|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
7/4/2008
Personal Aside: That Horrid Old “Conservative” University of Chicago…John McCarron Teaching Your Kids How to Be Good Journalists.
Horrid Old Conservative.
A frequent critic of this website, one E. A., a passionate supporter of Barack Obama, wrote recently to disparage the picture I drew of the University of Chicago liberal faculty lounge from which the presidential candidate was ideologically nourished. E. A. said disparagingly that the U of C isn’t liberal since it is the home of the Milton Friedman school of free market economics. Then 111 faculty members wrote to oppose construction of a Milton Friedman Center devoted to the study of economics since it would pollute the “diversity”…get that word…of the university. Isn’t that just like liberals who preach diversity…the same ones who oppose vouchers for public schools like the Obamas but who signal their own choice by sending their kids to private ones?
The Objective McCarron.
The other day I wrote about the “Tribune’s” former editorial writer who teaches journalism at Northwestern and doubles as WTTW’s main garrulous lefty talking head on “urban affairs,” John McCarron, He recently wrote an Op Ed for the “Tribune” equating supposed fallacies of Saint Augustine a central philosopher of western civilization with those of the largely repudiated Sigmund Freud. But I failed to give you a complete rundown on the absurdity of his article. He adds, “ask Friedmanites why it sells for $140 a barrel and they’ll wearily give you an Economics 101 lecture about supply and demand.”
Too bad McCarron nodded off when he took Econ 101 (if he ever took it) because he doesn’t realize that by opposing the U.S. finding new drilling and implementing nuclear energy his liberalism has contributed enormously to the high price…thus artificially stymieing the free market. God, when you consider the drivel this idiot pours into the heads of kids who are going to be covering such subjects as economics…(well finish this sentence for me, will you?).
This ignoramus continues: “Ask them [Friedmanites] about the impact of the OPEC oil cartel, of highly leveraged speculation in oil futures and or mercantilist maneuvers by state-controlled foreign oil companies and they’ll likely change the subject. Say, have you read the latest from the American Enterprise Institute?” Well, it’s a dead cinch certainty McCarron hasn’t or he wouldn’t be exhibiting his ignorance on such things, failing to acknowledge the cardinal point of market economics is development of additional energy resources domestically. He likely opposes any offshore drilling, nuclear energy and prattles that the free market has let him down with high energy prices.
Then he turns to Enron. Enron’s sin repudiates the free market? Enron’s executive WERE guilty of accounting fraud for which many went to jail for long-running prison terms. Jeff Skilling, the ex-CEO is in a federal pen at Waseca, Minnesota serving 24 years 4 months and has been turned down repeatedly on appeal. Or isn’t 24 years enough for corporation-hater McCarron? He would prefer the death penalty most likely. And why does he believe a business executive who cheats the public invalidates the free market? Does a journalism lecturer who shuns facts and propagandizes invalidate the craft of reporting? He zings Exelon because it operates apart from the mercantilism that used to be applied and dislikes its higher prices. Obviously, McCarron would feel better in a state-run society where industry is under the thumb of government. But the USSR where things were run that way went under and China which McCarron salutes has loosened the strings so as to practice a variant (not perfect) of capitalism which has caused it to zoom upward.
My questions are three. First, why is this crypto-socialist who is so wildly uninformed on economics teaching young people JOURNALISM of all subjects at a reputable school? Second, how did “Tribune” editors allow him to get away with an Op Ed that so glaringly spotlights the intellectual deficiencies of its author? Third, why are taxpayers’ funds used on WTTW to allow such lickspittle onto the airwaves with such unquestioning incredible credulity?
| | | PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION WILL CENTER ON OBAMA.
If Electorate’s Sleepy Eye is Pleased-He’s In. If Not, McCain’s In.Voters Have Decided McCain is Reliable, No Extremist: It’s Obama’s to Lose.
Latest column in The Wanderer, the nation’s oldest national Catholic weekly.
By Thomas F. Roeser
CHICAGO-John McCain is running a considerably lackluster, underfinanced campaign which makes a lot of gaffes--but Republicans should take heart.
The 2008 election for president is not going to be about McCain. It’ll be exclusively about Barack Obama.
It will hinge on how well the 46-year-old survives the scrutiny that comes understandably to a candidate who came up from nowhere. His story is essentially the political version of the 1967 Academy Award-winning Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? the first saga of interracial courtship to reach the screen. In that film, Sidney Poitier became betrothed to the daughter of a prominent white family in a 10-day whirlwind courtship and comes to their mansion to meet her family.
So idealistically perfect did screenwriter William Rose draw the portrait of Poitier, playing a young African physician…spectacularly bright graduate from a top medical school (read: Harvard)…who launched innovative medical improvements to a poverty-stricken African nation…who, get this, refuses to engage in a physical romance with his fiancée despite her willingness…and who leaves money on his future father-in-law’s desk to pay for a long-distance phone call he made…that the only objection that could be entertained against him by the white family would be his race. That was exactly Director Stanley Kramer’s intention for a film that earned eight academy award nominations and two Oscars (Best Actor in a Leading Role; Best Actor in a Supporting Role; Best Actress in a Supporting Role; Best Art Direction; Best Director; Best Film Editing, Best Music; and Best Picture along with two Oscars for Best Actress in a Leading Role, Best Writing, Best Story and Screenplay).
The Sidney Poitier image is essentially the portrait, largely unscathed, that has emerged thus far of Barack Obama. He is still the same bright, tall, slender attractive young man of mixed black and white race I interviewed on ABC-Chicago radio before he became an international superstar celebrity and whom I saw instinctively in 1997 as a future prime Democratic candidate for national office. Let’s understand: the Sleepy Eye of the electorate has already focused twice on Obama and has received unfavorable vibes before falling back asleep. Once it saw the idiotic anti-whitey ranting of his minister of 20 years, Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Obama’s weaseling about it, first defending him and then when nothing else worked, throwing the old man under the bus. Second it fluttered open to catch Michelle Obama, in a role of Goddess of Grievance, say she has just now at age 44 become proud of her country with Obama failing to contradict her. But neither of those impressions were conclusive nor did they bear on Obama the potential president. The Poitier image endures-for now.
Again, voters will make their electoral decision not on Obama vs. McCain but on Obama. If they feel he is a profligate high taxer, a bumbler on national security or if he makes a terrible gaffe in the debates this fall, they will go to McCain--not because he is ideal but because they will regard him as a safe choice, not an extremist but as someone they have known for a long time. McCain is loaded with disadvantages. He looks older than he is at 72, takes much of the weekends off, can’t keep up with Obama in fund-raising, is a guerrilla fighter who has found himself in charge of an army but who doesn’t run it very well. He is impetuous, a jump-starter, not a planner. But all of this means very little since he is going nowhere on his own but will only be elected if and when the electorate becomes convinced that Obama is too young, too inexperienced for the task. Thus McCain can do very little to influence the outcome. The election is Obama’s to lose.
If this is true, and I devoutly think it is, who is around to cut Obama down to size? Don’t count on the mainstream media to do the job. They are too obsessed with hating George W. Bush and too emotionally involved in the Sidney Poitier romance brought to the silver screen in sequel as a political adventure.
McCain can’t allow himself to become a personal campaign battering ram against Obama. Today’s style of campaigning does not lend itself to that. A presidential candidate who goes personally sharply negative is largely a no-no. The denunciatory act of saying the first black candidate for president is an emperor with no clothes will have to be done by (1) 527s, the joker provision in the McCain-Feingold act that allows for independent TV expenditures not tied in any way to presidential campaigns which produced “Swift Boats” in 2004 decimating John Kerry and almost single-handedly returning Bush to power…(2) conservative bloggers, the same ones who torpedoed Dan Rather out of the water by unveiling his and CBS’s scurrilous attack on Bush’s National Guard enlistment, details of which were fraudulently produced…(3) TV cable news and (4) talk radio.
The way the media are set up now in this country, these four are a formidable phalanx. The old powerful liberal big-city newspapers are fast losing circulation, broadcast TV news is hemorrhaging viewers (average viewing age is 50 compared to the national population average of 37); cable TV outlets which don’t hammer out conservative themes run far below FOX in watchers; and liberals have been frustratingly unable to mount a progressive talk radio personality equal to Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, Michael Medved or Michael Savage.
Now this is not to say that conservatives have the upper hand: not at all. Liberal bloggers are excellent with The Daily Kos and mega-multimillionaire ex-conservative-turned-liberal-Democrat Arianna Huffington’s daily Huffington Post.. The odds are now almost nonexistent for McCain winning despite the prattling of the networks that the two are within the margin of error in national polls. They are--but national pairings in polls mean nothing since presidents are elected by state electoral votes.
The significant figure is this. The best election prognosticator in the business, ex-Bush aide Karl Rove, now working for FOX has Obama leading in states with 269 electoral votes-one less than needed for election and McCain at 191. Chicago’s David Axelrod tells me Obama’s people are close to having picked his running mate and are ironing out final details on key cabinet posts. But what it means is that the election is all but lost to Obama but still not yet over-the way it was in 1936 when the Republicans nominated Alf Landon against FDR.
To Defeat Obama What’s Needed?
Answer: nothing McCain has stressed to-date. Americans, weary with Bush, the Iraq War, the fulsome rout in employment, oil, the dollar and stocks, don’t care a whit about whether Obama was really born in Kenya rather than Hawaii as conservative bloggers aver (his mother was an American citizen and the Constitution would defend his right to run for president no matter what the INS has said). They don’t care what kind of rascality his old minister is engaged in or what demagoguery Fr. Michael Pfleger alleges against whitey or the fact that Michelle Obama is ungrateful to her country. They don’t care that he doesn’t wear a lapel flag pin or place his hand on his heart when they play the national anthem. They don’t listen to the stuff-true as it is--that Obama is a crypto Marxist in philosophy or a follower of Critical Legal Studies. In truth, American voters care about themselves at this critical juncture.
What would they listen to and what would cause that Sleepy Eye of the electorate to open and having opened stay awake for a few seconds longer than it has heretofore? National security for one; higher taxes for another. The fact that studies show that armed with a heavy, very heavy, Democratic majority in Congress the plans are set-as he himself advocates-for a 60% tax bracket for upper-income Americans. You think Joe Sixpack is worried about the well-being of those richer than he? Well he isn’t but is smart enough to know…against all liberal class warfare hustling…that nobody’s ever been hired by a poor man-and that by penalizing the rich, the jobs for the middle would continue to fall off with increased velocity.
