Personal Asides: Memo to Catholics—Benedict Intends the Media Shock Waves He Provokes…Nunn, Boren Endorsements for Obama Gives Seal of Inevitability to Nomination…For Theological Wonks Only…The Iranian-North Korean Nuclear Threats.

Benedict XVI.

At this writing…Sunday afternoon…it is certain that Pope Benedict’s visit to the U. S. was a triumph. His willingness to bring up clerical pedophilia, to the discomfiture of some U. S. bishops who have shrugged it away with bureaucratic answers, was the perfect thing to do. The only question is why Rome hadn’t addressed it in this thoroughly serious way before. But Benedict has proven to be in every sense a brilliant successor to both Peter and John Paul II and his homilies on this and other things falls neatly into the authenticist Catholic rubric his supporters had hoped.

There is another factor, brought up by the “Register’s” admirable correspondent Fr. Raymond De Souza that bears reflection. Where some Catholics regret the spin the news gives on some of the Pope’s talks…with some discomfiture…De Souza astutely points out that in his estimation the Pope intends the shock value that is contained in the documents, using the media admirably to educate. Example: Before his elevation, he wrote much if not all of “Dominus Iesus” which used the words “gravely deficient” and “defects” in describing Christian sects outside the Catholic pale. This caused some consternation by those who felt the media was exaggerating a possible rupture in ecumenism. Some said the Pope goofed, used bad p. r. in communicating the goal of ecumenism.

Not so, says De Souza. For those of us who were reared in the certainty that (no matter how chauvinistic it sounds in today’s Rotary Club-style p. r. imaging) Catholicism adheres to the Church founded by Christ—uniquely one. The Roman Catholic church we believe is not just another Christian denomination, but, as Vatican II has said, is the organism in which is possessed the objective fullness of Christ’s heritage to the Church, the totality of His revelation, sacraments with authority to rule the people of God in His name—the church of which the Bishop of Rome is visible head. Other Christian bodies participate, in greater or lesser measure, of those elements of sanctification and truth that exist in divine fullness in the Roman Catholic Church. This is a tough truth. It means not as some advocates of ecumenism maintain that the truth is to come about from reunification of the churches. Tough but true: Catholic doctrine teaches that the Church is the end to which all churches and ecclesial communities must strive to attain, that it possesses truth which subsists is the one true church governed by the successor of Peter and by the bishops in communion with him.

Thus Benedict is as skilled as his predecessor in using the media to communicate. Some p. r. practitioners say he has erred in making “mistakes” that cause criticism. Not so. There is a deliberate method in making these so-called “mistakes” that are not mistakes at all.


Nunn, Boren Endorsements.

The Obama endorsements by Sam Nunn and David Boren give a seal of inevitability to the Illinoisan’s candidacy…not withstanding that three super-delegates also endorsed Hillary or the embarrassments to Obama of the past weeks concerning remarks in San Francisco and disclosure of Jeremiah Wright hate sermons.

My guess is: no matter what happens in Pennsylvania, the party leaders generally have decided that it would be too grave a risk to stiff the hugely powerful African American electorate at this point. The private judgment seems to be that black resentment would be fatal for the party’s well being in perpetuity if Obama were denied. After all he has the momentum and star power that guarantees far more than just black waves of volunteers—but an ocean full of youth, affluent whites et al in the future. Even if Obama were to be defeated by John McCain, the party would be better off than if it stiffed Obama. And, of course, there’s no certainty that McCain will win since the pendulum’s rhythm definitely seems likely to swing in Obama’s favor. Barring some Event as Harold Macmillan would say.

Theological Wonks.

Some questions for theological wonks (and you don’t have to be Catholic as this writer is, to play). Reminder: The honor system is in force once again and we trust you not to go to search engines or outside theological books. Your own rationale will suffice—besides it’s much more fun. If perchance you have read an official answer somewhere, you are honor bound to cite it. Here goes.

All of us understand that Moses was a person of great sanctity and Elijah as well. Why is it, then, that Christianity…particularly the Catholic church which investigates people of great sanctity and affixes a formal canonization to which other Christian denominations follow suit (for the most part)…hasn’t canonized Moses or Elijah? Is it because these people come from what we call the Old Testament but which Jews call the Jewish Bible? In other words because Moses and Elijah were Jews? Or because the Catholic church hasn’t gotten around to it yet? None of the foregoing? What’s the reason? And should Moses and Elijah and other great spiritual leaders of the Old Testament BE called saints i.e. Saint Moses, Saint Elijah?

The Iranian-North Korean Nuclear Threats.

Last week Iran announced it is tripling its number of centrifuges to 9,000. A centrifuge is a motor-driven piece of equipment that puts an object in rotation around a fixed axis, used in chemistry, biology and biochemistry. The importance to us is that gas centrifuges are used in uranium enrichment preparatory to constructing a nuclear weapon. It takes many thousands of centrifuges to enrich uranium for use in a nuclear reactor and a great many more to enrich it to nuclear bomb grade. But Iran is getting there.

What to do about it is a key question since the ruler of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is a millenarian madman and fatalist. Also you have the highly likely matter of future earthquakes. A 2003 rumble rocked Bam and scientists see the strong possibility of future ones that may rival Chernobyl. In short, Iran is a disaster no matter where you look.

Then you have North Korea. Six-party talks there failed and Pyongyang has started nuclear testing and is on the threshold of becoming a full-blown nuclear power. It has declined to reveal its nuclear facilities, breaking its earlier word (to Jimmy Carter and others).

Most people except the Far Left agree that Iran should be prevented from making a bomb and North Korea should be remonstrated not to—but you can imagine what a President Barack Obama will do. He will, to quote his words, negotiate with Ahmadinejad and Kim Jong-Il in North Korea. Thus we will sit transfixed until this very young president re-learns what other naïve young presidents have learned (and what Jimmy Carter never learned)—that there are some people in the world who are crazed and not susceptible to rational dealing.

A President Obama will arrange a formal meeting with Ahmadinejad first and then fly to see Kim Jong-Il with mainstream media attending both sessions with high hopes. Well, Ahmadinejad will stand on his tip-toes in order to pat Obama on the head and say, “there-there little boy…” whereupon Obama will retort “Don’t call me BOY!” and the MSM will rush to the cameras to announce a full-blown racial crisis, interviewing Al Sharpton for comment. Then in North Korea, media will thrill to the fact that two men “of color” are conversing—which will be big on the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric.

Following which Obama will address the U. S. on prime time and announce the following: He will ask Jimmy Carter, age 84, to be a personal mediator between us and Iran and George McGovern, 86, to go to North Korea and sit down with Kim Jong-Il .

The reason for Carter’s hatred of Israel being that U. S. Jews backed Ted Kennedy against him for the nomination in 1980, he will recommend that we let the Palestinians drive Israel into the sea and good riddance since Israel has had the temerity to defend itself against rockets which Carter has called provocation of war. Then he will set himself up for a second Nobel prize and warm editorial support from the New York Times. This happens and U. S. Jews give serious consideration to eventually voting Republican—well, maybe. Probably many of the non-observant ones will still stay with George Soros.

McGovern will recommend that we pull all our troops out of South Korea where they should never have been in the first place. Back home, Ron Paul will be getting ready to run for president in 2012 when he will be 77. He will become the social lion of the Left and Right and be interviewed on “Meet the Press with Tim Russert.” CBS on the left will greet isolationists and paleos of the right triggering what will be known as The Grand Realignment of politics.

In that spirit, the nation will return to the Era of Good Feelings under President Monroe when a single party commanded the affections of practically all segments of society. The paleos will hug the anti-war bombers of the `60s including Billy Ayres. Pat Buchanan will toast Eleanor Clift and Jimmy Carter, both kindling a vigil light for the late Sam Francis. The Nobel people will strike several medals for a multiple ceremony— Jimmy Carter (#2) and for McGovern and Ron Paul, one each. Revisionist historians will date our debacle from entry into World War II and will ask themselves: What the hell was Pearl Harbor doing in the Pacific anyhow?

Then…KABOOM. From Iran and North Korea the missiles will rain down reproducing the felicitous last scene from Dr. Strangelove with the song: “We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when”…and as smoke rises from desiccated Manhattan, two chimps who survive the blast, will look at themselves and ponder: Should we start this thing all over again?

*************



Meanwhile, Charles Krauthammer, a brilliant commentator…and my favorite on foreign affairs…suggests that with North Korea, we initiate a two-layered anti-missile defense system where each layer, while imperfect, has a 90% shoot-down accuracy, based on which we tell Kim that if he starts something we will by god finish it. Kim is eccentric but not crazy. The chances are good there will be a stalemate until regime change. Thus far I agree with Krauthammer with respect to North Korea.

Not so with Iran since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a total wacko who truly believes his is the hand of God, about whom Bernard Lewis, at 92 the greatest living expert on the Middle East has said this (I paraphrase):

Amhadinejad is not a patriot where Iran is concerned. He and his followers do not worship Iran; they worship Allah. He has said that patriotism is another name for paganism and that he is willing to see Iran go up in smoke provided Islam emerges triumphant in the world. You don’t…you can’t…cower this guy.

Therefore with that mindset which is far different than North Korea’s, a deterrent strike has to be launched. Since Iran’s nuclear facilities are dispersed, with some of them underground, there should be a systemic bombing campaign that would set back its nuclear program for years to come. That would be the best legacy Bush would leave for his successor…and for all of us. In George W. Bush we have a unique president who is unconcerned about the eddies of popularity and who knows evil when he sees it—probably the most courageous, heedless of personal popularity, man to serve as president. Let us pray Bush initiates the preemptive strike before he leaves office and is succeeded by John McCain who has said publicly that there is one thing worse than bombing Iran—and that is to leave Iran with nuclear capability.

In passing, the stakes are so great that the nightmare startling me to sit up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat is the probability that the next president WILL be Barack Obama. For this election is his to lose. His election…there is no nice way of saying it…could send the Great Innkeeper coming downstairs in His house slippers to address the global cocktail party, rap His knuckles on the bar and say, “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s closing time.”

Flashback: Humphrey, the Small Town Drugstore Liberal…Gene McCarthy Lives an Eccentric Lifetime--28 Years--After Hubert’s Death.

[A memoir of the past 50 years in politics, written for my kids and grandchildren].

The Small Town Drugstore Liberal.

All one has to do is to look at Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and the rest of them: Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, Pat Leahy, Barbara Boxer, Diane Feinstein, to see the turn liberalism took after Hubert Humphrey’s death.

Humphrey was the last of the old-fashioned types, the kind whom you could vote for if the Republicans hadn’t nominated anyone good—and vote for with gratitude, too. He was a patriot (no matter his lamentable weakness in cow-towing to the elitist, anti-war Left when he finally got the presidential nomination; he probably would not have followed through had he won the election). He was a sports fan who liked to dance and go to parties. He drank beer and after a harrowing battle with pneumonia as a kid never smoke again. His passion for neatness was a social phobia. He could roar with laughter at a off-color joke. He was always the small-town pharmacist, reared in small town traditions. He lost a lot of sleep one night in Windsor castle because he couldn’t turn the hot water spigot off in his bathroom and worried about the loss of all that hot water from the boiler.

He was always ready to make allowances for human failings (the best thing I liked about him). He was never aghast at dealing with small time minor crime syndicate figures as Minneapolis mayor. Freddie Gates who was not one of them but a pinball machine manufacturer who knew them well was not only his friend but held the Bible when Hubert was sworn in as vice president. Hubert was an outrageous opportunist—doing Joe McCarthy one better by introducing an amendment to outlaw the Communist Party which annoyed civil libertarians. He was at once for massive national defense expenditures and détente, was at ease with Zionists and Arab nationalists. He had a genius for compromise and a dormant conscience when it came to ideological contradictions. He was a Prairie Progressive who could eat with bankers but still wore off-the-rack suits and Thom McCan shoes. He was a terrific fighter but lacked one essential quality: ruthlessness, meaning that he was no killer.

