request. The request was made after he had received his final earthly consolation from Eppie Lederer aka Ann Landers, of course.   Who in the name of God,  preparing to meet his Maker, would recruit the “Gay Men’s Chorus”…whose very formation is antagonistic to the fundamental teaching of the Church…. for the task of serenading God to accept the body in the bier except one who wished to give a kind of irreligious finger to the Church? 

        What does that tell  you? 

         Now since we don’t know his final disposition saying a prayer for Joe Bernardin is advisable.  But hey shouldn’t it be imperative to disband his enlarged creation the USCCB which has through spurious “collegiality” emasculated subliminally the work of the individual bishops? How about somebody suggesting that? Everybody hiding under the bed with timidity?  Nope, we’ve already had a taker….one of the better bishops, Fabian Bruskewitz of Lincoln, Nebraska.  See, bishops aren’t all wimps! 

          And how about Thomas Olmsted, the bishop of Phoenix who just stripped the label “Catholic” from the abortion-providing St. Joseph Hospital?   Congrats Bishop!   Now what about removing “Catholic” from De Paul which is offering a Queer Studies minor and thumbing its nose at the Church all the while advertising itself as the “largest Catholic University in the U.S.?  Well you see uh-uh-uh I mean uh-uh we’re going to parse-parse-parse that one indefinitely.     

Retirement Long Overdue Basis Longstanding Weirdness: Pat Robertson. Haley Barbour.

                                        Chuckles Robertson.

       Make me a promise, will you?   When I get as goofy as Pat Robertson will  you get hold of my wife and have her lead me away from the computer?  Promise?  All right.   Odds are I’ll be senile.   Which is not Pat’s problem.   He’s always been weird.

         Robertson’s two years younger than I (born in 1930) but he’s had that vacant-minded chuckle even when he’s talking seriously… and misty eyes… that  tell you he’s a brick short of a load.    Yesterday he came out for legalizing marijuana.   Yeah Pat, just what we need now. We got incipient war in Korea, Iran with the bomb, the Russians stoking Iran with nuclear enrichment, China virtually owning us, Charlie Krauthammer seeing Obama cresting, gays going in the military and ordered to shower with the straights and now this ex-Southern Baptist charismatic preacher (charismatic preaching an anomaly to Baptists anyhow) sees the most important thing is to start Americans legally puffing.

        No, once again: I really don’t think it’s senility.   And if you thought this is just a sudden development, sorry to disappoint.   He’s been strange ever since I first met him when he announced for president in 1988.  At that time I was a political officer for a major corporation and interviewed presidential candidates.   As a Catholic I get sort of whoozy with evangelical preachers on TV anyhow, especially beefy ones when they close their eyes tight into little slits,  frown like they’re experiencing gas pains and yellSweet J-e-s-u-s!  There’s a lady in Sleepy Eye Minnesota that’s  got a lump, I say, got a lump in her breast!  Her daughter’s gettin’ married tomorra and she can’t git to the doctor til the day after tomorra so until then put her in Your lovin’…I say lovin’…arms, hold her tight…” and then chuckle like Robertson always does especially when he talks about the hot blue flames sprouting up from Hell’s oven and says “heh-heh-heh what’s the next request Rachel?”

        Anyway Robertson was just packing up from his home base in Virginia Beach to go to Cedar Rapids to launch his drive to win the Iowa GOP caucuses (which he did win by the way) and invited me to join him at his country club for lunch.  

      I was going to Washington to lobby anyhow so I caught a commuter plane and met him at his Club.  We talked about the issues there and he seemed all right, not unlike any other salt-and-pepper mega-millionaire considering a run for the White House.  We talked Cold War, trade, domestic politics—all of which he was well-versed in, being the son of  longtime Sen. A. Willis Robertson, a tagalong to the conservative Dem Byrd machine.  But then he started in on a hurricane that was sweeping down on Virginia Beach.  How he got on that I can’t remember but I guess it was a digression from how we should handle the then Soviet Union to God’s Providence.

            The hurricane was comin’ right at us, , he said with a pointless chuckle that didn’t really fit in to the story. It was charted to hit the coast and was aimed right at my television studio [pointless giggle].  The studio when all is said  an’ done could have been totaled and wiped us out [giggle-cough]. So ah went to mah office and knelt down and prayed like this—Sweet J-e-s-u-s!...”  At this point the business executives dining there were watching intently but they were round-eyed, no chuckling.

          Sweet J-e-s-u-s There’s a terrible storm comin’ that can destroy…ah say d-e-s-t-r-o-y all we have been doin’ in Your Name!

          By now the main dining room was hushed.  Ah say hushed.

        All ah ask Sweet J-e-s-u-s is that the storm, the hurricane, be detoured to save the studio which is the conduit…ah say the con-doo-it… to communication in Your Name!   A detour, puleeze!.  [Pointless chuckle].

