Class Warfare: Who are “the Rich”? — America starts to feel the hurt from Obama’s Policies

When I was growing up, I was always confused by the term “bourgeois.” It seemed like “everyone” hated the Bourgeois: Communists, Fascists, Aristocrats–whatever the context in fiction, “bourgeois” was always an insult.

Obama tells us he wants to “tax the rich,” which in and of itself would be an OK idea according to Catholic Social Teaching, but the problem is one’s definition of “the rich.”

“Rich” is a vague term. “Upper class” is defined as anyone whose primary source of income is *not* from working a job. A longtime medical doctor, for example, who may have millions of dollars in investments but still has a practice, is just “upper middle class.” As soon as he retires, however, he becomes “upper class.”

This gets to the notion of “the 1%”, so touted by the Occupy Wall Street folks: 1% of Americans are “millionaires,” but that means a lot of things. When they talk about “the millionaire next door,” they’re talking about the fact that most “millionaires” live middle class lifestyles. I know a few people who are technically very well off financially, and even millionaires, who could be much better off but live the Church’s teachings and engage in a great deal of both personal and organized charity.

The “millionaire next door” is your grandparents who technically own their middle class home outright after paying two or three times its worth in mortgage payments, and have a few hundred thousand dollars in life savings that they live off of.
Now, in other circumstances, I might address such people to consider, voluntarily, whether they’ve done enough to store up treasure in Heaven.

However, I do not think that such people should be considered “rich.”

Regardless, when I hear liberals talk of “the rich,” they often mean “small business owners,” “entrepreneurs,” and/or “people with jobs,” even if those people are barely staying afloat financially.

Now, I have repeatedly said that, whether or not Obama is a “Communist,” he is certainly a Marxist in his historical and economic theory (and no less than the former Soviet propaganda engine, _Pravda_, has described Obama as a Leninist).

In “real life,” there are various social strata described by various terms and indicated by various conditions (i.e., actual wealth versus where that wealth comes from, net worth, debt, etc.)

So in terms of my pre-graduate school confusion, the bourgeois may be just as “rich” as “aristocrats,” but the aristocracy look down on the bourgeois because they are “nouveau riche”. The “poor” and socialists look down on the “bourgeois” because they are capitalists. In some contexts, “bourgeois” refers to having a sense of social morality.

Generally speaking, “bourgeois” is supposed to refer to the upper middle class, to capitalists, entrepreneuers, etc.

However, in Marxist theory, there are only two classes: bourgeois and proletariat. In Marxist theory, anyone who works is proletariat; anyone who employs others and/or owns land is bourgeois. So a person could be both in different relative contexts.

A person who makes $200,000 a year for an employer is still technically the “proletariat” in Marxist theory. A person who is an entrepreneur with a small business and takes home only $40,000 a year is “bourgeois.”

So, yes, in Marxist theory, most Americans are “rich,” because most Americans qualify as “bourgeois” in some regard: i.e., if you hire a tutor for your kid, you’re bourgeois, or whatever.

So, yes, Liberals, when Obama said he wanted to tax “the rich,” he meant to tax YOU.

Enjoy your 2% tax hike and whatever else is coming.

Remote Material Cooperation Explained in a Nutshell

Once again, this year, a majority of US “Catholics” went out to vote and cast their vote for a man who:
a) is a more radical pro-abortionist than NARAL or Hillary Clinton (i.e., he supports outright infanticide by starving born babies to death and says that is necessary for preserving the right to an abortion)
b) is forcing Catholics to pay for other people’s contraceptives and abortifacients
c) is forcing Catholic health care workers to violate their consciences
d) is bringing this country closer and closer to recognizing same sex “marriages”
e) has involved us with several more unjust wars and increased rather than pulled back his predecessor’s policies regarding bombing of civilians, unjust treatment of prisoners, etc.
f) has taken away, with Congress, US citizens’ constitutional right of habeas corpus
g) criticizes people who “cling to their Bibles”
h) says Jesus is just a great moral teacher and not necessarily God incarnate or the only savior
i) is supported by a party that “booed” God at its convention
i) whom Pope Benedict XVI indirectly called an enemy of the Church (he called present administration an enemy of the Church, and commenter on this blog once asserted I was lying because he did not directly name Obama).

I could, of course, go on way past “z” if I wanted to.

These Catholics say this doesn’t matter because (supposedly) those aren’t the reasons they support him (though some at least have the courage to admit they do), but because supposedly their greed for more money (in other words, their worship of Mammon) supersedes those issues in importance. They don’t care that our country is headed for complete bankruptcy, that the government is not going to be able to help those who truly need it if they keep driving it into insolvency with huge debts to pay for pork (such as the pay increase that the Executive and Legislative branches just gave themselves).

These “Catholics” say voting for this puppet of the Freemasons is OK because he “cares for the poor” (hogwash: he was supported and paid for by the richest men in the world, and his policies are only designed to help the rich). When confronted with the Church’s teachings on material cooperation, they say that they’re OK because it’s “remote.” It’s the same justification they use for benefitting from medical procedures developed with embryonic or fetal tissue research.

The problem is that the whole point is “remote” material cooperation is still material cooperation. There are obviously mitigating factors for someone engaging in remote material cooperation, but it’s still cooperation. The remote control doesn’t control the TV any less than the buttons on the TV itself: it just does it from far away.

The classic example of remote material cooperation is the mob: if the only restaurant in town is owned by the Mafia, and you know it, you don’t have much choice but to use that restaurant if you’re in a situation where going to a restaurant is necessary. However, if the only restaurant in town is owned by the Mafia, and you don’t really need to go there, you’re consenting to funding the Mafia’s actions. If there are two restaurants in town, and the Mafia owns one but doesn’t own the other, you’re morally obliged to go with the one that’s not owned by the Mafia.

I always say that people’s attitudes towards remote material cooperation with abortion just show how they really do not believe abortion is the taking of a human life (and thus, under _Evangelium Vitae_, they are heretics). The Nazi soldiers tried at Nuremberg and elsewhere used the infamous defense of “I was only following orders”: they claimed that even though they committed the atrocities themselves, Hitler was to blame, not them (obviously, they had a choice). I don’t know if anyone ever tried those who *voted* for Hitler, but I think most of us would say that those who voted for Hitler are morally culpable for their participation in what he did. Indeed, it has become a popular way for secular liberals to discredit Pope Benedict XVI in that the young Josef Ratzinger was enlisted unwillingly in the “Hitler Youth.”

Most of us would agree that a person who is a supporter of the KKK, even if that person isn’t an active participant, is in some way guilty of encouraging the violence done by the KKK and other hate groups.

Indeed, the very Catholics who insist they can detach their support for Obama from his support for slaughtering babies will say that you’re a schismatic if you show any sympathy for views of the SSPX, so they show their own double standard.

What do I think of Guns and Gun Control?

1) I HATE THE ISSUE. It is such a non-issue, on both sides. It’s absurd. Yes, the Demonocrats want gun control so they can establish a grand Communist tyranny. Yes, Republicans oppose gun control because they want a grand Libertarian anarchy. It’s a complex issue, with various complex moral layers, and each side tries to drastically oversimplify it, stating the problems in the other side’s position without seeing the problems in its own.

2) As far as the Second Amendment goes:
a) It says “well-regulated Militia” Much has been made of how people in Switzerland have lots of guns and very low violent crime in recent weeks, but it was pointed out to me the other day by a FB friend who lives in France, the people in Switzerland have to undergo yearly tests to retain their gun ownership rights.
b) It can be amended.
c) If we are to take the Founding Fathers’ word that it is to protect the people *against* the government, we must also remember that they were Masons, with an attitude of opposition to traditional forms of government.

3) Catholics like to quote Catechism 2265:

Legitimate defense can be not only a right but a grave duty for someone responsible for another’s life. Preserving the common good requires rendering the unjust aggressor unable to inflict harm. To this end, those holding legitimate authority have the right to repel by armed force aggressors against the civil community entrusted to their charge.[66]

Without including its qualification in 2264:

Love toward oneself remains a fundamental principle of morality. Therefore it is legitimate to insist on respect for one’s own right to life. Someone who defends his life is not guilty of murder even if he is forced to deal his aggressor a lethal blow:
“If a man in self-defense uses more than necessary violence, it will be unlawful: whereas if he repels force with moderation, his defense will be lawful…. Nor is it necessary for salvation that a man omit the act of moderate self-defense to avoid killing the other man, since one is bound to take more care of one’s own life than of another’s.[65]” (emphasis added)

So when someone says, “I wish they’d have shot that guy dead before he even got into the school, they are not following Church teaching regarding legitimate self-defense. The Mississippi shooter who has been discussed as a parallel case–who killed his own mother before coming to a school but was stopped in progress and later said he did it as part of a Satanic cult–was stopped by an assistant principal using a private handgun. And that assistant principal never fired a bullet. Indeed, in many of these mass shootings, the shooters stopped when confronted by either a private citizen, security guard or police officer with a gun–and either surrendered or killed themselves.

It may not even be necessary to fire a gun to stop an assailant. More on this later.

Here are some other passages from the Catechism that gun fanatics ought to consider. First, the passage from _EvangeliumVitae_ which led to the _Catechism_ being almost immediately revised:

2267 The traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude, presupposing full ascertainment of the identity and responsibility of the offender, recourse to the death penalty, when this is the only practicable way to defend the lives of human beings effectively against the aggressor.
“If, instead, bloodless means are sufficient to defend against the aggressor and to protect the safety of persons, public authority should limit itself to such means, because they better correspond to the concrete conditions of the common good and are more in conformity to the dignity of the human person.
“Today, in fact, given the means at the State’s disposal to effectively repress crime by rendering inoffensive the one who has committed it, without depriving him definitively of the possibility of redeeming himself, cases of absolute necessity for suppression of the offender ‘today … are very rare, if not practically non-existent.’ [68]

While 2265 is taken by some as saying there’s a moral obligation to use violence, 2306 offers a different perspective:

Those who renounce violence and bloodshed and, in order to safeguard human rights, make use of those means of defense available to the weakest, bear witness to evangelical charity, provided they do so without harming the rights and obligations of other men and societies. They bear legitimate witness to the gravity of the physical and moral risks of recourse to violence, with all its destruction and death.[103]

Again, when “pro-gun” people speak with glee about the notion of killing a would be assailant, they’d do well to remember these passages:

2302 By recalling the commandment, “You shall not kill,”[93] our Lord asked for peace of heart and denounced murderous anger and hatred as immoral.
Anger is a desire for revenge. “To desire vengeance in order to do evil to someone who should be punished is illicit,” but it is praiseworthy to impose restitution “to correct vices and maintain justice.”[94] If anger reaches the point of a deliberate desire to kill or seriously wound a neighbor, it is gravely against charity; it is a mortal sin. The Lord says, “Everyone who is angry with his brother shall be liable to judgment.”[95]

2303 Deliberate hatred is contrary to charity. Hatred of the neighbor is a sin when one deliberately wishes him evil. Hatred of the neighbor is a grave sin when one deliberately desires him grave harm. “But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven.”

And the following passages, while specifically applying to war, should be taken into consideration by those who “stockpile” weapons, especially in “preparation” for a hypothetical societal collapse or government oppression:

2315 The accumulation of arms strikes many as a paradoxically suitable way of deterring potential adversaries from war. They see it as the most effective means of ensuring peace among nations. This method of deterrence gives rise to strong moral reservations. The arms race does not ensure peace. Far from eliminating the causes of war, it risks aggravating them. Spending enormous sums to produce ever new types of weapons impedes efforts to aid needy populations;[110] it thwarts the development of peoples. Over-armament multiplies reasons for conflict and increases the danger of escalation.

2316 The production and the sale of arms affect the common good of nations and of the international community. Hence public authorities have the right and duty to regulate them. The short-term pursuit of private or collective interests cannot legitimate undertakings that promote violence and conflict among nations and compromise the international juridical order.

4) I never understand what a gun can do that a knife, a sword, an arrow, a spear or a throwing star cannot. Indeed, in terms of the Church’s teaching on disabling rather than killing an opponent whenever possible, these weapons would be far more effective.

5) I also do not understand why Christians are not more eager for the opportunity to try and convert a would-be assailant, to confront someone obviously in the grip of the Devil with holy water, prayer and preaching, and the power of Sacramentals, and not with violence.