His insatiable ambition for the presidency betrayed him when he eagerly sought…and accepted…the vice presidency with Lyndon Johnson. Johnson was a bully and sucked the life-blood out of Hubert, making him a vassal which Hubert was only too glad to be. Had Hubert remained in the Senate when Johnson ran into trouble with the Vietnam war, Hubert would have had a good chance of beating Gene McCarthy and Bobby and would have got the nomination on his own terms. The election then might assuredly have been his. Had Hubert become president he probably would have done what Nixon tried to do and that is to wriggle out of Vietnam—unsuccessfully. He would have piled up the deficits as Nixon did but as he had a much better character than Nixon would have been a better president. Yes, he certainly would have gone to China because he would have hired Henry Kissinger as his national security aide.

McCarthy’s Life an Irreversible Decline.

If Gene McCarthy’s life is the story of movement from a Minnesota small town (Watkins, Minn.) to presidential prospect, it is far different from Hubert’s progression from small town (Huron, S. D.) to presidential prospect. Hubert lived his whole life as a prairie progressive. Gene was not faithfully consistent in anything he did—from his politics to ideology to marriage. He began his career running for the House in 1946 coincident with the postwar rise of Communism, and as a Catholic was seen to be resolutely opposed. His run for the Senate in 1958 squared with liberal discomfiture with the passivity of the Eisenhower administration on economics and foreign policy (believe it or not liberals of his time felt that a 5-star general in the White House was allowing the Soviets to get ahead of us in the Cold War with a “missile gap,” which was speedily disproved).

When Gene won reelection in 1964 it was because of a great yearn by the electorate for Medicare and other social programs. But by 1966 the liberal wave had begun to decrease and there were the beginnings of troubles with law and order in the country. Still McCarthy’s many articles indicated that he was out-of-step with the rising discontent in the country with liberalism (with this he was similar to Hubert who would never entertain trimming his sails to accommodate conservatism). McCarthy’s sole goal being for himself rather than a liberal ideology, he bargained for the vice presidency with LBJ and promised to be loyal to the crusade of the Vietnam War. I have always wondered what would have happened had LBJ chosen McCarthy instead of Hubert for vice president. It is my guess that probably McCarthy would have remained far more constant to LBJ and the war than Hubert did. Why? Because Bobby Kennedy, McCarthy’s great hate, had left as AG, had become senator from New York and would be trying to pay LBJ back for not picking him…Bobby…for vice president (not that LBJ had given it a moment’s thought). Gene would have been motivated strongly to stand for the war against Bobby because he hated Bobby so.

Actually, motivated by hatred for Bobby, Gene would have been first in line for the presidency when LBJ retired, would probably have gotten the nomination over Bobby and conceivably could have crusaded to win the war—hatred for the Kennedys being such a powerful incentive (as hatred always was for Gene). He might not have defeated Nixon in 1968 since the pendulum was swinging for change (just as the pendulum is swinging for change today from what the public believes is a too-long custody of the White House by Republicans).

Gene had some key advantages over Hubert. He was more cerebral and much handsomer but that’s all. He was less energetic, far more relativistic in line with Virgil Michel-Godfrey Diekmann individualism, watering down absolutes of any kind which gave him an irresoluteness which lost him many followers. His great faults were arrogance, meanness, a Captain Ahab’s yen for bitter retribution, a bitterness that motivated him to get even with his enemies and deep cynicism, faults the far more generous Hubert never had. His legislative record was much thinner than Hubert’s. He gave his name to no major bills as did Humphrey, Fulbright and never lived up to what some believed was his full potential.

Because St. John’s, my old university, never had another public official that gained a national reputation, they have marketed Gene McCarthy with a McCarthy chair et al. Indeed my good friend Al Eisele who wrote the book on Humphrey and McCarthy which I used as a text for dates—adding an enormous amount of personal detail which only I could know—is coming to Chicago to lecture and I will be there.

What did McCarthy do in those years between Hubert’s death, in 1978 and his own in 2005 at age 89? First, he kept his health which is a good thing. I used him often, paying him for university lectures and once for his testimony in behalf of Quaker Oats in the early 1980s which was trying offset a hostile takeover by Brascan of Canada, an arm of Seagram—by convincing him to support in public testimony before a House committee a protectionist measure that would set up a foreign investment review board which would block acquisitions in the same way Canada does ours, a bill that had no chance of passage but which succeeded in frightening off Brascan, a measure that gained its House hearing thanks to the intercession of Speaker Tip O’Neill.

He supported Ronald Reagan in 1980, hoping in return, as McCarthy told me, of the ambassadorship to the UN, the negotiations conducted through Mike Deaver. The idea of Gene McCarthy supporting Reagan for president stunned me. Here was a one-time liberal anti-communist of 1946, turned critic of Vietnam who had said it would not hurt if the U.S. lost the war, turning into a libertarian paleo type in foreign and military affairs, believing we were too obsessed with anti-communism, endorsing an ex-California governor who said the USSR was “an evil empire.” Gene’s endorsement of Reagan hardly made the news since Gene had long since cheapened the franchise of his endorsement. The UN ambassadorship never came. I am told he met with Reagan. Two years later Gene said, “I’m not sorry I endorsed Reagan. I thought the Carter thing had to be stopped…I was not happy about what Reagan was going to do. I never really endorsed his economics…I supported Reagan only as against Jimmy Carter. As soon as he was elected, I turned on him.” Right.

He endorsed Reagan, McCarthy said, because Carter boycotted the Olympics. “When he did that, I said this has got to stop pretty soon. I mean, that’s the kind of thing a third-rate country does.” But in 1981 he decided to run for the U.S. Senate from Minnesota as a DFLer to get his old seat back. He showed up at the Minnesota State Fair as champion of the nuclear freeze movement, signing autographs and said, “I’ve suggested to Democrats that if they’ll forgive me for being right, I’ll forgive them for being wrong.” A cartoon in the Minneapolis “Star” showed tourists walking down the midway looking at stalls labeled Hilda the Fat Lady, Zira the Snake Woman, Bongo the Ape Man and McCarthy for Senator.

And there’s more. We’re not done yet with Gene McCarthy.

Personal Asides: Note to Dan Kelley Un-garbled and Extended…The Worst Ex-President, Jimmy Carter: III and Conclusion.

Un-Garbled and Extended.

Yesterday’s response to faithful and astute contributor to this website and The Observer Dan Kelley came through garbled for much of the day--so I rewrite—and enlarge it—here. There were two appointments to the U. S. Senate by two different Minnesota governors in the space of slightly over a year. First, in 1977, DFL Governor Wendell Anderson cut a deal with his DFL lieutenant governor, a dentist named Rudy Perpich, pronounced per-pitch (who had a sister Stella I dated several times, telling her with a subtle play on her surname to demonstrate my drawing room sense of sophisticated humor: “I am taking you out on Per-pitch!” She was so unimpressed that soon I wasn’t taking her out at all on per-pitch or not, which was the last time I tried to make fun of a girl’s name).

Anyhow, Anderson resigned as governor and Perpich, ascending to the governor’s job, named Anderson to the U. S. Senate to replace Walter Mondale who had been elected vice president. That was one senatorial appointment. There was a great deal of heat regarding that appointment with Minnesotans resenting the musical chairs aspect. Anderson planned to run for election in 1978.

The second senatorial appointment came in 1978. That year, Hubert Humphrey died and Gov. Rudy Perpich named Muriel, Hubert’s wife, to the Senate. She had told DFL leaders she would not run for election which would be held in 1978, the understanding being that she was keeping the seat warm for her son, Hubert H. III (Skip), a state senator.. Result: two Senate seats were up in the same year.

But the outcry among Minnesotans was so great on the DFL musical chairs game that in 1978 in the state there was a clean statewide Republican sweep. Republican Rudy Boschwitz defeated Wendell Anderson and Republican Dave Durenberger (the son of the athletic director at St. John’s) whom I always felt was a jerk-of-all-jerks (but success-worshipers always told me I was wrong), was elected to the Humphrey seat defeating multi-millionaire Bob Short. Not only that but Gov. Perpich was defeated by my old boss, Republican Al Quie for a net gain of three Republican seats (one governor, two senators).

A follow-up: Durenberger went on to win a full term in 1982, defeating Mark Dayton, a multi-millionaire heir to the Dayton department store fortune—and in 1988 defeated Skip Humphrey, a former AG who, despite his legendary name in Minnesota turned out to be a very-very small chip off the old block. Durenberger became chairman of Senate Intelligence and was a regular staple of news in Washington as people told me: nyaa-nyaa, see? You said he was a jerk-of-all-jerks!

Why did I think this way about him? When I and my colleague staffers worked for the Republican governor, the multi-millionaire self-made owner of the H.B. Fuller industrial adhesive company in St. Paul, who lost by 91 votes out of 1,250,000 cast I and those of my ilk on his staff worked from 7 a.m. to at least 11:30 p.m. every night. After he lost and staffers like me were ready to be carried out under complete exhaustion, he told us:

You have all done an outstanding job. Now the best of luck on finding a job in the private sector.

We—all of us—did, I locating a good one at Quaker Oats which made me thank the lucky stars that we lost the governorship when we did, so I could get out of the government and secure a foothold at a reasonably early age (36) in a good corporation. But our former chief of staff was out of work for a year. And when our old ex-governor boss whom we served so faithfully returned to his executive suite at the glue company, did he pick up the phone and offer any of his haggard, exhausted ex-governor office staffers to be helpful, using his name as recommendation for a job. Nope. He said this to all of us: I believe you should do what I did—get a job on your own. He didn’t deny that if we wanted to use his name as reference he would agree to it—but lifting the phone from the cradle and calling around to his fellow CEOs when we were out of work? Nope. I’m happy to say I got my job at Quaker on my own…although after I found it, he did vouch that I served him well and was sober, all that good stuff.

Instead, he thrilled us by informing us he had found a brilliant young man…and matinee idol handsome, too…to be his general counsel at his glue company whom he paid a luxuriant salary: Dave Durenberger. It took no time at all to discover what he paid Durenberger and Durenberger took no time at all in—at reunions—giving us a condescending pat on our backs. “You guys really worked in the trenches,” he said to all of us. “I envy you! But then I was in law school.” While we were getting a late start in our private sector jobs following a paper-thin defeat for reelection, he was earning big bucks at the glue company—more dough than any of us ex-staffers were getting--our ex-boss was nurturing David’s political career and setting him up for national attention—pushing him forward to run for the U.S. Senate.

“What do you think of Dave?” my ex-boss ex-governor said to me once when I stopped in St. Paul. Then without waiting for the answer;

“Ah, it is so good to finally—finally—find a young man of talent, handsomeness, firmness of character whom I can hire and push along to what I hope will be a rewarding career in politics.”

“Jealousy!” my wife said to me. “That’s all it is! You hate Durenberger because he is the favored one when all of you guys wanted to be. Remember that the next time you go to confession!”

It so happened I didn’t.

But she was very true. Very prescient.

Onward and upward he went as all of us former gubernatorial staffers watched, rubbed on political scabs, and gnawed our fists in envy, saying he’s a jerk of jerks. Ah but the scenario the media spun was so tender. Here was an earnest young man with the finely chiseled profile of John Barrymore who worked as a highly socially conscious top aide of a fine former governor.