       All was silent—even the waiters carrying in their trays were hushed.   The only sound was Robertson’s chuckle.

         Well, I said, what happened?
         Mah prayer wuz answered.  The storm did de-toor. 
          Where did it go?

         Oh, it veered and took out a whole lot of Front Royal [chuckle].

         I didn’t say anything but felt when a hurricane’s bearing down on Virginia Beach and threatens to hit Chuckles’ TV empire,  the place not to be is Front Royal.
                                      Give `em Haley?   No Way.

           I’m a political realist and I see the signs now of a big liberal drive to rehabilitate Barack Obama.   We know Charlie Krauthammer’s aboard and now just like blackbirds on a telephone wire, when one settles there they all gather.  There’s Chris Matthews, he’s one blackbird; David Broder is another. Here comes Katie Couric.   Lookie there, it’s Matt Lauer and coming up fast is Brian Williams.   They’re all due to say that this embattled president’s got his groove back.  He took that super-heavy, lop-sided Democratic congress and got `em to pass repeal of don’t-ask-don’t-tell which led Barney Frank to declare it’s okay for gay males to shower with straights but by no means should straight males shower with straight females cause they’ll likely engage in all that disgusting heterosexual stuff….gosh there has to be some absolutes somewhere or we’ll go decadent.

           Anyhow all those media blackbirds sitting on the same telephone wire as Charlie will soon be touting the idea that by passing the gay rights thing and the concurring resolution to keep the government going until March and the Nuclear Treaty Obama has risen to Reagan proportions.   Soon it’ll be all over the media since Nancy Pelosi has hired Stephen Spielberg to hype it.

        Something tells me that this is not the time for Republicans to run  Haley Barbour had some very nice things to say about the White Citizens Councils, has a fat red face, double chin, a protuberant belly, who looks like he’d be  more  comfortable in Junior Gilliam overalls ala the `70s TV hit Hee Haw,  is governor of Mississippi with an Yazoo accent that whatever he says sounds likeyou all’s in a heap of trouble, boy—heah?  

             

AND YOUR QUESTION IS…

     Q.  A Catholic myself, I’ve always wondered how Catholic pro-abort politicians and advocates square themselves with the reality of mortal sin when they go to confession.    Do you suppose they confess it, vow “firm purpose of amendment”  with fingers crossed and then go on to receive Communion  or what?

    A.  Some do I’m sure.  But most take advantage of a theological heresy that they are convinced provides them with a loophole but which has been condemned by the Church in an encyclical in 1975. It’s a thing I first bumped into in 1946 when my roommate who was taking theology from a liberal Benedictine…in contra-distinction to me who was sitting at the feet of Ernie…told me he didn’t have to worry about going the limit with his girlfriend back in Red Wing, Minnesota because it wasn’t a mortal sin.

      Q.  How in the world did he think that?

        A. The liberal Benedictine said to commit a mortal sin you would have to subjectively reject God, that particular acts alone are not enough to constitute mortal sin and because he decidedly did not reject God he was in the clear.   That’s not what Ernie said.  He said it is wrong to say that particular acts are not enough to constitute mortal sin.  Later the Holy See issued Persona Humana which cleared it up and ratified what Ernie told us. 

      Q.  Interesting.  But I would think that it would have been obvious from the very beginning.

       A.  But very human rationalization intruded.  I learned not very long ago that this whole controversy was sneaked into a doctrine called “Fundamental Option.”   The doctrine before this intriguing bit of heresy was sneaked in was not controversial.  It maintains that each person gradually develops an orientation for his life to be either for or against God. 

      That comes from Augustine and is connected to his famous two cities—the City of God whose members love God even to contempt of themselves and the City of Man whose members love themselves even to the contempt of God.   Somehow the bad guys embroidered the City of God portion to say you really have to denounce God willfully in order to commit mortal sin and be estranged from Him.   So once again Ernie was far ahead of his time in anticipating Persona Humana.

        I always thought Greeley was taking great liberties with theology in his writing and political advocacy but could never pinpoint how until I was told what teaching this heresy is fallaciously connected to—“Fundamental Option.”   Harmless sounding title.   Not long ago I asked a theologian whom I view as a direct intellectual heir of Ernie to discuss it at Catholic Ciitizens, Fr. Brian Mullady OP who did a brilliant job.

          Q.  As good as Ernie?

         A. You will understand with no disparagement to Fr. Mullady that in this octogenarian’s judgment no one is as good as Ernie 1946-50.

          Q.  Are you overjoyed with the Census that shows growth of congressional seats in states where  Republicans are strong?

         A.  Yes but tempered by the worry that here in Illinois where we Republicans have picked up four seats from The Squid, the redistricting process which will be controlled by Madigan, Cullerton and Quinn could by redrawing the map to eliminate one seat as required can distort the districts so as to minimize chances for Republicans to win.