6) The situations in my life where I’ve been most afraid for my life, having a gun in the house wouldn’t have helped, and may have actually allowed the individuals the opportunity to kill someone.

7) I know a lady who has lived for many decades in an older neighborhood where because of trees, sidewalks, etc., there are a lot of prowlers. On several occasions, she has protected her house merely by the threat of having a gun (yelling, “I have a gun, and I’m going to shoot you” at prowlers whom she could see but could not see her). This on the one hand shows how actually having a gun is not necessary and, again, killing the criminal is not necessary. It also shows how having the *ability* to own guns protects people.

8) Criminals by definition don’t follow laws: if they want guns or any other weapons, they’ll get them.

9) There are several websites that discuss the Texas “concealed carry” law and how many crimes have been committed by people with concealed carry permits, how many crimes have been committed by people *without* concealed carry permits, and how many crimes have been prevented by people with concealed carry permits:

http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba324

http://www.txdps.state.tx.us/rsd/chl/index.htm

Note, however, that by definition “concealed carry” is a form of “gun control”: requiring licenses to own weapons is a form of gun control, and is the form of gun control I support.

10) I think gun control has been a contributing factor to the mass murders of the past 20+ years, because gun control advocates have convinced families to keep guns away from their children. So children in households *with* guns, who used to be raised to hunt and to know how to use a gun and how to respect it, have been taught that their parents’ guns are a mysterious taboo waiting to be explored. On the other hand, they watch violent movies, and mommy says, when the person dies on the screen, “You know that’s just pretend, right? And he’s coming back. He’s not really dead.” They play video games and get to “kill” people and monsters, and have them “come back,” and if they get “killed” in the video games, they get to “start over,” and for certain kinds of personality types, this can be very damaging.

11) Just as with guns as such, blanket suppression/condemnation and blanket permissiveness of TV/movies/video games are equally to blame. Instead of parents telling their kids “this is OK to watch/play, but this isn’t,” and explaining *why* the “not OK” is “not OK,” parents either ban everything or permit everything. A while back, a nice lady on Facebook was concerned that her kids were invited over to a friend’s house to play _Super Smash Bros_. “It sounds horrible” she said. I explained that, while I’ve never seen or played it directly, the game is really no more harmful than _Wii Boxing_: it’s just basically a boxing game featuring a mix-up of classic video game characters, particularly from the Mario franchises. Parents ought to have such basic, minimal knowledge about TV, movies and video games, especially when it’s as simple as looking something up online. If they really don’t know this stuff, then they’re not participating in their kids’ lives. And THAT is the thing to be concerned about in terms of societal causes.

12) People who want to do evil will do evil. As several Facebook memes are pointing out, Timothy McVeigh did it with fertilizer. The guy in China stabbed a classroom full of kids with a knife. The 9/11 terrorists used plastic knives. As my wife pointed out this evening, in the past few days, while she was driving the kids to school, two different idiots tried to kill her and them with automobiles. What ultimately infuriates me about the gun control “debate” is that it’s about epiphenomena.

You can ban and round up every legally owned assault rifle, and criminals who want assault rifles will get them (and apparently with the help of the Obama Administration). You can put TSA agents at every public venue, and strip search everyone, and those with wicked designs will find ways to get around it.

Unless you directly take on evil, all the rest of it is useless. More on that later.

Do Liberals Always Think We’re Angry Because *They’re* So Angry?

In his short-lived sitcom Bob, Bob Newhart played a cartoonist who had been a popular comic book writer a generation before and was hired by a comic book firm to work with a hip young writer on reviving the superhero he created with a “gritty,” 90s approach. In the show’s most memorable scene, often used in ads, the younger writer encourages Bob to express his anger in his work.
“But I don’t have any anger,” says Bob.
“Show me your anger, Bob!” shouts the other guy.
“I don’t have any anger.”
They go back and forth a few times, until “SHOW ME YOUR ANGER, BOB!”
Until Bob finally screams, angrily, “I DON’T HAVE ANY ANGER!!!”

One of the surest ways to incite someone to anger is to claim they’re angry when they’re not, and a favorite debate tactic of liberals is to accuse conservatives of being angry, especially when we’re giving impassioned defenses of causes like the Right to Life. Ever since those early 1990s, the racist, sexist expression “Angry white males” has been used to dismiss conservatives.

So, the other day, after what I’ll admit became a bit of an angry Facebook discussion with a self-proclaimed daily Mass attending Catholic who supports gay marriage and opposes the Church’s right and obligation to tell the State what to do in matters of Natural Law, I posted a reflection on how we often speak of “poorly catechized” Catholics, but there are actually a lot of *badly* catechized Catholics. Some woman who, from what I can discern from her blog isn’t Catholic but likes to post a lot of anti-Catholic stuff, posted an extremely condescending comment with three points:

1) She claimed that my mission statement is a lie because I oppose Obama. Apparently, she thinks that abortion and eugenics constitute support of children and disabled people.
2) She approved of my interlocutor’s disrespect for the Pope, made condescending comments about how she presumed I must have been “dismissive” in my tone, and how people have to be nicer to each other when debating vital moral truths, and how I ought to be capable of seeing some good in my interlocutor’s demonic positions in support of government-endorsed sin.
3) She said she sensed a lot of “anger” in my post.

Hmm, that’s funny, since I thought in the post in question I was being fairly neutral, if not expressing dismay and sorrow that so many Catholics have been misled about what Catholicism is. I sometimes confuse Ven. Fulton Sheen’s observation that not 1 person hates the Catholic Church but millions hate what they think the Catholic Church is with GK Chesterton’s observation that Christianity has not been tried and found wanting but found difficult and not tried. It is also Fulton Sheen who said, after the infamous Land of Lakes convention that fomented dissent against Humanae Vitae in Catholic universities, that the worst thing a Catholic parent can do is send their child to a Catholic college.

Ironically, as I noted in my previous post, I had baited my “Catholic” interlocutor at one point the other night with a charge that he had been brainwashed by a secular education, expecting him to say he had a Catholic education–since usually when I encounter someone who thinks they way he does, that person has been to 12 years of Catholic school, and probably has an MA in theology from one of several universities.

The first time I was suspiciously dismissed from a teaching job was at the first Catholic college I taught for online, when I had been careful to do everything they said, and had even done a great deal of work, unpaid, because I had been verbally offered classes several quarters in advance, only to be told at the last minute that my classes were assigned to someone else. “Did I do something wrong?” “No. We just had to give your classes to someone we hired after you.”

Later, I applied for a job with the online program of another university. My training went well, though I was uncomfortable with the notion they wanted me to do a semester of “training” unpaid. The very last training assignment was an essay on “diversity.” I was puzzled. I had never had to talk about “diversity” at any of the public or secular for-profit universities I’d worked for, so why at a Catholic school? Then I did a more careful perusal of the school’s main site to find they had an active “LGBT” program, including a Gay Rights Week on campus. So I wrote my essay on how great it was to finally teach at a Catholic institution and be able to incorporate my faith in the classroom, and I never heard from them again.

Anyway, I’m getting off track from this post’s intent.

Another time I was directly fired from a teaching job, this time at a for-profit college, it was nominally for cause (they always emphasized how gradebook and attendance errors could be grounds for immediate dismissal, and I had a couple due to entering the information in the computer the wrong way), I felt that the firing was not due to that. I had a couple openly homosexual students, and I found myself put on the spot at one point, and in the following class session, I was being observed again, when I had just had an observation a few weeks before, and a week after that I was called in to the dean’s office and fired. I was vindicated, however, when I saw the campus advertising for a dean and assistant dean later that quarter.

Francis Cardinal George, OMI, has said that he expects to die in bed, but he expects his successor to die in prison and his successor’s successor to be publicly executed. Archbishop Chaput has made very similar statements. As I’ve noted many times since last January, the Holy Father himself, addressing the US bishops at their ad limina visit, said the “gay rights movement” and the present administration pose an unprecedented threat to religious freedom in our country, particularly the freedom of the Catholic Church. The UK this year passed a “gay marriage” law that specifically requires churches to participate if they provide weddings to non-members. My interlocutor the other night kept insisting that legalizing gay marriage isn’t a threat to the church, even after I listed the number of ways that it is a threat to the Church and to heterosexual couples (for example: various government forms are now changing to say “Spouse 1″ and “Spouse 2″, rather than “husband and wife”), including the stated goal of many homosexual activists–and many of my students whose papers I graded over the years–that they want to see the day when the Catholic Church, specifically, is forced to endorse gay marriage.

When Archbishop Levada was appointed prefect of the CDF by Pope Benedict XVI, a lot of people were concerned because of his compromise on San Francisco’s law requiring employers to provide benefits to gay couples. After unsuccessfully suing the city, Archbishop Levada said he was going to allow employees of the Archdiocese of San Francisco to name any adults who lived with them without paying rent to be “dependents”–thus not creating a special right for homosexuals but also providing a needed benefit for adult relatives who live together, etc. In a discussion with some other Catholics who were concerned about whether this made Levada a “liberal,” some of whom were from Canada, I asked what the justification was for the “gay marriage” movement in Canada. Here in the US they make impassioned arguments about legal property rights and insurance coverage, when Canada has socialized medicine. One fellow said, “They don’t make any pretense about it. They openly say their goal is to force the Catholic Church to recognize gay marriage.”

If I say that gay marriage creates a situation where it’s harder to protect my children from sin, that means I’m a “hater.” If I say that it’s frustrating to see so many openly gay characters on television, and how gay couples are becoming more and more prominent on TV, that somehow extrapolates (as my interlocutors the other night directly accused me of saying) that I want to kill gay people or something. No, it just means the same thing as why I try not to let my children see programs involving cohabitation. They still think of the Sixth Commandment as the _Veggietales_ “Dance with who brung ya,” and they think it’s gross when people who aren’t married kiss each other.

Canada is now saying that homeschooling families can’t teach Christian morals to their kids. Canada is saying that it’s “bullying” and “hate speech” to say that homosexual behavior is wrong. Members of the “Christian Left” will respond that we are all sinners, and that’s perfectly true. The other night, one of the guys I was arguing with (there were two, but one was more active than the other) pointed out that the only New Testament passages that explicitly mention homosexuality group it with drunkenness, theft and slander. I responded that I try not to let my children get exposed to drunks, thieves and slanderers, either, and that if someone started a movement to legalize drunk driving, theft and/or slander, people would object to that. That didn’t go over well, and I was accused of confusing bigotry with reason.

Again, angry liberals like to accuse conservatives of being angry when they don’t have a leg to stand on in their arguments.

Then there’s the famous, “It’s biological,” which I’ve addressed many times. My body’s propensity to have its arteries blow up is also biological. Just because I am, as “Lady Gaga” tells her followers, “Born that way,” doesn’t mean it’s God’s intention: the Church has that covered in the doctrine of Original Sin. Sociopaths, manic-depressives, addicts and schizophrenics are all, in some extent, born that way. That doesn’t mean we allow them to *stay* that way. My autistic children are “born that way,” and autism actually has a lot of redeeming qualities, but that doesn’t mean they should be permitted to throw self-destructive fits.

If there’s a biological basis for homosexuality, that doesn’t mean God intends it or it’s something good. I often mention the “study” a few years back where some geneticists got together and debated homosexuality: normally, a favorable genetic trait leads to individual health and procreation, and if something doesn’t meet those criteria, it’s a genetic defect. Homosexual behavior doesn’t lead to procreation, and it leads to all sorts of health problems. A logical conclusion would be that it’s a genetic defect, but these geniuses decided to redefine the standard for an advantageous evolutionary trait and say that homosexuality is a natural tool for population control! So much for survival of the fittest!

But, again, that’s hate. That’s anger. That’s bigotry.

When an unmarried woman gets up in front of Congress and claims that college students like herself have to spend close to $1000 a year on birth control, and someone calls her a “slut,” that’s dismissed as anger and bigotry.

I call it the little boy pointing out that the emperor’s naked.