He became a senator, then a leading U.S. senator and a prospective (maybe, who knew?) even presidential possibility. I prayed: God, take me early—before the presidential boom starts.

Well, while Dave’s career boomed, all of us ex-staffers began to make out in the private sector pretty well. None of us would be national public figures but we had good jobs, bought good houses, were able to send our kids to college. Once in a while we’d look back over our shoulders at Dave but--.

Then we all became instantly ecstatic. It was discovered that Sen. Durenberger, he who was chairman of Senate Intelligence, no less, was conducting a virtual in-public love affair with a woman not his wife and getting caught up in ethical mishandling of public funds leading to a signal achievement: for which he apologized to the Senate and to the nation, following which he was still denounced unanimously by the entire Senate in formal resolution, whereupon he wisely determined not to run again.

Then I felt guilty. So the next time I went to confession I confessed (a) my anger at Dave’s success, (b) my joy at Dave’s debacle and (c) my guilt at savoring his destruction.

I got a good Dutch uncle talking to and three Hail Marys.

“I think I will call up Elmer,” said I to my wife, referring to my ex-boss and former governor, “and give my condolence to the fact, having thought he found a young man of talent, handsomeness, firmness of character, he must now be disappointed—so I will console him.”

You still have not learned, she said. You will NOT. You have not learned anything from your shameless schadenfreude.

I was only kidding.

I don’t think so, she said.

All right—but anyhow I don’t feel bitter about Dave Durenberger any more.

Quie, my old boss during the early years when he served in the U.S. House, completed only one term as governor, declining not to run again for the very good reason that he came into office pledging no tax increases, discovered that, in his estimation, he couldn’t balance the budget without one unless he were to cut services to the bone. This he explained to the people who beat him up anyhow so he prudently determined to keep it at one term, never acknowledging that his reason was he knew full-well he would be defeated.

And to round out the merry-go-round aspect, he was succeeded by—guess? DFLer Rudy Perpich, outliving his unpopularity, making a comeback.

You see what happens when I get started, Dan?

The Worst Ex-President: III.

We return to the story of little Jimmy Carter, feeling neglected by posterity because of a disastrous presidency where he was unceremoniously turned out by…ugh…Ronald Reagan—so he decided to play off the Nobel Prize people’s dislike of Israel by laving it up with the Palestinians and intruding himself on the Middle East peace process. Invading the Middle East he gave the PLO a man-hug, despite the fact that it tried to scuttle Carter’s Camp David agreement. He bought entirely Arafat’s denial that he wished to drive Israel into the sea despite the words of the PLO covenant.

Then Carter volunteered to become a ghostwriter for Arafat, drafting on his lap-top the strategy and wording for a speech Arafat would deliver. And Carter did a whole lot of chores for the PLO, seeing all the while that his good works get reported to the Nobel people. For instance, in 1990 when Arafat supported Saddam Hussein’s takeover of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia cutr off the money spigot for the PLO, Carter appealed to the Saudis to turn the money valve on again. A biographer, an historian, Douglas Brinkley by name (no he’s not David Brinkley’s son, that is another historian, Alan) wrote in his puff biography of Carter, he had a fondness for Arafat and the Palestinians, a “fondness…that transcended politics, based on their emotional connection and the shared belief that they were both ordained to be peacemakers by God.” This included his praise for the Saudi royal family for “preserving the proper degree of religious commitment” in their country…not mentioning the fact that bibles are sometimes confiscated at the border along with Jews.

On and on in his books and interviews throughout the years Carter continued to woo the Nobel people. He wrote and would say often that Israel’s plans to divert water from the Jordan and Sea of Galilee led to the founding of the PLO in 1964. Not so. It started when the Arab states turned thumbs down on a U.S. plan for distribution of the water because “it would allow the Zionists to consolidate their existence.” Israel got U.S. approval to divert a small amount; the Arabs fought back by diverting water upstream from Israel—and by forming the PLO as a guerrilla movement.

In his public pronouncements with an eye cast on the Nobel people, Carter would say statements like this: “One of the vulnerabilities of Israel—and a potential cause of violence—is its holding of prisoners.” The prisoners were terrorists: rather like saying the U. S. is losing the war of ideas by holding prisoners. He would say: “Palestinian leaders unequivocally accepted” the Bush administration’s road map but “Israel has officially rejected its key provisions with unacceptable caveats and prerequisites.” What were they? Oh, just that Palestinians declare an end to violence and terrorism “and undertake visible efforts on the ground to arrest, disrupt and restrain individuals and groups conducting and planning violent attacks on Israelis.” Well, all this work paid off in 2002 when he won the prize.

Look, the Israelis aren’t angels and by fighting back engage in death and destruction as their mortars that fell yesterday killed some innocent civilians including a 23-year-old non-American, independent TV photographer…but Carter is uniquely one-sided—and finds that liberal popular favor is with the Palestinians. So when Hamas was founded to upstage the PLO, Carter unsurprisingly finds peaceful purposes with it, writing in his latest treatise, “Hamas would modify its rejection of Israel if there is a negotiated settlement that Palestinians would approve.” And, he continues, “Hamas has meticulously observed a cease-fire commitment and since August of 2004 it has not committed a single act of terrorism that has cost an Israeli life.” See—that is even worse than shilling for its official p. r. office since Hamas announces its operations on its websites. In the same time frame that Carter maintains Hamas is death-free, Hamas claims responsibility for fifteen attacks that killed 26 Israelis including two children and eleven other civilians as well as thirteen soldiers.

What is the reason for Carter’s animus of Israel? Certainly at the outset, it seems to have been the desire for the Nobel Prize. The online journal “Front Page” lists the millions of dollars his Carter Center gets from Saudi Arabia and other Arab states—but mainly the anti-Israel view fits conventional leftist Third World ideology which he has increasingly become closer to. He ridicules Israel’s anti-terrorist wall as the “segregation barrier” and “imprisonment wall.” He writes, “The wall ravages many places along its devious route that are important to Christians. In addition to enclosing Bethlehem in one of its most notable intrusions, an especially heartbreaking division is on the southern slope of the Mount of Olives, a favorite place for Jesus and his disciples.”

He moves to seemingly embrace the age-old canard about the media run by Jews that follows one line—pro-Israel. That was the old rumble many years ago, and still current, by the Paleolithic right…but not valid now. While assuredly there are many Jews in the media, the interesting thing is that mainstream media are more likely to take Carter’s position on the Middle East than Israel’s. Carter writes, almost conspiratorially, “Because of powerful political economic and religious forces in the United States, Israeli government decisions are rarely question ed or condemned [and] voices from Jerusalem dominate in our media.” This sounds like Ron Paul and his breed. Where are the “voices from Jerusalem”? The nation’s most prestigious newspaper is The New York Times, run by the Sulzberger family—and if you think they represent “voices from Jerusalem” you have another think coming. The paper is consistent in taking positions antithetical to Israel. Is he talking about the Christian Right? Nobody accuses it of dominating the media. When he pushed the so-called Geneva Accord, an independent plan for Israel-Palestinian settlement in which he was involved, The Times hailed it as “truly momentous” and other mainstream news sources—NBC, ABC, CBS, the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and others agreed.

It is clear that the Carter expedition to Hamas and his running interference with Republican and Democratic presidents is a driven effort to become a martyr and further impress his Nobel Prize friends. Martyrdom? When Brandeis University invited him to debate Alan Dershowitz he was offended with the university turned down his demand that it send a private plane to address the university—and in addition, host him for a speech alone, without Dershowitz. After it rejected the idea, he said “Muy most troubling experience has been the rejection of my offers to speak, for free, about my book on university campuses with high Jewish enrollments.”

Embittered despite his collection of awards, Carter is quickly gaining the same eccentric reputation of the rogue Archbishop of Canterbury—regarded as a strange fixture in American political life…a failed president for all the good the Camp David Accord attained…and indisputably the worst ex-president in American history.

Personal Aside: A Reaffirmation, a Correction and a Justification…The Worst Ex-President, Jimmy Carter: II.

A Reaffirmation…

Our good friend and excellent contributor to this website and the “Observer,” Daniel Kelley suggests that I am wrong in reporting that Muriel Humphrey was appointed to Hubert’s senatorial seat by Minnesota Gov. Rudy Perpich.


....a Correction…

Where I was grievously wrong yesterday has been pointed out by Bookworm. I should never write this stuff after midnight when I am rushing to go to bed. I mentioned that Andrew Johnson was the only president to serve in the Congress following the expiration of his term. Stupid—and I knew better because in the `50s as a congressional aide, I was often a guide for Minnesota tourists visiting Statuary Hall (the first site of the House in the present Capitol building). And as I mentioned to them many times, the 6th president, John Quincy Adams, served in the House from Massachusetts and made quite a distinguished record there, serving for 17 years, fighting the gag rule which prevented debate on slavery from being discussed, winning the fight at last in 1844 when the House relented and repealed the gag rule. His role as congressman was far more valiant than his presidency—or his earlier role as U. S. Senator from Massachusetts preceding his White House service when he served as a Federalist but supported Tom Jefferson. As a Whig House member he was often in the minority in his party, supporting the Bank of the United States, opposing the Mexican war and opposed the annexation of Texas. Presciently he led the fight against heavy odds to accept a $500,000 donation from England for creation of a museum which nativists of his own party opposed…initiating the Smithsonian Institution. All these things were part of my spiel to visiting firemen.

In fact I would point out the exact spot where Adams’ desk was located on the Whig side of the aisle (at that time House members had desks). The old man (called “Old Man Eloquent”) by his admirers, would hunch over his desk deep in thought. Everyone thought he was concentrating until they found out why. The arc ceiling in the chamber was in fact a voice tunnel that carried the whispers of Democratic House members from across the room. Their secret consultations were heard by Adams which was the reason he was hunched over, trying to listen.

In proof I would ask tourists to stand where Adams’ desk had been located, lower their heads and concentrate. Then I would go over to what had been the Democratic side, bend down and whisper very quietly, “Minnesota, Hats Off to Thee!” They would hear it clearly.

On February 21, 1848 after pronouncing a very loud “No!” on a measure to decorate several generals serving in the Mexican War (which war he strongly opposed), Adams slumped over his desk, suffering a major stroke. He was attended by five doctors, four of whom were serving in the House. He was carried to the Clerk’s office adjoining the floor where he slipped into a coma. He was removed to a hospital where he died two days later. I thank Bookworm for correcting this glaring example of my ineptitude for which I am embarrassed.

…and a Justification.

In answer to Daniel Arquilla who suggests that the worst ex-president should be John Tyler of Virginia, let me say he has a point which I considered but rejected—however men of good will can disagree. Arquilla evidently assumes that Tyler, the 10th president, was disloyal to the country following his White House service. Two points:

1. I have always given John Tyler more credit and aver he was not

disloyal. Why do I say that? As ex-president, on the eve of the Civil War, in February, 1861 he led a delegation of 21 states to Washington, convening a congregation that sought to mediate the differences and avoid civil war. I’ve always felt good about Tyler for this. He became quite unpopular in Virginia by doing this but he risked all to make a last stab for peace. The peace mission was a very noble attempt but failed. I have always acknowledged that Tyler’s support of secession was reasonable. Why?

When the constitution was ratified three states made it clear that they would not sign the document unless states reserved the right to withdraw and wrote that provision into their ratifications of the constitution…Virginia, Rhode Island and New York. I have long argued that what we call the Civil War was not a Civil War but the War Between the States because the rebelling states did not want to take over the country but be independent—and certain articles written by some of the founders, i.e. Hamilton, allowed that they could secede. I am a Lincoln fan because I think he did the prudent and pragmatic thing by opposing secession—but don’t ask me to support him on logic alone. After all, Lincoln was a nationalist and a creature of his age. We know that he did not declare war because of slavery. He did it as a nationalist and I am happy he saved the Union. But let’s not cede to him the legal purity of the argument.