           Q.  But I read in the blog The Illinois Review…in an article by a former Republican state senator…that Madigan is so fundamentally decent a chap that he will not stretch district dimensions and will continue to be fair and square.

          A.   Ah yes.  Yes indeed.  Have you taken a look at the 4^th district that is represented by Rep. Luis [Little Looie] Gutierrez?   If you hurl a raw egg at a car windshield you will notice how it splatters with rivulets here and there.  That’s how the 4^th looks because it was drawn so as to include maximum Hispanic voters who elected Little Looie enabling him to set forth on his dream to be the ranking demagogue for immediate amnesty of illegals.  No, I’m sure the coming map drawing will reflect the same fairness as exhibited in the architecture of the 4^th.   

Slick or Sick Charlie? “Brilliant” Obama Out-Foxed the Republicans on Tax Bill and is the True “Comeback Kid”! Huh?

         Charles Krauthammer is a smart guy all right…always worth reading…but even though often on the same page he should never be taken as a dependable true friend of the Republican party or conservatism generally.  He’s moved from pundit to ingenious column-ing manipulator ala Walter Lippmann…and like Lippmann is willing to shuck many a moral absolute along the way.   

        Starting as speech-writer for Vice President Mondale he later seemed to abandon the Democratic party when its foreign policy turned mildly then vigorously anti-Israeli cum anti-Semitic. He found in the Republicans a willingness to defend Israel and its promise as the only democracy in the Middle East that should never be extinguished. That’s what I believe and up to now have acknowledged  his writings have brought comfort to the Republican party in the past but he is fond of  setting his own  course.  He dazzles but his course is often purposefully misleading for his own complicated ends.

       But Dr. Krauthammer zeal for the survival of Israel extends beyond it tohis reckoning that militant aggrandizement befits a “great power.” Which means he is a cheerleader for every foreign excursion that portrays the U. S. as brandishing muscle—particularly in the Middle East.   In many ways he is a column-writing Metternich.

        There are many reasons for identifying Krauthammer with Henry John Temple, 3^rd Viscount Palmerston [1784-1865]—Lord Palmerston  who served variously as either prime minister or foreign secretary and as either Tory or Liberal, when his country stood bestride the world.

       Palmerston’s credo was this: Britain has no permanent friends but permanent interests.  That was Lippmann’s credo by which he became the most influential political columnist of the 30s to 60s and it is Krauthammer’s now.

      Cunning, opaque, almost indecipherable as to his clear intent,    Krauthammer uses his column ingeniously.  Last week he wrote that by bowing to the Republican tax program to continue the Bush tax cuts down-the-line including the much maligned cuts for the rich,  Barack Obama suckered the Republicans, pulled the wool over their eyes, deserves the sobriquet “Comeback Kid” and forecasts his reelection is “more likely than not.”      Puleeeze!

          That is enough to entice liberals who have looked askance at Obama to rush to Charlie and beg “give me a drag on that stuff.”   But of course Charlie has got hold of some bad weed there.

      Obama’s historic lows in the polls are sufficient to show that Dr. Krauthammer is playing a trick on all—mostly the Democrats but also on Republicans.  This president has sunk under 50% in approval, one of the worst ratings in memory.National Journal’s polling has 60% of the populace saying  it’s going in the wrong direction, 30% in the right. Thanks to him the Democrats have lost their majorities in Congress.  The next  House is heavily Republican.  The next Senate though technically Democratic will be all but officially non-Democratic. 

          Yet we’re to believe from Krauthammer that because he was taken to the cleaner’s by the Republicans, Obama is on the cusp of reelection?  His rationale is that Bill Clinton took five months from the shellacking he took in the midterms to regain momentum but here Obama has done it by ingeniously snookering Republicans by winning passage of the tax bill that they wanted in just a few weeks!   One must rub his eyes and say, com’on Charlie, give us a break!

          Of course, Krauthammer’s spurious rhetorical pyrotechnics aside, a cursory look at the package he describes as a brilliant Obama triumph shows that it’s 76% Republican-written and 12% Democratic-written. It was supported by the Tea Parties, Freedom Works, Paul Ryan, Ron Paul, a majority of prominently-mentioned Republican presidential candidates and The Wall Street Journal.   This is the great triumph Obama hath wrought!

           As to the host of ultra-liberal malcontents on the Left who are blasting Obama, Krauthammer dismisses them by sayingwhere else do they have to go?   That’s a major error I thought even average pundits have been cured of.   Where else can they go?   Gee, Charlie, they can stay home!   That’s the story of most debacles in American history.

       Movement people on the Right and Left have done this all the time!    What does Krauthammer think happened just last November 2?   A serious drop-off of Obama supporters—independents, young people, women….all except the blacks and eventhey didn’t show up at the polls in the strength they did for him in 2008!   What does he mean where else do they have to go?  What happened to Republicans in 2006 when conservatives stayed home and allowed the Dems to give George W. Bush a “thumpin’” by seizing control of Congress?   

