Category: Politics

Two entries on the Drudge Report, as of 10:09pm:

Administration will seek additional billions early next year to fund Iraq, Afghan wars, WASH POST reporting in Page One lead story on Tuesday, insiders tell DRUDGE… Developing…
New legal opinion by Bush admin concluded for first time some non-Iraqi prisoners captured by US forces in Iraq not entitled to protections of Geneva Conventions, NYT set to lead in Tuesday editions, newsroom sources tell DRUDGE… Developing…

Can anyone make the case that the media are not biased? Those items are not news. Of course the administration wants more money for overseas operations — do you think the military can get along without money?
All I have to say about the second item is: it’s about freakin’ time. Men who deliberately attack the innocent, who do not fight in uniform or obey the laws of war are not legal combatants. They are the “pirates and brigands” singled out in moral theology as those who wage private wars, and legitimate authorities have the God-given duty — yep, I said God-given, just like St. Paul said — to deter and punish them. Morally, they have no excuse. Legally, they are not entitled to Geneva protections and can be executed when they are caught.
Today, the NY Times published a story on some nasty explosives that disappeared because George Bush is an incompetent fool. (I’m paraphrasing.) Turns out they have no idea when the materials disappeared, and it’s likely they were removed before the war started last year, because the site would be bombed at the beginning of hostilities.
This wasn’t “news” in the sense of being new — plenty of people have known about this matter since last year. Besides, the explosives were gone by the time American forces reached the storage bunkers, as NBC News reports.
Why are so many formerly prestigious news organizations willing to sacrifice themselves on the pyre of Senator Kerry’s presidential ambitions? I can hear a voice in the back muttering, “Legal abortion…stigma-free extramarital sex…child-free consumerism…freedom from God’s laws….”

Al Qaeda’s favored presidential candidate speaks up against the little guys:

I know there are some Bishops who have suggested that as a public official I must cast votes or take public positions – on issues like a woman’s right to choose and stem cell research – that carry out the tenets of the Catholic Church. I love my Church; I respect the Bishops; but I respectfully disagree.
My task, as I see it, is not to write every doctrine into law. That is not possible or right in a pluralistic society. But my faith does give me values to live by and apply to the decisions I make.

That’s straw-man argument: the Church does not, has not, and will never teach that secular legislators are supposed to “write every doctrine into law.” Either he’s 1) misinformed; 2) stupid; or 3) setting up this straw man to mislead Catholics into voting for him.
Senator Kerry can’t possibly be misinformed — he keeps telling us he was an altar boy, which means he knows every jot and tittle of Catholic doctrine, and has never forgotten any of it. We know he isn’t stupid, because he’s managed to become a senator and marry not one, but two mega-rich heiresses.
That leaves misleading. I have little doubt that Kerry knows what the Church teaches; I am less certain that he knows why she teaches it. His forays into Biblical exegesis, Catholic catechetics, and recent Church history (remember “Pope Pius XXIII in the Vatican II”?) leave one with the impression that he sees the doctrines of Holy Mother Church as obstacles to be avoided.
Kerry’s public words and deeds indicate that his morality is guided by his own personal political advancement. In contrast to President Bush, who has shown that he can apply extra-political reasoning to moral issues (read his August 2001 stem cell speech), I defy anyone to show an example where he took a potentially unpopular view and stuck with it for any length of time.
Defending the unborn against direct assaults on their lives, is not (for the millionth time) a “Catholic” issue. It has nothing to do with the faith revealed by Jesus Christ and passed down through the apostles and their successors. Neither is embryonic stem cell research. Both involve the willful eradication of innocent human beings, and these truths are fully knowable to anyone with an adult. No divine revelation required.
When the Catholics of Massachusetts were busy betraying their faith by voting out pro-life Democrats in favor of pro-abortion Democrats, if John Kerry had stood up for the unborn, I’d respect the heck out of him. Instead, today not only will he ignore the Church and natural law, he promises to nominate only judges who are committed to allowing abortion under every circumstance. The hollow man lurches on, seemingly untroubled in his imitation of Judas (using Christ when it’s convenient, then selling him out when it looks like fidelity might endanger your own fortune.)
Maybe someday in my lifetime, one of the major parties will nominate a good Catholic presidential candidate. Until then, I’m sticking with the good Protestant over the bad Catholic.