That is why I am not prepared to say that John Tyler was disloyal, a traitor or the worst ex-president. Not at all. Virginia was one of those states that included the secession provision in its ratification. Assuredly, after his peace effort failed, he did urge Virginia to secede citing the original compact that Virginia’s founders had included. Virginia, after all, was one of the mother states, the home of Jefferson, Washington and Madison…so it has always stayed with me that since the secession language was contained therein and evidently approved by them, seceding was not an act of treason or disloyalty—which spares Tyler from that onus, I believe.

Nor is Tyler’s connection with Virginia, one of the states to insert the provision, the only reason his view does not brand him disloyal or treasonous. Former president and strong abolitionist John Quincy Adams had this to say on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Constitution —and bear with this very long sentence:

“The indissoluble link of union between the people of the several states of this confederated nation, is, after all, not in the right but the heart. If the day should ever come—may Heaven avert it—when the affections of the people of those States shall be alienated from each other; when the fraternal spirit shall give way to cold indifference or collision of interests shall fester into hatred, the bands of political associations will not long hold together parties no longer attracted by the magnetism of conciliated interests and kindly sympathies; and far better will it be for the disunited states to part in friendship from each other than to be held together by constraint.”

On Daniel’s second point, that Tyler was elected to the House of Representatives of the Confederacy, I am prepared to concede—but he died before he could serve, on January 18, 1862 at the Exchange Hotel in Richmond as Representative-elect at age 71 prior to his being sworn in. He was a member of the Provisional Congress of the Confederacy before that but this was a kind of ad hoc governance.

The Worst Ex-President, Jimmy Carter: II.

Yesterday we talked about Jimmy’s botching up negotiations with North Korea, having intruded himself into negotiations by bludgeoning the Clinton administration, publicizing himself on television as the architect of a deal he called the Agreed Framework under which the North asserted that it sought nuclear energy only for the purpose of generating electricity. Working in secret it kept on researching the nuclear bomb which was suspected all along but formally discovered under the George W. Bush administration—whereupon Carter wrote an article for “The New York Times” that blamed North Korea not at all but leveled blame solely on the United States for branding North Korea as part of an axis of evil. The article which gave aid and comfort to North Korea was a despicable act by a despicable little man.

What Carter’s egocentric intrusion did was worsen the problem. In 1994 a military attack on North Korea might have been prudent. Now a strike against its facilities would be infinitely more perilous. So…thank you, Jimmy.

Now Carter turned his attention to the Middle East. Egypt’s President Anwar el Sadat made a remarkable peace journey to Israel in 1977 which set the tone. At first Carter responded coldly to the gesture but then he resolved to take advantage of it. Calling both side together for 13 days in 1978. he made a noteworthy accomplishment at Camp David getting Sadat and Israel’s Menachem Begin to agree on several fundamentals that led to the 1979 Israel-Egypt peace treaty including framework for negotiations to set a self-governing authority on the West Bank and Gaza Strip with Egypt regaining the Sinai. But as with all international agreements with which the U.S. has been involved since the end of World War II, this was greased by American money, a mixture of grants and packages, Egypt to receive $1.3 billion annually which it used to modernize its army (replacing the earlier subsidies from the USSR) and Israel getting $3 billion a year in grants and military aid. It was not such a good deal for Sadat who though a hero in Egypt for regaining the Sinai saw Egypt expelled from the Arab League as result of his trip to Israel ending with turmoil at home, riots and his eventual assassination.

As a private citizen and in quest of the Nobel Prize for Peace to rehabilitate his deep unpopularity and reputation as a failed president, Carter wrote two books on the Middle East—the first “The Blood of Abraham” (1985) which was a mild snoozer followed by a second written in more dramatic and draconian terms, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.” In the second he lavished great praise on Arab leadership. Carter may have been impractical as a president, prone to be gulled by the Soviets, but in the quest for his reputation’s enhancement he is a canny politician. The Nobel Prize people are notable for animosity to Israel and warmth to Palestinian insurgents. Therefore he praised all Arab leadership in the book and accepted at face value Yasir Arafat’s statement made to him in 1990 that “The PLO has never advocated the annihilation of Israel. The Zionists started the ‘drive the Jews into the sea’ slogan and attributed it to the PLO.”

Carter gives this as gospel despite the fact that the covenant of the PLO pledges “the Palestinian Arab people reject all alternatives to the total liberation of Palestine.” Total liberation. Not a peep out of Jimmy. And there were other skewed circumstances which showed he was angling for the prize so needed to rehab his reputation, understanding that to gain it he’d have to come down on the Arab side to have any chance of winning it at all. More tomorrow.

Personal Aside: The Worst Ex-President in U. S. History—I.

As I was reading about Jimmy Carter embracing a Hamas politician yesterday during a visit to the West Bank, ignoring a request from the U. S. that he not go because Hamas is a terrorist group, I began speculating, as a history buff, on who in American history has been the worst ex-president.

I thought: Maybe it was Democrat-turned-Republican, Andrew Johnson. Nope. Johnson, the 17th president, who was impeached and spared from conviction by one vote because of his decision to follow Abraham Lincoln’s policies of reconciliation with the South and ran into trouble. The South had no intention of sharing power with the ex-slaves; Radical Republicans led by Thaddeus Stevens wanted punitive policies pursued so that the old southern Democratic cabal that ran the Congress for so many years would not return. The differences led to vicious fighting (something like Blagojevich vs. Madigan in Illinois) and the passage over the president’s veto of a flagrantly unconstitutional “Tenure of Office Act” which stated the president could not fire a cabinet official unless he had the approval of Congress. It was passed to protect Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton who was a Radical Republican and who was flagrantly disloyal to the president.

Johnson fired Stanton and perforce was impeached. He was almost universally hated—by misguided followers of the assassinated Lincoln who felt he was “soft” on traitors i.e. the South…by the South because as a native southern Democrat he had bolted to run with Lincoln. Seemingly by everybody. But as the day of seemingly inevitable conviction neared…when Johnson would be found guilty and sentenced to prison…seven Republican senators including Illinois’ Lyman Trumbull defected, took their political lives in their hands, and voted to acquit Johnson. Now: was Johnson a bad ex-president? Did he run around the hurl invectives and insults at his enemies? No. He was elected to the Senate from Tennessee and served honorably—the only ex-president to return to elective office—and died as a Senator. In a statement found after his death, he wrote: “I have performed my duty to my God, my country and my family. I have nothing to fear in approaching death. To me it is the mere shadow of God’s protecting wing.”

*****

Well, I ruminated: maybe it was the 14th president, Democrat Franklin Pierce, one of the most handsome presidents, a fashion-plate but highly unpopular because of his pro-slavery views. Nope. The 14th president, born in New Hampshire, had had a tough time with the bottle all his life including when he was a House member, senator and president but he never disgraced himself or his country. He served one term, returned home, began drinking in earnest to conquer depression. He opposed the abolitionists but stressed that the Union must be preserved; as a result he was called traitor by both sides in his home town of Concord, N. H. On Lincoln’s assassination, an angry crowd raided his home. He was a failed, unpopular president but he was loyal to the Union.

Could it be Democrat James Buchanan? Nope. The 15th president ranks near the bottom of the list because he frittered away any opportunity to prevent an angry South from seceding although notwithstanding his Pennsylvania heritage he was pro-South and wanted Kansas to be admitted as a slave state which was blocked. He loyally supported Abraham Lincoln, his successor, and the Union.

A quick survey: None were hostile, disloyal to their predecessors—except one: James Earl Carter, the 39th. Rewarded by the Left which has taken over the conferring of the Nobel prizes for Peace, Jimmy Carter undoubtedly has won the cup. Now, at this writing, he has spurned the pleas of the U.S. government and has journeyed to the Middle East and meetings with the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. Yesterday he embraced its bloody leader Khaled Mashal in Damascus with a man-hug. He is the radical Palestinians’ boy, author of a book “Palestine Peace Not Apartheid”—a title so stridently anti-Israeli that even he regretted the title in retrospect. He has criticized our president in time of war and actively gives solace to the enemy with trips like this.

Yes, Jimmy is the worst ex-president. And he keeps on adding to his negative luster. He is proud that he can greets dictators, saying “When I go to a dictatorship, I only have to talk to one person and that’s the dictator because he speaks for all the people.” I’ll let that statement sink in for a moment. He was always a critic of Ronald Reagan’s description of the USSR as “an evil empire” and never commented when as result of Reagan the empire folded. Carter rose to the fore to criticize George H.W. Bush, saying that when Bush smiled he looked “like a fool.” He led a strong opposition against use of force to reverse the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait in 1990. In fact, he dispatched a letter to the heads of state of the members of the UN Security Council in flat opposition to the U. S. position, strongly urging them to oppose the American request of UN authorization for military action. Bush only learned about this indirectly—not through any courtesy of Carter—when he visited with Canada’s Brian Mulroney.

Why was Carter supportive of what he called “an Arab solution” to the threatened occupation of Kuwait? It would violate what he himself had called the “Carter Doctrine,” threatening war in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan which was identical to Saddam Hussein’s move in the Persian Gulf? Best guess is the little fellow (Carter) was jealous of Bush and wanted to land back in the headlines himself. Tirelessly, Jimmy Carter played against U. S. interests, arriving in Yugoslavia during the Bosnian War in the mid-1990s winning praise for Slobodan Milosevic and which he returned with the statement that “the prospect for ending the crisis through U.S. military means is almost hopeless.” Studiously the liberal mainstream media covered him as a rebuke to Bush. In North Korea he was joyfully received by Kim Il Sung because as president Carter had tried to withdraw our troops unilaterally from the South. Bill Clinton didn’t want him to go but against his better judgment assented. We are still ruing the day Clinton made that decision.

Visiting Pyongyuang he immediately sided with Kim Il Sung against Clinton’s stance against North Korean nuclear weapons. Touring North Korea he found the country just like home. Shops in Pyongyuang were “similar to the Wal-Mart in Americus, Georgia.” The neon lights reminded him of Times Square. The people were friendly, the regime reflected their “popular will.” Acting highly improperly, Jimmy Carter and Kim cut a deal so that North Korea would be given two light-water nuclear reactors in exchange for its graphite reactor. In return for the U.S. promise to enter talks over a North Korean wish list, North Korea would verifiably freeze activity with fuel rods and whatever weapons material they had earlier extracted would be forgiven. But they had extracted enough for the production of two bombs. Not easily forgiven.

Then Carter said the details could be ironed out by the diplomats. As for him, he had a date with the media. So without notifying Washington of the details, he sped to the news cameras to announce it. But the North Koreans began cheating immediately although North Korea received fuel as a gift form the U.S., Japan and South Korea. By 2002 the Bush administration confronted the North over its cheating. It acknowledged it not with an apology but with anger. Then last year North Korea tested a nuclear bomb. The North had insisted in talks with Carter that it sought nuclear energy just for the sole purpose of generating nuclear energy. Yeah, right. Now it changed its tune and said he wanted to belong to the nuclear club. And Jimmy Carter? He wrote an Op Ed for “The New York Times” putting the blame squarely on the U. S. for branding North Korea as “the axis of evil.”

Now we get to the Middle East and his views which have led him to side with the Palestinians—but that’s for tomorrow.

Flashback: Hubert’s Wife, Muriel, Allows Herself to be Appointed Senator Until November, 1978. The Following Year She Re-Married and Had a Rather Cruel Thing to Say (I Think). Evaluations of Hubert. And As for McCarthy

[More than 50 years of politics written as a memoir for my kids and grandchildren].