We Owe an Apology to Richard Nixon

Watched James Taylor’s _One Man Band_ concert the other night. It was pretty entertaining up until he started talking about Richard Nixon, at which point I hit the FF. For 40 years, Democrats have been defining themselves by hatred of Nixon, and it was because of Nixon that the media broke their longstanding tradition of complete deference to the president. For 40 years, Watergate has defined American politics.
And what was Watergate? A scandal about a cover-up of a break-in that was intended to cover up the fact that Nixon had an “enemies’ list” and was using the CIA to spy on US citizens. Nixon got blamed for the genocide that happened because he got us out of Vietnam, *and* he gets blamed for Vietnam itself, which John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson got us into (consider how one of the proofs John Kerry has lied about his Vietnam record is that he’s attributed to Nixon decisions that were LBJ’s).
The media, and whichever party has not had the presidency at the time, has tried to make various scandals into the “next Watergate.” So there was “Irangate,” or “Iran Contra,” a scandal involving the Reagan Administration supposedly trading arms to terrorists for the release of hostages. Then there were the very scandals of the Clinton Administration, which involved an awful lot of mysterious deaths surrounding corrupt business deals, though most national attention was given to Clinton’s sexual escapades to distract from the real scandals.
Then there’s George W. Bush. Demonocrats supposedly hate Bush for getting us involved in the Vietnam-esque conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan (and, admittedly the Neocon Dubya is the first Republican to get us invovled in such a quagmire, where the military actions authorized by his father and Ronald Reagan were efficient and ended when the “mission was accomplished”).
Bush gets blamed, rightly, for spying on US citizens, expanding the powers of the president, getting us into two wars, and giving massive bail outs to huge corporations (bail outs that Congressional Democrats pushed for).
So, now we have Barack Obama.
Obama’s done everything that Bush, Nixon, Reagan and Clinton did (except maybe the sexual stuff), and worse.
We have more wars, entered into with no justification.
We have unmanned drone strikes.
We have “Fast and Furious,” a scandal about outright giving guns to drug lords and terrorists, guns that were in turn used to kill US agents, without the benefit of trading them for hostages.
We have Obama’s cover-up of the administration’s inaction regarding the Benghazi embassy attacks.
We know that Obama not only has an “Enemies List” but has established various online initiatives asking his loyal followers to turn in their neighbors who oppose the president’s policies.
We have an administration that now says it’s OK for the government to unilaterily assassinate not only foreign nationals but US citizens if it deems them threats, with “Attorney General” Eric Holder saying that their determination someone is a threat is sufficient for “due process.” We have Congress almost unanimously approving a law allowing indefinite detention of US citizens. And Nixon was in trouble just for spying on US citizens.
Oh, and Bush’s Patriot Act makes law what Nixon did.

Yet for Obama, the media have amazingly returned to the old tradition that had them covering up the flaws–whether cosmetic (FDR’s wheelchair) or genuine (JFK’s adultery and drug addiction) of former presidents. Will anyone in the mainstream media finally pick up on Benghazi? Will a contemporary Woodward and Bernstein have the courage to bring down this wannabe tyrant? Will the scandals of Obama cast the shadow on the Democratic Party that Nixon’s scandals have cast on the GOP?

Ruth Graham famously said that if God doesn’t do something to certain US cities, He owes an apology to Sodom and Gomorrah. Well, if Barack Obama is not impeached, the American people owe an apology to Richard Nixon.

Hitler was a Rothschild

Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744-1818) founded modern international banking in the 18th century. He put each of his five sons in charge of a bank in one of the five major financial capitals of Europe at the time: Frankfurt, Vienna, Naples, London and Paris. From that time until today, the Rothschild companies have always remained privately held corporations, with ownership distributed among the members of the fmaily, so the true assets of the Rothschild family as a whole have always remained a mystery:

Paul Johnson writes “[T]he Rothschilds are elusive. There is no book about them that is both revealing and accurate. Libraries of nonsense have been written about them… A woman who planned to write a book entitled Lies about the Rothschilds abandoned it, saying: ‘It was relatively easy to spot the lies, but it proved impossible to find out the truth’”. He writes that, unlike the court Jews of earlier centuries, who had financed and managed European noble houses, but often lost their wealth through violence or expropriation, the new kind of international bank created by the Rothschilds was impervious to local attacks. Their assets were held in financial instruments, circulating through the world as stocks, bonds and debts. Changes made by the Rothschilds allowed them to insulate their property from local violence: “Henceforth their real wealth was beyond the reach of the mob, almost beyond the reach of greedy monarchs.”[11] Johnson argued that their fortune was generated to the greatest extent by Nathan Mayer Rothschild in London; however more recent research by Niall Ferguson, indicates that greater and equal profits also were realised by the other Rothschild dynasties, including James Mayer de Rothschild in Paris, Carl von Rothschild and Amschel Mayer in Frankfurt.[12] (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rothschild_family)

Because of the Bible’s condemnation of interest among God’s people but permission of interest charged to gentiles, a strange policy developed in Europe historically that Christians were not permitted to swindle each other, but they were permitted to swindle Jews, and vice versa. This is most popularly illustrated in Shakespeare’s _The Merchant of Venice_. This is why, historically, Jews have been associated with banking and money-lending. It has facilitated anti-Semitism and mutual hatred among Jews and Christians. And European Jews have historically used their wealth, as Shakespeare illustrates and as the above-quoted articles mention, to influence politics.

Mayer Rothschild successfully established branches of his family in every major European nation. Several wings of the Rothschild dynasty were either promoted to nobility or married into nobility.

Back in 2011, conspiracy reporter Alex Jones (not to be confused with the African American Pentecostal minister who converted to Catholicism) reported on research proving that the Rothschilds essentially control the world economy.

The Four Horsemen of Banking (Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup and Wells Fargo) own the Four Horsemen of Oil (Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch/Shell, BP Amoco and Chevron Texaco); in tandem with Deutsche Bank, BNP, Barclays and other European old money behemoths. But their monopoly over the global economy does not end at the edge of the oil patch.

According to company 10K filings to the SEC, the Four Horsemen of Banking are among the top ten stock holders of virtually every Fortune 500 corporation.[1]

So who then are the stockholders in these money center banks?

This information is guarded much more closely. My queries to bank regulatory agencies regarding stock ownership in the top 25 US bank holding companies were given Freedom of Information Act status, before being denied on “national security” grounds. This is rather ironic, since many of the bank’s stockholders reside in Europe.

Jones goes onto explain how much of the ownership of these banks is held by an organization called US Trust Corp, and he proceeds to explain the eight families who, along with Saudi oil dynasties, control ownership of the world’s major banks: “They are the Goldman Sachs, Rockefellers, Lehmans and Kuhn Loebs of New York; the Rothschilds of Paris and London; the Warburgs of Hamburg; the Lazards of Paris; and the Israel Moses Seifs of Rome.”
Further, he goes on to explain how all these “eight families” are really just one family, because as each of these other banking dynasties grew up in the 19th and 20th Centuries, they eventually married into the Rothschilds.

Jones explains all of this in the article I just linked and quoted, and of course like most “conspiracy theories,” he has tons of evidence and academic citations–unlike your average “mainstream media” story which expects you to believe what it says based upon the reporter’s word alone.

Once the ball gets rolling, one can see how the Rothschilds have pulled the strings of most of the last 200 years.

So yesterday I learned something very interesting through a Facebook meme that apparently started on Jesse Ventura’s page. My wife said, “It’s true because it’s in a picture,” right? I said, “No, it’s true because they have the genealogy.”

Oddly enough, for a family that has backed the worldwide Population Control movement, the Rothschilds’ family motto is Psalm 127:5 (“Happy is the man who has filled his quiver with these arrows”).

Mayer Rothschild had five sons: Nathan (London), Amschel (Frankfurt), Salomen (Vienna), Carl (Naples), and James (Paris).

The following graphic shows the official genealogy of Mayer and his son Nathan:

There are more complicated versions of the family tree out there, but this is sufficient for what we are talking about.

Note Nathan’s firstborn son, Lionel (1808-1879).

Lionel had a housekeeper named Matild Schueckelgruber.

Matild Schueckelgruber had an illegitimate son, who was believed to be fathered by Lionel Rothschild. When her son, Alois Schueckelgruber (1837-1903) married Clara Poltzl, he had his name legally changed to protect his family because of his illegitimacy: he adopted his mother-in-law’s maiden name, Hitler.

Alois and Clara Hitler had three children: Gustav, Adolf and Paula.

It is often noted that Hitler was part-Jewish, but no one ever mentions that his Jewish ancestry was Rothschild!

The meme on Facebook shows the faces of Hitler and the Rothschilds, illustrating some of the family resemblance.

It’s tempting to think that Hitler was himself a plant by the Rothschilds and funded by them, but it’s not necessary to leap to such conspiracy theories. It’s far more likely that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was inspired by his hatred for the family that had denied his father’s birthright: note from the graphic that Alois Schueckelgruber/Hitler was three years older than his half-brother Nathanial Rothschild (1808-1879).

But far more important is how these facts are expunged from history. Like so many fictional masterminds from Moriarty to “Dale the Whale” on _Monk_, as the Wikipedia article I quoted above notes, the Rothschilds have made great efforts to cover up their mere existence, much less the extent of their assets, from the history books, and any attempt to chronicle their history has been muddled with lies and rumors and contradictory stories.

This little tidbit just illustrates the point: regardless of whether they were pulling Hitler’s strings or World War II was a family squabble, either way you cut it, the Rothschilds don’t want people to know that Hitler was their relative, the first cousin once removed of Sir Evelyn de Rothschild (1931-?), rumored to be the true richest man in the world, with a net worth estimated at somewhere between $1.5 Trillion and $500 trillion.

In 2008, for example, Evelyn de Rothschild and some partners bought Lehman Brothers for $10 billion.

While liberals are fond of complaining about Halliburton and the Koch family, the real power behind the government is the Rothschilds. Back in 2008, I was dining at a friend’s house, and he had been reading up on “conspiracy theories,” and he told me that Warren Buffet and Bill Gates were just “boot lickers” compared to the real wealth in the world, which is covered up in private companies. I had heard similar claims before from disparate people. Again: people dismiss “conspiracy theories,” but it’s funny how the “conspiracy” theory books, websites and Internet videos always come with plenty of documentation and evidence, but the mainstream “news” and “history” always just expect the reader or viewer to take the author’s word for it.

You may think you’re voting for Barack Obama or Mitt Romney this November, but you’re not. You’re voting for which one of Evelyn de Rothschild’s puppets you’d rather be entertained by for four years. As another friend of mine put it, the only difference between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama is whether, when the government turns the military on the people, it starts with the pro-life activists or the labor unions.

So, “conservatives,” while you celebrate the speech of Clint Eastwood, the “surprise speaker” at the Republican Convention who is an outspoken opponent of Life, who paid for several abortions of his own children and recently produced and starred in a pro-euthanasia, anti-disability movie, go and pat yourselves on the back for what good you’re doing by supporting Tweedle-dee.

Who’s your Pope?

Tracy: “So what’s your religion, Liz Lemon?”
Liz: “I pretty much do whatever Oprah tells me.” –_30 Rock_

“His heart was moved to pity for them, for they were troubled and abandoned, like sheep without a shepherd.” –Mt 9:36

The Catholic Church is often attacked over the concept of Papal infallibility, yet one of the ironies is that people long for “infallibility.” There is a reason the Bible is constantly comparing people to sheep: sheep are, as a priest once pointed out in a homily I heard, stupid. This is a controversial point, I know, but most people really are stupid. “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”: our great excuse at personal and final judgement day will be, as the Catholic Church teaches, stupidity (Catechism 1793).

So we seek out people to guide us, like Israel begging Samuel for a king (1 Sam 8). Yet, just as when Samuel warned Israel that a King would become a tyrant (and all the kings of Israel fulfilled that warning, so too do the little kings we create for ourselves inevitably fail, because all are human.

In a previous post, I explained the limits and extents of Papal infallibility. Infallibility is, in one sense, a very limited concept, though it includes a general sense of obedience to the Pope. A traditional notion of anti-Catholicism holds that the Pope somehow micromanages the Church. The “Kennedy Doctrine” is heretical because, as Vatican II documents, Bl. John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI all teach, the State *must* listen to the Church. However, in one sense, Kennedy was right in trying to dispel a common notion that Catholics all get secret personal marching orders from the Pope.

Papal infallibility only plays a big part in my life because religion plays a big part in my life. As I noted in the earlier post linked above, a Pope’s personal opinions are just that: opinions, and even his prudential judgements about matters of great import, and whether the Church’s teachings are properly being applied, are just that, prudential judgements. A Catholic owes a certain deference to the Holy Father, but Catholics are free to make up our minds on such matters, provided that we give them due study.