Obama and the Democrats would end the Bush tax cuts on the rich, which would hike their top bracket to 40%. He’d slap FICA taxes to all income, not just the earnings under $100,000 as it is now. Thus you add 40% plus FICA’s 12.5 plus Medicare’s 2% plus the state and local taxes coming on top of it (here in Democratic Cook county and Chicago under the Democrats they are coming at us like a freight train out of control careening down the tracks). So after deduction ranging from 5 to 6% and you get a 60% bracket.
Further he’d
o double the dividend tax, socking the elderly coupon-clippers who depend on fixed incomes, in addition to which he’d
o cover 12 million illegal immigrants with expanded federal health insurance which threaten to escalate costs and promote eventual
federal rationing of healthcare where the elderly sick would not
be allowed certain medical procedures if the government decides
they’re excessive.
Trust me, these starkly higher taxes and their results are the things that count in the coming election to narrow the odds to McCain. Still, dwarfing higher taxes is national security, the fear that when and if danger strikes at home, Obama will not be tough enough to defend us.
McCain can harp effectively on Obama’s high tax plans but there’s nothing he can do to contrast himself with Obama anent a future terrorist strike. Only “events, my dear boy, events” can. Remember Harold Macmillan’s warning to the overconfident that sure-thing elections can change by “events, my dear boy, events.” McCain railing that he would be better as president than Obama in event of attack or near attack would be counterproductive. If a threat comes as an October surprise, it cannot be seen as McCain’s doing. Still, the lingering thought of another 9/11 is one of McCain’s few hidden assets. But to show you how inept the McCain staff is, his “senior counselor” K street lobbyist Charlie Black blurted to Fortune magazine that a terrorist attack just might help, adding credence to the growing belief that Black is a close contender for the Jack Abramoff 2008 award for ineptitude or early senility.
Summary: Barring a terrorist strike that could elect McCain, the one other thing that could do the trick is Obama’s huge proposed tax hikes-if capitalized on shrewdly.
Obama’s Favorite Vice.
It appears likely…at this stage anyhow…that Barack Obama’s vice presidential pick will be Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) whom everyone, including most Republicans secretly, agree would be the ideal compatriot for the Illinoisan, admirably filling in the gaps in Obama’s very slender resume although assuredly Webb has as short a fuse as McCain and is just as angrily unpredictable. . Webb, 62, is a multitalented individual, a gifted novelist, decisive administrator and Marine holder of the Navy Cross, Silver Star, two Bronze Stars and two Purple Hearts. He has a spectacular military record for heroism in Vietnam. He’s a loose cannon, yes as witness his tirade the other day against McCain using his military credentials in the campaign. What? No one played up military experiences in novels, TV documentaries and politics more than Webb. But count this dumb comment as proof Webb really wants the vice presidency.
He’s a non-Catholic, is of northern Ireland, Scotch-Irish descent, listing himself as a generic Protestant, is pro-choice but quiet about it and was Ronald Reagan’s secretary of the navy. His citation for the Navy Cross says that in 1969 as a platoon commander “while participating in a company-sized search and destroy operation deep in hostile territory he discovered a well camouflaged bunker complex that appeared to be unoccupied.” He advanced to the first bunker when three enemy soldiers armed with hand grenades jumped out. “Reacting instantly, he grabbed the closest man and, brandishing his .45 caliber pistol at the others, apprehended all three of the soldiers.” Advancing to the second bunker, he called for the enemy to surrender, then hearing nothing lobbed a grenade into it, killing two of the enemy. Heedless of other possible enemy soldiers in the tunnel, he explored it and obtained “numerous documents containing valuable intelligence data.” He went to the third bunker where the enemy tossed a grenade at him.
Now comes the edifying part. “Observing the grenade land dangerously close to his Marine companion…Webb simultaneously fired his weapon at the enemy, pushed the Marine away from the grenade and shielded him from the explosion with his own body. Although sustaining painful fragmentation wounds from the explosion, he managed to throw a grenade into the aperture and completely destroy the remaining bunker.” He became the first U.S. Naval Academy graduate to serve as secretary of the navy. A Republican then, he worked to rehabilitate the Marines when they were thrown into disarray with the Clayton Longtree espionage affair where Longtree became the first Marine convicted of spying for the USSR,, racial infighting and Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North’s (Webb’s old boxing sparring partner at Annapolis who gave Webb a bloody nose ) main role in the Iran Contra affair. Webb resigned in anger from the post when Reagan sought to reduce the size of the Navy in contradistinction to Webb’s drive to increase it to 600 ships, Reagan commenting in his diary sourly that “I don’t think the Navy was sorry to see him go.”
In private life, Webb became a best-selling novelist, exhibiting a fine literary style, beginning with a book that dealt with the Vietnam war (Fields of Fire) but bad for a later politician, filled with graphic descriptions of sexual content and female anatomy and attacks on homosexuality. He wrote several other best-sellers including A Sense of Honor, Something to Die For and Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America. Branching out he was executive producer of the 2000 film Rules of Engagement starring Tommy Lee Jones and Samuel L. Jackson. His script for Whiskey River was bought at a handsome fee by Warner Brothers and is currently in production.
Earlier, Webb who’s been married three times with his latest wife a Vietnamese, came to the impolitic conclusion that women had no place in the military and announced it to the world in an indiscreet Op Ed article he wrote for the Washington Post titled “Women Can’t Fight.” The article provoked an explosion in feminist circles that taught Webb they indeed can and he has since apologized. Still, Webb’s maverick status is interesting and where vice presidents are supposed to be dull, shock therapy for the same-old, same-old boring liberal Democrats-ideal as a match for an Obama candidacy.
Starting out as a conservative Democrat from southern Virginia to a family where gun ownership was important, he got a law degree from Georgetown where as an ex-GI he became incensed with elitism of upper-crust snobs who looked down on “the blue collar kids, the red-necks, the and bowling alley kings” with which he identified himself. He became an author before he entered public life, converted to the Republicans to serve Reagan, fought with Reagan, endorsed George H. W. Bush, then George W. Bush in 2000 but split from him on the Iraq War saying it was a blunder. He defeated Virginia senator George Allen who was first in line for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008.
After election in 2006 at the White House reception, Webb declined to have his picture taken with President Bush whom he criticized in the campaign. When Bush asked “how’s your boy?” about his Marine son serving in Iraq and who had a close brush with death, the hot-tempered Webb replied loud enough for the press to hear: “I’d like to get them out of Iraq, Mr. President!” Bush flared back: “That’s not what I asked you. How’s your boy?” Webb: “That’s between me and my boy, Mr. President!” That was only the first example of the unorthodox-whom critics say on occasion is an emotionally unstable--lawmaker. In March, 2007 his aide was arrested for carrying Webb’s loaded pistol into the Russell Senate Office building.
Never far from controversy, Webb’s writings have often gotten him into trouble. His November, 2006 Op Ed in The Wall Street Journal condemned “certain immigrant groups” that surpass “stock that has been here for 200 years that haven’t gotten to the top because they simply don’t possess the necessary attributes” which columnist James Glassman insinuated was anti-Semitic. Webb’s anger is directed not only at liberal elites but Big Business. Of wealthy CEOs he writes in his new book A Time to Fight “did they invent the light bulb? Did they discover the Internet?” Still those are the exact qualities that counterbalance the Obama of the Harvard faculty lounge set.
Were he to be paired with the Illinoisan, the ticket would have an angry populist hero of the “hillbilly whites” (his term) with the latent power to woo Sam’s Club conservatives, a natural pairing for the laid-back Obama, the darling of those who Stand Tall in Georgetown. But as this is being written, wine and brie elitists around Obama are arguing against Webb. For his own good, the candidate shouldn’t listen to them.
| | |
7/3/2008
Personal Aside: Let Us Return Again to Fantasyland As Pat Buchanan argues Winston Churchill and FDR Pushed Adolf Hitler into War, Evoking an Unnecessary Allied Response.  | Why are paleos in such agreement with the
moveon.org left...hating Bush, denouncing our
country's interests in winning this war? Of all the
paleos, Pat Buchanan is the biggest anomaly...
one who supported Goldwater, Nixon, Reagan but
is AWOL in this war. Incredible. |
Pat in Never-Never Land.
Since I have known Pat Buchanan for 30 years (I predate him in years by 10)…paid him corporate honoraria after he left the Nixon White House when we enlisted him in reviewing the national political situation for Quaker Oats sales force and suppliers…and hosted him once when he ran for president the first time (1992)…it is not difficult to see the sentimental feelings for one enamored of his father’s memory in his latest books-as I am proud to say I had the same kind of father.
Pat and I have discussed our similarities before. He comes from the same kind of lineage as I-half Irish, half German. In my case, I was the only child dazzled by a father beloved who would instruct me in geopolitics as I, a 7 year-old, listened, fascinated as he prepared his morning abulutions, sharpening his Rolls Razor on a strap, stirring the warm soapy lather in a mug and applying it with shaving brush as he talked about the world.
I, propped on a clothes chute, read as perfectly as I could the editorials from Col. Robert R. McCormick’s “Chicago Tribune” to him and listened to his comments. As father was a very devoted adherent to Col. McCormick in all his views, I matriculated early to become what was termed then-and now--as a far-right extremist, a label I bore proudly. In fact I recall distinctly going to Saint Juliana one morning disheartened-and when my nun, Sister Patricia McGill, OFM, asked why I was downcast told her “the socialists have gotten to Bob Taft.” It was about 1939 (I then 11) and Taft, a president’s son who had just come to the senate but who had a national lineage was fighting our likely involvement in the war, but deviated somewhat to say that he had supported our joining the League of Nations which to my father was anathema.
I began these chores of listening to father each morning in 1935 (having been born in 1928) and continued them on an almost daily basis every morning through the 1930s and well into the `40s, embracing the rise of the New Deal, the failure of Franklin Roosevelt to rescue us from the Depression, the recession that hit in 1938 and the movement to enlist us in the war to save Great Britain which finally rescued us from the Depression. Not only that but I have never distanced myself from the view that our entry into World War II was manipulated by an unholy consortium of New Dealers as a throwback to the unnecessary World War I (the Pearl Harbor attack having been precipitated by all manner of taunting we imposed on Japan that made the despicable attack predictable) who then, stunningly, did not send a warning that had been intercepted and for some unknown reason, our installations in Hawaii were still sitting ducks for the attack.
