CalPundit links to Devra and others regarding the Catholic church’s recent edict to politicians regarding their positions on abortion.
CAN CATHOLIC POLITICIANS DISAGREE WITH THE CHURCH?….
The bishop’s newfound aggressiveness seems to have been partly prompted by a Vatican document released a couple of weeks ago telling Catholic politicians that they are obligated to follow church doctrine on a variety of topics, including abortion. As Jim Capozzola pointed out last week, the Vatican wasn’t really saying anything new, but they were trying to re-emphasize existing doctrine, and it seems to have hit home.
I am not a religious person. I try, however, to be sensitive and respectful of others beliefs and I don’t usually cast my political positions in terms of religious faith or my own agnosticism.
But, I really have to ask my Catholic friends how they are able to take seriously moral edicts from the leaders of their church at the present time? I find it impossible to understand how papal infallibility, moral instruction and rampant institutional child molestation and cover-ups can be reconciled through either logic or faith.
Maybe it’s just me, but if I were a member of such a congregation I think I’d be thinking in terms of Schism II. For the hierarchy to be taking political action, in this country at this time just smacks of the kind of hubris that landed this church some serious deep waters a few centuries ago.
Again, it’s really not my business. But, I would be very interested in hearing how rational Catholics are dealing with this.
The Blogtopian Constitution requires that one designated blogger be at an undisclosed location during the SOTU in case Andy Sullivan or Free Republic spam the internet with hot, breathy descriptions of manly presidential glutes and guts, thus causing all thinking people’s brains to explode and ending the blogosphere as we know it. I’m afraid that I was it this year. Therefore, I was mercifully unable to see George Winston Bush deliver his usual masterful oratory last night. I am especially sorry that I missed the final, absolute, I-Mean-it-for-real-this-time case for regime change…er…no disarmament…uh…liberation, yeah that’s right, liberation of Iraq. Thankfully, TBOGG was kind enough to analyze the all the new facts presented and distill it down to the essential fine points for me:
War. What Is It Good For? Absolute Manhood for Chickenhawks: We’re going. Americans will die in Iraq and possibly at home in retaliation. The oil companies will get their oil after the US government (us) pays to restore the fields to workability. Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle will share a deep wet kiss…with lots of tongue. Michael Kelly will finally have an erection…his wife won’t notice or care. Poppy Bush will finally be avenged, but not in time to stop his moral rot. And little George Walker Bush will get his first pubic hair.
Quick get a camera…..
Julia over at Sisyphus Shrugged does a nice rundown as well and points out another shift in Bush’s usually hawkish rhetoric:
Reader Leah (whom I now have the pleasure to harass about getting her own blog) gives me a heads up to a comment that Ed Harris made about our Fearless Leader, Cowboy Bob:
SHIELDS: Now for the Outrage of the Week.
Bob Novak.
NOVAK: Actor Ed Harris came to Washington this week for a pro abortion dinner.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ED HARRIS, ACTOR: We’ve got this guy in the White House who thinks he is a man, you know, who projects himself as a man because he has a certain masculinity, and he’s a good old boy, and he used to drink, and he knows how to shoot a gun and how to drive a pickup truck, et cetera, like that. That’s not the definition of a man, (EXPLETIVE DELETED) it. (God-dammit was the deleted expletive)
(END VIDEO CLIP)
NOVAK: It is simply disgraceful for Democrats to associate with this Hollywood sleaze.
Leah adds:
Sleaze? What’s sleazy about Ed Harris? I guess in Novak’s shock, shock, that anyone might say anything unflattering about a President….especially after the free ride Clinton got…..
Yeah, I just hate it when politicians associate with Hollywood celebrities. Why just the other day, Nancy Reagan was seen hobnobbing with a whole sleazy bunch of them at the Bel Air hotel.
Both Kate O’Beirne of National Review, on Capital Gang, and Bill Kristol on Fox used almost identical language to describe a suddenly more hawkish sounding Colin Powell: “Colin Powell is now where Dick Cheney was last August, inspections won’t work, we cannot disarm Saddam Hussein through inspections.”
Ah, yes. Back in August, Cheney was ready to parachute into Iraq right at that moment, right?
And Powell led Junior from the darkness and persuaded him (with the help of other cool heads like James Baker and Henry Kissinger) to take the case to the United Nations. I cheered. At least we wouldn’t be casting aside international law and “going it alone.”