The principle of subsidiarity that the Church teaches in politics and economics applies in the Church as well. The Pope oversees 2 billion Catholics and does quite a lot but relatively little. A few thousand people work at the Vatican to oversee those 2 billion Catholics, and the proportion of Vatican employees to worldwide Catholics is far less a percentage than the staffs of most secular corporate or government headquarters.

Then there’s the local bishop, who oversees hundreds or thousands or even millions of parishioners. Again, the bishop’s authority is relatively minimal and mostly managerial. Most practicing Catholics only see their bishops on rare occasions, such as Confirmation or Ordination masses, or special events. I was a parishioner in my diocese’s cathedral as a kid, and I remember even *there* that the bishop making an appearance was a special event.

Then comes the local pastor, who *ought* to be involved intimately in each of his parishioners’ lives, but in practice this rarely happens. So the Church in general, in terms of Her human agents, doesn’t play that big a role in the average person’s life. I care about my pastor’s views on theology, morals, liturgy, church discipline and even politics. I don’t care about my pastor’s views on music (except liturgy or moral issues), sports, movies (except moral issues), etc.

The Pope doesn’t tell me what to watch on TV, though he may give advice on what to consider from a moral aspect when choosing a TV show.

However, people in general look for “infallible authorities” to give them simple answers. They balk at the notion of an established and official hierarchy, but they create one for themselves by seeking out little gurus, the way the fictional Liz Lemon “worships” Oprah.

Look at the way certain Protestant televangelists rake in the dough and the adulation, and people hang on their every word. Look at the range of issues where people would seek advice from James Dobson. Look at the followers of Oprah, Dr. Phil, Dr. Laura or Martha Stewart, the modern-day Sophists.

then add to that the polarization of society, and people’s basic need to separate everything in to “good” versus “evil.” So once a particular “guru” has been established as a “good guy,” then everything that person says *must* be good, and if anyone criticizes that person, watch out.

So the followers of Fr. Corapi, myself still one of them when his troubles started, reacted in his defense when he announced that he’d been suspended. Anyone who raised a sign of caution that there might be validity to the allegations–especially since he based his entire ministry on his allegedly sordid past–were attacked as agents of Satan.

Look at what happened when some people raised questions about the ethicality of Lila Rose’s “undercover” operations at Planned Parenthood.

Even questioning one aspect of a “good guy’s” behavior is offensive to the “follower” because the “good guy” is bestowed a kind of personal infallibility that goes far beyond the scope of the infallibility of the Pope–and often the person doesn’t have any real claim to such authority.

I raise this issue because, back in 2004, Catholic Answers, which is a wonderful apologetics organization, issued a “Catholic Voter Guide” was basically geared towards saying it’s wrong to vote for the Democrats. Interestingly, the content of the Guide itself favors voting for a third party candidate, but it has been manipulated to support the Republicans.

This “Voter Guide” was issued right around the same time as the leak of the “private letter” that then-Cardinal Josef Ratzinger sent to Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, clarifying the prioritization of “life issues” in voting, and in various reports, the content of the Catholic Answers “Voter Guide” got conflated with the Ratzinger letter.

The Catholic Answers Voter Guide introduces a concept of “Five Non-Negotiables”: abortion, stem cell research, euthanasia, cloning and gay “marriage.”

Now, it’s true that these are “non-negotiable” in Catholic teaching. This refers to the fact that the economic documents always emphasize the freedom of Catholics to determine how to apply them, and it refers to how in matters such as war and the death penalty, the Church discourages them and gives strict guidelines for their application but still gives the State the right to use them when necessary.

The whole point of the Catholic Answers Voter Guide is this:

Candidates who endorse or promote any of the five non-negotiables should be considered to have disqualified themselves from holding public office, and you should not vote for them. You should make your choice from among the remaining candidates.Candidates who endorse or promote any of the five non-negotiables should be considered to have disqualified themselves from holding public office, and you should not vote for them. You should make your choice from among the remaining candidates.

Do not reward with your vote candidates who are right on lesser issues but who are wrong on key moral issues. One candidate may have a record of voting exactly as you wish, aside from voting also in favor of, say, euthanasia. Such a candidate should not get your vote. Candidates need to learn that being wrong on even one of the non-negotiable issues is enough to exclude them from consideration.

Eliminate from consideration candidates who are wrong on any of the non-negotiable issues. No matter how right they may be on other issues, they should be considered disqualified if they are wrong on even one of the non-negotiables.Eliminate from consideration candidates who are wrong on any of the non-negotiable issues. No matter how right they may be on other issues, they should be considered disqualified if they are wrong on even one of the non-negotiables.

These posts would seem to advocate voting for a third party candidate because the voter is encouraged to eliminate anyone wrong on one of these “five non-negotiables”. This is affirmed by the teaching of John Paul II, who said it was more important to vote for the candidate that’s morally correct than to worry about who would win. See “John Paul II on Incrementalism”.

The Voters Guide, on its own merits, is a helpful document. However, there are several problems that have arisen from it because of tribalism and party politics:

1) Because Catholic Answers has a reputation for “orthodoxy,” they are “good guys” in the above calculation, so they are, according to the reasoning, beyond reproach, and on the other hand, anything Catholic Answers issues gets elevated to Magisterial teaching. So even though this is a voter guide issued by a lay apologetics group, many Catholics speak of the “Five Non-Negotiables” as if the concept was an ex cathedra papal statement.
2) There are more than five non-negotiables in Catholic teaching, and the Catholic Answers staff were misrepresenting papal teaching to suit their own accomodation to American politics. This is my big beef with the document. The Voter’s Guide is used to argue why ESCR, abortion, euthanasia, gay marriage and cloning are always evil, but the Church also says many other things are always evil: contraception, in vitro fertilization, etc.
3) it has become confused and conflated in the public mind, which isn’t the fault of Catholic Answers. A woman once insisted to me that there are only “five intrinsic evils,” and she listed CA’s “five non-negotiables.” I quoted the passage in the Catechism (2297) which defines intrinsic evil, itself quoting Vatican II:

“Whatever is hostile to life itself, such as any kind of homicide, genocide, abortion, euthanasia and voluntary suicide; whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, physical and mental torture and attempts to coerce the spirit; whatever is offensive to human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution and trafficking in women and children; degrading conditions of work which treat labourers as mere instruments of profit, and not as free responsible persons: all these and the like are a disgrace, and so long as they infect human civilization they contaminate those who inflict them more than those who suffer injustice, and they are a negation of the honour due to the Creator”

Now, the lady in question told me that I wasn’t a Catholic for thinking that the Catechism, _Veritatis Splendor_ and _Gaudium et Spes_ superseded Catholic Answers and “defriended” me on Facebook. Surprisingly, she didn’t block me, and we run into each other periodically on other groups and pages.

But her confusion and tribalism represents a typical problem. In 2008, things were complicated by the war and ESCR. The “Catholic Left” argued that torture should be a “non-negotiable” since the above passage lists it as equally evil to abortion. That would be fine if Bush had been running for re-election, but the fact was that most of the Republicans running in 2008, and the third party right wing candidates, all opposed waterboarding: IIIR, only Giuliani (who’s also pro-abortion) and Thompson specifically supported it: Dr. Paul, Mike Huckabee, Chuck Baldwin, Bob Barr (pro-abortion) and especially John McCain all opposed “enhanced interrogation” for one reason or another, and so torture should have been a non-issue. Ironically, all the Catholics who voted for Obama because of “enhanced interrogation,” illegal detainment and other intrinsic evils of the Bush Administration, along with the questionable justification of the war in Iraq, elected a president who has been far worse for these evils and who has gotten us into several very clearly unjust military actions, such as Libya.

Meanwhile, Catholic conservatives continue to blindly vote Republican the way Catholic liberals have blindly voted Democrat. Even though the CA Voter Guide itself encourages voting third party if possible, Catholics have used the CA Voter guide to justify milquetoast Republicans over Democrats because “abortion is a non-negotiable!”

Well, the problem is that John McCain supported ESCR, and suddenly ESCR became a “negotiable” — NRLC even dropped it as a priority issue (and let’s not forget that Bush authorized it so long as the babies were already dead). Now, we have Mitt Romney, who passively legalized gay marriage in Massachusetts, passed a healthcare mandate law in Massachusetts (and convinced Obama to go with a mandate over total socialization), ignored a Catholic protest in MA to his own contraception mandate, gave money to Planned Parenthood, made money off two abortion-related companies (one that produced abortion pills and another that handled “disposal” of aborted fetuses), and was outspokenly pro-abortion and for changing the GOP platform.

We are supposed to believe that social liberal Mitt Romney has undergone a total change in his views since being governor of Massachusetts. We’re supposed to believe he’s pro-life, even though he’s skipped every pro-life event this year, including events that all his opponents in the primary attended. We’re expected to believe he’s opposed to a health care law he helped write.

We’re supposed to believe that he’s pro-life and pro-family because of his stay-at-home wife (in whose name the Planned Parenthood donations were made) and his 5 kids–one of whom is having his own children through “surrogate motherhood”–even though the Romneys had their kids in the 1970s, and their kids were grown before their father did his worst anti-life and anti-family actions. The fact that the Romneys were already Mormons with a big family when they supported PP and contraception mandates, etc., before they opposed them, they makes them far worse.

And for some reason people are buying this garbage and getting mad at those of us who don’t. They insist Romney’s going to be better than Obama and change things, but he’s not. He’s going to say “Ha, Ha!”

I remember the arguments of Catholics–from died in the wool liberals to people like Doug Kmiec–who argued that if Obama knew a lot of pro-lifers voted for him, maybe he’d change his mind. Yeah, right. How did that work out for *them*?

Now we have Catholics arguing on the Right that if they vote for Romney, and he knows they voted for him because he claims to be pro-life and claims to be pro-marriage,

I argue with the “Catholic Left,” and they say that abortion is a settled issue, and it’s futile to keep fighting it, and it’s never going to be illegal, so it isn’t worth considering it as an issue.

Then I argue with Catholic conservatives about issues like contraception, and they say that contraception is a settled issue, and it’s futile to keep fighting it, and it’s never going to be illegal, so it isn’t worth considering.

The odds are I’m going to be dead before the election. My concern is primarily with peoples’ individual souls–including the candidates’–and not with what actually happens in the election. It’s better to vote third party, and know that you vote for someone who represents your conscience, than to vote for a major candidate by compromising your beliefs. It’s fine to vote for a “lesser of two evils” if you really think that’s necessary, but don’t try justifying the evil.

C. S. Lewis warned about “Christianity AND”. The Vatican censured the Action Francaise because its leaders referred to the Church as a tool to achieving the monarchist cause, rather than the opposite.

Shape your politics to your religion, not your religion to your politics.

More importantly, remember that human beings are flawed. The fact that you happen to like a lot of the things a particular writer or organization puts out doesn’t make that writer or organization infallible. You don’t have to 100% agree with someone. Decisions like whom to vote for are incredibly complicated, and any attempt to simplify the decision is going to be problematic.

And stop assigning absolute infallibility to people just because you generally agree with them. Let God be God.

What the heck did this Todd Akin dude actually say, and was he “right” in what he *intended* to say?

I haven’t been following the Todd Akin thing, but I find the diverse reactions interesting. Apparently, there are key three points that made his comments controversial:
1) he said, correctly, that rape as a motive for abortion is rare, but it came off to some people like he said pregnancy from rape is rare (or maybe he did, and he confused his own statistic).
2) he suggested “legitimate” rape, which created the firestorm–everyone took it as suggesting there’s such a thing as “legitimate” rape, but he meant “truly a rape”. Now, this has implications about such issues as spousal rape, date rape, etc., but I *think* he was referring to how abortionists are notorious for falsely reporting the reasons behind abortion. However, he should’ve been clearer in explaining that part of his position, which is the problem with our sound-biting, tweeting, shout-back-and-forth media/political culture.
3) he claimed that a woman’s body has ways of preventing an unwanted pregnancy, which truly is stupid and ignorant. Phrased a slightly different way, he again made a potentially valid point: the odds of any given sexual act resulting in pregnancy are extremely high. First, it has to occur within 5 days before ovulation or 24 hours after. Next, there are internal mechanisms that a woman’s body uses to filter out sperm: pH, her own immune system, etc.