That is still my view today and I am gratified at the recent book by the historian Thomas Fleming (NOT the man of the same name who is president of the Rockford Institute) who catalogued the step-by-step moves by Roosevelt to get us into the war. My old boss, the CEO of Quaker, had been as a very young man the president of the America First Committee and flew across the country in the campaign to keep us out of war with Charles Lindbergh. But of course once we entered the war, all of us became chauvinist patriots. Every young man who had been involved with America First…and they numbered quite a few famous ones including John F. Kennedy, chairman of the Massachusetts committee, Sargent Shriver, William Benton, Chester Bowles et al…went to World War II. Here at home (when the war ended in August, 1945 I was one year shy of draft age) we were fervent patriots; none of us had a thought of criticizing the war effort, including my father, mother and all the way up to Colonel McCormick.
The onset of the Cold War changed conservatism’s attitude toward internationalism greatly. Taft died in 1953 and the next generation of conservatives were far more hotly anti-Communist and world-battlefield committed than he. Barry Goldwater was feared not because he was an isolationist but because he was thought to be a warmonger. Joe McCarthy supported international pacts throughout the world to strengthen the fight against communism. The Republicans became the anti-communist party. The Cold War and possession of atomic arms by the Russians and Chinese made Republicans us get involved heavily in trying to contain the Reds. By the time I went to work in the Congress as a staffer, I worked for a strong anti-Communist internationalist, Walter Judd, ranking Republican on House Foreign Affairs. Like me, he did not doubt that FDR ingratiated the country into World War II but we all recognized things were different now. Nuclear missiles could wipe us out and we had to become leading global strategists to defend ourselves.
Whether he believed in what he was doing then or not, no one got involved in globalistic anti-Communism in the early `60s more than the early Pat Buchanan. He was a spear-carrier for Barry Goldwater who wrote the book “Why Not Victory?” calling on us to utilize all means to defeat Russia and China everywhere, throughout the world. He was a speech-writer for Richard Nixon who went to China in a brilliant move which divided what was up to that time a truly international alliance of Russia and China. He served Ronald Reagan as director of communications, traveling with him throughout the world including to the various summits where Reagan outsmarted Gorbachev. Then for Pat to suddenly revert to paleo-and not just Taft nationalism but Ron Paul isolationism, retreatism, is stunning to behold. Then leaving the Republican party
Bob Taft, after all, was not paleo nor isolationist; he understood the world very clearly having been the son of an internationalist, once admired by Teddy Roosevelt, who was secretary of war and governor general of the Phillipines….Bob Taft who as a lawyer served Food Administrator Herbert Hoover at the Versailles peace conference…but Pat embracing a paleo-nut like Ron Paul, who wants to abolish the Food and Drug Administration, wants to privatize the highways, wants to obliterate anti-drug legislation and who calls on us to leave the United Nations and live in Fortress America is truly something to behold.
There’s something eerily psychological about it as if, at age 69, Pat wants to atone for all that globalism and at this late time revert to please the memory of his long-dead father who like mine was a paleo, the only type of conservative around then (my own father backed Goldwater, Nixon and was an early admirer of Ronald Reagan before he died in 1966-men who were vastly different from Bob Taft…but my father wisely understood the world had changed. But to see Pat continue in this old way is weird. Moreover to reject free trade, put a 10-year moratorium on even legal immigration and practice protectionism when any student of history knows protectionism and high tariffs had much to do with the Depression of 1929. One expects to see him to produce a dog-eared copy of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and harangue from that. Eerie.
The paleo agenda corresponds closely with what is now the moveon.org left. Watch the “McLaughlin Group,” the funny, dated gathering which used to produce cogent discussion and which now engages in shouting matches. Buchanan supposedly on the right agrees with Eleanor Clift on the farthermost fringe of the left. Both want…like Ron Paul…immediate withdrawal from Iraq no matter what it takes, including the humiliation of the United States. That spells the difference between Buchanan’s crimped, sour views and my family’s when war struck in 1941. We wanted to win the war. Buchanan, now matter how he dislikes hearing it, is not rooting for us to win this war. Like Eugene McCarthy who said it would pay the U. S. to lose in Vietnam-teach it a lesson-Buchanan has moved to take his place with the insouciant left that Stands Tall in Georgetown. Bitterness, sourness and crotchety old age have turned him from rooting for the U.S. to win to writing inconceivably bad tracts, perverting history, to try to make a pathetic point.
Sad but true, much of what passes for paleo-conservative thought…however paleos may deny it… is anti-Semitism, It invaded my own grand parents’ thought in the Depression `30s when they-Irish and German--huddled before the radio listening to Fr. Coughlin (whose views on many issues approximate Pat’s)…the conspiracy theory that somehow the “international bankers” (code word: Jews) have bewitched us, beguiled us with their Wall Street money to fight their wars for us.
The brunt of Pat’s book “The Unnecessary War” dwells on the blunders of British statesmen that in his words “reduced Britain from the greatest Empire since Rome into an island dependency of the United States in three decades. It is a cautionary tale, written for America, which is trading the same path Britain trod in the early 20th century.” What a fairy tale. It is truly conspiratorial nonsense. The story of America and Britain is much easier to fathom than that. Long before 1939…in fact, by the end of the 19th century… the British empire started to slip because it could not compete with the growing resources of the United States. And it was easy to understand. There were rebellions in its colonies by the restive spirits that imitated our own. What Britain did, perforce, was brilliant. It managed to tie its destiny to ours.(My father said that it beguiled us-but from its own standpoint it was a wise strategy.)
Far from foolishly expending its energies to the point where it became a vassal, Britain followed the cyclical phases of history. Wealth of nations began with the United Provinces of the Netherlands 400 years ago then passed to the U. K. and now to the U.S. Each of these empires defeated huge rivals, from the Spanish Armada to Soviet tanks, they survived for one reason-by building a democratic society at home and by forging its energies to embrace a global economy, utilizing their strength to control the seas, safeguard trade and when necessary overcome adversaries abroad. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 promoted pluralism. The American revolution shocked Britain but the successors of George III wisely linked arms with us for its own survival. My own father admired Churchill saying, “would that we had a leader with his vision!” He was right.
Churchill beguiled Roosevelt to lead us to war-but that didn’t make Churchill a scoundrel: it made him a British patriot. Saying that the treaty of Versailles was unjust to the Germans does not convince me; it was harsh but less harsh than Germany was to nations it conquered. Maintaining the British unwisely provoked Hitler to their own peril does great injury to history and to logic. Since Britain was in dire straits economically, it was not to its interest to goad Hitler with a stick. Hitler was a madman with world conquest on his mind-and when Neville Chamberlain’s government fell because Chamberlain had underestimated Hitler, the country had to turn to the old imperialist, Churchill. And Churchill knew that the only way to save Britain was to encourage the United States to join the war.
The more I pondered over Buchanan’s book, the more I wondered why he had gone to the stupendous work to convolute such a conspiratorial rationale that defies the recognized course of history. But it is clear that his interest is not history at all-but to forge a weapon that this very bitter man wishes to be used against his former party-the Republicans--with this make-believe scenario: what happened to Britain can happen here.
Frankly, I think there are elements in George W. Bush’s outlook that are too Wilsonian; and if and when the Republicans lose the election of 2008, a readjustment will occur. We must limit our global reach-but not withdraw to the borders of Camden, New Jersey as Ron Paul and his extremists believe. There are real dangers threatening our continuance in the world-dangers far more worrisome than communism….the dangers of terrorism which have struck us once and by all odds will strike again if either paleo-ism or leftwing Obama-ism gain ascendancy.
| | |
7/2/2008
Personal Aside: McCarron’s `60s Style Op Ed Brimming with Ignorance.  | Milton Friedman.
Ignorance purveyed in John McCarron's
Tribune Op Ed piece misstated thoughts
of Nobel economist, Augustine of Hippo
and Sigmund Freud...all in 700 words. Medill
journalism students and Trib readers
deserve a rebate. |
Barack Obama is only the latest example of on-one-hand-then-the-other intellectual duplicity which oozes relativism. Another is John McCarron. The “Tribune’s” onetime editorialist McCarron appeared yesterday in the paper with an Op Ed. As a “Trib” editorial writer he specialized in the style during the era when the paper’s editorials ended up with nihilism-“who knows?” “stay tuned” “time will tell.” McCarron’s habit is to cast doubt on all sides and then gravitate gently to the left. He spent eight years on the paper’s editorial board when its most meaningful rhetorical device was the shrug. Rather than getting rid of him completely, the paper keeps him on tab as a once-a-month columnist. Good thing he runs only once a month for normally it would take a month of research to confront this jocular know-all with the truth.
McCarron can be funny but that’s a dodge; he wastes no time establishing the validity of doubt which one can assume is the basis of his lecturing at the Medill school of journalism at Northwestern. Marshaling an array of facts and drawing a conclusion is much too hard for him: he’d rather purvey doubt and after the fog lifts settle down on the side of the Left. We wonder how young journalists get screwed up: McCarron’s flip doubt of certainty-a doubt of which he is sure (note the contradiction)-is one good reason.
Yesterday, McCarron wrote about Milton Friedman, taking the typical relativist evasion, just like the “Tribune’s” editorials of yore. Friedman “was a great economist.” But wait, “let’s not celebrate him as a cure-all.” But before he gets to Friedman, he has something to say about “powerful theories of human behavior.” Even-handedly, he casts doubt on both Augustine of Hippo and Sigmund Freud. Their theories of life are flawed, you see? “The trouble with powerful theories about human behavior,” he writes, “…is that true believers come to believe their master’s theory explains all human behavior.” Just like an old-fashioned “Trib” editorial. No absolutes, no certainty-just, a shrug laced with a primitive dose of liberalism. It’s that kind of editorial jerkiness that got the paper where it is today.
So let us start with Freud.
Freud’s philosophy is encased in his “the Future of an Illusion” which is an attack on religion as a fiction, fantasy spun by infantile minds and thus takes atheism for granted. His theory of the origin of religion, in his “Totem and Taboo,” (1913) maintained that it all started in pre-historic days with the cannibalism of a father by his sons. This ritualistic meal was the beginning of religion and when he examine our evil past, he insisted, we discern in all families incest, patricide and cannibalism. Utterly no grounds for that supposition existed or does exist now-but that was Freud’s doctrine.
So the prime assumption by Freud was that God doesn’t exist. One “powerful” theory of human behavior? Not really. Maybe some weirdos still adhere to it but not many. Yet in his insouciant way which accepts no absolutes, McCarron equates Freud with…with WHOM?
Saint Augustine of Hippo. Now let us turn to him.