GJELTEN: The US military official speaking on background says war planners in the Pentagon are basically making that same assumption. For military action to conclude by the end of February, preparations, of course, would have to begin well before that. Some senior commanders say as many as 200,000 US troops would need to be deployed to the region to carry out an Iraqi operation with a good chance of success. John Pike does the math.
Mr. PIKE: That would require military buildup of anywhere from two to three months before the ground campaign began, which would mean that American troops would have to start moving into Kuwait sometime around Thanksgiving.
U.S. firepower a growing force in Persian Gulf . Experts say troops total about 200,000
Cheney may have been “here” in August, but he knew they couldn’t make a move until February. We’ve patiently gone along with the UN inspections process and changed our harsh “regime change” language to “disarmament” for the 4 months it took to build up our forces in the region to the level required for an invasion. Colin Powell, the diplomat, at the most propitious moment possible suddenly become fed up with the UN and is “where Cheney was in August.” We are poised to invade in February.
If there was any question that Rush Limbaugh is the most dangerous demagogue in America, he may have erased it with his latest broadside, describing antiwar protesters as “fascists and anti-American.”
This is the latest step in the right-wing campaign to demonize opposition to President Bush’s questionable policies as “anti-American,” a campaign I’ve described previously. It is closely associated with attacks on multiculturalism. But Limbaugh takes it another step by associating liberals with Nazis and other fascist regimes
This is not the first time he has misused the term. He has referred at various times to “liberal compassion fascists,” and on other occasions has explained to his national audience that Nazis in fact were “socialists.” This is, of course, the kind of twisting of terminology that turns the meaning of a concept into its precise opposite — thereby nullifying its meaning and reality — that is the essence of Newspeak.
More at the link.
This is important. Limbaugh is not a joke and he isn’t an entertainer and he isn’t mainstream and he isn’t benign. He is a powerful demagogue and a high ranking political propagandist for the Republican party. He should be taken very seriously.
I was chastised over in Atrios’ comments section for not providing the correction on the “Bush revives confederate wreath practice” story on my blog. I did, of course, but that wouldn’t have been enough in any case.
We left bloggers have been summarily marched to the wood shed for not adequately prostrating ourselves at the feet of George W Bush, indeed all Republicans, for spreading this shameful lie perpetrated by Time Magazine. It seems that we all owe George W. Bush an apology for ever believing such a thing and, even worse, for commenting on it.
I have given it a lot of thought and I agree that when someone attacks the character of someone in office based upon rumors, gossip and an unprofessional media, they owe it to that person to sincerely apologize when it turns out that such a thing is factually incorrect.
So, I apologize to George W. Bush for believing that he would revive a practice of sending a wreath to honor Robert E. Lee and posting a short comment about it. He did not do it and I hope that everyone realizes this and wipes the scurrilous accusation from their mind.
Now, I realize that this will cause a bandwidth crisis that could presage the end of the Internet as we know it, but there can be no logical consistency in requiring me to apologize for a post that linked to a Time article (to which I merely appended “Karl Rove makes Lee Atwater look like an amateur”) without also requiring that Republicans and the press apologize for 8 solid years of character assassination and smears against the Clinton administration. (And I would say that the Gores deserve a mea culpa too, for the lies perpetrated against them by the press and the GOP during campaign 2000.)
I do look forward to Rush Limbaugh and all of his imitators, the entire Barbizon School of Dyed Blond Former Prosecutors, the editorial board of the New York Times and the Washington Post, William Safire, Maureen Dowd and every other columnist, Lucianne Goldberg and her coven of hideous bitches, AND EVERY OTHER REPUBLICAN WHO SAID THAT CLINTON WAS A CRIMINAL, to now prostrate themselves at the feet of Bill and Hillary for the despicable, cruel and outrageous lies they spread from the years 1992 through the present.
If I’ve got to apologize publicly for posting one inaccurate article, the entire Republican establishment will be spending the rest of its natural life trying to find the time to eat and sleep in between confessions of guilt.
Better get started, Kids. I suggest that you begin with the false allegations of holding up Air Force One with a haircut, go on to the bogus accusations of influencing Beverly Bassett on Madison Guarantee (and ALL Whitewater related smears for that matter.) Don’t forget Vince Foster’s much investigated “murder,” through Safire’s “scoop” that Hillary was about to be indicted and just keep going until you hit Clinton’s illegitimate love child and the phony White House trashing story.
Once you are through with all that, then come back for the next round of apologies to Al Gore for the series of lies told about him during the campaign. (And you might want to send a couple over to your fellow Republican, John McCain, too.)
