In praise of the Roman Catholic clergy
I suppose that what I am about to say will be a voice crying in the wilderness -- ignored by everyone. But I feel I should say it -- particularly in the light of all the justified horror over priestly pedophilia. My basic point is that a significant minority is not the whole and I want to talk about those priests who have remained godly men.
I am particularly concerned that the foul deeds of a few may lead to victimization of innocent priests. Like most Australian conservative writers, I suspect that we have already seen a grievous instance of that in the conviction of Cardinal Pell -- who added to his sin of being a priest the even greater sin of being an outspoken conservative. He doesn't even believe in the great Leftist global warming hoax! Unforgiveable! And that he was doing important work in a senior position at the Vatican also put a target on his back
So the Left were out to "get" him for years, with a constant blizzard of unsubstantiated accusations hurled at him so when even a very weakly substantiated accusation of pedophilia against him came before a jury they appear to have decided that there is no smoke without fire. It seems very likely that the court of appeal will exonerate him.
Secondly, I was baptized into the Presbyterian church and I was a strong evangelical Christian throughout my teens.
A Prime Minister of Australia once called the Premier of my home State a "Bible-bashing bastard". I was of that ilk before a study of philosophy re-oriented me. So I have NO Catholic background.
I do however rejoice that I have a religious background. Billy Graham once said that there is a God-shaped hole in everyone. For some people (Muslims?), Satan occupies that hole but the hole is there. Putting it less colorfully, man (including women) is a religious animal and never to have experienced religious commitment is to have missed out on an important part of life. Putting it most prosaically, the old anthropologist's maxim holds true: You have to become part of something to understand it. And because of my religious background I do have an empathy for and an understanding of religious people, Christians in particular
And that is fundamental to the simple thing that I want to say: There are God-filled people in all religions, a small minority from whom the love of Christ and the assurance of eternity shines out almost visibly. They stand out vividly to me when I encounter them. And among the spirit-filled men I have met most have been Catholic priests.
I could name some but to avoid embarrassment I will name just one -- one now deceased. I am thinking of Father Brady, of the Little Kings movement in Brisbane. He was an elderly man when I met him, one of the last Irish priests in Australia, but he wore that unmistakeable smile of serene happiness and assurance which told you of his inner peace and willingness to help. I could see the love of Christ shine out from him. It was unmistakeable to me. I recognized it immediately.
That is all I want to say. Some of the best men I have met have been Catholic priests. The ill deeds of the criminal few should not dim the devoted, lifelong and sometimes inspirational lives of the many.
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The Real Threat to Our Republic: The Democratic Party
It seems like only three years ago that liberals were accusing Donald Trump of not committing to accepting the election results if he were to lose — as everyone expected him to. Oh, wait, that was three years ago. In fact, there were a lot of things being said by liberals three years ago that are amusing to look back on today, such as this gem from Jason Silverstein, national politics reporter at the New York Daily News:
Even if Donald Trump wins the popular vote for President in November, it is entirely possible — and even Constitutionally acceptable — that we could be spared from his leadership. For that, we can thank the Electoral College.
“We take for granted every four years that the Electoral College will vote accordingly to the winners of each state's popular vote,” Silverstein said, but "there is nothing in the Constitution, federal law or electoral history” that says that’s how it has to work. “The Electoral College has the freedom to override the people's choice — in part, to expressly stop someone like Trump from taking over.” To Silverstein, the Electoral College was designed to stop Trump, not enable him to be president. The scenario he then presented, that rogue Electors could simply ignore the popular vote in their state and not cast their ballots for Trump, was a ridiculous pie-in-the-sky scenario, but is a fascinating look into how the left fantasized that the Electoral College could “save us” from Trump. In fact, Silverstein’s scenario may have inspired anti-Trumpers to harass and threaten Electors to do just as he envisioned… you know, to preserve the Republic, or something.
Others believed that the Electoral College system gave Hillary Clinton an advantage from the start. “Even before candidates were decided in the 2016 presidential election,” explained MSNBC political reporter Alex Seitz-Wald, “Democrats started with a major advantage – thanks to changes in the Electoral College – over presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump.” Of course, once Trump won the election without winning the popular vote, Democrats’ attitudes toward the Electoral College changed drastically. What they had counted on to keep Trump out of the White House had suddenly put him in. The last time this happened was, of course, the 2000 election, where Bush’s narrow margin in Florida gave him an Electoral College victory without winning the national popular vote.
Democrats are pointing to these two elections as reasons why the Electoral College is outmoded, racist, homophobic, transphobic, something-phobic, whatever. The national popular vote is the only truly democratic way to choose our president, they now say. Democrat presidential hopefuls are embracing this idea, and blue states across the country are entering into the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, in the hopes of, essentially, overthrowing the Electoral College system. To “preserve” our Republic.
The problem with their position now, besides the obvious, is that when it comes to the Electoral College, it’s not the system they have a problem with, it’s that's the system doesn’t work for them. The last time a Republican won both the national popular vote and the Electoral College vote was in 2004, when George W. Bush defeated John Kerry. But Democrats didn’t simply concede defeat when it was obvious they’d lost fairly.