         What was Krauthammer’s hidden intent in writing a column maintaining Obama was ingenious in saddling up with a largely Republican tax bill? He’s mischievously and famously opaque and indecipherable. One guess: Probably to show Obama he will gain a strong new ally—him —if the president moves to the center on other issues particularly foreign-defense…and that the praise is done to puff the case for the fumbling, flailing Obama to  further adopt more of Bush foreign-defense objectives as he has in Afghanistan.  Hence it’s a love note. If Obama heeds the siren call Charlie Krauthammer will write more love notes.

          Barf me with a spoon if he’s not outrageous in laving the soft-soap of  sycophantic praise for Obama’s “brilliance.” Few imagine now that Obama is “brilliant,” just endowed with Sidney Poitier’s egregious drawing room manners as in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?—and Krauthammer the cynic knows it.

          Thus Charles Krauthammer should never be recognized as a conservative neo or moderate (nor as a liberal one for that manner).   One of the disagreeable habits he exhibits is a stunning denseness about the great object of his affection: israel.

       Israel’s greatest allies here aren’t Catholics, not even Jews who run secular and unobservant.  They’re evangelicals who believe biblical tie-ins between the Jews and Christianity.     Why if Charles wants to shore up support for his goal of a strong Israel does he fool around with alienation of its prime supporters?   Why does Charles toy with Christianity’s virulent secular enemies?   Why?    As Norman Podhoretz wrote: God saw them dancing around the Golden Calf and almost despaired with what he called “this stiff-necked people!”

      Make no mistake, today’s Golden Calf is secular, godless, hedonistic, decadent liberalism made manifest in setting a bonfire to enduring absolutes.  Including to what used to be called Judeo-Christian.  Toleration is one thing; moving homosexual practice to acceptability  is quite another.  

         So last night there was Charlie Krauthammer on Fox saying that don’t ask don’t tell will be all right because…hey…it’s inevitable!  It’s generational!  The last generation was benighted on several issues but not us. But tying the threat of homosexual ardor that could disrupt the military in times of war as “generational” and linking it with acceptance of civil rights for racial minorities is fallacious pseudo intellectual fantasy and Krauthammer knows it.

           This is the cynic in him; it is also the liberal stiff-neckness that afflicts so much of a once religious people of which Podhoretz complains.  It’s a shame that Slick Charlie cannot see fit to cooperate with those of us who understand along with the importance of Israel the need to preserve the safeguarding of families, as well as preservation of this nation from decadence as written in God’s law as given to Abraham. 

           But that’s  Slick…maybe Sick… Charlie.

The World’s Liberal “Conscience” and Benefactor Typified in Richard Holbrooke Whom Media Sanctifies as Hero.

        The embodiment of to what Robert A. Taft opposed is typified in the tearfully-written memoir about Richard Holbrooke which appeared last week in The New York Times.  Warning: If you agree with the bogus humanitarianism flowing in the article, write me at once because you have been seriously overdosed with contemporary secular humanistic thinking where America’s role as Avenging Angel is sanctified until all goes pfffft.

        The column appeared Dec. 16 was written by sob-sister Roger Cohen of the paper’s London bureau.  Rather than my linking it here and causing my software to be drowned by its soggy writing, I recommend you Google it—but I’ll summarize it here.

     Richard Holbrooke died last week suddenly at 69 from a torn aorta.  His passing took U. S. Georgetown drawing room liberal globalists including media by surprise—and when it loses somebody like Holbrooke without much warning, it usually canonizes him. To the mind of this ex-foreign service officer who worked for the ranking member of House Foreign Affairs in the `50s, Holbrooke was the consummate liberal foreign policy idealist who never learned from his wide experiences in busy-body intrusion in globalism.

      He received undergraduate degree from Brown University in 1962, tried to get a job as a reporter with The Times out of college, was turned down and settled for the U.S. Foreign Service.

         A born “bright young man” in the JFK-LBJ tradition,  he was promoted as a young foreign service officer to become gofer for Anthony Lake in Vietnam (1963-66).  Lake was a top aide to Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. the notorious mushy Republican who had been named to the post as a conciliatory gesture by the man who defeated Lodge in the Senate, JFK.

         Lodge will be remembered as one who played a decisive role in turning his back at Washington’s insistence on the steadily encroaching movement to capture and murder South Vietnam’s first president, Ngo Dinh Diem who was a pain in the ass to everybody because of his autocratic tendencies.  What particularly irritated the Young Secular Braves in Washington was his fervent Catholicism which caused him to be skeptical of the revolution self-immolating Buddhist monks caused which caused anguish among State Department liberals who felt nothing was worth dying for.