On the other hand, it is also well documented than an ovulating woman puts out pheromones and other indicators that make her more desirable to men, just like an animal in heat (“more, but not less,” as C. S. Lewis puts it). So on the other hand, it is likely that’s a factor in rapists targeting victims–certainly “date rape” cases–so that would indicate a greater likelihood of pregnancy.

In any case, pregnancy that results from rape accounts for less than 1% of all abortions, and that shouldn’t even be the focus: the focus should be on the fact that the child doesn’t deserve to die for the sperm donor’s sin, a fact attested to by this woman’s powerful testimony (who is deeply offended by Akin’s comments).

I don’t know whether Akin was intending to say that a rape exception for outlawing abortion is a relatively minor exception or that it should not be an exception, but one thing that’s very clear is he phrased his arguments quite poorly.

However, the other thing that’s abundantly clear is that his idiotic comments are in turn being taken out of context by the Left to claim he said something he never said. The majority of the brouhaha has been over his poorly chosen phrase, “legitimate rape.”

From the context, as I noted, it’s clear that by “legitimate”, he meant “actually a rape.” Now, that again is a very problematic statement. However, to hear the liberals talk about it, Akin said that some rapes are “OK”, and that is NOT what he said at all.

So his comments were idiotic but well-intentioned, and they’ve set back the cause of protecting the biological children of rapists for being executed for their fathers’ crimes, but he never said anything like what the feminazis are claiming he said, and that is a grave injustice.

At first, I assumed the few pro-Akin bits I’ve glanced at over the past few days had been shallow attempts at partisan “my side can do no wrong”-ing, but now that I’ve read what he actually said, it’s very clear that this is another case of the left and the media finding some idiotic statement by a Republican and then twisting it completely so they can claim that all conservatives secretly think that way.

Meanwhile, Newsbusters is pointing out that the “mainstream media” have given 4 X the coverage to Akin’s comments that they gave to Joseph Biden’s offensive comments last week: comments that in attempting to castigate all Republicans as racists just showed Biden for the racist he is. Let’s not forget that Biden’s the guy who, in early 2008, said Barack Obama is special because articulate black men are, according to Biden, so rare. Which is kind of funny, coming from an inarticulate Irish-American.

So let me get this straight

1. An anti-abortion activist shoots an abortionist, and it’s instant news, dominating every headline and every TV station. Immediately, it’s “all pro-lifers are terrorists.”
YET

A gay “rights” activist shoots a security guard at the Family Research Council, which is constantly vilified as a “hate group” by the Left, and it gets barely a mention in the news.

2. If a “pro-lifer” commits an act of violence, pro-lifers are quick to denounce the violence, and the Left, again, is quick to say that the “rhetoric” of all pro-lifers is responsible. If a liberal is shot by another liberal, as in the case of Rep. Giffords, even *that* is blamed on conservatives

YET

A pro-gay rights activist commits an act of violence against the Family Research Council, and pro-lifers are quick to say that we should NOT blame all gay rights activists for this one act of violence. Meanwhile, the Left is saying FRC deserved it because it’s a “hate group.” (Whose rhetoric is inciting people to violence?)

3. An anti-abortionist shoots somebody, or a soldier shoots somebody, and Obama’s all over the place denouncing it. A gay activist shoots somebody, and you don’t hear a peep from the president–hours later, after much pressure, a white house spokeshuman issues a half-hearted and vague condemnation.

Thankfully, no one died in the FRC shooting, but what gives? Do people really not see the double standard and the hypocrisy of the Left and the Mainstream Media?

If somebody else builds it for you, will they come?

Obama’s now-infamous “You didn’t build that” speech may have been trying to express a valid point-that most people acknowledge anyway–that all our successes come from the people who helped us along the way, but it does so in a *negative* way. Yes, there are sadly people on the “Right” who insist, “This is *my* money, this is *my* business. I earned/built it, and it’s mine, mine mine,” and sadly given the polarized nature of our political dialogue, many people *say* that but don’t really mean it the way it sounds. However, Obama’s speech speaks to the difference between the Radical Left and, well, just about everyone else.

I’ve heard many of the “bosses” on _Undercover Boss_ say how they recognize the people who’ve helped them along the way, so they want to reach out to their lower level employees as benefactors or mentors–that’s great, and that’s what the occupant of the White House was theoretically getting at. However, his approach was to say you deserve taxation, not “you should voluntarily reach out to those who are trying and need a hand up.” Rather than positively building on the notion of showing gratitude to those who have helped us in life, he focused on being negative towards those who are successful, treating their success as a random aggregate of factors that put them where they are.

This is the expression of the attitude of the kinds of people who support Obama: liberals with an entitlement mindset who insist their own situations, whatever they are, were the “luck of the draw” compared to other people. It is a depressed, and depressing, way to look at life. Liberals insist conservatives are too negative because we speak out against sinful behavior. Liberals, however, are too negative in that they speak out against any kind of success.

Look at the liberal attitude towards education: back in the days of segregation, “White schools” supposedly did much better than “black schools” or “hispanic schools,” and since the white schools were better funded, and since rich kids generally do better than poor kids, the liberals started to insist that money was necessary for a good education. So they started throwing money at schools with no real understanding of what they were doing. Then neoconservatives came along and said, “We’re throwing all this money at schools, but nothing’s changed. We’ve had integration, and minorities are still performing badly. So it must be the *teachers*.” Both sides, when it comes to education, take Obama’s attitude of looking for someone to blame, of attributing lack of success to circumstances. No one seems to be aware that success in education is always correlated to parents. Affluent parents tend to be more educated themselves and more likely to encourage their children’s education, plus they’re able to pay for better resources *at home.* In “Lilies that Fester,” C. S. Lewis warns that one danger of mass education is a true education happens at home, not at school, and the poor cannot afford their own books and private tutors, etc., so mass education just turns into mass brainwashing, and that’s exactly what we’ve gotten today. States have adopted bi-partisan “Standards of Learning” that list, in great detail, what topics students are “supposed to know”: this war but not that war, this president but not that president, this novel but not that one. . . . It amounts to a very obvious attempt at biasing the students’ knowledge to what the legislators insist they should know–in order to better serve the legislators and their corporate sponsors. A true education is about learning how to think and how to read, and then being exposed to a variety of information and books so one can form one’s own mind.

I don’t think there’s a single Valedictorian, Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude, or other award winner who thinks, “I got here by myself.” We all recognize the role our parents, our elder siblings, our teachers, our friends, and our other mentors played, as well as the authors whose books we read. But there is still an element of personal motivation involved there, such that two people from exactly the same background can end up quite differently. The other day, I watched the movie _Eagle Eye_, where Shia Labeouf portrays identical twin brothers (one of whom is dead at the time of the film). One brother, the dead one, was an A-student who ended up in the USAF and as one of the top young people in US military intelligence. The other brother, Labeouf’s character, had the capacity to go to Stanford, with a little help from his father’s money and connections, but was always a poor student who needed his older brother’s help. He was never motivated to “succeed” like his brother was, and had been working odd jobs and bumming around the country for years. That wasn’t the point of the movie, but it does illustrate what I’m talking about here.

Modern liberalism originated with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who held that an individual’s morality and worldly success were products of environment. That view has been the basis of liberal thought for centuries since, but as various ventures have tried to reform society to eliminate sin and eliminate poverty, they have all failed. One answer that modern progressives have come up with to explain the failure of their agendas regarding sin is that maybe certain things are not sinful. This is the agenda behind the “born that way” rhetoric of the homosexualist movement.

However again, when it comes to “success”, liberals/progressives continue to insist that circumstances are the primary reasons for success or failure. They refuse to state it in a positive way by encouraging those who succeed to become benefactors and mentors to those who don’t succeed precisely because they don’t see the success as coming *from* the person. To the mind of a liberal, there is no difference between Mitt Romney (whose net worth is estimated at $250 million) and a Mega Millions jackpot winner. Can a Mega Millions Jackpot winner give a speech saying, “This is how I won the lottery: you can do it, too?” No. And in their mind, the success of someone like Mitt Romney or John Boehner, both of whom were born into poverty and made it big, must be the result of some nefarious scheme or some cruel fortune.

A conservative, and even an “old school liberal,” says that people like Romney and Boehner have something to be proud of. That Boehner is one of 10 siblings and made it big while his other 9 siblings live middle class lifestyles at best should not be seen as the “luck of the die,” but rather as a testimony to his personal commitment.

Similarly, those who find success in a middle class lifestyle should have similar pride. I was just watching an episode of _Everybody Loves Raymond_ the other day where Ray is having a “mid life crisis,” and he tries to put together a “bucket list,” but all he can come up with are foods he never tried, and diseases he doesn’t want to get. Debra tries to explain to him that he’s content. My wife always talks about how much she admires her father for how he turned down opportunities for career advancement for his family. I know my own father did the same. Both our mothers did the same thing by turning down their own paths for career success to be stay-at-home mothers, and we admire them, as well.

To a liberal, a stay at home mother is someone to be pitied because she is “saddled” with the burden of a family by her religion, by the institution of marriage, by not having free government paid-for birth control, etc. A father who doesn’t “advance” in his career is to be pitied for the circumstances of his kids “holding him back” or because someone else got the job.

Those who get promotions are not to be admired because it’s entirely random and arbitrary–which is why liberals support affirmative action. Grades in school are random and arbitrary–so students are taught not to respect teachers whom they think are entirely ‘on the take”; successful students aren’t “hard workers” but “teachers’ pets”.

This is the attitude that leads people to vote for Obama and “Occupy Wall Street.” Again, those people would say they think conservatism is a miserable philosophy because we condemn the sins that they use as opiates, but we look at their philosophy and say, “How can anyone live with such a negative attitude about success?” When we find success in our achievements–whether as stay at home parents, small business owners, middle class workers or wealthy executives–we don’t need to resort to the opiates of sin to self-medicate our ennui. That’s why it’s ultimately happier to be a conservative.

How a member of the “Christian Left” Thinks

I try, I really do. I really try to give an open mind to people who claim to be “Christian Left,” “pro-life Democrats,” etc., but it just doesn’t work. To be a part of the Christian Left, it seems that one must:

1. Turn a blind eye towards, if not condone, all the moral filth promoted by the Left in general, while condemning members of the Christian Right for being political allies of some people who are greedy or racist.
2. Support Socialism, even though the Popes have unequivocally and consistently condemned it.
3. Repeatedly insist, “Judge not lest ye be judged” when it comes to abortion, contraception, homosexuality or divorce yet simultaneously (and at the same time) insist that everyone who supports a conservative position is secretly racist, sexist or greedy, even if the latter’s words give no indication of those positions.
4. Clairvoyantly insist that all who profess to be pro-life or pro-family are just covering up deep-seated hatred for women, gays, or humanity in general.
5. See “racism” in any political cartoon, joke or photoshopped image regarding Barack Obama, yet say that even the most offensive depictions of George W. Bush or Mitt Romney or Rick Santorum are excusable because “rich white guys deserve it.”
6. Ignore statements like, “It’s Constitutional, m*****f****s” or even defend such statements as acceptable political speech yet say that “You’d have to be an idiot to think Obamacare’s giving you anything for free” is offensive and crosses the line.
7. Ignore if not support horribly sexist comments about Sarah Palin, Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter, Ann Romney, etc., but say that Rush Limbaugh crossed the line by saying an unmarried girl who claimed to spend $1000 a year on birth control is a “slut.”
8. Again, while supporting “freedom of choice,” “same sex marriage,” etc., you insist on condemning “hate speech” and labelling any statement of traditional Christian morality, even from the Bible itself, as “hate.”
9. Make no comment when liberals say, “Republicans are nothing but a bunch of hatemongers,” but when a conservative friend quotes Russell Kirk or Dietrich von Hildebrand and tries to philosophically explain his position, and the liberals just jump in and say, “See? Another hate-monger,” you tell the conservative to cool it.
10. Most of all, to be a member of the “Christian Left,” you must support the notion of “progress,” even though if you’re truly a believing Christian you’ll know there’s no such thing: the only “progress” in human history happened 2000 years ago, and there is only the choice between accepting Christ’s grace through the Church and the Sacraments and not accepting that grace. There is individual progress in holiness, but the world can never have “progress,” especially when “progress” is defined as moving *away* from the principles of Christendom.
“Progressives” condemn the Christian Civilization of ca. 400-ca. 1800 as “the Dark Ages,” by definition condemning the Christianity that informed those times, so how could any Christian be a “progressive”?
“Progressives” ascribe to a false Marxist view of history, or at least to the Hegelian system upon which Marxism was based, which runs contrary to the Christian view of history elucidated by St. Augustine, so how can any Christian be a “progressive”?