A lion of western philosophy equated with Freud? Augustine proved that certainty is possible of attainment. What is there about that proposition that McCarron doubts as a pretext for study of all human behavior? In his “City of God” Augustine characterizes a struggle between those who believe in the city of man…characterized by lust for domination…and those who subscribe to the city of God which purveys goodness.
Augustine was the West’s first great philosopher of history, affirming a distinction between two kinds of love-lust and charity…a distinction that has under-girded thought for a thousand years and without which you cannot understand Chaucer or Dante or Shakespeare. Com’on, McCarron isn’t this a fast and easy, cowardly, really, way of rejecting all certainty which is the essence of the nihilism you subliminally espouse?
Now to Milton Friedman.
Get this guy McCarron: “Don’t get me wrong. I’ve got nothing personal against the Nobel Prize-winning economist…He literally turned the world on to the enormous power of free markets, the power to deliver what government-controlled economies rarely have-widespread improvement in a peoples’ standard of living.” Nice of you to concede that, McCarron! . But…BUT.
Now a careless journalist’s purveying of truth. “His many disciples credit Friedman and Friedmanism with everything from the fall of Communism in eastern Europe to the entrepreneurial spirit behind the digital/cyber revolution that took off during the 1990s. There is some truth to these claims.” SOME TRUTH. Nice of you to concede, McCarron.
But “the nuclear arms race was a standoff…” WAS IT?
“The nuclear arms race was a standoff” when Reagan and Gorbachev met but the tipping point went to us over the SDI which the USSR couldn’t match, McCarron, remember? Gorbachev knew the USSR could not afford to continue on its bluffing past. At Geneva, in 1985 he restated the bluff: Reagan was seeking “to use the arms race…to weaken the Soviet Union…But we can match any challenge, although you might not think so.” Reagan answered: “we would prefer to sit down and get rid of nuclear weapons and with them the threat of war” and SDI would make that possible.
Now Reagan made a proposal that frightened some of his far-right supporters in this country: The U.S. would even share the SDI technology with the Soviet Union. Gorbachev stormed: SDI was “only one man’s dream.” Reagan asked why “it was so horrifying to seek to develop a defense against this awful threat?” The summit broke up inconclusively and Gorbachev went home to ponder.
Two months later, still in 1985, Gorbachev proposed that the U.S. and Soviet Union commit themselves to rid the world of nuclear weapons by 2000. Then at Reykajavik, Gorbachev accepted Reagan’s zero option, which would eliminate all intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe. He leaned over to Reagan and proposed a 50% cut in Soviet and U.S. strategic weapons.
Unfazed, Reagan countered by suggesting phasing out all ICBNs within the same period-and repeated his offer to share SDI. Reagan drew on his actor’s ability and added that he and Gorbachev would come to Iceland and each of them would bring the last nuclear missile from each country with them. Then they would give a tremendous party for the whole world… And then they would destroy the last missile.
No, said Gorbachev, NO. The U.S. would have to give up the right to deploy SDI. Angrily, Reagan walked out of the summit. They met a third time in Washington in December, 1987 at which time they DID sign a treaty dismantling all intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe. Later Writes academe’s ranking historian of the Cold War, John Lewis Gaddis of Yale concludes that Gorbachev decided he couldn’t compete with the U.S.’s system, its military strength based on its capitalistic economic strength. The USSR capitulated two years later.
Was there a standoff that continued? No, ONE SIDE GAVE UP-THE USSR. What’s the matter with you, John? Don’t you know your history? And about free market economics…the nostrum you think is exaggerated by the Friedmanites…Gaddis writes this:
“Gorbachev’s impressionability showed up in economics. He had been aware, from his travels outside the Soviet Union before assuming the leadership that `people there…were better off than in our country.’ It seemed that ‘our aged leaders were not especially worried about our undeniably lower living standards, our unsatisfactory way of life and our falling behind in the field of advanced technology.’ But he had no clear sense of what to do about this.”
Gaddis adds: “So Secretary of State [George] Shultz, a former economics professor at Stanford, took it upon himself to educate the new Soviet leader.” And Shultz did. Gorbachev was greatly impressed. In his 1987 book “Perestroika,” he echoed some of Shultz’s thinking, “how can the economy advance if it creates preferential conditions for backward enterprises and penalizes the foremost ones?” When Reagan visited the USSR, Gorbachev arranged for him to lecture at Moscow State University on the virtues of market capitalism.
Gaddis forgets to mention only one thing. George Shultz had been dean of the University of Chicago School of Business and imbued with Milton Friedman’s entire concept. It is this thinking that McCarron disses as an incomplete expositor of human behavior-as incomplete as Freud’s nonsense that has been widely repudiated.
And majestically wrong-headed, McCarron who instructs budding journalists at Northwestern, goes on to say “the Friedmanites never comprehended that perfect markets, in which free men and women make well-informed decisions that benefit everyone over time, never existed and never will. Some have much better information than others. Some are more shrewd. Some are crooks and swindlers.”
Thinking that Milton Friedman’s concept of free markets and free society was based on 100% perfection is lunacy. He said he was a libertarian philosophically but a Republican for the sake of expediency, adding, “I am a libertarian with a small `l’ and a Republican with a capital ‘R.’ And I am a Republican with a capital ‘R’ on grounds of expedience, not on principle. I thinhk the term classical liberal is also equally applicable. I don’t really care very much what I’m called. I’m much more interested in having people thinking about the ideas rather than the person.” If that is the statement of an purist who cannot accommodate the real world, I’ll take vanilla.
Friedman was a pragmatist in politics but realized, as he later said, something that old relativist McCarron still hasn’t grasped:
“Free markets would undermine political centralization and political control.”
McCarron thinks the existence of “crooks and swindlers” repudiate Friedman economics. How weaknesses in the human condition undermine an economic theory is beyond me-and should have been beyond the editor who signed off on McCarron yesterday. Who signed off on it anyhow-the lady who used to write cookbooks who’s on the editorial board?
Prattles the old liberal: “…the hard lessons of the Gilded Age and the Great Depression, of trust-busting Teddy Roosevelt and of New Dealing FDR are long forgotten.” The Gilded Age brought America to a level of unprecedented prosperity with William McKinley when voters properly rejected the crazy nostrums of Free Silver William Jennings Bryan. Teddy Roosevelt was for all his stentorian “progressivism” a forerunner of modern liberal mediacentric egoists and, really, John you have to get out more and at least read Amity Shlaes (she’s a Chicago girl originally) on the fallacies of the New Deal and how it worsened the Depression.
“So what, now do we have to show for it?” You mean, John, after we won the Cold War? “Don’t look now but the rising economies of our world are Communist China”…which has begun to apply capitalist principles…”a heavily bureaucratized India”…ditto and the “totalitarian monarchies of the Persian Gulf” which have not applied free market principles, John but just squatters rights on their gushers. Get a life, McCarron.
The “Tribune” ought to continue to publish McCarron once a month-but along with him they ought to be sure that this old-style 1960s liberal relativist is paired with a glossary contradicting him with a history check. Yesterday would have been appropriate to run a sentence each on what Augustine stood for and what Freud believed. By not doing this news consumers are being as mis-led as the college students McCarron screws up as he did yesterday by dishing up bad theology, philosophy and economics in one fell swoop. It’s quite a task in one 700 word Op Ed to screw up the thinking of Augustine, Freud and Friedman.
| | |
7/1/2008
Personal Aside: Tell Me, Why…Why…Would Anyone Want to Go to the Taste of Chicago?
Why?
A good number of years ago when I was a regular panelist on the Bruce DuMont radio show, the show would go one night to the Taste of Chicago and broadcast from the WBEZ booth. The first year we were there, I was sickened as we talked of public affairs on the mike, watching the army of vandals chewing, spitting and mulching, here a gross woman in gingham chomping her jaws on something, the juice trickling down her chin; there an oaf pulling on a chicken leg shouting to his fellows with a monotonous, unintelligible chant, now a child being tugged along by a mother unaware that her charge has just emptied her bladder. Following the show, I took a walk around the grounds. It was about 90 degrees with nary a breath of air stirring. What I saw was enough to cause my stomach to recoil. First there was the sight of an overweight chef in a grey undershirt preparing meals supposed to be exotic, bare tattooed arms with huge tufts of sweaty black hairy underarms, perspiration rolling down from his underarms and dripping onto the skillet, while he rubbed his nose to brush away beads of sweat that plopped onto the plate he was holding…the crowd waiting patiently to be served by this performer; a woman, tired and angry at her small child, giving it a demoniacal smack; a central casting rube with a W. Clement Stone mustache carrying a latte with five expresso shots. I asked myself: why? Why?
Long lines, moving very slowly, were lined up before the booths where tiny portions were ladled out by unshaven servers (and these were the women) is desultory fashion, the recipients having to nibble from their fragile, half cardboard half paper plates which fold up in the heat, all the while standing. That was enough for me and so I decided to leave. Leaving itself was a torment, fighting echelons of sweaty people who all seemed intent on going in the opposite direction I was struggling to get. I admit I have a tendency to grow panicky in crowds and for a half hour I could hardly breathe as I battered my way through the suffocating armies marching toward me.
In all of entertainment…even with things I am not interested in, like the ballet…I have never uttered a complaint when forced to go. But I am extraordinarily fortunate to have married a woman 49 years ago who without any importuning by me has come to the same happy conclusion about Taste of Chicago. If I were to name one thing that eludes me about contemporary Chicago it is the strange success of Taste of Chicago…a sad trampling of civility which reduces the finest event of western civilization-a savory dining experience-to ashes and banal barbarism.
| | |
6/30/2008
Personal Asides: Ed Meese was a Guest in Chicago at Closed Luncheon…Fred Barnes Is Proud His Son Wants a Political Career (God Help Us!).  | Madison, Father of the Constitution,
would have mixed emotions about recent
Supreme Court decisions and a national
authority explained to us just how and why. |
Ed Meese
The 75th attorney general of the United States was guest of an organization I serve as program chairman, “Legatus,” a group of Catholic CEOs who meet in the Chicago area for dinner with their spouses once a month. Meese was introduced by a good friend of mine, Ed Feulner, president of the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D. C. where Meese serves as Ronald Reagan Distinguished Fellow. He spoke to us on the recent decisions of the Supreme Court, something many other CEOs would have given their eyeteeth to hear.
As Meese’s remarks were off the record, not to be quoted but able to be paraphrased (the way White House correspondents summarized an interview with the president, showing no direct quotes), let me summarize some of the main points he made but again they must not be taken as verbatim.