      In line with pragmatic short-range liberal intrusionist thinking it was determined by the Kennedy people in Washington that everything would improve if somehow the arch-Catholic (and don’t kid yourself, his Catholicism alienated many in Washington) Diem would be removed…pushed out or even murdered… to assuage the Buddhist monks and other more “moderate” South Vietnamese.  This produced the quickening end of the War--after which the catastrophic mistake was later described by Ho Chi Minh in these terms: “I can hardly believe the Americans could be that stupid!”  

      The Kennedy brothers, Robert MacNamara and Lodge were not just an Innocent in that enterprise, twiddling their thumbs and whistling to themselves with  eyes turned skyward—but they knew the schedule and rough timetable of what would happen to Diem. They gave a tacit nod to Diem’s enemies and waited for it to happen.  Simultaneously the word went out to American generals in Vietnam that they should by no means seek to interfere or block what was to happen to Diem.

      Diem’s fate was sealed on Nov. 2, 1963 when he and his brother were captured by forces led by Gen. Durong Van Minh.  They were taken to a basement and murdered.   For all Diem’s disadvantages, his  removal and the tacit understanding that America played a passive part in his murder, irremediably worsened the U. S. course in the Vietnam War.  A succession of leaders followed but they were all ineffective because it was perceived that America itself, by getting rid of Diem, was intransigent.

       Thus the end-result was the debacle that has stained liberal mismanagement of foreign affairs since.  Irony of ironies, those who sanctioned looking the other way when the murderers came for Diem were themselves slain--John and Robert Kennedy…as if the Fates determined to show America their follies.   Well, the media resolved not to understand their weaknesses and have canonized both.

      It is interesting to note that as with everything else involving massive foreign intrusion inaugurated by Democratic administrations, the liberal media—then as now led by the self-same New York Times—were in full support.  In-educably they still are…until having aided in creating a crisis by their advocacy, they bail out.

      That had been exactly the case with China when the impresario of Establishment thinking…an uncommonly good general but less than a statesman… Gen. George Marshall [ret.] insisted Chiang Kai Shek accept Mao’s Communists into a coalition government.  Rightly, Chiang refused; the U.S. halted its aid and Nationalist China fell to the Communists creating a problem we deal with today. Marshall proceeded from that error to the  Secretaryship of State where he endorsed a plan written in his name by Will Clayton, George F. Kennan and Dean Acheson. Taft voted for the Marshall Plan reluctantly believing that economic aid to Europe might shore up the West but vigorously opposed NATO where he was indubitably correct. Were I  in his shoes I would have done the same.

         One would hope young Holbrooke who was an eyewitness to the Vietnam botch-up would have learned something here about the foolish micromanagement by liberal elites whom David Halberstam called in his book of the same name “the best and brightest.” All Democrats with the inclusion of the nation’s laziest Republican vice-presidential campaigner (in his hotel room by 6 p.m. every night), Lodge, share in the blame.  

          But addiction to the adventures of tinkering with nations and world peoples’ destinies gave Holbrooke a kind of near sexual tumescence.  He was hooked and hooked to…what else?...the party largely of intervention and Dudley Do-Right self-rectitude which serves as substitute for legitimate religious experience—the Democratic.

        So moving aggressively upward he drank heavily of the Metternich liqueur—going to the LBJ White House, drafting a memo that said, as if he could not fathom why, that Hanoi was winning the battle of ideals in Vietnam and America although he was witness to the major occurrence why.  Still thirsting for adventure that would require his tinkering, he  wrote a volume of the Pentagon Papers.   Under Republicans he was a fish out of water; I met him briefly when I was Peace Corps public affairs director and he was being dispatched to Morocco as the agency’s “country director.”  I remember our title “country director” enticed him hugely.    But directing mostly blond kids from Winnetka who were tutoring kids in Marrakesh didn’t turn Holbrooke on.   He longed to advocate ideas that would overturn tyranny--and in the early `70s he quit to become editor of Foreign Policy magazine [1972-76]. It was second rate to Foreign Affairs but gave him visibility. And it turned out, he was an uncommonly good writer.

           With the return of the Democrats to power with Jimmy Carter in 1976, Holbrooke was back pushing his resume and landed a job as assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific. His idolizers say he “normalized” relations with China in December. 1978.  Gee, how’d he do that?  I thought Richard Nixon with his historic trip broke the Sino-Soviet entente and inestimably advanced the cause of peace.  What happened in December, 1978 was this: we formally ditched our ally Taiwan and officially recognized the Peoples’ Republic of China. 

            Holbrooke’s great glory was the Dayton Peace Accords which ended the Bosnian war.   We had no stake in it but Holbrooke felt Europe’s worst conflict since World War II mandated American involvement.   Lucky for us it did not mean more than our own involvement in diplomacy and Holbrooke shone there.  By the end of 1995 there were one hundred thousand dead.    At his suggestion we pressured NATO to bomb the Serbs.  When there came a pause in the bombing Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic pleaded for it to finally end but Holbrooke drew himself up to full height and said “History would never forgive us if we stop now.” So he continued the bombing and the killing to avenge the earlier genocide.