Unless there is a Third Party Upset, the Constitution is Dead

No matter who wins this election, the Constitution is dead. The reason is that, all other issues aside, the two dominant parties are forcing us to choose between the two kinds of candidates the Founding Fathers wanted to prevent.

Those who are ignorant of history think that the United States was the first democratic representative government in Western history. This is most certainly not true.

England, quite obviously, had a functioning representative Parliament for centuries, and one of the goals of our Constitution was to correct some of the failures of the English system (including Common Law, which essentially gave the courts in England an oligarchy–the Constitution forbids the courts from legislating precisely to do away with Common Law amd Judicial Review, yet somehow those powers were usurped by the Courts, anyway).

Since Plato, political philosophers were aware of the dangers of democracy. The various failed attempts at democracy in Greece, combined with the failures of the Roman Republic (failures our nation has emulated), the historical lessons of democracy were clear.

History has shown that democracies inevitably fail and turn to dictatorships. Prior to the US, the most successful democratic system was the Roman Republic, which, like the US after it, was adamant about not having a king. Yet the Roman Republic converted to the Roman Empire, and the way things are going, our Republic will not last nearly as long as Rome’s did before it suffers the same fate.

Historically, democracies and republics fall because of one or more of three things:
1) People are greedy, and support the candidate who best facilitates their greed, eventually bankrupting the government
2) The people will elect a demagogue who tells them what they want to hear and seduces them into giving him dictatorial powers
3) A guy with enough money can essentially buy an election.

So, that’s what we have in this election.
In this corner is Barack Obama, a classic example of a demagogue. He has gained power by dividing the country on race and class. He has made false promises to the poor while giving huge “bail outs” to corporations that did nothing but lay people off, so that the existing public services are increasingly strained. His administration has doubled the national debt in four years.

In the other corner, we have Mitt Romney, an unlikable candidate with no clear convictions other than economic conservatism who has essentially bought the election. His competitors, all of whom were far more popular among actual voters, simply could not compete with his seemingly limitless campaign funds.

So, there you have it, folks. The two candidates that our Founding Fathers specifically warned us against and designed the Constitution to prevent. After all, that Electoral College that liberals keep complaining about and telling us is obsolete was supposed to prevent this. Presidents were never supposed ot campaign directly to the people; the Electors were supposed to campaign on behalf of the presidential candidates and do it face-to-face.

How “Arrest Bush” People Promote a Catholic State

I think everyone in our culture, if they know anything about Catholicism, know that the Catholic Church used to have an Inquisition. Now, much like Bishop Sheen’s statement about people hating not the Catholic Church but what they *think* that Catholic Church is, those people often think they know what the Inquisition was but know little about it.
First, there were technically two sets of entities known as the “Inquisition.” On the one hand, there was/is the entity that worked within the Church to enforce orthodoxy and investigate heresy and other issues. It still exists, though some of its methods and organizations have changed with its name. Its name was later changed to the Holy Office, and it is now known as the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith.
The other side or form of the “Inquisition” was the internal agencies of local countries where Catholicism was the state religion, which enforced violations of Catholic teaching as criminal offenses. Sometimes, quite rarely, that meant “witchcraft” or “heresy,” but it also included moral offenses. The different state Inquisitions would use different methods, and the exact methods of the Inquisition would vary with different officials like any organization. Sometimes, it used torture. In some cases, it was actually closer to modern notions of justice than the criminal and civil courts of those times.

Sometimes, it would be over-zealous.

When Joan of Arc was sentenced to death by the Inquisition, her trial was overseen by substitute officials because the Grand Inquisitor was in Rome during the whole affair, and as soon as he came back, he reviewed the trial and found it to be unjust, though it took another 50 years to fully reverse the verdict and 500 years for Joan to be canonized.

King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella who united Spain after centuries of wars between Christians and Muslims, instituted the Spanish Inquisition, which was notoriously harsh and overzealous in trying to keep the Muslims from retaking the country, and trying to keep Protestantism from overtaking Spain as it had so many countries in Northern Europe. The Spanish Inquisition was overzealous to the point that Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, two of the greatest saints of all time and both later deemed Doctors of the Church, lived in fear of the Inquisition, and at least one of Teresa’s books was “lost in the shuffle” as the Inquisition investigated it.

Yet in spite of these offenses that everyone knows about, the Inquisition did a lot of good. Back in those days, there were priests who committed sexual abuse (Holy Mother Teresa writes about one in her _Life_), but the Inquisition punished them. In World War II, the Holy Office used its network to assist Allied spies and as an “underground railroad” to help Jews and Allied POWs escape the Nazis.

The abuses had more to do with the local state-affiliated Inquisitions than the overall Inquisition of the Church, which is why the Church changed the name and reorganized it. On the other hand, a lot of what is “commonly known” comes from anti-Catholic propaganda and is actually historically inaccurate.

Thus, I find it ironic that, on the one hand, the Church is criticized for having the Inquisition. On the other hand, the *contemporary* Church is often criticized for things that the Inquisition used to handle. The extensive problem of sexual abuse by priests in this century could be blamed, in part, on the absence of an Inquisition. The insistence of bishops on emphasizing reform and forgiveness in dealing with sexual abuser priests was due, in part, to a mentality of “We don’t want to be like the Inquisition.” If the Inquisition was still active, and was a government agency, there would have been a clear avenue for punishing priests who engaged in sexual abuse or embezzlement or other offenses. But since the US insists on separation of Church and State, and the Church says, “fine; we’re separate, so stay out of our business,” the problem arose that we are all aware of.

Dr. Charles Rice points out that people are opposed to the notion of Natural Law until it’s convenient. Suddenly, at the Nuremberg Trials, people were talking about Natural Law. Then it was moral relativism all over again. People will tell me that they don’t believe in Natural Law, then say that BP needs to be punished for the oil leak in the Gulf–a form of Natural Law.

Earlier, I posted about uncivil political rhetoric and noted that I believe Barack Obama should be impeached and prosecuted for a number of things, including war crimes, violations of the Constitution and defrauding the people.

I figured an automatic reply from some would be, “Prosecute Bush,” and in one sense, I agree. Anticipating that response inspired *this* post.

Morally, Bush is responsible for a lot of offenses. I don’t think he’s responsible for everything that the Left claims. The assertions of WMDs in Iraq, for example, were made under the Clinton Administration, and again, proving a negative is impossible. We’ll probably never know for certain whether the WMDs were there or not. There are Iraq veterans who claim they found WMDs but the media didn’t report it. There are various conspiracy theories about the WMDs being sent off to other countries before the invasion. Who knows? I think that Bush was sincere, though, in acting on the intelligence he was given. I suspect something like what happens in the movie _Wag the Dog_, however.

I still think Bush also did a lot to violate the Constitution, and to violate human rights, but he did it with the support of Congress, and there is nothing in US law that would directly impeach him. Even if the Supreme Court were to rule the Patriot Act, or NCLB, unconstitutional (it already ruled McCain-Feingold unconstitutional), that still wouldn’t be grounds for prosecution. You can’t prosecute someone for passing a law that’s later overturned.

Of course, the Left would argue that he should be arrested by some UN agency, but of course that’s not an option I would support. The UN goes against everything I believe in, starting with the principle of subsidiarity, and including the fact that it’s basically a Masonic entity.

To this, I note how many Papal documents, such as Caritas et Veritate, that seem to support the UN are actually undermining it. When the Vatican says something like, “There needs to be a global entity overseeing the morality of the banking industry,” the Church is saying, “Wink, wink, nudge, nudge”; “There needs to be an entity to oversee global morality. By the way, we’re a global entity that God established to oversee morality.” It’s saying basically that the Church should be running the UN.

That gets us back to the Inquisition. Just as a modern day Inquisition would have stopped the sex abuse crisis in its tracks, so too would it give us something to do with Bush.

Obama is clearly guilty of constitutional crimes. Bush is guilty of grave moral offenses, many of which he shares with Obama, but he did them all with the protection of the institutions we have in this country. We don’t have an entity that punishes violations of Natural Law that are not also part of the criminal code. That’s what an Inquisition is for.

So, that’s how the Occupy Wall Street Left, which would reflexively say “Inquisition” as a response to any pro-Catholic statement, is actually arguing *for* an Inquisition.

Can we please NOT feed into the other side’s characterization of us?

OK, I have had it.

Yes, satire, polemic, sound bites, etc., are part of rhetorical debate and discourse. Yes, the reason our country is so ideologically divided is that we’re facing such crucial issues that people have disparate views on. I don’t understand how anyone can deny the humanity of an unborn child or the right of a disabled person to live. I also don’t understand how anyone who supports those rights can deny that the vulnerable need some help from society to live, and part of that includes some level of government assistance. Yet at the same time, I don’t understand how people can stick their heads in the ground about the fact that our government is already bankrupt, and this spend-spend-spend with no budget cuts or tax increases mentality will only lead to self-destruction (personally, I think officially adopting state capitalism is the only way to really get out of the mess we’re in). I understand that people are still afraid from 9/11, but I also don’t understand why people who profess to be devout Catholics can refuse to honestly interpret the Church’s teachings on Just War. I don’t understand why people who claim to be pro-life can fail to recognize that Blessed John Paul II, John Cardinal O’Connor and even Fr. Frank Pavone have all taught that war and the death penalty are just as much pro-life issues as abortion. At the same time, I can’t fathom how people refuse to recognize that the vast numbers of children killed by abortion compared to those other issues, and the fact that the Church teaches the state sometimes has to use them out of extreme necessity, mean that abortion should be our top issue in terms of voting. OK, I get why our country is so hotly divided.

I also think Barack Obama is a monster. His position on Born Alive Protection, that letting babies who survive abortions starve to death is “necessary to protect the right to abortion,” an issue which even NARAL won’t take a position on, which Alan Keyes pushed in the 2004 Illinois Senate election, ought to be enough to discredit him. I think the damage he’s done to our economy is offensive, and the fact that his supporters think that trillions of dollars in corporate welfare is equivalent to FDR’s New Deal shows how ignorant most of his supporters are. I’m a “birther” in that I don’t think Obama is eligible, whether or not he was born in Hawaii, because of his Indonesian joint citizenship, and his possible criminal activity. I certainly think he has nothing to hide, as he has refused to release, and instead suppressed, records which most presidential candidates have shown to the public. I think he should be impeached for his unconstitutional invasion of Libya, for his other gross violations of the Constitution, and now for his own lawyer’s admission that the “Long form birth certificate” published by the White House in April 2011 was actually a forgery meant to deceive the American people.

(Now, for those who say, “Throw Bush in jail,” I have a response coming later; stay tuned).

I am sick to death of the claim that those of us who oppose Obama do so only because we’re racists, and the ensuing debates that end up making Obama’s critics look racist in their attempts to save themselves from accusations of a “thought crime” and the effort to prove a negative.

All of that said, could we please stick to the issues and avoid making that impression? People tend to ignore the extremes of political argument that come from people they agree with. I have argued with people on the Left who insist that political discourse has only become so nasty under Obama, and that the Right is only nasty, and when I point out the 8 years of “Kill Bush” and attempts at obscene references to the president’s last name, etc., they have no idea what I’m talking about. People who never listen to Rush Limbaugh insist that he’s a hate-spewing demagogue. Then they happily listen to Jon Stewart and Bill Maher and other “comedians’ who do nothing but rip on the Catholic Church, rip on conservatives, etc.

So we keep excusing the ever-volatile rhetoric because in our eyes the other side does it worse.

But conservatives should be better. If we’re sincerely about promoting Christian values and human dignity and the Right to Life, then we need to reflect those values. Most of my political arguments with liberals the past few years have involved me fighting to prove I’m not a racist.