On the decision of one of his top former aides, Douglas Kmiec, to endorse and campaign for Barack Obama. There has been a good deal of countervailing opinions about the Kmiec decision from people who worked with him. Given that Kmiec was such an intensive opponent of “Roe v. Wade” and foremost Catholic scholar and definitive defender of unborn life, his coming out for just another abortion rights crusader…not just one who voted against the partial birth abortion ban…not just one who voted not to confirm the last two Supreme Court justice…but as one by reason of his status as judiciary chairman of the Illinois state senate tops all other members of the Democratic Senate in his opposition of the “Born Alive” bill which would allow born baby victims of botched abortions to receive needed emergency medical attention….the turn-around is indecipherable. For reasons of comparison, try these (with some hype but equally shocking to those of us who have followed Kmiec):
Augustine leaves his bishopric in Hippo and returns to his mistress and their illegitimate baby, saying he had re-thought the whole thing and having been a pro-family Manichean wasn’t half bad.
Thomas Aquinas says that on reexamination his proofs for the existence of God are goofy and he’s going to embrace the Big Bang theory but as to what produced the Big Bang he shrugs and says who knows?
Mother Teresa says she’ll retire and go to Vegas where she’ll buy a penthouse condo from the subscriptions of well-wishers and launch a new career as a flamenco dancer.
These things would first call into question their mental stability as it does only to a slightly lesser degree with Doug. The word is that insensate ambition for the judiciary is behind it…but behind THAT is nuttiness.
Second, what happens with some Supreme Court nominees that no matter their vetting, turn sour? Dwight Eisenhower later said the worst decision he ever made was to name Earl Warren as chief justice. John Kennedy rued his appointment of Byron (Whizzer) White, one of his top advisers in the campaign and who was close to Bobby Kennedy, who after he was appointed turned right and became one of the mainstays of the conservative side of the Court. Reagan named Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy who were supposed to be conservatives but who ended up being swing votes, tipping things to the Left. True he appointed Antonin Scalia was named a justice and William Rehnquist chief justice along with the excellent appointment of Robert Bork whose nomination was defeated by the Democratic Senate. This was not construed as a criticism of Meese or Reagan by me but a simple question over what went wrong. I asked: did they lie?
The answer seemed to be no, they didn’t lie but reaffirmed something that people have long believed about the human condition and have written about extensively. The Washington, D. C. social mill is insidious and some people, once they hear the siren call of the opportunity to Stand Tall in Georgetown with the liberal intelligentsia, the “Washington Post” and “New York Times,” fall susceptible. As soon as they cast a vote that is to the liking of the intelligentsia the news media report “they are showing growth in office.” It is as fallacious to try to ferret out this indication to be liked by one’s liberal peers as it is to repeal the multiplication table. It comes down to the human condition.
Scalia and Clarence Thomas were approached but did not get tempted. Harry Blackmun, named by Nixon, had a wife who was hot to trot in the Georgetown social circle; it meant very much to her to be lionized there and she took Harry by the hand and he meekly went along. That and the fact that Harry was chafing as being seen as the slow-witted half of the “Minnesota Twins”-joined at the hip with Warren Burger. That desire for praise and insecure feeling at being taken for granted caused him to try to Stand Tall in Georgetown. Aside from barring a justice from going to cocktail parties, there is no foreseeable way of obviating the human condition. One can only try to see ahead by studying the potential nominee’s weaknesses. Kennedy evidently was seduced when he accepted a commission to teach overseas and gratified intellectuals over there by accepting an international code of law that is not ours…despite the fact that Kennedy had been hard-line.
Third-somewhat surprising but gratifying-the long disused provision of the Constitution to have both Houses vote on a formal declaration of war is troublesome and has been caused by the Left’s often refusal to support war…something unknown before Vietnam. The formal declaration should be returned however and there are ways to do that consistent with immediacy.
Fourth-the Supreme Court decision overturning Louisiana’s enactment of the death penalty for raping a child was an abrogation of Court power. The decision should have been left to the states-but one must understand that the legislation itself is a complicated one…in that coming from the experience of law enforcement authorities, when a person is confronted with the inevitability of getting the death penalty if one is caught, the temptation is to go ahead and kill the child since nothing worse can happen. Makes sense.
Fifth-confirmations to the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary have turned controversial since the abortion decision has been so inflammatory. Traditionally the Senate always regarded the job of confirmation to center only on the nominee’s qualifications for the job, not his or her philosophy of the law. The situation turned ugly with the confirmation battle over Abe Fortas’s nomination as chief justice of the United States-but the situation turned on certain payments Fortas received from a foundation that were made while he was a Justice for very little work which looked suspiciously like a payoff. No ideology or philosophy was challenged there but Fortas withdrew after it was clear he could not win confirmation.
Then the see-saw battle devolved into legal philosophy with the fights being waged over abortion although often the issue wasn’t raised. Robert Bork was “borked” and the Republicans were enraged. It is significant to note that when Clinton named Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the high court Republicans accepted her credentials while disagreeing with her stridently liberal views but she was confirmed easily. This did not happen with George H. W. Bush or George W. Bush.
Fred Barnes.
I forgot to report something that struck me, at least, as interesting. When Fred Barnes spoke earlier at a Chicago meeting of Heritage, he said that if he had to do it over, he would embrace a political career…by which I assume he means a career leading to elective office…than a journalistic one. And second that he is proud that his son now in college is pointing himself to a career in elective office.
Shows how different we are. I have steadfastly and until now successfully discouraged my kids to even think of running for elective office. Not that anyone has-but I would regard that choice the same way as I would if my boys told me they were about to work on a riverboat casino…or if my girls told me they were thinking of being interns to ex-president Bill Clinton. Not that I don’t want them knowledgeable and even involved in the political process in volunteer or even staff positions if they wish-but that should be the extent of it. Reason: without being too churchy about it, I think pointing oneself to elective office is running perilously close to having to make compromises with money and principles as to lose one’s soul. With look and if I am still around, I should be able to dissuade great-grandchildren to do the same thing. It strikes me that for all his sophistication as a journalist, Barnes who has never been involved in a campaign first hand and has only covered them, doesn’t understand the first thing about the bargaining that goes with politics.
My own experience as campaign manager, publicist, staffer in party, state governmental, federal and corporate life has led me to this conclusion since as I approach the age of eighty I have seen enough to split the planets and to make the patriarch Abraham an infidel. The best advice I ever had in my life came when I was importuned to run for congress in Minnesota many years ago and I went to my old boss, Elmer L. Andersen, who had been a very successful governor of Minnesota. A self-made multi-millionaire businessman and entrepreneur, he had served one very memorable term, having lost reelection by 91 votes out of 1,250,000 cast (largely paper ballots). He asked my net worth which was then lamentably insignificant. He said something I shall long remember: elective office is very perilous to the soul (he was a Lutheran) and he did not venture out as a candidate until he had a net worth of some $20 million (which by 1952 standards would amount to about $70 million today). His reason is that to forage around for money is to endanger your very integrity for what you will feel constrained to do to pay the campaign bills.
I have seen candidates rent huge chunks of their souls this way over 50 years…seen them in two states. The ones who did not merchandise their souls were all multi-millionaires, including Peter Fitzgerald one of the most integrity-filled in either state. I once told a very promising young man now in university who wants to do this that he should first make $50 million in the private market. This doesn’t mean he shouldn’t serve in volunteer capacities, on candidatorial search committees and fund-raising assignments, research and speech-writing activities…anything BUT candidacy. But as for himself being a candidate without those resources, he is courting moral as well as economic disaster and probably incipient jail-time. That is why I will not support anyone for major office in this state in 2010 with my endorsement…insignificant as it may be… who does NOT have the wherewithal to finance his own campaign and hence be free of morally crippling conditions that would involve him/her in Faustian bargains. For openers: the George Ryan career and the Rod Blagojevich career. Enough said?
| | | Flashback: Learning to Admire Heroes from Beowulf as Taught by Steve Humphrey…on Death and Being Ready when God Calls Us from Fr. Emeric Lawrence OSB… All Leading to a Lesson Learned from the German Nuns.
[Going on 80 with memories for my kids and grandchildren].
The Core Curriculum of Classical Studies.
Like a crash of a tidal wave for this writer as he turned 19 came the drowning with culture from the old Saint John’s. Steve Humphrey, a tiny man, impeccably dressed short-cropped, graying hair, Windsor knotted tie, deep-set eyes and an idiosyncratic way of leaning his head on his shoulder as he reflected, was a professor who introduced me to the classics. Long dead, he still possesses my deepest admiration and love. So powerful was he when he read aloud in class that we began to understand immediately the import of the words-only to discover when we were left on our own to read in our rooms and did not have him to read to us, we foundered.
I remember going to his room on first floor Benet with a lack of understanding of a tract from “Beowulf” only to find that Maury Mischke, an ex-GI and then sports editor of “The Record,” the school newspaper had arrived first with a problem from “The Canterbury Tales.” I’ll take him first, said Humphrey, an ex-GI, in deference to Mischke’s status as an ex-GI (in those days they were preferential in respect by the university). As I watched, Mischke handed him the book and Humphrey read aloud from it, slowly, sonorously. Not only did Mischke get it on that first reading by Humphrey but I did as well despite that I hadn’t tackled it yet. Humphrey returned the text to him with a slow smile and asked: What’s so difficult? Nothing, said Mischke, but if I had you at my elbow to read it aloud to me, I’d get it easier! No sooner had Mischke left than Humphrey did the same for me.
He said as he reclined his head to the left where it almost touched his shoulder: “Now listen as I read--Beowulf the Geat goes to Denmark to help Hrothgar, king of the Danes, get rid of a monster dwelling on the bottom of the sea called Grendel and here”-citing a passage-“Grendel gets hungry and returns for a snack, grabbing Beowulf for a dainty course!” I exulted: Now I got it! I GOT IT! And hurried back to my room to devour the rest of the assignment.
All the while we learned that Europe’ glories were created by the Catholic Church from early western civilization taught by Fr. Dunstan Tucker, OSB, a handsome, prematurely white haired cleric fighting asthma when the weather was soggy…sometimes taken to the infirmary doubled up so he could breathe in short gasps… who had been a naval officer in the recent war, who was also an expert on Dante and the university baseball coach. And concurrently the meaning of death from a man who was theologian and my French professor, Fr. Emeric Lawrence OSB, an ex-GI who had seen a lot of action in the South Pacific as a chaplain, a cogent writer as well, he telling us that Christ’s words for us to be ready when He visits us as a thief in the night and His emphasis on the minor worth of riches and fame in comparison with the grace of God being as valid as when He spoke them first in Palestine. Not to be confused with the enthusiasm of our American history professor, Fr. Vincent Tregater OSB with patent leather shiny black hair and an always beaming countenance whom we called “Smiling Jack” after a cartoon character of that era, who informed us that a 28-year-old scholar had just written a definitive biography of Andrew Jackson and had received the Pulitzer prize for it, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
And then art appreciation from Fr. Angelo Zankl OSB, then a ruddy, black-haired dynamo, who died earlier this year at 105…no, that’s not a typo, who taught us that Leonardo took so long to complete “The Last Supper” because his faith mattered more to him than artistic perfection and he strained the utmost of his talents to make his masterpiece served God perfectly.