            Holbrooke was one of many Wilsonians who urged wherever there is carnage, genocide, we must get involved—either physically or use our muscle to stop it.  Sorry.   I think that’s not our role.  Sounds cold and detached but the first rule should be: Does it impact and threaten the peace and safety of the people of the United States?

           If no, then other forces must be called to bear.  This is what we were told the United Nations was to do.  If it can’t….and certainly it has been proved impotent in many world crises…it should be disbanded.  But barging in even if peace is ultimately accomplished should not be our role.  If we are expected to do this as supposedly the world’s major superpower, we shall not be so for long…but bled white as we very nearly are now…by intrusiveness and over-extension.

           So RIP Richard Holbrooke.   We likely may not see your ambitious, power-driven ambitious sort again.   Which is all right by me.           

Memo to the Next GOP President: Time to Ditch Wilsonianism and Reincarnate Robert A. Taft Recognizing that Protecting U.S. Peace and Liberty Comes First.

 

         Dear Sir/Madam: 

          There’s a middle way between George W. Bush Wilsonianism and the ultra libertarian Ron Paul…the guy who wants us to scrub the CIA,  repeal the Patriot Act and take the cover off future secret Wiki-Leak as we relax by sucking in the smoke from legalized pot.  There’s a middle way, I tell you that I’ve relearned from restudying the views of the first presidential candidate I volunteered for—Sen. Robert A. Taft [1889-1953]. 

        Taft lost for many reasons. 1. He was fat (a problem I hope we can readjust  to in the future…not right now…with a President Chris Christie, bridging the gap from his 6`2” 332 lb. father and before him tubby Teddy Roosevelt (215 lbs. at 5`8”) and before him Grover Cleveland 5`11” and 250 lbs).
    

       2. He was full of brains but looked and acted like an auditor come to examine the books.

       3. He looked askance at frivolous  p. r. as when he opened his Blackstone hotel door during the convention in 1953 and was greeted by a delegation of Young Republicans who had toted a 700 lb. baby elephant up the freight elevator for a publicity photo, thundering “Get that God damned thing out of here!” as the early TV cameras whirred. 

         4.  He wasn’t a 5-star general who won World War II in the European theatre.

     5.  He had unrivaled political courage—citing the Nuremburg trials as ex-post-facto justice when the country’s mood was for vengeance and opposing Truman’s seizure of the steel mills and making its workers akin to the military which gained him no votes at all from organized labor.

        Bob Taft the president’s son was not an isolationist or Fortress America guy.  As a young lawyer he went to Versailles with a delegation that accompanied Wilson; Taft’s presidential father sent Marines to Nicaragua in 1912 to protect American lives and interests there.  Before that old man Taft was governor-general of the Philippines which we took over under a protectorate after we won the war with Spain and ensured that the islands adopted a Constitution with a bill of rights identical to ours.   He was secretary of war under T.R., deterring Teddy’s high flown emperor-of-the-world ambitions.  He was acting secretary of state where he continued to counterbalance the aggressive TR.

        The philosophy of Bob Taft on foreign affairs is ably presented in a book he wrote by himself, A Foreign Policy for Americans. He opposed our entry into World War II which was maneuvered by FDR in secret correspondence with that “former Naval person” Winston Churchill.   To his dying day Taft suspected the machinations that led to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor—a suspicion that has been justified by Thomas Fleming (the historian-novelist, not the Rockford Institute president of the same name) in his brilliant, unforgettable and never challenged The New Dealers’ War: FDR and the War Within World War II, published in 2001. It says a whole lot about the world in which we live that the true story which Fleming documents that led to the Japanese attack has been redacted from U.S. consciousness.

            Bob Taft was a fervent anti-communist; he could hardly be anything else—but he steadfastly opposed the North American treaty that created NATO, arguing that international agreements like it presupposed U. S. intervention in war—arguing it bypassed the role of Congress to declare war.   He was 100% correct. Not long before he died, Henry Hyde who had been chairman of House Judiciary told me that the reason we entered the Vietnam and Iraq wars without a formal declaration was because the multiplicity of our negotiations have presupposed our entry without the necessity of a vote up or down.

        I would hope this folly would be halted by the next Republican president who will pledge to return to the Constitutional principle of declaration of war.    The pretext that the times are too rushed for this action is arrant nonsense.

        Moreover I would hope that by whatever means…either by campaigning presidential candidates themselves…or patriotic groups such as the Tea Parties would advocate the cutting-back of needless, expensive and provocative expansion of the military which has grown to 156 separate countries, with 116,000 military personnel in Germany alone.  The rationale here has been since the Cold War that these troops are urgently needed to protect the peace and liberty of the United States.  To which Taft would respond: Nonsense!  They constitute a real danger that this country will be further drawn into wars.