Muriel.

The largely silent partner of Hubert Humphrey, his wife Muriel (born: 1912, a year after Humphrey), was named to Hubert’s seat on January 25, 1978 by Minnesota Governor Rudy Perpich (DFL) and served until the next special election, on November 7 of that year. She was the first woman to serve in the Senate from that state. All of us who saw her as a demure spouse, dedicated to him, were rather surprised when after her appointment, she pressed for things Hubert didn’t really touch—like abortion rights. She said “There’s something I’ve been wanting to say for a long time. I’m a liberal and I’m proud of it. In fact, I was probably a little more liberal than Hubert was. I just wanted to say that.”

She was born Muriel Fay Buck in Huron, S. D., attended Huron Collegeg and met Humphrey in 1934 when he worked at his father’s drug store and she was a bookkeeper. They had four children—Hubert III (Skip), Nancy, Robert and Douglas.

A year after his death when she had returned to private life, Muriel Humphrey re-married one Max Brown, a friend from childhood. She gave as her last public comment: “I don’t live a life of politics any more. Max and I have so much fun. We have a wonderful companionship that Hubert and I didn’t have, couldn’t have. We were so busy and it was so official almost all of the time.” Well, ex-cu-se me! She needn’t have said that. To this day I don’t know what that statement really meant. Sounds a little like repudiation, if you ask me. I didn’t know her well—hardly at all. But there is all the evidences of a woman who felt she was abandoned for her husband’s first love, a political career. In a very real sense, he widowed Muriel when he married her. The suggested epitaph for his tomb “Gone to Another Meeting” is apt. I think there were many times when he showed her…not be words but actions…that his mistress was politics, that his lover was politics not Muriel.

I suppose she was right but still, making a public statement like that struck me…and still does…as gratuitously critical of him.

She lived for nineteen more years, dying at age 86 (her second husband survived her) and was buried in Lakewood cemetery next to Hubert.

Evaluation of Hubert.

My conclusion is that he was very nearly a great man but not one. Yet he was a good one. One evidence that he was good is that he was so forgiving throughout his life. He forgave Gene McCarthy and met with him before Hubert became sick. They had a drink together and joked although I doubt McCarthy came to see Hubert when he was ill (although Richard Nixon did, let it be said).

I would have preferred that he had the courage to follow Vietnam through to a conclusion as Bush is doing with Iraq, not repudiating Lyndon Johnson and standing fore-square for victory. I believe that was a character defect for them both. Hubert so wanted to become president all his life…from his days as Minneapolis mayor to the end of his life…that seemingly he would sacrifice everything to that end. I think he would have been infinitely better off had he stuck close to the formula for Vietnam Johnson had set. But then, Johnson himself, became discouraged and seemed to fall back, calling truces and alternatingly bombing and canceling the bombing.

Nevertheless, Hubert was a patriot, far different than the breed of liberal today. He was probably one of the two finest platform speakers I have heard in my lifetime…the other being Ronald Reagan (born the same year as Hubert). The miraculous facility with the spoken word never left him. Judged as one of his finest speeches was his last 50-minute address to the Minnesota AFL-CIO convention, a half year before his death. He was a compulsive talker—not just orator. He could never stop talking. Riding along with him in the car I wondered as a young man whether he might be seized with compulsion and scream out for help, yelling “I want to stop this talking but I cannot!” One thing is sure: his speeches always sounded better than they read. All the same, he did use ghost-writers and sometimes had two or three different people write speeches for the same event. The purpose was to search for “grabbers” as he called them—ideas.

All the same, nobody could write for him. The speech he made that changed the Democratic party forever from a party that tolerated segregation from its southern patriarchal Senate chairmen to the populist party it is today was delivered with just a few notes. It is to Hubert’s great reputation that he effected that change of a party…and I don’t blame him for the pander-bear the party subsequently became: other men deserve the blame for that. I shall write more about him in the future.

McCarthy Always Striving to Get Even.

In contradistinction, I feel Gene McCarthy was probably the most colorful public man I knew—more colorful than Hubert…but neither a great man nor a good one. That is difficult to say but I have thought it over for a long time and come to no other conclusion. In her autobiography, “Private Faces, Public Places,” Abigail McCarthy summarizes Gene’s departure from her life by saying, “Gene has said that he cannot remain faithful to anyone.”

I fully believe that to be the case. He was unfaithful to those who believed in him and helped him. He was antiseptic. I do not feel he was a good legislator but at most a highly literate English major. He loved poetry but wrote bad poetry. He had the ability to win people to his side but equal with that was his disinclination to remain loyal to them.

I would blame Godfrey Diekmann OSB for this but I cannot since they were contemporaries and Godfrey was by no means Gene’s mentor. As a matter of fact, Gene came closer to being Godfrey’s. But their view of the Catholic Church is assuredly not my view. Their Church is infinitely flexible with very few absolutes. Just yesterday, a former priest of their general era, Robert McClory, wrote a piece for “The Tribune’ about Benedict XVI’s coming to the United States. McClory, a true disciple of Diekmann whether he understands it or not, pretended to write a suggested speech for the Pope in which the pontiff said he was appointing a worldwide committee of bishops, theologians, lay leaders etc. to come up with recommendations on the salient issues of the day that are dividing the Church; like the morality of embryonic stem cells (somebody should tell McClory that one is redundant given the latest developments along that line0, homosexuality et al.

That is the nature of modern relativist liberals in the Church. They cannot accept as given any finality of the moral law. There should always be a convocation of great thinkers and always a plebiscite. Gene McCarthy would have endorsed this as would Godfrey Diekmann.

Probably one of the most creative ideas Gene ever had was enunciated at my house in 1976. After he disclosed the plan at my house to use his candidacy to elect Gerald Ford over Jimmy Carter (discussed earlier in these memoirs), I marvel at how close he came…and the fact that had Dick Ogilvie sanctioned us finding some contributors, the outcome could have been different. Even with his sparse funds, McCarthy delivered Ford twenty electoral votes in three states—Oregon, Maine and Iowa. In New York, McCarthy sought strenuously to get his name on the ballot which, if it had appeared, would have certainly changed the outcome. Democrats spent more than $50,000 in legal challenges that kept his name off. If he had equal resources to spend…and if that damned Dick Ogilvie would have lifted one little finger and allowed me to go to his rolodex and get contributors…the country could have been spared Jimmy Carter—for which I shall never forgive Ogilvie so long as I can remember him. Opinion polls in New York always put McCarthy’s support in the state at more than 5%.

Why did Ogilvie seem so intransigent? Because his goal was not first to see Carter defeated but to guard himself against any personal taint—although the taint, were it to come, would be illusory and insubstantial. Ogilvie was not (a) great, nor (b) good nor (c) anything more than a cold-hearted opportunist of no fixed principle. He died a very lucky man as the Feds were on the verge of…but that is for another day. .

There is more to write about McCarthy for our paths crossed many times after 1976. But for now this is all I will supply.

Personal Asides: As the P. R. Fog Sweeps Away We Glimpse the True Obama… Joel Weisman is Not a Wise Man as “Chicago Week in Review” Follows the True Liberal Line—More Regulation for the Airlines with Nary a Word About the Politics of Airline Tie-Ups. .

The True Obama.

If these remarks had been made in a debate toward the end of the 2008 campaign they would have constituted the “events, my dear boy, events” cited by Harold MacMillan that can derail all but certain electoral victories. Since they were delivered early in April, they will not be fatal. But at the very least they are a healthful blast of cold air that wipes away the public relations fog that has surrounded the base of the Obama pedestal…allowing us to imagine the lofty intellectual that stands thereupon.

Make no mistake, Columbia’s and Harvard’s Obama is a gifted man, a bright one and a rather suave prose stylist, having written his own two autobiographies. And an ivy league elitist. As one who went there to teach when I was nearly fifty, with philosophy formed, I was happily impervious even though I frequented the Harvard faculty lounge where the conversational lion was the cynical and epigrammatic John Kenneth Galbraith, he of the lifted eyebrow and acerbic phrases. Being impervious didn’t blind me in 1977 to the fact that ivy league liberalism looks down its aristocratic nose at average American types. And still does. Look at Yale’s John Kerry and his wife, the heiress Theresa Heinz Kerry who went to Wendy’s on a campaign foray and was stunned to hear about chili. She asked what it was. Damn! Nobody told her about chili. She was actually rather sweet in her unaffected elitism whereas he was phony about trying to ditch it.

Dexter and Choate prep and Harvard’s John Kennedy worked his way around it by using self-deprecation, saying on the one occasion when he was a freshman senator after alighting from a taxi where the meter hit $20 he considered his two choices: one to give the driver a hefty tip and tell him to vote Democratic. Then he remembered what his father would advise. So he gave the driver no tip and told him to vote Republican. This took the sting out of his elitism. After Hubert accused him of trying to buy the West Virginia primary, he told the crowd to consider turning out heavily on election day but that he had a note from his father…which he read aloud…that said, “Jack—I will not buy any votes more than necessary—Dad.” Dartmouth’s Nelson Rockefeller, campaigning in Minnesota with me as a gofer asked repeatedly that he wished to eat lunch at a place that served cheese blintzes, a staple among the Jews in lower Manhattan. Yale’s George H. W. Bush repeatedly let his elitism come through as did Yale’s Sargent Shriver when he bought a round of shots and beer at a working class bar full of labor union members. When the bartender asked what he would have, he said “Couvessior” which caused the group to view him dubiously. And we all remember John Kerry going wind-surfing and blaming a Secret Service guy for getting in his way so he fell down on skis.

By and large, Obama comes through winningly as a regular guy. But like Groton prep and Harvard’s FDR who was an elitist, in private moments his liberal snobbishness comes through—as it did before last week.

This came through clearly…despite the p. r. shroud…in remarks made by Obama last week in a closed-to-the-media session with well-heeled liberal donors in…where else?...San Francisco. A blogger for Huffington.com attended because she ponied up $2,300. She brought a small tape recorder with her and captured his sentiments. Until she heard him she was convinced he is Destiny’s Tot. Who knows, maybe she still believes this—but she was sufficiently disturbed to write up his remarks for the blog, to which we are indebted.

Let’s parse the statement as we would do a Dante canto. First he sets the tone. There are small towns in Pennsylvania from which industry has retreated. Nothing unusual here except a belief that only government can regenerate communities—a staple, unfortunately, in Democratic parlance since Hubert Humphrey:

“You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration and the Bush administration and each successful administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.”

Interpretation: This is standard liberal Democratic boilerplate of old not “new” politics which we have come to expect from Obama. You mean to say that with all the federal initiatives that have been in the goody-bags of the federal government since Clinton and Bush…indeed since John Kennedy came through in 1960 and proscribed the Area Redevelopment Act and the Economic Development Administration…since Lyndon Johnson came through with his specialized War on Poverty and worker retraining programs in 1964…and NOTHING has revived them…that they require even MORE? He does not quantify. This gives the drift that here we have a purer socialist candidate than we have ever had heretofore. But then Hillary Clinton emits the same palaver. But she is smart enough not to look down her nose at common folk who go to church and revere the 2nd amendment.

“And it’s not surprising, then, that they get bitter. They cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Parse. “And it’s not surprising, then, that they get bitter.”

Rather like looking at average Americans through a microscope. Ah, how very interesting.