All of these things cascaded upon my 19-year-old brain at the same time while I heard my classmates, some grey-haired ex-GIs ask questions seemingly as deep as the lectures themselves, leading me to go deferentially to the interrogator after class and ask what he meant. But ex-GIs were not always intellectual. We held our Ethics class in a wooden barracks that had been built to accommodate the overflow of students in this first year after the war, a building whose windows seemed sealed shut. Okay in the winter but unless it was zero or below outside, it was always stifling hot and the windows didn’t budge when you tried to open them. Bede Hall, an ex-GI and scion of a well-known lumber products family in Saint Cloud, the Matthew Hall Lumber Company, struggled with the window as class was getting ready to start, groaning to a presence that stood behind him, “Christ! It smells like a French bordello in here!”
He turned his head to be nose-to-nose with the professor of Christian Ethics, Mr. Emerson Hynes (later to become Gene McCarthy’s legislative assistant when McCarthy served in the Senate). Hynes smiled and said softly-but in a tone that carried throughout the room-“well, Mr. Hall, we presume you know just how a French bordello smells but rather than making it public, take your seat and keep that confidence to yourself and your confessor.”
The Early Concentration on Sexual Ethics.
At that early time-1947, twenty six years before “Roe v. Wade”-Hynes lay down the principles governing abortion, not by consulting a book about it but by beginning with Augustine and his uncertainty as to when life began (he thinking it started with “quickening” or the movement of the unborn child in the womb) through Aquinas down to the present doctrines propounded by Pius XII: it is lawful to extract from the mother a womb that is dangerous diseased i.e. cancerous which is not the same as a direct abortion, Catholic morality allowing this kind of rare surgery according to what has come to be known as the “principle of double effect”-my seatmate nudging me at that point and saying “that’s a question sure to come in the semester exam.”
It assuredly did. “Give an example of the principle of double effect.” Answer: The action, removal of the diseased womb, is good, consisting in excising an infected part of the human body and which saves the life of the mother albeit this eliminates the possibility of her having children in the future-but understand this is very rare.” Follow-up-now give an example of wrongly applied principle of double effect. Answer: “If the unborn child were to be aborted through artificial means because it’s birth would be inconvenient, or to save the reputation of an unwed mother or father or both.” Then, suppose the unborn baby is slated to be born retarded or with some serious deformity-is abortion permitted as a humane act? Answer, the same in 1947 when legal abortion was almost inconceivable as now when so-called “therapeutic” means is applied-no.
The exam questions continued: Does the Church teach that it prefers the life of the child over the life of the mother? What to do in that regard? Answer: Neither the life of the mother nor the life of the child can be subjected to an act of direct suppression. In one case as with the other, there is only one obligation under Catholic ethics-make every effort to save the lives of both mother AND child.
Finally, “wherein lies the sinfulness of abortion?” Answer-It consists of the homicidal intent to kill unborn life which is the sin of murder by intent.
Lectures dealing with reproduction were highly stressed by Hynes. Ex-GIs and we teeners were confronted with the doctrine stressed by the Decretals of Pope Gregory IX which summarize Aquinas: contraception is ethically wrong and a grave sin because it contradicts human nature. Question: “what did Pius XI say about contraception?” Answer-two things: he condemned the essential sinfulness of contraception and promulgated the Church’s absolute right in modern times as over the centuries to pronounce on the morality of human behavior.
It is ironic to note that while we dumb ones were taking philosophy and ethics from two authenticist scholars-Fr. Ernest Kilzer OSB for philosophy and Emerson Hynes for ethics-the “brighter ones” as adjudged were taking both from the leading scholar of so-called liturgical revival, the heir to the late Fr. Virgil Michel OSB, Fr. Godfrey Diekmann OSB. Twenty-two years later Godfrey was a signer of a document by modernist theologians protesting Paul VI’s “Humanae Vitae,” the pope’s condemnation of artificial birth control. A number of men who took theology from the dynamic, spectacularly colorful Godfrey ran into serious intellectual problems when the so-called “spirit of Vatican II” came into conflict with authentic theology and a number of them, confused, left the Church for which Someone Higher than earthly authority will render judgment on Godfrey…and indubitably already has.
| | |
6/27/2008
Personal Aside: High Sources (but Anonymous) Confirm Daley-to-George Agreement to Keep Pfleger.  | | Managing partner of Daley & George? |
Daley & George.
It started with a high clerical source telling me that Mayor Daley called Francis Cardinal George on the phone and urged the prelate not to remove Fr. Michael Pfleger permanently. It was seconded when another knowledgeable (not high but well placed) source with connections in the city administration confirmed the call was made. It confirms what this column has maintained-that Pfleger is an important albeit ad hoc leader in Daley’s Democratic party who has been to Daley’s summer cottage and has shared the mayoral private box at White Sox games. Pfleger’s command of thousands of troops (most of them non-Catholic) who go to his church for Sunday (railing and screaming hate for whitey notwithstanding) is a home for political activism which is indispensable to the party. And as we know, the lay chancellor, Jimmy Lago, is an ex-precinct captain with heavy-heavy Democratic and liberal ties. And as we also know, “it can be said the Republican party never had a soul.”
One of the major law firms in this town is Daley & George…Michael Daley, the mayor’s brother and Jim George a partner. Daley & George may stand for another partnership. Can I prove the phone call was made? Nope. But was the suspension harmful to Pfleger and the Democratic party? Far from it: it gave Pfleger a new lease on life. It is not the first time the Catholic church here in Chicago and elsewhere has been made a pawn in politics courtesy of partnerships such as this. The Kennedys and Richard Cardinal Cushing of Boston; the Democrats in the Congress and Theodore Cardinal McCarrick who spared them embarrassment by willfully subverting Ratzinger’s letter opposing pro-abort Catholic politicians being allowed to receive the Eucharist.
Earlier, George Cardinal Mundelein and FDR. FDR to Attorney General Francis Biddle to the IRS to threaten Dubuque archbishop Francis Beckman which got rid of a pesky independent-minded and anti-war prelate by threatening him with IRS action on paintings he had purchased as an investment for the archdiocese, leading to pressure for his forced recall by U. S., Catholic hierarchy including Mundelein. FDR to Thomas (Tommy the Cork) Corcoran to Mundelein, getting Mundelein’s approval on the nature of an appointment to the Vatican, not for an ambassador (that would be too risky in the anti-Catholic climate) but a special emissary, the retired U.S. Steel president (and a Protestant) Myron C. Taylor. FDR to Edward Cardinal Mooney of Detroit via Mundelein silencing Fr. Charles E. Coughlin because he was irritating Roosevelt. Note: Coughlin was an early day Pfleger and should have been silenced as a hate monger.
Earlier in the 20th century it goes back to Theodore Roosevelt and St. Paul archbishop John Ireland, Ireland giving the president political advice and the president lobbying for Ireland to get the red hat (which didn’t work and in fact killed any chance Ireland had).
| | | OBAMA’S AFFECTION FOR “CRITICAL LEGAL STUDIES” MAKES HIM THE MOST RADICAL CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT YET.
Last week’s column in The Wanderer with updating. More about Doug Kmiec and a whole lot more about Critical Legal Studies.
By Thomas F. Roeser
CHICAGO-A meeting here last week at 55 east Monroe between 30 evangelical Protestant leaders and Sen. Barack Obama included a sharpie working on Obama’s side: ex-Reagan aide, constitutional scholar and supposedly Catholic social conservative Douglas Kmiec. I wrote about Kmiec before in The Wanderer and have known him for several years. He and I both wrote Op Eds for the Tribune before my contract was not extended because I was too conservative. Doug stayed on and remained in the good graces of the paper’s editorial board, witness his prominent appearance on the paper’s editorial page last week in passionate defense of Obama.
If he is successful at his trade, Doug won’t have to lie about Obama’s record on abortion-just obfuscate it, minimizing its effect, saying that getting rid of legalized abortion requires far more than a constitutional amendment but also non-governmental things (true)-so no big deal. In a column for the Trib he says “he [Obama] intends to ask government and non-governmental entities-and you and me-to do our part. Frankly, it’s more than a little exhilarating to be given that much faith and trust.” How touching. Then he rhapsodized about Obama’s brimming good will, a sly hint that he may be amenable to softening his pro-abort stand. It’s a very tough sell. Kmiec must convince the churchmen and the liberal secular media to equate Obama’s pro-abort record with McCain’s pro-life one…blanding both out with so many fine legal distinctions as to make both equivalent on the issue. If it works, he will likely be in for a fine reward from President Obama.
Kmiec, a native Chicagoan whose father was a foot soldier for old Mayor Richard J. Daley before Douglas turned conservative and Republican, is the brilliant constitutional scholar who was head of the prestigious Office of Legal Counsel for Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, performing excellently as a pro-life advocate in that position. His resume in the law is impeccable: former dean and St. Thomas More professor of Catholic University of America (the Thomas More name rings hollow now), director of the Thomas White Center on Law & Government at Notre Dame; now chair in constitutional law at Pepperdine University’s school of law.
However richly he deserved it, Kmiec missed being appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court by George W. Bush. Former White House colleagues tell me why. It had nothing to do with Kmiec’s abilities but because the George W. Bush people felt (rightly in my view) that since Kmiec has had such a lengthy paper trail in support of pro-life that a Democratic senate would be sure to deny him confirmation. As it was, getting John Roberts and Sam Alito confirmed was tough enough (Doug’s new found patron, Obama didn’t vote for them for instance) and they didn’t have the voluminously long record of public writings in behalf of pro-life that Kmiec had.
But former fellow law professors who know Kmiec well, say getting on the Supreme Court has long been his life’s objective. Nothing wrong with that since he has the intellectual resources to be a brilliant jurist. After Bush left him in the lurch (he feels), he started out the political year supporting Mitt Romney’s presidential bid, explaining adroitly Romney’s move from pro-abort to pro-life, a tough job in itself. But when Romney’s effort fizzled, Kmiec jumped to Obama, stunning some of his colleagues but not one in particular at Notre Dame who told me he’s not surprised by Kmiec’s opportunism.