         Does this mean a needless relaxation and unilateral disarmament in the War on Terror which Ron Paul, joining with the virulent Left in this country, has declared ala Barack Obama’s once favorite minister, that 9/11 and subsequent attempted attacks on our shores are “chickens coming home to roost!”  Nonsense.   But to criticize unilateral disarmament and disbandment of the CIA as he recommends is not to give needless approval of Wilsonianism. 

        In reiteration, (1) America should resolve via your Republican election to return to the democratic policy of declaration of war with the step fully examined by the Congress. (2) There should be reasonable withdrawal of military personnel which have been stationed in certain countries out of force of habit and nothing else.  (3). Tyrants and not-nice rulers  the world has had for millennia.  The blood of not one American should be expended on regime change and dissolution of tyrannies if the peace and  liberty of Americans are not threatened-- no matter how the siren song of pleas come from the media and nicey-nice idealists.

      (4) Let this former Peace Corps exec and foreign service officer say this to you:

      Regarding taxpayer philanthropy, just as we should cease thinking of ourselves as either the world’s taxpayer-paid angel of mercy and/or retributive arm of justice, the implementer of God’s wrath to bring democracy to the entire world and warm toast and cookies to the Hottentots via this government, charitable expenditures designed to convey by taxpayer means the corporeal works of mercy  should be repudiated by the Republican campaign…the missions of mercy transferred to privately-run charitable causes.   When I was in the Peace Corps (its public affairs director), 3^rd world nations suspected our volunteers were hirelings of the CIA; not true but the suspicion has never gone away.  The Peace Corps work should be spun off to private groups and churches where bona fide help should not be confused with empire-building selfish interests.

           5.  It can’t be stated too often: This country was founded as a republic not an empire. Cliché it may be now but still undeniably true.

       6.  The highest expenditures overseas comes not from wars but the gooey decisions to “nation-build.” The Iraq War’s costs have been estimated at possibly $3 trillion. Nation-building amounts to 80% of that cost with the actual combat cost 20%.  6.  Ever since the demise of the Taftian view this country has pursued the policy of “whatever it takes” to support the Pentagon under the impression that we can’t spend too much for defense.  Wrong. I remind you that this lack of budget oversight has resulted in the Navy having more flag admirals than ships—315 admirals, 264 ships. Moreover while the military has fewer than 3 million personnel in active and reserve status, the command structure equals what it was in World War II with almost 15 million personnel.

       7.  The United Nations was a nice feel-good experiment but it has too often not only failed to safeguard peace but has been commandeered by 3^rd World demagogues to openly sabotage the American effort to protect ourselves.  A central plank of the campaign should be to withdraw from it, sell  its New York building to private interests and get its grotesque spider-web flag the hell out of our shores. 

        8.  Finally, any attempt to return foreign-military policies to Taftian designs will be assailed as “Fortress America” and isolationism.  It is not.  But if there ever comes a move to this extreme…ala Ron Paul’s craziness…it will be spurred by the continuance of Wilsonianism that has all too often characterized American foreign policy under the two parties.   

Think Don Draper with Tears. We’ll Never Hear the End of Boehner’s Weeping from the Liberal Media…Com’on this Rahm Stuff is a Pro-Emanuel Put-On, Isn’t It?

 

                                              Cry Baby.

      Yes, there is definitely something wrong with a guy who cries that easily as does John Boehner--aka Don Draper with tears.  Okay if you’re interviewed on TV about your child who has just died that’s one thing.  A guy who weeps convulsively about the tough days of his childhood…as Boehner did earlier…well, it’s acceptable but still should cause your eyebrows to lift. But a future Speaker of the House weeping on 60 Minutes over non-personal issues portrays embarrassingly for the new GOP House majority the close-up of an obviously emotionally brittle and very troubled individual whose recourse to tears betrays considerable inner turmoil.  Either that or guilt for something only he knows. 

         Still, he’s easier to take than Newt who met his third wife while cheating on his second. Boehner reminds me strongly of the character
“Don Draper” as played  by actor Jon Hamm on the TV sit-com Mad Men, the story of Madison Avenue ad account executives in the 1960s. The script writers patterned him on Draper Daniels, creative director of Leo Burnett (he “invented” the Marlboro Man cigarette image) whom I remember from my days at Quaker…an immaculately tailored, tanned  bon vivant…actually a farm boy from upstate New York…who would sail in for conferencing on our cereals with a twinkle in his eyes that be-told future late night action.

                                       The Rahm “Residency” Promo.

          Rahm Emanuel has been on television for weeks and ranks high-up in national news stories—all with positive flavor. It’s hard to imagine that a slick greaser like Emanuel, participant in multi-dozens of Washington deals…can be presented as an innocent resident facing the prospect of being denied the right to run for mayor when in fact he was a city Congressman.   Talk about Draper Daniels: he could have easily staged this scenario for a client.