Then I look on my Facebook wall, and I see posts from my conservative “friends” (quotation marks referring to the Facebook term, not questioning the friendship of the individuals in question) that make me cringe: “Tar and Feather”; “Arrest Him” (again, used for Bush, took, but the pictures are the key); pictures showing either Barack or Michelle Obama with expressions on their faces that harken to anti-African American stereotypes. Then there’s the occasional outright racist reference, like the bumper sticker that plays on the N-word (in a manner that doesn’t even make sense). I saw a headline about how “Facebook censors conservative sites” that a few of my friends forwarded, apparently without reading the article. The article was actually about Facebook censoring *racist* sites, and the comments were things like, “I’m not a racist. I just believe white people are superior.” What the heck? How can anyone call themselves Christian and believe these things?

I wish to God that Alan Keyes had been the first African American president. I know one of the major reasons he wasn’t was that there is a great deal of active and latent racism among my political bedfellows–he was arbitrarily shut out of debates, for example. When Keyes and his supporters were protesting a debate he was shut out of in Atlanta, the police came and put him in cuffs, and then drove him to an African American slum and dropped him off.

I realize race is an issue, even though I think it’s stupid that people make such a big deal about it on both sides. Why should the color of one’s skin matter any more than the color of one’s hair? Oh, that’s right. In some parts of Europe, you might as well be black as have red hair (in fact, these days, red heads get treated worse than “racial minorities). African Americans argue amongst themselves about the merits of being “light” or “dark.” It’s absurd.

We intentionally put our daughters in an inner city Catholic school with a predominantly African American population partly because the school and parish are relatively orthodox/conservative/traditional, but also because we wanted them to be exposed to people of different races. While there are white children in their classes, our daughters’ closest friends are all of other “races.” Our son goes to a racially public school and in spite of his autism and severe aversion to socialization of any kind, his classmates adore him, and he seems to like them as best as he’s capable. We recently went to a birthday party for one of his classmates. We were only one of two white families at the party. It was clearly not a “we’re inviting everyone in the class” party. I think most of the guests were relatives, and it was a joint party for two sisters, so the guest list per sister was correspondingly reduced. The mother told us that, when they were doing the invitations, her daughter said, “We *have* to invite Josef!”

On the adult level, our friends are very diverse. We have friends who are white, black, Hispanic, Oriental and Arab. We don’t care about race. We *do* care that a person is Catholic and pro-life. I have a brother in law who says his standard for friends is, “Are you Catholic, are you pro-life, and do you like _The Simpsons_?” For Mary and me, it’s something similar. We dislike Kerry, Gore, and Clinton, and some of our own relatives as much as we dislike Obama, because we believe being “pro-choice” is a reprehensible position equivalent to being pro-Holocaust or pro-terrorism, but just because he happens to have darker skin tone than they do, people say we’re “racist”. It’s absurd.

But fighting that image is not helped by conservatives who consciously or unconsciously use racist language or images. I’m sick of it. You want to show Obama disrespect because he supports killing babies or he supports bankrupting our country? Fine. Then make sure your satires and images and sound bites reflect those reasons. Otherwise, when it comes to personal attacks, why can’t we as conservatives set a higher standard then stooping to the level of Jeneane Garofalo and Al Franken?

Why This Paleocon Solidly Supports Rick Santorum

Let me start this very clearly: anyone reading this blog should realize I’m a solid paleoconservative, and I’ve been very critical of both neoconservatism as a philosophy and Rick Santorum insofar as he exemplifies it. That said, with all things put together, I have decided that Santorum is not only the best candidate among the standing Republicans but the only possible candidate to face the crisis our country is in.

Will he win? Well, polls are indicating he’s the only Republican who has a chance of beating Obama, and it’s really a question of whether he has a chance of beating Romney. At this point, since I’ve argued for years that a repeat of 1860 is the only way to end abortion, I’m counting on the GOP to split at the convention the way the Democrats did in 1860. In a three way race between Obama, Romney and Santorum (or Paul, but he hasn’t got a shot at this point), I’m sure Santorum would be the spoiler the way Lincoln was in 1860, because Santorum appeals to the same voters Lincoln did, and they’re still roughly the same percentage of the population.

A. Constistently Pro-Life?

Again, I disagree strongly with some of Santorum’s foreign policy positions. I agree with those who say that his positions on “enhanced interrogation,” assassination of civilians, and foreign interventionism belie his pro-life convictions and do not reflect a consistent pro-life philosophy. However, I always recognize, with the Church, that there is a hierarchy to pro-life issues.

1. Abortion and contraception are absolutes. I’ve always argued that given the choice between two anti-abortion candidates, the next issue to consider is contraception, and Santorum is better than the other candidates on that. Indeed, my otherwise favorite Ron Paul and his non-Catholic supporters have specifically criticized Santorum’s position on contraception. This was why, literally at the last minute, I decided to vote for Rick in the SC primary.

2. War is not an absolute, as then-Cardinal Ratzinger wrote in his infamous “secret letter” to Cardinal McCarrick. Since the state has the right to wage war when necessary, and since the judgement of whether a war is just or unjust is prudential, even though I disagree with Santorum’s positions on war-related issues, he seems to be exercising his prudential judgement and taking Church teaching, as he understands it, into consideration.

3. Santorum has shown himself willing to adjust his own beliefs to the Church’s teachings, more than any other politician I’ve seen. Since being voted out of office, from what I’ve heard from him on EWTN, he seems to have repented of his support of Specter, for example. If any politician is willing to change to be more in accord with the Church, he’s it. So I pray he’ll alter his foreign policy views as time goes on.

4. While I disagree with his views, again, I think he’s sincere in them. I’ve always pointed to Pat Buchanan as the ideal Catholic paleocon and the late Bob Casey, Sr., as the ideal Catholic liberal–both argue sincerely from their Catholic principles to their political conclusions. I happen to agree more with Buchanan, but respect Casey’s reasoning. I say the same thing about Santorum: I respect his reasoning, even though I disagree with some of his conclusions and his view on the function of government.

B. Paleocon versus Neocon view of Government

As a paleocon, I’d prefer small-government solutions to problems. I’d rather we outlaw abortion the Ron Paul way than by passing yet another federal law.

However, I have to recognize the signs of the times. If Ron Paul had done better so far, it would be one thing, but he’s hardly gotten any votes at all. Paleoconservatism is a dying position. In Canada, neither dominant coalition is officially pro-life anymore, and the “Religious Right” is suffering as a minority. That will happen in the US if Romney gets the GOP nomination. Rush Limbaugh said last year how the GOP leadership wants to the Christians to shut up about abortion. For the most part, paleocons and neocons agree about issues; we just disagree about the best way to tackle them. Even though I disagree with Santorum about *how* to tackle them, I also acknowledge that, at this point, his methods may be the only way to win on certain issues. Having seen Buchanan, Dornan, Keyes and now Paul get rejected time and again, I have to admit that paleoconservatism is a losing viewpoint, and if we don’t find a way of working with the neocons, we face the fate of not just paleocons but all pro-lifers in Canada.

C. Catholicism

Right before I went to the polls in the South Carolina primary, I went across the border to a pro-life rally in Augusta for the Anniversary of _Roe v. Wade_. It was sponsored by the interfaith “Alleliua” community. It was raining, and crowded, so I sat in my van and listened to some of the talks. I heard some speaker–don’t know if he was Catholic or Protestant–saying how we’re all “flavors of the same Christianity,” and that the Magisterium of the Catholic Church is subordinate to the Bible. Heresy trumps abortion, and I high-tailed it out of there. Then I went to the polls, and thought how I could not stomach voting for a non-Catholic when I had two acceptable Catholic candidates to choose from. Then I thought about the fact that Paul’s people were criticizing Santorum’s position on contraception, and voted for him.

That same weekend, this stuff about the HHS mandate came out. We are faced with a true culture war, where everything is pointed against the Catholic Church. Even ex-Catholic Glenn Beck, who was criticized here and elsewhere for seeming to tell Catholics to leave their Church a few years ago when he told people to leave any churches that talk of social justice, is praising the Church for taking a stand, and saying that the Obama administration is at war with the Catholic Church. Glenn Beck and the Limbaugh brothers have recently been speaking out in support of the Catholic Church, Rick Santorum, Pope Benedict XVI and Timothy Cardinal Dolan, saying how they’re taking a firm stand against Obama and for Christian values.

We’re at a watershed moment in our culture, and the Church Herself is under attack. I have no doubt that Romney, if elected, will just continue the work that Bush and Obama have started. The only one who can stem this tide against the Church in America is Rick Santorum.

D. Santorum shows signs of being the next “Reagan.”

It was under Ronald Reagan that Pat Buchanan coined the term “Paleocon” to distinguish from the former liberals who had joined the GOP over abortion and other social issues. Reagan breaking his promises to shut down the then relatively new EPA and Department of Education in favor of using them to promote a conservative agenda was one of the tell-tale signs of the so-called “neo-conservatism.”

The last GOP primary to last this long was 1976, when Reagan won 10 states against Ford. Obviously, Ford lost the election to Carter, but Reagan won four years later. If Santorum *doesn’t* win this nomination, he’s a shoe-in for 2016 (assuming there *is* a 2016 to look forward to). If the delegates are tied or close to it going into the Convention, we may see what I’ve been predicting: a party split where the GOP divides along its social conservative and economic conservative lines the way the Whigs did in the 1850s and the Democrats did in 1860. If Obama and Romney split the secularists, and Santorum wins the religious voters, Santorum could win.

E. Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Anthony “Swing Vote” Kennedy

Those three are now the longest-serving members of the Supreme Court, if not the oldest. At least one of them is most likely to die, retire or get sick in the next 5 years. If Obama has a chance to nominate another justice, it will most likely be to replace a conservative or moderate. We’re not only dealing with overturning Roe v. Wade now, but “gay marriage” in numerous states, as well as Obamacare (which may hopefully be overturned in a few weeks), and several other unconstitutional laws passed under Obama (and Bush).

In 8 Years, George W. Bush nominated 2 justices to replace a couple “moderate” Republican justices. Obama’s replaced a liberal with a liberal. If he can replace a moderate or a solid conservative with a liberal, then liberals will have the majority on the Supreme Court for the foreseeable future, and if any of these issues make it to the Court, they can solidify them into so-called “settled law.”

If Romney gets in, he’ll most likely appoint “moderate Republicans” who can go either way.

Only with Santorum do we have a chance of appointing conservative jutices and getting the solid conservative majority we need to get this country back on the right track.

That’s why paleocons need to hold their noses and vote for Rick.

The Iraq War In Perspective

Now, if a war is unjust, or the method used in a just cause is unjust, it doesn’t matter if one person dies.
However, I get sick of hearing about how the war in Iraq should have outweighed abortion as a respect life issue.

So, we all know that in America, abortion kills about 4,000 people daily, about 1.2 million per year. Worldwide, there are 42 million abortions a year, which works out to about 115,000 per day.
Under Saddam Hussein’s regime, between 70 and 125 Iraqis were killed per day.

While some sources claim the total deaths in Iraq from 2003-2011 number in the millions, there is no official statement to back that up. We know a total of 4408 US soldiers died, a total of 318 soldiers from other coalition countries, and a total of 1487 contractors.

187 reporters and media support staff were killed, and 94 Aid Workers.

Given that a certain number of soldiers die every day just due to accidents, given that the reporters and aid workers who died would have been in Iraq or some other troubled part of the world, I wonder how many of them would have died anyway.

The Iraqi government estimates that between 110,000 and 150,000 Iraqis died of violence between 2003-2011, including Iraqi security forces, “insurgents,” and, again, those who died from acts of terrorism and other violence that may have happened without the war. A little over 40,000 of those were Iraqi security and “insurgents.”

So if we go with the maximum figure of 150,000 Iraqis, as stated by the Iraqi government, and add the whopping total of 6,494 non-Iraqi deaths in the conflict, that’s an average of 17,389 deaths per year.

So if we are to accept the false dichotomy that a Catholic voting in 2004 or 2008 was choosing between the pro-life issue of Iraq, and the pro-life issue of abortion, and had to decide which was more pressing:
0,017,389 deaths per year (Iraq)
1,200,000 deaths per year (abortion).

Which looks more pressing to you?

110,000-150,000 total Iraqis killed from 2003-2011
115,000 abortions per day, worldwide

48 deaths per day in Iraq, versus 4,000 abortions per day in the US
48 deaths per day in the Iraq war (including people who probably would have been murdered, died from accidental causes in the military, or killed by terrorism or violence if the war wasn’t going on), versus as many as 125 Iraqis killed per day by Saddam Hussein during his regime (not to mention the people he killed in the wars he fought).