Kmiec’s rationale seems to be that if he gives his all to the Obama candidacy and succeeds, he (Kmiec) will likely be nominated by a President Obama to the high court. Given the likelihood of an enlarged Democratic majority in the Senate, Kmiec might be able to cobble together enough votes from pro-aborts and forgiving pro-lifers to make it through. He may well be right. Believe it or not there are some pro-lifers who feel that if Kmiec were named by Obama, the slippery professor could revert to pro-life; thus he could be a double agent. Or maybe a double-double agent. If I were Obama, I would be suspicious too -for nothing is intellectually simple with Kmiec.
The Obama-Kmiec Team.
The Obama-Kmiec meeting with evangelicals was not to convince them that Obama was suddenly hit by a lightening bolt on the way to Damascus and has become pro-life…but to demonstrate that while adamantly pro-abort, his door is ever-open for a deal and negotiation with the full contingent of evangelical leaders, a meeting Kmiec assuredly will be handling.
Among those crowded into a conference room was a group that was far from stolidly pro-life to be sure-but mostly black ministers who favor Obama anyhow and might importune their more conservative brothers to hop on the train. The gathering was a closed-door propaganda event designed to show Obama’s openness.
Attendees included Cameron Strang, founder and CEO of Relevant Media (not to be confused with Catholic Relevant Radio) but the publisher of the hip Christian magazine in liberal terminology with a big kid audience; Bishop T. D. Jakes, the black leader of a Dallas mega-church; best-selling author Max Lucado; Paul Corts, president of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities; Rev. Stephen Thurston, president of the National Baptist Convention of America and black pastor on Chicago’s south side.
Also, Rev. T. Dewitt Smith, president of the Progressive National Baptist convention, Inc. and AME Bishop Phillip R. Cousin, Sr. But the dessert, whipped cream with a cherry on the top, was the presence of the Rev. Franklin Graham, son of Billy and head of the Billy Graham Evangelical Association. If either one of the Grahams might tell the media, for instance, “we should consider this young man because he has a good heart,” a major battle would be won and Doug Kmiec would be the victor. And with Obama’s election, Doug would be on his way to the high court.
Stumbling Block: Obama’s Opposition to “Born Alive.”
All the same, Kmiec has endorsed for the presidency not your average liberal Democrat pro-choicer but the man who has certifiably the worst pro-abort record of anyone in the Senate and of anyone who has ever sought the presidency [italics mine]. Obama is not only a vehement advocate of abortion rights and opponent of the partial birth abortion ban. In the Illinois legislature as senate judiciary chairman he personally killed all efforts to pass a “Born Alive” bill that would save the lives of babies born from botched abortions who were still struggling for breath. Obama’s veto certified that such babies will die unattended, writhing in pain, because to save one would jeopardize, he and his wife Michelle wrote, abortion rights for women, in that it could aid legislative efforts to make abortion more difficult to get.
Before he came to the U. S. Senate, that body, while under control of the Democrats voted on the same legislation and passed the “Born Alive” bill which Obama had opposed as a state lawmaker. Those voting for it included the laundry list of most leading pro-abort senators including Sens. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), Diane Feinstein (D-Calif) and Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.)
An almost insuperable task for Kmiec is, with Obama unrepentant of killing “Born Alive,” to parse the necessary rationale to obfuscate and downgrade a simple black and white pro-life distinction on unborn life between his new boss and John McCain. He does not abjure pro-life but writes as a pro-lifer with legalistic distinctions. McCain as you know favors a constitutional amendment that overrules Roe and sends the abortion issue to the states. Obama does not favor such an amendment. Now, take this masterpiece of twisted logic from Kmiec’s recent “Catholic Online” column where he tackles the question “whom should Catholics vote for vis-à-vis pro-life?”
“Given that abortion is an intrinsic evil without justification, thinking the overturning of Roe `solves’ the abortion problem, when it does not, can mislead Catholics into the erroneous conclusion that any candidate unwilling to pledge reversal of Roe is categorically unworthy of support.”
Reasonable-sounding to some, but hold on! But how about one who has voted in favor of leaving born alive babies, maimed through abortion, to suffer in agony and die in pain rather than have a hospital treat them humanely and giving them medical attention because abortion rights would be trammeled on?
That’s very tough even for smart, savvy lawyer Doug Kmiec to handle so he ignores the issue. But if any serious pro-lifers are convinced to vote for Obama, only deception and duplicity will sway them.
Kmiec’s “Martyrdom” for Conscience.
A major weapon used by Kmiec to court favor with the secular media and Obama supporters is his supposed punishment by the Catholic Church because he has announced for Obama. He announced that at Mass sponsored by Catholic businessmen whom he was to address later at dinner that he approached the altar to receiving the Eucharist-and was denied. The priest shook his head and declined to offer Kmiec the host. Kmiec then reportedly said: “You’re making a mistake, Father.” The priest replied calmly, “No I’m not.” Kmiec returned to his pew. His wife rushed out of the church in tears. Then Kmiec went on a media campaign, reporting that he was denied to various liberal media sources including E. J. Dionne, a Catholic and longtime liberal Op Ed writer for the Washington Post, a former Rhodes scholar and holder of a doctorate in political science from Harvard. Kmiec’s argument: horrors! By denying him, the priest turned the Eucharist into a “political weapon.” Obviously Kmiec knows better than that.
Dionne broke the story in his column on June 3, writing “Word spread like wildfire in Catholic circles: Douglas Kmiec, a staunch Republican, firm foe of abortion and veteran of the Reagan Justice department, had been denied Communion. His sin? Kmiec, a Catholic, who can cite papal pronouncements with the facility of a theological scholar, shocked old friends and adversaries alike earlier this year by endorsing Barack Obama for president. For at least one priest, Kmiec’s support for a pro-choice politician made him a willing participant in a grave moral evil.
“Kmiec was denied Communion in April at a Mass for a group of Catholic business people he later addressed at dinner. The episode has not received wide attention outside the Catholic world but it is the opening shot in an argument that could have a large impact on this year’s presidential campaign: Is it legitimate for bishops and priests to deny Communion to those supporting candidates who favor abortion rights?...Kmiec says he is grateful because the episode reminded him of the importance of the Euchari8st in his spiritual life, and because he hopes it will alert others to the dangers of `using Communion as a weapon.’” (Italics mine).
The issue quickly gained publicity speed as Kmiec wished. Nina Totenberg of National Public Radio and dean of the Supreme Court press corps, used it last week on the air. Totenberg is the reporter who broke the Anita Hill story that almost lost Senate confirmation for Clarence Thomas in December,1991 hours before his Senate confirmation vote.
Totenberg interviewed Kmiec and conferred the garland of martyrdom on his brow which he accepted modestly, saying he would not identify the priest who denied him out of charity. Just the thing to win support for Kmiec from liberals who incardinate refugees from conservatism to Stand Tall in Georgetown, the liberal sanctuary in Washington, D. C. and polish his image so as to become an overnight liberal hero. Also, Totenberg found a liberal theologian at Georgetown (not difficult) who railed that the offense to Doug Kmiec by the priest punished him, was an attempt to arm-twist Kmiec’s conscience, attesting that no priest has the right to deny anyone Communion without checking with his bishop.
Never? How could a Catholic theologian seriously stand by that statement? Suppose a drunk weaves into the sanctuary and approaches the priest in the act of distributing the Eucharist. Must the priest interrupt the Mass and call his bishop on the phone to ask him what he should do? Ridiculous. The answer from those skilled in theology with whom I’ve talked is this: the priest on the altar must make the judgment. If, in fact, the priest has doubts as to the validity of the communicant, he makes the call.
But that’s not Doug’s worry. He’s a certifiable liberal martyr now. So, invested in the toga and regalia of full martyrdom as a turned-away communicant, Kmiec wrote his Op Ed for the Chicago Tribune last week. His byline carried the prime identification: “Douglas W. Kmiec, who was denied Communion by a priest for endorsing Barack Obama is a professor of constitutional law at Pepperdine University and was an assistant U. S. attorney general during the Reagan administration.” [Italics mine]. Thus Obama’s hometown newspaper should solidify the impression that Doug Kmiec is a man of conscience willing to be used as a test case for
conscience” in behalf of Obama’s campaign. In his Op Ed, Kmiec skipped Obama’s pro-abortion views, certainly his “Born Alive” kill and gave a sugary flavor to his new boss’s meeting with evangelicals: “Why would the presumptive nominee of the Democratic party devote so much time talking faith rather than politics? [sic]. Quite simply, because it is the senator’s deep personal faith that explains his audaciously positive hope for his country.”
Hurdle 2: “Critical Legal Studies” Influencing Obama.
But Kmiec will also need more than his sugared words to get Obama’s true views on legal construct through to the public. The dirty little secret which I discovered after several sessions interviewing him on ABC Radio in Chicago, is that full-blooming with his credentials as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review and lecturer in constitutional law at the University of Chicago, Obama has been all but an announced exponent of what is known as “Critical Legal Studies” that was fashionable in the `80s, the view that legal language is, in fact, a false discourse that perpetuates hierarchies-men over women, rich over poor, majorities over minorities whereas the object of law is to not merely determine “constitutionality” but force-feed “equality” whether the law requires it or not.
The old Doug Kmiec of a few months ago would be expected to stand opposed to that view. As recent as last year, Obama gave ample demonstration that he was enlisted in the new view which comes as close to enunciation of Critical Legal Studies as has been made by any public official. .
On July 12, 2007 Obama addressed the Planned Parenthood Action Fund in Washington, D. C. Here are some excerpts where he answers questions. I have taken the liberty to parse it.
Obama: Well, the first thing I’d do as president is, is sign the Freedom of Choice Act [Applause].
Fact: The Freedom of Choice Act was introduced in Congress one day after the Supreme Court upheld the Partial Birth Abortion act on April 19, 2007. The FOCA would invalidate many federal, state and local anti-abortion laws including the Partial-Birth Abortion Act and would create an absolute right to abortion overriding any federal, state or local law that simply “interfered with” that right, no matter how compelling the justification..