After all that, then maybe we can be considered even. I have apologized for the harm I did to George W. Bush by repeating an inaccurate story.
When Did Police Decide That Common Sense Is For Losers?
You know, if those in authority didn’t behave like robots and used just a tad of reason when dealing with the public, maybe we wouldn’t have to use the legal system to enforce common decency.
TACOMA, Wash. (AP) – A woman with a brain tumor filed a lawsuit against Walgreens Advance Care Inc., saying when she arrived to pick up her painkiller prescription one day, a pharmacist had her arrested.
In a lawsuit filed Thursday in Pierce County Superior Court, Shannon O’Brien, 35, said she went to the drive-up window at a Walgreen Drug Store two blocks from her home last July 7. The pharmacist on duty thought she had faked her Percocet prescription and called police, the lawsuit stated.
“I was in hysterics – crying, very upset and very embarrassed,” O’Brien told The Associated Press on Thursday. “They could have checked my records. I’ve had the same medicine every month.”
[…]
O’Brien, who was first diagnosed with a brain tumor in 1994, said she told the officer who handcuffed her that he could call her doctor or her nurse to verify the prescription.
“I told him I had brain cancer, and I had a medical information card inside my wallet,” she said. “It didn’t matter to him. He didn’t believe anything I was telling him.”
As Skimble says, “American life gets more humiliating by the day.”
I’m sure Toe-art Reform will put this little whiner in her place. A real American would be glad to get arrested and hauled off to jail if it helped fight the drug war, brain cancer or not.
posts about the rhetorical fight being waged between Howard Dean and John Kerry over the Iraq resolution. I’m with Dean on this. Kerry’s Iraq vote was disasterous, and all the more so because he didn’t have to do it. He says he’ll hold Bush’s feet to the fire, but unfortunately, he has absolutely no power to do that so it sounds like so much weak political bullshit. Which it is.
The Red Staters who were facing shameful scumbags like Saxby Chambliss last November could be forgiven. But it was important to rank and file Democrats that their leaders (none of whom were facing tough re-election battles) understood how important this issue was to them and that they take a stand.
Every last Democratic presidential hopeful in the Senate took a dive.
It was a cowardly CYA-for-the-future-because-the-big-bad-Republicans-will-be-mean vote that took the starch right out of the Democratic base who made thousands of calls and wrote thousands of letters veritably begging the leading Dems to hold tough on this issue. Any Democratic electoral momentum leading up to the election hit a brick wall when they caved on the issue.
And we can thank the vaunted political strategists of Carville, Shrum and Greenberg for this incredible miscalculation:
According to the memo, the most effective argument for Democrats who oppose the war is one which “affirms one’s commitment to wage the war against terrorism, including getting rid of Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, but that questions the rush to war; it calls on the U.S. to seek U.N. and international support, others sharing costs and making sure we will achieve greater stability.”
Nearly as strong, the memo argues, is explaining a no vote as a no “for now,” and “stressing the need to go to the UN and try to get the inspectors back into Iraq and work to get the support of our allies.”
That position, the memo notes, is strongest by far with “independents and with men (where the issue has more salience.)”
The least effective argument?
“Outright opposition to the war against Iraq and to the concept of regime change, finishing with the phrase, ‘it is the wrong thing to do,’ produces a weak response,” they write.
Driving the point home, the memo points out that the poll found that a Democrat who opposes the war who simply argues that the policy is wrong loses by 15 points (39 percent to 54 percent) to a Republican who says he or she “trusts Bush to do this right.”
Yeah. The politician who sounds the most like he’s trying to have it both ways is always a big winner.
Carville,Greenberg and Shrum’s post mortem of the election said:
In the end, 39 percent of the actual voters self-identified as Republicans, 3 percent more than in 2000 and 1998. The Democratic portion fell to 35 percent (down from 39 percent in 2000 and 37 percent in 1998). That alone could more than account for the shift witnessed at the polls. There was an even bigger increase in self-identified conservatives in the elector-ate, 41 percent, compared to approximately 30 percent two and four years ago.
How surprising.
Now, we are stuck with this absurd position of having to defend giving Junior a blank check while pretending that we are “influencing” the debate. And this happened, in my opinion, largely because some of the Democratic base was depressed by the craven behavior of its Senate leaders on the grave issue of whether to go to war.
I love Carville on Crossfire. He seems like a great guy. But, I have to wonder when the last time these three mythical Democratic strategists actually won any elections.