        A cynic will say that without this breathtaking series of whether he will…or will not…be able to prove his residency (which to the average man’s mind is undeniable) Emanuel would just be another candidate—and probably a tarnished one at that basis the debacle of the Obama administration. Now his complicity as the Mover of the Louisiana Purchase and the Corn Husker Purchase for the unpopular ObamaCare will never be discussed because as result of Odelson’s  bamboozle he looks inevitable, maybe even without a runoff.

       Knowing Rahm from the old days when we were both on WBEZ 30 years ago--his  political job was then to round up Jewish money as he described it for campaigns…I can’t be blamed for imagining he cut a deal with Burt Odelson to bring the suit, the cameras showing Emanuel cool-cool-cool during the tempest as an ideal mayor should be.

        If I’m wrong and Odelson entered this fracas on his own, he should never be regarded as anything more than a supreme blunderer of Chicago politics.  His lawsuit will be regarded as a masterpiece of faulty reasoning…on par with that of Mayor Jane Byrne when she worked behind the scenes to get Harold Washington into the primary between her and States Attorney Rich Daley—the strategy being that Washington would draw black votes from Daley and with the “fractioning” of the black vote, grease the skids for her reelection.

Politically Incorrect Views Meted Out Here to Sacred Liberal Topics.

      News story:  Michael Steele to run again for GOP chairman.

           So what? This guy’s a con.  The only reason he was elected is because he’s black and Obama’s black and the stupid RNC thought this would somehow equate.  For his part, Steele figured he could parlay fame to a berth on the national ticket in 2012 believing that his commodity would be his power to woo black voters. Nonsense.  Blacks are  indentured to a party that has given them substandard schools, unemployment and inadequate housing, the Democratic party. Indentured because they believe the liberal line.  The idea that the GOP should “outreach” is bogus.  “Outreach” to what?  Try to out-promise the Dems?  Ridiculous. Nor is  Steele a model.  He misspent the party into penury and when he faces his challengers he’ll play the race card. Mark my words before it’s over he’ll blast the GOP for “racism.”   Defeat him resoundingly, overwhelmingly.  His blasting his party won’t hurt because blacks are never going to go two-party since they’re indentured—only slightly less than they were under slavery.   But then they knew they were slaves.  Not now. They’re political slaves but don’t know it.

                       News story:  Richard Holbrook Dies.

      Great loss? Yeah, somewhat. He was highly skilled in negotiations and if there were any justice he should have been Obama’s secretary of state.  And if Hillary Clinton were as astute as she is billed she should have turned Obama down and let him name Holbrook.   As senator she would be in a beautiful position to run for president in 2012.   Now she’ll be just an asterisk.   Quick:  who was Hoover’s secretary of state?  Answer: Henry L. Stimson who later was FDR’s secretary of war—but who cares?   Same with Hillary who has been unimaginably bad.

                 News story: Palin Here, Palin There, Palin Everywhere!

          She’ll run but won’t make it.  You betcha.  But she’s invaluable for grass-roots energy.  Actually for a party on the cusp of winning heavily in 2012 not just the presidency but keeping the House and gaining the  Senate, its prospective presidential candidates are not impressive.   Usually the GOP follows the rule of “now it’s his turn”—which means Romney.   Will somebody muss up his hair, please? Scuff up his shoes?  They’re shined so brilliantly you can see your reflection in them.  How will he explain RomneyCare?  The best ones seem to be those who relate to the blue-collars…Huckabee and Pawlenty.  I’m always switching my favor.  Pawlenty may be the guy: I’m hugely impressed with how he unhorsed the public employee unions in Minnesota as detailed in yesterday’s WSJ.  The more Mitch Daniels writhes trying to get out of his gaffe that social issues should be shelved,  the worse it gets.  Now he says he likes social issues to be pursued “if they don’t get in the way.” Chris Christie is too new on the scene but I have a strong interest in a fat man for president.  He’d be the first since William Howard Taft.  Before him, Teddy who was a tubby; before him Cleveland.

               News Story: Carol Moseley Braun and Her $$ Angel.

       The gelatinous-spine of the news media has hardened somewhat now that the Sun-Times reported (yesterday) that Carol Mosley Braun is up to her old tricks…wallowing in personal debt of $250,000 secured through one of four mortgages on her5-bedroom Hyde Park house—the debt owed to a guy who is charged with harassing an employee which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld last month…Moseley Braun’s financial affairs in chaos, her inexplicable organic coffee and tea business in disarray. It took Coleman Young twenty years to turn Detroit into a desolate moonscape.   Moseley Braun can easily do it in one term with her masterly ineptitude for administration.  The only two I have any faith in are Rahm Emanuel and Gery Chico…but Chico is malleable and can easily be rolled by the Gray Wolves of the Council.  Rahm is so duplicitous and mean I think he’ll perceive it’s in his own interest not to let Chicago go the way of Detroit.