Obama: That’s the first thing that I’d do. Um, but the, okay, but, but your question about the federal courts is absolutely on target. I taught Constitutional law for ten years and I have to say after reading this latest decision and the series of decisions that the Supreme Court has been putting forward that I find it baffling… Because sometimes they are striking down acts of Congress like the Violence Against Women Act, showing very little deference to congressional decision-making and that somehow when it comes to a piece of legislation that is not taking into account clear doctrine that the Supreme Court has laid out, they say, “Oh, that’s fine. Congress can make those decisions.” There is an inconsistency and I believe a hypocrisy in terms of how we see many of those decisions issued.
Fact: He’s for congressional “decision-making” when it suits the liberal agenda and for the Court overruling congressional “decision-making” when it doesn’t. Sophistry. Finding the Partial Birth Abortion ban constitutional is in accordance with its powers as defined by John Marshall in Marbury v. Madison (1803).
Obama: And one way is a cramped and narrow way in which the Constitution and the courts essentially become the rubber stamps of the powerful in society. And then there’s another version [sic] of the court that says that the courts are the refuge of the powerless. Because oftentimes they can lose in the democratic back and forth. They may be locked out and prevented from fully participating in the democratic process.
Fact: “Powerful” and “Powerless” is Critical Legal Studies language.
Obama: That’s one of the reasons I opposed Alito, you know, as well as Justice Roberts. When Roberts came up and everyone was saying, “You know, he’s very smart and he seems a very decent man and he loves his wife [Laughter]. You know, he’s good to his dog [laughter]. He’s so well qualified. I said, `well, look, that’s absolutely true and in most Supreme Court decis--, in the overwhelming number of Supreme Court decisions, that’s enough. Good intellect, you read the statute, you look at the case law and most of the time the law’s pretty clear. Ninety-five percent of the time, Justice Ginsberg, Justice Thomas, Justice Scalia, they’re all gonna agree on the outcome.
Fact: Meaning something else is required beyond the “mere” reading of the law which might deviate into Originalism, horrors…, the pretext of Critical Legal Studies.
If he’s going to make this sale, Doug Kmiec has to wrestle with Obama’s support of the essentials of Critical Legal Studies well as his own conscience.
| | | OBAMA’S AFFECTION FOR “CRITICAL LEGAL STUDIES” MAKES HIM THE MOST RADICAL CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT YET.
Last week’s column in The Wanderer with updating. More about Doug Kmiec and a whole lot more about Critical Legal Studies.
By Thomas F. Roeser
CHICAGO-A meeting here last week at 55 east Monroe between 30 evangelical Protestant leaders and Sen. Barack Obama included a sharpie working on Obama’s side: ex-Reagan aide, constitutional scholar and supposedly Catholic social conservative Douglas Kmiec. I wrote about Kmiec before in The Wanderer and have known him for several years. He and I both wrote Op Eds for the Tribune before my contract was not extended because I was too conservative. Doug stayed on and remained in the good graces of the paper’s editorial board, witness his prominent appearance on the paper’s editorial page last week in passionate defense of Obama.
If he is successful at his trade, Doug won’t have to lie about Obama’s record on abortion-just obfuscate it, minimizing its effect, saying that getting rid of legalized abortion requires far more than a constitutional amendment but also non-governmental things (true)-so no big deal. In a column for the Trib he says “he [Obama] intends to ask government and non-governmental entities-and you and me-to do our part. Frankly, it’s more than a little exhilarating to be given that much faith and trust.” How touching. Then he rhapsodized about Obama’s brimming good will, a sly hint that he may be amenable to softening his pro-abort stand. It’s a very tough sell. Kmiec must convince the churchmen and the liberal secular media to equate Obama’s pro-abort record with McCain’s pro-life one…blanding both out with so many fine legal distinctions as to make both equivalent on the issue. If it works, he will likely be in for a fine reward from President Obama.
Kmiec, a native Chicagoan whose father was a foot soldier for old Mayor Richard J. Daley before Douglas turned conservative and Republican, is the brilliant constitutional scholar who was head of the prestigious Office of Legal Counsel for Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, performing excellently as a pro-life advocate in that position. His resume in the law is impeccable: former dean and St. Thomas More professor of Catholic University of America (the Thomas More name rings hollow now), director of the Thomas White Center on Law & Government at Notre Dame; now chair in constitutional law at Pepperdine University’s school of law.
However richly he deserved it, Kmiec missed being appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court by George W. Bush. Former White House colleagues tell me why. It had nothing to do with Kmiec’s abilities but because the George W. Bush people felt (rightly in my view) that since Kmiec has had such a lengthy paper trail in support of pro-life that a Democratic senate would be sure to deny him confirmation. As it was, getting John Roberts and Sam Alito confirmed was tough enough (Doug’s new found patron, Obama didn’t vote for them for instance) and they didn’t have the voluminously long record of public writings in behalf of pro-life that Kmiec had.
But former fellow law professors who know Kmiec well, say getting on the Supreme Court has long been his life’s objective. Nothing wrong with that since he has the intellectual resources to be a brilliant jurist. After Bush left him in the lurch (he feels), he started out the political year supporting Mitt Romney’s presidential bid, explaining adroitly Romney’s move from pro-abort to pro-life, a tough job in itself. But when Romney’s effort fizzled, Kmiec jumped to Obama, stunning some of his colleagues but not one in particular at Notre Dame who told me he’s not surprised by Kmiec’s opportunism.
Kmiec’s rationale seems to be that if he gives his all to the Obama candidacy and succeeds, he (Kmiec) will likely be nominated by a President Obama to the high court. Given the likelihood of an enlarged Democratic majority in the Senate, Kmiec might be able to cobble together enough votes from pro-aborts and forgiving pro-lifers to make it through. He may well be right. Believe it or not there are some pro-lifers who feel that if Kmiec were named by Obama, the slippery professor could revert to pro-life; thus he could be a double agent. Or maybe a double-double agent. If I were Obama, I would be suspicious too -for nothing is intellectually simple with Kmiec.
The Obama-Kmiec Team.
The Obama-Kmiec meeting with evangelicals was not to convince them that Obama was suddenly hit by a lightening bolt on the way to Damascus and has become pro-life…but to demonstrate that while adamantly pro-abort, his door is ever-open for a deal and negotiation with the full contingent of evangelical leaders, a meeting Kmiec assuredly will be handling.
Among those crowded into a conference room was a group that was far from stolidly pro-life to be sure-but mostly black ministers who favor Obama anyhow and might importune their more conservative brothers to hop on the train. The gathering was a closed-door propaganda event designed to show Obama’s openness.
Attendees included Cameron Strang, founder and CEO of Relevant Media (not to be confused with Catholic Relevant Radio) but the publisher of the hip Christian magazine in liberal terminology with a big kid audience; Bishop T. D. Jakes, the black leader of a Dallas mega-church; best-selling author Max Lucado; Paul Corts, president of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities; Rev. Stephen Thurston, president of the National Baptist Convention of America and black pastor on Chicago’s south side.
Also, Rev. T. Dewitt Smith, president of the Progressive National Baptist convention, Inc. and AME Bishop Phillip R. Cousin, Sr. But the dessert, whipped cream with a cherry on the top, was the presence of the Rev. Franklin Graham, son of Billy and head of the Billy Graham Evangelical Association. If either one of the Grahams might tell the media, for instance, “we should consider this young man because he has a good heart,” a major battle would be won and Doug Kmiec would be the victor. And with Obama’s election, Doug would be on his way to the high court.
Stumbling Block: Obama’s Opposition to “Born Alive.”
All the same, Kmiec has endorsed for the presidency not your average liberal Democrat pro-choicer but the man who has certifiably the worst pro-abort record of anyone in the Senate and of anyone who has ever sought the presidency [italics mine]. Obama is not only a vehement advocate of abortion rights and opponent of the partial birth abortion ban. In the Illinois legislature as senate judiciary chairman he personally killed all efforts to pass a “Born Alive” bill that would save the lives of babies born from botched abortions who were still struggling for breath. Obama’s veto certified that such babies will die unattended, writhing in pain, because to save one would jeopardize, he and his wife Michelle wrote, abortion rights for women, in that it could aid legislative efforts to make abortion more difficult to get.
Before he came to the U. S. Senate, that body, while under control of the Democrats voted on the same legislation and passed the “Born Alive” bill which Obama had opposed as a state lawmaker. Those voting for it included the laundry list of most leading pro-abort senators including Sens. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), Diane Feinstein (D-Calif) and Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.)
An almost insuperable task for Kmiec is, with Obama unrepentant of killing “Born Alive,” to parse the necessary rationale to obfuscate and downgrade a simple black and white pro-life distinction on unborn life between his new boss and John McCain. He does not abjure pro-life but writes as a pro-lifer with legalistic distinctions. McCain as you know favors a constitutional amendment that overrules Roe and sends the abortion issue to the states. Obama does not favor such an amendment. Now, take this masterpiece of twisted logic from Kmiec’s recent “Catholic Online” column where he tackles the question “whom should Catholics vote for vis-à-vis pro-life?”
“Given that abortion is an intrinsic evil without justification, thinking the overturning of Roe `solves’ the abortion problem, when it does not, can mislead Catholics into the erroneous conclusion that any candidate unwilling to pledge reversal of Roe is categorically unworthy of support.”
Reasonable-sounding to some, but hold on! But how about one who has voted in favor of leaving born alive babies, maimed through abortion, to suffer in agony and die in pain rather than have a hospital treat them humanely and giving them medical attention because abortion rights would be trammeled on?
That’s very tough even for smart, savvy lawyer Doug Kmiec to handle so he ignores the issue. But if any serious pro-lifers are convinced to vote for Obama, only deception and duplicity will sway them.
Kmiec’s “Martyrdom” for Conscience.
A major weapon used by Kmiec to court favor with the secular media and Obama supporters is his supposed punishment by the Catholic Church because he has announced for Obama. He announced that at Mass sponsored by Catholic businessmen whom he was to address later at dinner that he approached the altar to receiving the Eucharist-and was denied. The priest shook his head and declined to offer Kmiec the host. Kmiec then reportedly said: “You’re making a mistake, Father.” The priest replied calmly, “No I’m not.” Kmiec returned to his pew. His wife rushed out of the church in tears. Then Kmiec went on a media campaign, reporting that he was denied to various liberal media sources including E. J. Dionne, a Catholic and longtime liberal Op Ed writer for the Washington Post, a former Rhodes scholar and holder of a doctorate in political science from Harvard. Kmiec’s argument: horrors! By denying him, the priest turned the Eucharist into a “political weapon.” Obviously Kmiec knows better than that.
Dionne broke the story in his column on June 3, writing “Word spread like wildfire in Catholic circles: Douglas Kmiec, a staunch Repub |
| |