“They cling to guns…”

This is the snob version of gun ownership. If they were smart like us Harvard people they’d support the confiscation theory. The Founders made a place for guns in the Constitution [Amendment II) as this one-time lecturer at the University of Chicago law school should know. Small town America likes to hunt. They don’t live in gated communities (as does Jeremiah Wright) and, the poor dear things, believe they should have recourse to their own defense with guns. Fancy that! “They cling to guns” is unworthy of a serious presidential candidate—rather like a bumper-sticker. His support of all extreme anti-gun ownership measures in two Senate chambers makes this not a simple misstatement. Here he chides the yahoos with a thumb in their eyes.

“…or religion…”

Religion, particularly traditionalist religion, is such a boring opiate, really. Most of the Founders were pro-religion. They opposed an established church so as to remove a threat to the free exercise of religion. This too is a snob version of liberal agnosticism i.e. we rationalists are unlike the, implicitly in his view, poor slobs in the rural towns who resort to religion and prayers. Good stuff for delivery in ultra-secularist San Francisco.

“…or antipathy to people who aren’t like them…”

The duplicitous, many-sided phrase that makes it sound like these implicitly in his view uneducated slobs are hate-filled. But few have been more hate-filled than Jeremiah Wright from whom Obama has resolutely refused to be dissociated, saying that to disown him would be to disown the black community.

“…or anti-immigrant sentiment…”

Meaning one can say those who oppose issuing drivers’ licenses to illegal immigrants which after much hemming and hawing in a TV debate Obama came down as being undecided.

“…or anti-trade sentiment…”

This is highly hypocritical since Obama has been a leading voice against NAFTA and other free-trade devices approved by the Clinton administration and who attacks Hillary Clinton for not having sufficiently objected to her husband’s enactment of it.

“…as a way to express their frustrations.”

We must really pity these poor things. They have to find some primitive way to express their alienation; unlike us who go to Harvard seminars.



“Chicago Week in Review” and Conventional Wisdom.

Let’s just say Joel Weisman is very liberal-predictable. He breathes in unison with conventional wisdom. Everything he touches is pre-formed by the liberal bias. Friday night he asked his “Chicago Week in Review” panel to analyze the American Airline tie-ups. The unanimous answer: the airlines are sickeningly culpable. One reporter, Bob Reed of “Newsweek,” said that while he entertains libertarian thought as a consumer he would have to grudgingly admit more regulation by Big Daddy Feds is required.

Not a word about the fact that the tie-up is due to Minnesota’s Jim Oberstar, chairman of the House Transportation committee who put on a show for his constituents causing the FAA to put on a show for Oberstar and the airlines to put on a show for the FAA. While airline passengers loll in the airports and media shakes their head and say “aha! The airlines are culpable!” The story on WTTW-TV sorely needed Dan Miller to explain but Miller has left the “Sun-Times” as business editor to go to Heartland where he is a top level executive. But is he ever missed giving the free-market side of the story. The “Tribune’s” business reporter, a no-name, did a predictable liberal job of either ignoring the underlying story or not understanding it.

The story is this.

After the FAA, doing its job, found Southwest derelict and fined it more than $10 million for inspection lapses, Oberstar (whom I knew when he was a gofer for his old boss Rep. John Blatnik who was chairman of Public Works) made a specialty of raising hell. The regulatory process works but Congress wants to take the credit so he dragoons all the cringing executives of FAA and the airlines, finger-points and gets lots of face time on TV. No moderation, no balance to the hearings and the National Transportation Safety Board’s report that “accidents in all segments of civil aviation in 2006 were less than in 2005 with general aviation recording the lowest number of accidents in the 40 years of NTSB record keeping.” No what happens is a special congressional show put on for the constituents back home, showing fearless lawmakers jabbing angry accusatory forefingers at timid airline executives and regulators.

What happens then is predictable and has been a regular congressional ploy since James Madison first thought of the committee system. The FAA with its credibility on the line and a Bush nominee awaiting confirmation has to put on an act to show the congressional leaders they mean business. So it puts on the very special show. The airlines have to look good so they examine every individual nut and bolt. And of course Weisman hasn’t a clue and his panel of trained seals…all agreeing with each other: more regulation-more regulation-more regulation…rounds out yet another week of predictable land-of-nod agreement posing as commentary…with the taxpayers who bear a financial brunt of “public TV” getting hoodwinked..

Personal Asides: Paulson and George, Separated at Birth, Entirely Different…The `60’s Defining Moment V: The Environment—1969. Commentaries…Oops I Forgot: The `60’s Defining Moment VI: “Secular City” 1965.

Paulson and George.

As you can see, Treasury Secretary Henry (Hank) Paulson and Francis Cardinal George were born twins. One made almost $1 billion as head of Goldman Sachs in the relatively free market, has become George W. Bush’s treasury chief. The other with Ph.Ds in theology and philosophy presides over the archdiocese of Chicago. Both have the same amount of hair—but they are as different as possible to be. One is entirely free market. The other is moderately pro-regulation. Guess which is which.

The one you’d expect to be laissez-faire…the pro-Wall Street advocate of free markets, Paulson… has just proposed a plan that sends the feds into the market swiftly when traders err and their markets collapse. He is asking Congress for greater authority to intervene in trading activities of investment banks so as to do what he did to Bear-Stearns to be applied in the case of what he calls “systemic risk” i.e. the danger of market meltdown. It has been called the most drastic intervention in U.S. fiscal history.

The one you would imagine would be more pro-regulation…the bishop who like all his colleagues has been commanded to see that all members should believe the truths propounded by the apostles and their successors and confess what they believe…is totally laissez-faire. There are three powers inherent in the episcopacy: (1) the power to administer the sacraments…(2) the power to teach authoritatively the revealed truth…and (3) the right to govern and direct the people of God according to norms of worship and conduct binding on the faithful. Especially with No. 3 you would expect to see more discipline in the Chicago episcopacy than from a free-market Republican secretary. Wrongo.

That’s where the twins are different. The episcopacy is very laissez-faire. Let a scandal erupt with priests violating children and while it’s deplored and change is pledged, violations occur again—but that’s okay. Let the lay chancellor who, it had been assumed, had supervision over these things but who, it seems, didn’t and he gets promoted—that’s okay. Let everyone who had anything to do with Fr. Dan McCormack’s training in seminary and his ordination and who failed be promoted—and that’s okay. Let a seminary rector who approved ordination of McCormack be promoted to auxiliary bishop—and that’s okay. Let him say as Bishop of Tucson that he would still ordain McCormack if he had to do it all over again and be tapped to be elected second in rank among all the bishops of the United States on a slate approved by the Chicago archbishop—and that’s okay.

Let Mercy Home for Boys & Girls which is directly under the archdiocese’s jurisdiction invite Hillary Clinton to address its fund-raising—and that’s okay. Let DePaul University which carries the title “Catholic” with the permission of the archbishop teach kids Queer Studies 101 on how to be introduced to homosexual sex—and that’s okay. Let the university president reject the archbishop’s views on communicating on homosexuality while still keeping the designation Catholic for his school—and that’s okay.

Let Fr. Michael Pfleger a priest of the archdiocese and a pastor invite Al Sharpton and a host of other Democratic candidates who espouse abortion and gay rights in opposition to the church to speak at St. Sabina’s in violation of the IRS—and that’s okay. Let Fr. Pfleger go to a legally run gun shop and threaten on TV to drag the owner outside “like a rat” and snuff him out when the gun shop owner has violated no law and is within the precincts of the 2nd amendment—and that’s okay. Let Fr. Pfleger go to Trinity United Church of Christ and shout “how dare people” criticize its pastor for saying God damn the United States—and that’s okay.

Let Fr. Pfleger go to Springfield and address a rally where Pfleger urges the defeat of all state lawmakers who oppose his specified “gun control”—in violation of the non-profit clause of the IRS granted to churches—and that’s okay. Let Fr. Andrew Greeley, an archdiocesan priest, in newspaper columns mock the supposed fallibility of the Holy Spirit in selecting popes, endorse contraception and women priests in violation of church tenets—and that’s okay. Correction: not just okay but Greeley gets to take the Cardinal to dinner and the opera on occasion--very okay.

But don’t get the idea there are no limits to this ecclesial laissez-faire. Let one dare to write about these instances and it’s not okay. He is hauled down to Superior street and chastised and following that calls are made diocese-wide to shut him up including to people he works with. That’s okay.

Just so you don’t think that in this archdiocese there are no rules at all. There are and you’d better believe there are.

`60’s Defining Moment No. V: Environmentalism: 1969.

Thank you all for your exceedingly good commentaries on the rise of environmentalism in 1969—particularly from our super-star Frank Nofsinger plus Matt Nelson (outstanding), Dan Kelley (superb) and Pat Hickey (his on Greeley but still very-very good).

You’re all correct. I think I wrote about a lot of it yesterday but suffice it to say that while much of environmentalism makes common sense, the pernicious trait of politicized environmentalism is to allege that people are pollutant which plays hand-in-glove with other liberal ideas that have wreaked so much damage and have taken command of the Democratic party. As the Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg has shown in repeated studies, life expectancy is increasing on a global basis including in the Third World…air and water in the developed world are cleaner than they were 500 years ago—indeed much cleaner than when I was a boy…chemical poisoning of the earth is maliciously exaggerated…food and energy are cheaper…overpopulation is a myth—if anything our own country’s population is declining were it not for immigration and the global outlook is one of great human prosperity.

Now to a sixth and final development in the 60s—one which I overlooked and which should have come before Environmentalism. It is the havoc caused by a book which you may not have read but heard of…but in fact you have all been influenced by it with modernization of religion. Let me summarize the book which is

`60’s Defining Moment No. VI: “The Secular City” 1965.

It is what has happened to the once stable mainline Protestant churches, formerly a bulwark of societal stability: the Episcopal, Presbyterian, Lutheran (some of which remains). . It was largely done in by a book now largely ignored but which in 1965 was all the rage—“The Secular City” by Harvey Cox. His prescription was duplicated in my own Catholic church by a man I have made rather notorious among the few who read this website—Fr. Godfrey Diekmann OSB of my own St. John’s University, Collegeville, Minn. Let me define what the Protestant theologian Cox—still alive but now largely forgotten—maintained. Harvey Cox is still called by liberals “one of the preeminent theologians in the United States” where he serves—where else?—as professor of divinity at Harvard. He developed the thesis that the church…by which he means the word in a generic sense—Judeo-Christianity—should change from being a closed society to an activist cadre in the forefront of change, “celebrating the new ways religiosity is finding expression in the world.” He lamented that “intrinsic conservatism” prevents the denominational churches from leaving their palaces behind and stepping into “God’s permanent revolution in history.”

Cox listed two motifs in particular to characterize the style of the secular city. He called them pragmatism and…steel yourselves…profanity. Pragmatism we know. By profanity he meant “secular man’s wholly terrestrial horizaon, the disappearance of any supramundane reality defining life. Pro-fane means literally “outside the temple”—thus “having to do with the world.” There you have it. But I must leave you with more. When he wrote this book, John F. Kennedy was president and celebrated widely for being an outstanding one.

Wrote Cox: “John F. Kennedy embodies the spirit of the pragmatic.” Now there is was righter than he imagined and I have written much about Kennedy the pragmatist and so have you. By profane he lists the late French novelist and playwright Albert Camus. Profane by which “we do not suggest that secular man is sacrilegious but that he is unreligious. He views the world not in terms of some other world but in terms of itself. He feels thjat any meaning he finds must be found in this world itself. Profane man is simply this—worldly.” Anyone from this vantage-point who looks back at JFK knows where rampant pragmatism led us, from his horrendous personal life to serious misfeasances with government and failure to measure up to many—not all—tests of the Cold War. This in large measure I think is why you don’t hear much of “The Secular City” or Harvey Cox these days. As a matter of fact, I had to check the Internet to even determine if he is alive (he is: one year younger than I as a matter of fact).

