Category: Politics

Example number one: Michael Moore

‘Fahrenheit 9/11’: Connecting With a Hard Left – washpost – registration required so those pinkos can keep track of you.

Why is the title of Moore’s flim inspired by Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451? How ironic that Bradbury’s work is about censorship and anti-intellectualism. Left-wing propaganda doesn’t get more anti-intellectual than Fahrenheit 9/11.

*UPDATE*

Example number two: The nuts who cooked up The Day After Tomorrow, Al Gore, and moveon.org. Algore and the like-minded irrational animals at moveon.org are planning a rally the day that The Day After Tomorrow Comes out. I sense a Passion of the Christ kind of passion for the message of this disaster film. It’s a new gospel written by the liberal illuminati. They’d like to see us all live like Franciscans of the Primitive Observance without the poverty, charity, humility, and of course, faith in Christ.

Moveon.org is calling this flick “the movie the White House doesn’t want you to see.” They admit the movie is “more science fiction than science fact,” yet they trying to score political points by scaring the poop of people who can’t separate science fact from science fiction. They vote for democrats, you know.

On the weekends, after the older two children invade our bed, and I have gathered the courage to face the morning, I herd the little ones downstairs so they can watch something while I make breakfast. As we have no cable or satellite television, the television in the playroom is usually tuned to a PBS station.
While the “Thomas the Tank Engine” video was rewinding, I saw part of “Religion and Ethics Newsweekly” describing how Catholic politicians are feeling the heat for not acting like Catholics while in office.
I have expressed my displeasure with PBS religious programming in another post, but this segment was evenhanded. It did, however, give disproportionate attention to Mario Cuomo, the former New York governor and failed radio talk-show host. I couldn’t immediately remember the part of my right-wing catechism that talked about hating Mario. All I remember was that he was prickly about his ethnic background (as if being Italian in New York City was unusual) and was, for a time, the #1 apologist for pro-abortion Catholics, including himself. As I was not Catholic in the 1980s or the early ’90s, when Cuomo was governor, I didn’t care too much about the Catholic angle, so I didn’t remember the details.
The only other time I heard Cuomo speak was on his short-lived radio show, and that was probably by accident. He seemed affable but clueless about what makes good radio, as evidenced by the show’s brief run. On this PBS show, he seemed thoughtful and possibly even prayerful, talking about why he was personally pro-life but politically pro-abortion.
“Maybe I can respect this guy,” I thought, as Cuomo explained that Catholics had Protestant beliefs crammed down their throats a century ago, so Catholics shouldn’t do the same to other people. That’s a plausible point, though as I keep saying, abortion isn’t a religious issue, it’s a straight-up question of natural law. But at least Cuomo appeared to have thought the issue through, and if he was misguided, he was honestly misguided.
The show moved on to capital punishment. Cuomo complained (always in a genial way) that the Church didn’t do enough to speak out about capital punishment. “For 12 years” he opposed capital punishment, and he claimed, “I even wrote the pope, saying ‘come on guys, help me out here!'”
This tactic was a clever way of saying that he was, in point of fact, more Catholic than the Pope, more pro-life than the Roman curia. Then it all came flooding back: this was the same man who vetoed laws authorizing capital punishment, even though New York voters favored it by a huge margin and the bills always passed by comfortable majorities. Those bills were passed every year until Cuomo left office, and always shot down by the governor.
It takes courage to stand up for your beliefs when they are unpopular, especially for a politician who must stand for re-election, so points for Mario. But we have to subtract points for honesty. For although Mario loves giving his hand-wringing moral lectures about the inner conflict of a Catholic politician when his beliefs differ from what his constituents want, he “allowed his personal beliefs” to “interfere” with his “duty” to do whatever the opinion polls tell him to do.
Mario Cuomo might be sincere and misguided, or he might just be running interference for the Left in the cases of the death penalty and abortion. However, he wants everyone to know he is a serious, deliberate man, and therefore I agree with the latter possibility.

Show me any Reuters article from the Middle East, and I’ll show you at least one editorializing sentence. In this case, it’s the lead:

ABU GHRAIB, Iraq (Reuters) – Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld flew into the eye of the Iraqi storm on Thursday and denied his surprise visit was a publicity stunt to repair the damage from a scandal over the abuse of Iraqi prisoners.