One of the arguments by the Vatican to say that the Iraq invasion was unjust was that the damage to potentially be done outweighed the damage to be rectified.

I don’t see how 48 deaths per day in the war is worse damage than 125 deaths per day before it.

So, let me get this straight, Mr. “President” (and all his supporters) . . .

Planned Parenthood was founded by Margaret Sanger, a racist and a eugenicist, to wipe out poor people, minorities, and disabled people.
The Catholic Church was founded by Jesus Christ, the Son of God made flesh, to spread salvific grace around the world and convert people to belief in the Trinity and to live in a spirit of faith, hope and love embodied by poverty, chastity and obedience.
Yet the Catholic Church is vilified and Planned Parenthood is exalted.

We are not to criticize Planned Parenthood for its founder’s “outmoded” beliefs, even though Planned Parenthood still exercises those beliefs, but we *are* to criticize the Catholic Church for the behaviors of some Catholics, both laity and clerics, who have sinned in the name of the Church yet been condemned *by* the Church for doing so, when their actions clearly went aganist everything the Church stands for.

The Catholic Church is the largest charitable organization in the world and provides more free healthcare services than any other organization, yet the Church is open fodder for vilification, attacks, and censure, and the Church is to be forced to provide abortions, contraceptives, adoptions to same sex couples, same sex “marriage,” etc.

However, even though abortion accounts for over 99% of Planned Parenthood’s activities, any attempt to criticize, de-fund or censure Planned Parenthood, or to force Planned Parenthood to actually give women informed consent, is met with protestations that Planned Parenthood is a vital charitable organization because something like 1 in 200 women who walk in pregnant are referred to third party agencies for adoption services, women who walk in with concerns they may have breast cancer get a free feel-up and a referral to a third party organization for a mammogram, and one or two PP “clinics” in the country actually provide mammograms.

All Catholics are besmeared because of a tiny fraction of less than 1% of pedophiles in the priesthood, with a much larger percentage of active homosexuals who preyed on teenaged boys in spite of numerous Vatican documents that forbid ordination of anyone with “same sex attraction.” Yet the fact that Planned Parenthood “clinics” regularly cover up sexual abuse and statutory rape when underage girls come in for abortions, or the fact that many PP workers engage in sexual molestation themselves (see also “free cancer screenings”) is to be ignored because Planned Parenthood is such a vital charitable organization.

I get it.

“Advance Notice” on Forcing Contraception on the Country

The HHS has published some “advance notices” on “Women’s Preventive Services” (read “Services to Prevent Women from Being Women”):
http://www.hhs.gov/news/press/2012pres/03/20120316g.html
Supposedly, according to the link I got this from, there’s an opportunity to speak out, but I can’t find it.

“The President’s policy respects religious liberty and makes free preventive services available to women,” said Secretary Sebelius. “Today’s announcement is the next step toward fulfilling that commitment.”

How does a policy that forces religious people to pay for something we find abominable respect religious liberty?
Does their policy pay for NFP classes or NFP supplies?

They keep claiming that this is about “equality” for women, but what it does, like “gay marriage,” is create a special right for feminists that is denied to women who do not believe in birth control, if they don’t pay for NFP.

It also creates a special “right” for women that is not available to men, even though they try to claim this is equivalent to paying for Viagra (which women also take).

Liberals are hypocrites.

Dear US Bishops, Please Do Your Jobs

If there weren’t already plenty of reason to put Canon 915 into effect, now is the time. The 13 “Catholic” Senators who voted against the Church last week, Nancy Pelosi, Kathleen Sebelius (who was told not to receive Communion but not excommunicated), and possibly Joseph Biden (he claims to have had a profound experience on a recent visit to Our Lady of Guadalupe; maybe he converted?) have all clearly shown their complete disdain for the teachings of the Church, and they need to be excommunicated.

The Pope has said that Obama is an enemy of the Church. Cardinal Dolan and Cardinal George have said it. It’s time the bishops backed up their words with some actions.

I want to make sure DHS is reading my blog

One of the reasons I set up this blog was the ability to say “I told you so” (I have a post to that effect set to post on my hundredth birthday). When Bush said he was going to “wipe out terrorism,” knowing that liberals considered pro-lifers to be “terrorists,” I knew what the long term game plan of the Masons was. When he set up the Department of Homeland Security, I knew it was no good. It was interesting that shortly after 9/11, my wife and I watched a movie (I forget the title) about what went on in the UK in the 1970s, when paranoia about the IRA was used as an excuse to treat all Irish people and all Catholics as potential terrorists, and many of the strategies used by the UK then have been used by the US in the past decade. For 11 years, I’ve been warning my fellow conservatives that what Bush set up would be turned against Christians. Then, of course, Obama took office and immediately set about doing that very thing. Now, finally even the Pope and the Bishops are saying what I said in 2001. Francis Cardinal George, OMI, of Chicago, has said that he expects his successor to die in prison and his successor’s successor to be publicly executed.

So, I was interested to see a web site about some of the buzzwords that the DHS uses to flag websites.

I want to make sure that the Obama Administration knows who I am. I want to make sure they’re reading this blog so they can learn the truth of the Catholic faith, which according to the encyclical Testem Benevolentiae of His Holiness Leo XIII, they are obligated to obey as government officials: they can allow freedom of religion all they want so long as the government recognizes the Supremacy of the Catholic Church.

I hope for the sake of their own souls that they repent of following the Culture of Death, and convert to the Catholic faith. I hope for the sake of our country that they change their Satanic policies.

But, if they don’t, if they continue on this head-on course for full scale Communism in America, I want to make sure I’m one of the first people they round up when they start rounding up Catholics. To borrow from Flannery O’Connor, I don’t know if I can be a Saint, but I know I can be a martyr if they kill me quick enough.

So, for the sake of getting their attention, I’m going to copy and paste some of those buzz words, just as I’ve reported myself to every “Enemies List” they’ve set up this past 4 years (the latest is http://www.attackwatch.com, and local “Truth Teams” they’ve recently announced who will be going around to ensure that you are towing the Party Line).

If you’re using any of these words, DHS thinks you may be a terrorist, and your freedom of speech may be in danger:
DHS & Other Agencies

Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)
Coast Guard (USCG)
Customs and Border Protection (CBP)
Border Patrol
Secret Service (USSS)
National Operations Center (NOC)
Homeland Defense
Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE)
Agent
Task Force
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
Fusion Center
Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA)
Secure Border Initiative (SBI)
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (ATF)
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS)
Federal Air Marshal Service (FAMS)
Transportation Security Administration (TSA)
Air Marshal
Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)
National Guard
Red Cross
United Nations (UN)

Domestic Security

Assassination
Attack
Domestic security
Drill
Exercise
Cops
Law enforcement
Authorities
Disaster assistance
Disaster management
DNDO (Domestic Nuclear Detection Office)
National preparedness
Mitigation
Prevention
Response
Recovery
Dirty Bomb
Domestic nuclear detection
Emergency management
Emergency response
First responder
Homeland security
Maritime domain awareness (MDA)
National preparedness initiative
Militia
Shooting
Shots fired
Evacuation
Deaths
Hostage
Explosion (explosive)
Police
Disaster medical assistance team (DMAT)
Organized crime
Gangs
National security
State of emergency
Security
Breach
Threat
Standoff
SWAT
Screening
Lockdown
Bomb (squad or threat)
Crash
Looting
Riot
Emergency Landing
Pipe bomb
Incident
Facility

HAZMAT & Nuclear

Hazmat
Nuclear
Chemical Spill
Suspicious package/device
Toxic
National laboratory
Nuclear facility
Nuclear threat
Cloud
Plume
Radiation
Radioactive
Leak
Biological infection (or event)
Chemical
Chemical burn
Biological
Epidemic
Hazardous
Hazardous material incident
Industrial spill
Infection
Powder (white)
Gas
Spillover
Anthrax
Blister agent
Exposure
Burn
Nerve agent
Ricin
Sarin
North Korea

Health Concern + H1N1

Outbreak
Contamination
Exposure
Virus
Evacuation
Bacteria
Recall
Ebola
Food Poisoning
Foot and Mouth (FMD)
H5N1
Avian
Flu
Salmonella
Small Pox
Plague
Human to human
Human to ANIMAL
Influenza
Center for Disease Control (CDC)
Drug Administration (FDA)
Public Health
Toxic
Agro Terror
Tuberculosis (TB)
Agriculture
Listeria
Symptoms
Mutation
Resistant
Antiviral
Wave
Pandemic
Infection
Water/air borne
Sick
Swine
Pork
Strain
Quarantine
H1N1
Vaccine
Tamiflu
Norvo Virus
Epidemic
World Health Organization (WHO and components)
Viral Hemorrhagic Fever
E. Coli

Infrastructure Security

Infrastructure security
Airport
CIKR (Critical Infrastructure & Key Resources)
AMTRAK
Collapse
Computer infrastructure
Communications infrastructure
Telecommunications
Critical infrastructure
National infrastructure
Metro
WMATA
Airplane (and derivatives)
Chemical fire
Subway
BART
MARTA
Port Authority
NBIC (National Biosurveillance Integration Center)
Transportation security
Grid
Power
Smart
Body scanner
Electric
Failure or outage
Black out
Brown out
Port
Dock
Bridge
Canceled
Delays
Service disruption
Power lines

Southwest Border Violence

Drug cartel
Violence
Gang
Drug
Narcotics
Cocaine
Marijuana
Heroin
Border
Mexico
Cartel
Southwest
Juarez
Sinaloa
Tijuana
Torreon
Yuma
Tucson
Decapitated
U.S. Consulate
Consular
El Paso
Fort Hancock
San Diego
Ciudad Juarez
Nogales
Sonora
Colombia
Mara salvatrucha
MS13 or MS-13
Drug war
Mexican army
Methamphetamine
Cartel de Golfo
Gulf Cartel
La Familia
Reynose
Nuevo Leon
Narcos
Narco banners (Spanish equivalents)
Los Zetas
Shootout
Execution
Gunfight
Trafficking
Kidnap
Calderon
Reyosa
Bust
Tamaulipas
Meth Lab
Drug trade
Illegal immigrants
Smuggling (smugglers)
Matamoros
Michoacana
Guzman
Arellano-Felix
Beltran-Leyva
Barrio Azteca
Artistics Assassins
Mexicles
New Federation

Terrorism

Terrorism
Al Queda (all spellings)
Terror
Attack
Iraq
Afghanistan
Iran
Pakistan
Agro
Environmental terrorist
Eco terrorism
Conventional weapon
Target
Weapons grade
Dirty bomb
Enriched
Nuclear
Chemical weapon
Biological weapon
Ammonium nitrate
Improvised explosive device
IED (Improvised Explosive Device)
Abu Sayyaf
Hamas
FARC (Armed Revolutionary Forces Colombia)
IRA (Irish Republican Army)
ETA (Euskadi ta Askatasuna)
Basque Separatists
Hezbollah
Tamil Tiger
PLF (Palestine Liberation Front)
PLO (Palestine Libration Organization)
Car bomb
Jihad
Taliban
Weapons cache
Suicide bomber
Suicide attack
Suspicious substance
AQAP (Al Qaeda Arabian Peninsula)
AQIM (Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb)
TTP (Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan)
Yemen
Pirates
Extremism
Somalia
Nigeria
Radicals
Al-Shabaab
Home grown
Plot
Nationalist
Recruitment
Fundamentalism
Islamist

Weather/Disaster/Emergency

Emergency
Hurricane
Tornado
Twister
Tsunami
Earthquake
Tremor
Flood
Storm
Crest
Temblor
Extreme weather
Forest fire
Brush fire
Ice
Stranded/Stuck
Help
Hail
Wildfire
Tsunami Warning Center
Magnitude
Avalanche
Typhoon
Shelter-in-place
Disaster
Snow
Blizzard
Sleet
Mud slide or Mudslide
Erosion
Power outage
Brown out
Warning
Watch
Lightening
Aid
Relief
Closure
Interstate
Burst
Emergency Broadcast System

Cyber Security

Cyber security
Botnet
DDOS (dedicated denial of service)
Denial of service
Malware
Virus
Trojan
Keylogger
Cyber Command
2600
Spammer
Phishing
Rootkit
Phreaking
Cain and abel
Brute forcing
Mysql injection
Cyber attack
Cyber terror
Hacker
China
Conficker
Worm
Scammers
Social media