Cox’s dogma is in a very real sense is what Virgil Michel anticipated and what his successor Godfrey Diekmann OSB expressly taught with some Catholic variation. Essentially it means not that we bring religious values to the secular city—for that is what all the Church fathers taught. It means…however unintentionally Cox meant it…that we convert the church to a social, worldly and political organism, recognizing that it must be a revolutionary force in the world—a force that modern liberal theorists would harness to liberal goals: elimination of all social injustice in the world…in short transforming this world to a paradise on earth.

This book has been responsible in large measure for revolutionizing the main establishment of the Protestant church and for eroding in great measure the social teachings of my own Catholic church to an adjunct of the modern Democratic party—viz the priest who drives me somewhat around the bend as you have doubtless perceived, Andy Greeley. Go to it. This concludes the `60’s defining moments for now. Let’s have your comments.

Personal Asides: Fr. Greeley Again Brings Up Obama Possibly Being Shot...Excellent Responses to The Kerner Report, Defining Moment of the `60s IV…and Defining Moment V, The Environmental Movement.

Greeley.

All of us who are familiar with the, um, priest Fr. Andrew Greeley know he is desperate for celebrity…psychically unconvinced that, although having earned millions writing soft-porn using his clerical collar (and at one time wearing vestments in a photo on a novel’s back cover) as sales inducement, he will be ever taken seriously—as indeed with most cultivated people and knowledgeable Catholics, he has not. Moreover we all understand that Greeley’s true church is the Democratic party, one, unholy, venal and catastrophic. As he has been a kind of perverse court chaplain to the Daleys where he gently wafts the big fan over the brow of the Big One, he seeks to graduate to the White House where he can saunter, roman collar and all, into meetings as the spiritual (sic) counselor to a Bigger One. This hope is keeping this elderly, mostly ignored, spitting vitriol cleric alive. He has been serenading Barack Obama continually, defending his choice of spiritual guidance from Jeremiah Wright and has resorted to something greater than mere obsequious flattery.

Now for the second time, in his “Sun-Times” column, he has raised the possibility of Barack Obama being shot—assassinated. First, allowing that Greeley has no self-restraint where his desire for notoriety is concerned, it is the grossest act of editorial irresponsibility for the newspaper to have kept the reference in his copy. Whenever one raises the question of assassination of a public official, he runs the risk of triggering a similar desire for celebrity in a fevered mind that can be drawn to Greeley’s column. Second, the “Sun-Times” should immediately apologize for the lamentable lack of judgment from Greeley and his editor.

`60’s Defining Moment IV: The Kerner Report of 1968.

Comments yesterday on The Kerner Report included probably one of the finest commentaries we have received on the Series—the views of Frank Nofsinger. To my mind he sizes up the disarray concerning the races perfectly. You can read his and all other commentaries, of course, in Reader’s Comments for yesterday. Leon Dixon supplies another worthwhile piece. Elizabeth Alexander (I use her name because she does in Reader’s Comments) fears that we do not fully understand the black-white divide and she refers us to comments received from a John Kass “Tribune” column of Sunday which is contained in the Chicago Tribune website. All these things and John Powers, my good colleague, who has a scathing comment on the mis-uses of government to solve the poverty problem.

What Kerner did was to recast the civil rights narrative from a legitimate drive to equal opportunity and color-blindedness to a scathing fiction of racial victimization and irresponsibility. Martin Luther King and Roy Wilkins had concentrated on color-blindedness but were moving toward the more radical direction when King was assassinated. Probably the most immediate reaction to the Kerner Report was the furor over local control of public school faculty appointments in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville area of Brooklyn. Jews historically engaged in the teaching profession in New York but Kerner inflamed the situation so that blacks demanded “local control” over their schools, placing control on a higher priority than quality of teaching. Many bad speeches were delivered there—with indigent blacks declaring that the first and foremost thing was that black teachers and principals take over…shrugging off matters of educational excellence in favor of skin color.

This antagonized what had heretofore been a bastion of liberalism, the American Federation of Teachers and Albert Shanker. With “The New York Times” opting to its usual role of subservience before the specter of angry black demonstrations, the area was forced to decide whether American liberalism would continue to maintain support for a classic race-blind society or descend to black militancy. It chose the latter. An historic rupture was then effected between two once valuable allies—Jewry and blacks. The vestiges of Kerner are still seen in that choice as differences increase between blacks and Jews. Jesse Jackson’s scurrilous comment about “Hymietown” stems from that. Increasingly a segment of Jewish liberalism broke away over racist demagogues like Jackson…who was not punished by society for his bigotry…creating a segment that has aligned with the Republican party—Irving Kristol, his wife, Gertrude Himmelfarb, their son William; Norman Podhoretz, his son John and many many others. Most of the neo-cons who joined the Reagan, Bush I and Bush II administrations are ex-liberals estranged either directly or indirectly from the national effects of Ocean Hill/Brownsville whether they were involved personally or just followed it.

Kristol, a former Marxist, provided brilliant leadership by starting a journal that for me was a must-read for many years—“The Public Interest” which he edited with Nathan Glazer. He then became an editorial board member of “The Wall Street Journal” and wrote Op Eds that dramatically affected a new relationship between intellectual Jews and conservatism. He became a permanent fellow of the American Enterprise Institute and was a lecturer at our Quaker Oats public policy forums for years. His wife, Gertrude, was likewise a powerful force in shaping a counterculture to liberalism. Their son, William, is the editor and publisher of a fine magazine, “The Weekly Standard.” Podhoretz as editor of “Commentary,” a magazine initially put out by the American Jewish Committee, turned it into an exciting and challenging conservative vehicle which it still is. I regard it as the best and most satisfying of all conservative magazines. They were instrumental in leading Jeane Kirkpatrick, a liberal professor, to the Republican party and to the post of UN ambassador where she served stunningly.

But the bleak effects of the Kerner Report are with us yet. The continuing challenge against blacks who favor a more moderate way by being called “Oreos” by the militants, the expanded role of Jesse Jackson as extortionist are all vestiges of that ill-considered report. Just as with the Tet Offensive, the existentialist view of liberals…contrary to facts and history…is that it was a failure—giving birth to the “Iraq is lost” proclamation of Sen. Harry Reid. As with existentialism generally, what counts is not what is but the nobility of my feelings. I feel blacks should have overthrown “the Jewish teachers lobby” in Brooklyn; therefore it is a moral imperative. If there is resistance the Jews are at fault. Another vestige of existentialism is Fr. Michael Pfleger’s and others insistence that the murders among black poor are not caused by chaotic non-family structure or single-headed families but simply “the availability of guns-guns-guns.” Concentration on removal of guns relieves the poor of any appreciation of the role family stability plays in moral guidance. Guns supposedly go off by themselves and children are killed—not much concern is shown to how the children who roam the streets at night in gangs come from broken homes…for that would affix responsibility which for Pfleger and Jesse Jackson would be unpopular to admit.

Media go along since it is politically inadvisable to challenge. All existentialism is whim of the moment and angry rejection of facts that displease.

Thanks to all who participated and who may yet write on this issue.

`60s Defining Moment V: The Rise of Environmentalism: 1969.

With the perceived vacuousness of traditional religion there came good and bad: concern for conservation of resources but occasionally the worship of a new god—the earth. For practical purposes it began with the landmark book by Rachel Carson, “Silent Spring,” Pollution of the atmosphere became joined with criticism of technology. Interestingly enough, it was technology that gave the movement its first boost. Photographs of planet Earth made by Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders from the command module windows of Apollo VIII electrified the nation and created the aura that we are all inhabitants of the same planet which seemed to blur national boundaries. There was perceived some smudges in the photos which were immediately ruled as pollution and started a grand furor. Environmentalism and anti-pollution are virtues but there has ever since been the danger of materialistic pantheism.

Global warming and the awarding to Al Gore of the Nobel Prize and all the attendant issues about environmentalism have produced Earth Day and the fear that we are going to be suffocating in factory smoke and poisoned water. And what of the population? Too many of us as Ted Turner says. Now I’d like you to comment on this Defining Moment: V. The Rise of Environmentalism. Itemize the good and unsalutary parts if you would.

OBAMA MAY WELL WIN. UNLESS EVENTS INTERVENE.

The following is an expanded version—and a greatly altered one-- of an article for The Wanderer, the nation’s oldest national weekly Catholic newspaper.

I maintain…and will until I am disproved on November 4, 2008…that the next president will be Barack Hussein Obama. He has the purest socialist voting record in the Senate, refuses to wear an American flag lapel pin or place his hand over his heart when the national anthem is played signifying his disdain of patriotic display. So since I know the gentleman (having interviewed him on ABC radio here extensively) I may pack my things and move to the farthest point in Christendom, there to watch what I fear could be the final dissolution of the American republic.



But, politics being politics, there is one factor that may derail the all-but-inevitable. Nowhere in history was it better articulated than by stuffy but erudite Harold MacMillan, Britain’s prime minister (1957-63)—but more of that later.

He Will Have to Overturn Precedents.

There are several precedents in U. S. history that Obama, Destiny’s Tot, will have to overcome before winning the general election. So let me tick them off.

No candidate, since we have had primaries and caucuses, has ever been elected in November having lost more than one of the nation’s seven largest states. If Obama loses Pennsylvania later this month he will have rung up an historic first. Nor has a candidate who has lost six out of seven been nominated for president—so he may chalk up yet another one. In fact, if the Dems ran their caucuses and primaries like the Republicans with winner-take-all, Hillary Clinton, not Obama, would be nominated right now.

Then the fact that no Democrat north of the Mason-Dixon line has been elected president since John F. Kennedy was in 1960. That no candidate has ever been elected to the presidency with such little state or national political experience, except…except whom? Abraham Lincoln which fits right into the delirious enthusiasts’ mold.

Following which you have to consider that no president in modern times has been elected president with an undiluted straight ideologically pure liberal or conservative voting record. Barry Goldwater wasn’t. George McGovern wasn’t. McGovern outlined wild plans that even shocked Hubert Humphrey including a $1,000 per person grant from the feds which pleased the National Welfare Rights lobby and the “mainstream” [sic] adulatory news media. A drastic slashing of defense; a drastic expansion of domestic subsidies. McGovern was not for legalized abortion in 1972, a year before Roe v. Wade. Even so, he lost by the heaviest margin in history to Richard Nixon, of all people--carrying only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.

And McGovern lost despite the fact that he had been an authentic hero of World War II, his valiant war record couldn’t save him. As a B-24 Liberator bomber pilot with the 15th army air force he flew 35 missions over enemy territory from bases in North Africa and Italy, piloting his craft through downpours of enemy artillery fire and is the hero of the late historian Stephen Ambrose’s book The Wild Blue. When his plane was hit, as his crewmates prayed, he semi-stood up in the cabin to jerk the paralyzed controls to life and secured a successful crash landing on a tiny Mediterranean island, saving all hands on board and winning the Distinguished Flying Cross. His heroism rivals McCain’s but it didn’t do him a bit of good. With a 90% liberal voting record he lost overwhelmingly.

In contrast, compared to Obama, McGovern of 1972 was a liberal mush, a moderate. He was not the most liberal senator in the chamber. In contrast to Obama of today.