One of my pet theses is that journalists generally treat non-white people as forces of nature, not as morally accountable human beings. Thus, the Associated Press can repeat an outrageous statement like this:

“Last election, 27,000 of us voted, most of us for brother Al Gore,” said Rev. Tom Diamond, of the Abyssinia Missionary Baptist Church. “The Republican Party threw out 27,000 African-American votes. By all rights brother Al Gore is the president-elect.”

The Rev. Diamond is, of course, one of the Darker People, so reporter Mike Glover doesn’t even bother to explore this “fact.” Under normal circumstances, a journalist would start asking questions such as: Where does he get the number 27,000? Does he have 27,000 parishioners? When did the Republican Party “throw out” those votes, and when did they do it? Who did it? Et cetera, et cetera.
White politicians (and the good reverend is nothing if not a politician, at least part-time) get those kinds of questions because they’re, y’know, normal people. Republican minority-group members get treated like normal people too, because they forfeit their privileges. But the Darker People aren’t normal. They have emotions (they are often “angry” or “outraged”), but asking them to back up their statements with facts is nonsensical. To most journalists, that’s like like asking the wind why it’s blowing northeast, or the clouds why they are raining today.

No time for Kerry’s Europhile delusions – read the whole thing! But if you can’t read the whole thing, read these excerpts.

The war against the Islamists and the flu-shot business are really opposite sides of the same coin. I want Bush to win on Election Day because he’s committed to this war and, as the novelist and Internet maestro Roger L. Simon says, “the more committed we are to it, the shorter it will be.” The longer it gets, the harder it will be, because it’s a race against time, against lengthening demographic, economic and geopolitical odds. By “demographic,” I mean the Muslim world’s high birth rate, which by mid-century will give tiny Yemen a higher population than vast empty Russia. By “economic,” I mean the perfect storm the Europeans will face within this decade, because their lavish welfare states are unsustainable on their shriveled post-Christian birth rates. By “geopolitical,” I mean that, if you think the United Nations and other international organizations are antipathetic to America now, wait a few years and see what kind of support you get from a semi-Islamified Europe.
So this is no time to vote for Europhile delusions. The Continental health and welfare systems John Kerry so admires are, in fact, part of the reason those societies are dying. As for Canada, yes, under socialized health care, prescription drugs are cheaper, medical treatment’s cheaper, life is cheaper. After much stonewalling, the Province of Quebec’s Health Department announced this week that in the last year some 600 Quebecers had died from C. difficile, a bacterium acquired in hospital. In other words, if, say, Bill Clinton had gone for his heart bypass to the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal, he would have had the surgery, woken up the next day swimming in diarrhea and then died. It’s a bacterium caused by inattention to hygiene — by unionized, unsackable cleaners who don’t clean properly; by harassed overstretched hospital staff who don’t bother washing their hands as often as they should. So 600 people have been killed by the filthy squalor of disease-ridden government hospitals. That’s the official number. Unofficially, if you’re over 65, the hospitals will save face and attribute your death at their hands to “old age” or some such and then “lose” the relevant medical records. Quebec’s health system is a lot less healthy than, for example, Iraq’s.

I was going to make the whole quote bold and write “(EMPHASIS MINE!!!!!!!!)” at the end, but you get the picture.

NRO has an essay attacking Senator Kerry (D-Fallujah) for his ham-handed use of the Book of James. The Protestant writer, Quin Hillyer, assails the Cafeteria Catholic senator for equating “good works” with spending Federal money. In this, I agree with Hillyer (although I am uncomfortable with his view that almsgiving is per se an individual and not a corporate endeavor. The Old Testament prophets, to name one example, collectively excoriated the Chosen People for not taking care of widows and orphans.)
However, I think he misunderstands James, for the formulation “faith without works is dead” isn’t a comment on a person’s quality of faith — rather, it says that a faith which produces nothing is no faith at all, that it does not exist.
Mr. Hillyer says, “St. Paul’s repeated assertion that men are ‘justified,’ or saved, through faith alone.” Show me once in the Bible where it says that. It’s true that a famous Christian said that we are saved “by grace, through faith, apart from works of man,” but that Christian was Martin Luther, as I learned in my Lutheran confirmation class. Nobody thought that before he did.
Now, Hillyer is certainly free to accept Luther’s formulation, but he also wants to drag the Catholic view of salvation into his argument. He’s better off sticking to the meat of his critique, which is that wealth-transfer programs are a secular project that are unlikely to produce any spiritual benefits for the recipients.