What kind of crap is that? It shocks me that a “serious” news organization would imply that the Secretary of Defense should not visit a theater of operations, or that by doing so, he is
They’re not even subtle. Usually, reporters who want to write stealth editorials will find someone else to mouth their agendas, but Charles Aldinger is apparently too lazy to do that.

The trip looked like a robust answer to critics who say Rumsfeld, one of the architects of the Iraq war, should resign, six months before President Bush seeks re-election.

“Looked like” to whom? The article doesn’t say, so we can safely assume it’s the reporter.
It’s also pretty bad to quote Senator Kennedy (“We are the most hated nation in the world as a result of this disastrous policy in the prisons”) accusing the Defense Department of deliberately abusing prisoners as a matter of policy — something no Democrat has previously done, and there is no evidence to support the charge. Aldinger reports the comment as if it is a fact.
Then again, Reuters doesn’t call terrorists “terrorists,” because “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” I’m not sure whether that’s moral equivalence or rank nihilism, but it’s sick, whatever it is.

The majority leader of the New Jersey state senate is leaving the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church because the church wants her children to stop supporting baby-killing. This entirely reasonable request was too much for Senator Bernard Kenny (D-Moloch), who said, “If every faith starts trying to impose their rules on elected officials, democracy is going to be factionalized along religious lines,” apparently thinking that there is something “religious” about defending innocent babies.
As interesting as that is, one other quotation caught my bloodshot eye:

U.S. Rep. William Pascrell Jr., also a Catholic Democrat, agrees that politicians have an obligation to represent all their constituents.
“This is exactly what the Catholic Church said 50 years ago would not happen when Catholic politicians were trying to get elected to office,” said Kenny, a former altar boy from Essex County….
“I will continue receiving Communion – not in defiance, but out of conscience,” he said. “I have nothing to apologize for.”

That should be Hell’s new official motto:

I have not read a comparison of the last three Democratic presidential candidates, not even in the narrow subject of their proposed policies. Perhaps that’s because Senator Kerry has few specific proposals, but I am not interested in that right now. What strikes me is that Clinton, Gore, and Kerry are all Hollow Men.
I use that term not to express my contempt for their politics, but as a description of their souls, at least the aspects of their souls we can see without knowing them personally. “The Hollow Men” was one of the most famous poems of the 20th century, composed by T.S. Eliot in 1925 and still frighteningly relevant today. He sings of men who are dessicated to the roots of their being, mere shadows of men.
On the surface, the three men seem very different. The Arkansas kid from a broken home, the son whose senator-father programmed him to succeed in politics, and the Swiss-boarding-school product have few superficial similarities. Yet consider these things: all of them knew at a very young age that they would run for president, and calibrated their actions accordingly. They spent nearly their entire adult lives in politics, and virtually no time in the private sector.
None of them have any discernable principles for which they have worked during their political lives, and they have introduced no significant ideas into politics. Their primary concern is promoting themselves, not for the sake of a cause, but solely for personal advancement. The three men reject traditional understandings of morality in favor of a fuzzy relativism.
Because they do not seek to destroy and murder their opponents like a Middle Eastern despot, their danger to the body politic is not immediately apparent. Whatever one might think of Jimmy Carter, for example, he was not a Hollow Man in that he truly attempted to serve others when he was in office, and though ambitious (what high officeholder isn’t?), he did not allow his ambition to enslave him.
By contrast, the Hollow Men will subordinate everything and anything to their ambitions. They fought in the Vietnam War, they protested against it; they spoke out against abortion, they promise to nominate only doctrinaire pro-abortion judges; they say they will propose a tax cut, they raise your taxes; etc.
Sane men change their opinions in the light of new facts or upon deeper reflection. The Hollow Men change their opinions based on their perception of the world’s trajectory. Every action has raw calculation behind it: will this gain me votes or will it lose me votes?
What frightens me is not simply that the Hollow Men are self-serving and venal, devoid of higher purpose. We will always have such men until Jesus comes again. What frightens me is that so many ordinary people vote for them. What frightens me more is that millions of ordinary people are exactly like them.
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us — if at all — not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

[Read the whole poem]