The nonpartisan National Journal lists Obama as the most liberal of all senators—more than Ted Kennedy, Diane Feinstein or Barbara Boxer not to forget my own lip-synch bobbing head of lefty decadence Dick Durbin. The non-military-serving Obama is for tax hikes, for a drastic slash of the military, for more regulation, huge “investments” in domestic welfare programs not to forget his opposition to saving the lives of maimed babies born live after botched abortions where he has refused to agree to their being aided by nurses or doctors. Rather than preach abstinence to his young daughters, he has told them he doesn’t want to see them “punished” be having a baby as result of illicit sexual intercourse, which he does not condemn. He has so identified with his racist ex-pastor Jeremiah Wright who has cursed the United States from the altar and who had charged that American doctors inoculated black babies with AIDS. Aided by his wife Michelle who has just now found her first reason to be proud of America, he has seen patriotism fall into question.



Then, with this extremely one-sided liberal record, how can Obama win, you ask?

To which I answer: this country has changed, lamentably. The decadence has affected not just the kids but older generations. In my own, I can identify a seemingly stolid exurban white couple graying, business-oriented, highly secular, highly materialistic-possessed, passionately pursuing fashionable trends, consumed with a wish to be relevant and chic. They worry about appearing old so they identify with youth. They want desperately to be in synch with the kids who turn glassy-eyed like cult worshipers, chant cool mantra-like slogans and seemingly swoon with euphoria. These late 60-somethings want so passionately to belong and want to get back in touch with their inner-child. Of course, they are Obama rooters.

To them you add the current crop of young: Start with the kids in their 20s. They’re consumed by New Age glossolalia, his having attracted up to 22,000 swaying young enthusiasts at one time-- bereft of history beyond rock music to whom he is a Messiah or God-like figure, who don’t care for specifics, in fact dislike issues, carried away with kairos, Greek for a collective sense of what they hope is deeply meaningful change and to metanioa calling forth radical change of mind or consciousness. Go to the mainstream media, to those journalists even in their `50s: Chris Matthews, Brian Williams of NBC, Katie Couric of CBS. Wind up with the elderly couple I cited in the last paragraph—and move on to Warren Buffett and Paul Volcker, in their 70s.

Do you think a white-haired old man of 71 with a bump on his jaw from skin cancer who can hardly raise his arms above his shoulders and who has to pause while climbing stairs due to his broken knees from imprisonment in a long forgotten Vietnam war is going to capture them? Do you think he can compete with the Black Eyed Peas video, Yes, We Can! which is inter-stitched with clips, set to music, by chants from rock celebrities inter-cut with Obama’s stump speech? Chris Matthews who worked for Tip O’Neill another kid-wanna be admits to turn misty-eyed whenever he sees it and says “This is better than Kennedy. Obama comes along and he seems to have the answers. This is New Testament!”

These examples, young and old--have a spiritual hunger gone terribly wrong.

To this you can add a cadre of disgruntled conservative radio talk hosts who are not reconciled to McCain. Including Rush Limbaugh whose audience exceeds 20 million self-described ditto-heads and who earns $30 million a year who stands to make even more if Obama wins. A former p.r. man for the Kansas City Royals and Top 40 disc jockey, a drop-out from community college after flunking out following two freshman semesters, he is compulsively driven to announce his greatness…something his fans take as self-deprecation but they are wrong: he never, ever self-deprecates; it is a virtual certainty that when he says his talent is on loan from God, he is not kidding since he is wildly, most pathologically, self-adulatory. He talks nonstop of politics though he never worked a precinct or sought to get a piece of legislation passed which entails issue compromises (which he shuns) who substitutes for reasoned discussion catch phrases that signal “gotcha.”



To him you add the Pat Buchanan paleo-conservatives who wish to return to the libertarian pre-World War II era of the America First committee of happy memory and who feel that we have been betrayed, ill-served with internationalism, a promiscuous “free” trade that abjures protectionism, an immigration policy that requires a 10-year moratorium for even legal immigration and a domestic government the size of 1800’s…to which Ron Paul (believing erroneously--contrary to this nation’s founders did that every dollar spent on government is a dollar spent to deprive us of our liberties) has added privatized highways and abolition of the Food & Drug Administration because consumers served by the free market should discover by trial and error what is poisoned and what is not.

Yes, there are optimists who say the Jeremiah Wright controversy once recycled by Republicans will destroy Obama. And who thrill that John McCain is still ahead of Obama by a point or two. But these are hardly persuasive. I say the Jeremiah Wright matter has done its salutary work to pull down the Messiah image of Obama but has been squeezed dry of any benefit. Besides, the great preponderance of the American people are not politically conscious yet. They follow the canon of the Sleepy Eye.

What Is the Sleepy Eye Theory?

You know what that theory is, don’t you? What—you don’t? Of course not, I haven’t told it to you yet. I learned it from Gene McCarthy one afternoon in Washington when he was lazily stirring his scotch and soda while in his mid-80s. He was the first one to tell me about the theory of the Sleepy Eye.



As all of us old Minnesotans know, there is a town in southern Minnesota named Sleepy Eye, named for an Indian chief with one permanently half-closed eyelid he suffered from a war wound… but its mention started McCarthy explaining the theory which in more presidential elections than we realize has proved out.

He said: “You know, all of us who have run for president hope that everything we say in-election year and out is remembered and stored up by the electorate so that we’re safely returned to power. But that’s not so. When you’re running—particularly when you’re running for president—you find that until late fall the electorate is interested in anything but the election. The World Series, the Sweet 16 high school basketball tourney, the final 4 in college basketball—they all have to happen before the American voter thinks seriously about the presidential. All the issues and charges we toss at each other are largely unnoticed but for the media and political junkies. Then—finally toward the end of the campaign, the Sleepy Eye of the electorate opens for a bit and sizes up the candidates.

“It makes a decision and then the Eye snaps shut and goes back to sleep and a final impression is formed. Once the judgment is made: Pffft! A decision is made.” How does the Sleepy Eye work?

Examples:

1. 1960. For most of the campaign it was thought that John Kennedy was no competition in experience or political savvy to Richard Nixon who was vice president. But the Sleepy Eye was fast asleep. They had a debate here in Chicago at CBS-TV, the studio of which has just been knocked down. The two appeared and the Sleepy Eye opened. It swiveled around, deduced that JFK was younger, more attractive, more confident and poised than the sweating, jerkily nervous Nixon. The eye shut and that was it. Pfffft! It was a close election but the choice was Kennedy. McCarthy opined that once in every presidential election—sometimes twice but most often just once—the Sleepy Eye of the generally uninformed electorate opens and makes a conclusion on what it sees. After that—Kennedy: 49.7%, Nixon: 49.5% Nixon: pfftff!

2. 1976. Presidential debates were supposedly a thing of the past when President Gerald Ford agreed to debate Jimmy Carter. Carter was a virtual unknown and not widely perceived with great distinction in the U.S. He had been only a one-term Georgia governor. In their second debate, the Sleepy Eye was opened just long enough to catch Ford announce that “there is no Soviet domination of eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration!” Max Frankel of The New York Times who was on the reporters’ panel was incredulous and asked Ford to repeat what he had just said. Instead of correcting himself, the president continued down that track: there is no Communist domination of eastern Europe. The Sleepy Eye widened, made its conclusion that Ford was distinctly not on top of events and it shut fast. Carter didn’t have to say anything. On election day, the unknown Carter won with 50.1%. Ford pfffft!

3. 1984. On October 11 in Philadelphia a strangely fumbling, stammering Ronald Reagan at age 73 debated a younger, more aggressive 56-year-old Walter Mondale and flunked the test. But the Sleepy Eye had been snoozing. The second debate would be crucial. On October 22 they met in Kansas City and the Sleepy Eye was watching. Just in time to see Reagan say at the outset, “I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” His pompadour was neat, his body was trim and his eyes had a twinkling civility. The Eye concluded the age difference between them weighed in Reagan’s favor—Mondale pfffft!

4. 1992. Exactly eight years later to the day, October 11, President George H. W. Bush met two opponents, Bill Clinton and Ross Perot, in their first televised debate in St. Louis. At first the Sleepy Eye was snoozing but then it snapped awake. Bush attacked Clinton for his wartime anti-Vietnam protests abroad as a student. When the camera focused on Clinton for his response, he said quietly “you’re wrong to attack my patriotism. Your own father [Sen. Prescott Bush of Connecticut] had the courage to stand up to Joe McCarthy who was criticizing others’ patriotism.” Bush shrank back. The Eye made a quick judgment—for Clinton. But it wasn’t over yet.

In a second debate on October 15, a clumsily phrased question from an audience member asked how Bush was reacting to the recession personally: was he feeling the pinch? The president shrugged it off with an inept answer and looked pointedly at his watch as if to say: “enough with this stuff; I have a nation to govern.” The Sleepy Eye made its judgment. Bush pfffft.

Likely Scenario This Year.

This year I think the Sleepy Eye of the electorate will largely pass over bickering TV commercials and the issues until the candidates’ debates. TV is Obama’s medium. On the tube he is nearly unmatchable, poised, sincere-appearing, generalized, witty—even funny—cool and collected, deft in phrasing with a Harvard charm that ingratiated people to JFK. He is swimming with kairos generating that we are at a transformational moment to literally turn things around. He looks like a lighter skinned version of Sidney Poitier who so charmed Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? In contrast, McCain as a short-fused old-timer, a hero all right but a man of the past and seemingly the defender of a 100 year occupation of Iraq. The Sleepy Eye will be watching and in this, their first confrontation, sadly, I would not bet against Obama.

But hold on. What possibly could turn it around for McCain? What was Harold MacMillan talking about?



“Events, My Dear Boy, Events.”

Asked when he was at the top of his popularity, in 1963, what could cause him to lose since the future was all but mapped out as a success for Conservatives,, he answered sagely: “Events, my dear boy, events.” Meaning that stuff happens which nobody can anticipate; MacMillan restored prosperity to Britain and a return of international acclaim following Britain’s debacle over Suez with Anthony Eden. He had returned Britain to top nuclear status. Then unbeknownst to him, up popped up a courtesan named Christine Keeler. She was conducting an affair with the secretary of state for war in his cabinet, John Profumo. Bad enough but then it was found that, at this height of the Cold War, she was also spending much romantic time with a Soviet intelligence officer posed at the USSR’s embassy in London.

MacMillan’s government very nearly toppled being saved by one vote in the House of Commons. He breathed easier but then after a medical exam doctors told him he was near to breathing his last—for he was dying of terminal prostate cancer. To spare the nation, he resigned. An event between his top national security aide and a woman who was also linked with a Russian—something MacMillan couldn’t have known was happening and pffft! The Conservatives chose Sir Alec Douglas-Home, a crotchety over-the-hill patrician with no sense of politics. He would serve a year until the next election.

But the incalculable round of unexpected events was not finished with MacMillan, 67. After a minor exploratory operation as a private citizen in the U.S., he was told the doctors’ diagnoses were 100% wrong! The prostate was surgically shaved and in a week he was back to tip-top shape…but as a private citizen. The socialist medical scheme that had paralyzed British medicine was faulty. With the next election Laborite Harold Wilson took the helm. MacMillan lived 25 more years, dying at 92, having been bamboozed by rotten medical advice to retire just when he had achieved international success…betrayed by wrong medical advice. Pfft! Once again, events.

So all I have to say to brighten your day against a Sleepy Eye judgment in favor of Obama is to hope that MacMillan’s theory of “events, my dear boy, events” enters the election. For in my view, only an event unknown and unperceived can derail the Obama juggernaut--future occurrences…events we cannot know or predict. Events, my dear boy. It will not displease all conservatives. Limbaugh, whose grasp of history or public policy is on par with the average entertaining comic book, will have more grist for his mill and the paleos will have the chance to commandeer the Republican party and try to repeal the Pure Food and Drug Law.

Only events-my-dear-boy can change the course. Failing that: pffffft! I feel it’ll be Obama.