When the number of things I want to chatter about are many, and the minutes with which I have to chatter are few, I try to pick a subject that hasn’t received enough attention. Tonight, we ask, “Why isn’t Bush going to the funerals of soldiers who died in Iraq?”
Of late, many left-wingers have been asking this question, and it is typical of the Left’s off-the-rails hatred of President Bush. What they’re really asking is,
“Why isn’t Bush calling more attention to deaths in Iraq, which would hurt him politically and give Howard Dean some great footage to use in nasty campaign ads?”
There’s a great answer to their question here, which prompted a slew of responses. Think about something else — if the president went to a funeral, the focus of the event would no longer be on remembering the dead, paying respects to the family, and (if you’re Catholic) praying for the repose of the departed. It would be about the president attending a funeral.
But for the Left, nothing is too sacred to be off-limits to politics, not even a funeral, because to the committed Leftist, politics is sacred: he does not believe in a final, divine justice to be meted out by the perfect Judge, so politics is the only way to achieve justice. Men must seize power and order the world for themselves — or at least the correct men must do so. That this thinking must logically end in the Gulag or Dachau does not occur to today’s man of the Left, any more than it did to yesterday’s.
Month: November 2003
Marines Recruiting Toys for Iraqi Children
I read a piece the other day, I think it was in the Weekly Standard but it may have been in National Review, about the United States Marine Corp collecting toys to distribute to children in Iraq. Unfortunately, I think my mom threw out the magazine before I could go back and get the address. I’m familiar with the USMC’s toys for (local) tots programme, but this is the first time I had come across their toys for Iraqi tots programme. This is something I would like to encourage all our readers to support. Could Eric or any of other Marines please post the details?
Another way to be bought and sold
What goes around comes around: the immoral medical techniques vaunted as great breakthroughs create new opportunities for treating people as things.
UK authorities have banned a scheme that would, in effect, pay infertile women who seek in vitro fertilization. Under the proposal, women would undergo extra rounds of treatment to stimulate egg production and give all the eggs from those treatments away.
The payoff of about £2000 — call it $3400 — per cycle would come in the form of a price discount on the lady’s own IVF procedures.
If we’re willing to treat our own offspring — our human embryos — as the object of production techniques, including the selection of desired ones, freezing of surplus, and disposal of those rejected — well, we can’t be surprised if people try to treat the woman’s body as an object, an egg factory that can be rented.
A side-altar wedding?
A friend of mine sometimes answers questions from non-Catholics over the Internet, and he recently got a puzzling e-mail from a man interested in the Faith. The gentleman and his Catholic wife were apparently married in a Protestant ceremony (presumably without a dispensation). His wife has been under the impression that if he becomes Catholic and they marry in the Church, the ceremony would “have to” be conducted at a side altar.
I’m not familiar with that practice, though according to what I find on the ‘net, it apparently used to be customary for mixed marriages to be solemnized away from the main altar of a church. Does anyone know when this practice went away? Was it a matter of law?
In this couple’s case, if he becomes Catholic, it won’t be a mixed marriage, so even if the rule were still in place, it wouldn’t seem to apply. All in all, the lady’s concern may be unnecessary.
Mark Steyn on Johnny Hart and Islam
Mark Steyn weighs in with his usual pointed (and hilarious) commentary concerning the recent CAIR flap with Johnny Hart’s B.C. cartoon:
Although I agreed of course that Islamophobic cartooning was the most pressing issue of the week, in my usual shallow way I’d become distracted by some of the day’s more trivial stories – the 11 Hindus burnt alive by a Muslim gang in Bangladesh, the 13 Christian churches torched by Muslim rioters in the Nigerian town of Kazaure, and the 27 Turks and Britons murdered by Muslim terrorists in Istanbul.
No dead Jews in that particular day’s headlines, but otherwise a good haul of Hindus, Christians and, of course, Muslims. Every society has its ugly side: in America, the problem is stone-age cartoons; in Nigeria, it’s stone-age – or stoning age – reality. But one can’t help noticing that polysemic cartooning seems a notably ineffective way of stirring up anti-Muslim feeling, at least when one looks at preliminary statistics for Muslims murdered in America this Ramadan, compared with Muslims murdered in, say, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.