Bush won Florida easily in 2004, but the results in Ohio were a lot closer, and John Kerry was urged to contest the results in Ohio over allegations of voting “irregularities” statewide. He did not. No number of recounts in Ohio could have resulted in flipping the state and the national popular vote. The only purpose of challenging Ohio was to overturn the Electoral College results. A recount in Ohio only netted Kerry about 300 votes statewide, but that didn’t stop Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-Ohio) and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) from filing an objection (on behalf of a group of Democrats in Congress) to the counting of Ohio’s electoral votes, and delaying certification of the 2004 presidential election results. This was only the second time in history such a challenge occurred. Nothing came of the challenge, as we know, but it’s also interesting to note that even now, John Kerry believes that the election was stolen from him.
The Democrats’ attitudes toward the Electoral College have nothing to do with the merits of the system, but the merits of the results. If they lose, the system is rigged and undemocratic. If they win, the system has proven itself to work. Democrats have a history of wanting to change the rules for their benefit. Senate Democrats were more than happy to use the filibuster to block President Bush from nominating judges to the courts, but took that power away from Republicans when they used it to block Barack Obama from nominating judges, citing a “broken system.” Democrats don’t believe in the sanctity of rules or law and order, they believe in winning at all costs. They won’t be happy in a system that doesn’t allow them to win 100 percent of the time.
Democrats the mentality of four-year-old children. They have to win every time, otherwise, it’s not fair. The Electoral College isn’t a threat to our Republic, the Democratic Party is.
SOURCE
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Russiagate -- a Bright, Shining Lie
By Patrick J. Buchanan
"The Special Counsel's investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia ... to influence the 2016 US presidential campaign."
So stated Attorney General William Barr in his Sunday letter to Congress summarizing the principal findings of the Mueller report.
On the charge of collusion with Russia, not guilty on all counts.
After two years of hearing from haters in politics and the media that President Donald Trump was "Putin's poodle," an agent of the Kremlin, guilty of treason, an illegitimate president who would leave the White House in handcuffs and end his days in prison, we learn the truth.
It was all a bright, shining lie.
Reeling from Trump's exoneration, big media are now scurrying to their fallback position: Mueller did not exonerate Trump of obstruction of justice.
But Mueller was not obstructed. No one impeded his labors.
As for Trump's rages against his investigation, they were the natural reaction of an innocent man falsely accused and facing disgrace and ruin for a crime he did not commit, indeed, a crime that had never been committed.
The House Judiciary Committee may try to replicate what Mueller did, and re-investigate obstruction. Fine. This would confirm what this whole rotten business has at root always been about: a scheme by the deep state and allied media to bring down another president.
The Mueller investigation employed 19 lawyers and 40 FBI agents. It took two years. It issued 2,800 subpoenas. It executed 500 search warrants. It interviewed 500 witnesses. And it failed to indict a single member of Trump's campaign for collusion with Russia to influence the 2016 election.
Which raises this question:
If Mueller could find no collusion, after an exhaustive two-year search, what was the compelling evidence that caused James Comey's FBI and Barack Obama's Department of Justice to believe that such collusion had occurred and to launch this investigation?
Sunday, after Barr's summary of the Mueller report became public, Trump aired his justified anger: "It's a shame that our country had to go through this. To be honest, it's a shame that your president has had to go through this. ... This was an illegal takedown that failed."
Is there not truth in this?
Millions of Americans still believe what is now a manifest falsehood — that their president collaborated with Putin in cheating Hillary Clinton out of the presidency. The legal bills of Trump, his family, his campaign aides and his White House staff must be huge. Careers, reputations have been damaged.
The nation has been distracted and bitterly divided over this since Trump's first days in office. He has had a cloud over his presidency since he gave his inaugural address. Any ability the president had to fulfill his campaign pledge and negotiate with the largest country on earth, Russia, a superpower rival, has had to be put off.
Is it unfair to ask: Who did this to us?
Who led the Justice Department into believing Trump conspired with the Russians? Why did it take two years to discover there was no collusion? Who gave Putin and the GRU this victory by helping to tear our own country apart?
Our establishment is forever demanding apologies. Where are the apologies for the outrageous accusations that Trump was guilty of something next to treason?
Sen. Joe McCarthy did not do a fraction of the damage to the reputations of Dean Acheson or George Marshall that the elite media have done, unjustly and maliciously, to the reputation of Donald Trump.
Years after French Artillery Capt. Alfred Dreyfus was convicted of colluding with the Germans in the late 19th century, and was sent to Devil's Island, evidence against another officer emerged.
Soon, it was Dreyfus' accusers who were in the dock of public opinion.
That needs to happen now. The instigators of this investigation, launched to bring down a president, have damaged and divided this nation, and they need to be exposed, as do their collaborators in the press.
The roots of Mueller's investigation go back to the Clinton campaign's hiring of the opposition research firm Fusion GPS to dig up dirt on Trump. Fusion GPS hired ex-British spy Christopher Steele. He had sources in Russian intelligence who provided him with the contents of his infamous dossier. This was delivered to a grateful cabal at the FBI, which used it as the basis of a FISA court warrant to surveil the Trump campaign.
The dirt in the Steele dossier, much of it false, would be secretly shared with Trump-haters in the media to torpedo his candidacy; then, when Trump won, to destroy his presidency before it began.
Now that Trump has been exonerated, the story of how his accusers, using the power of the state, almost murdered a presidency with lies, propaganda and innuendo, needs to be brought out into the sunlight.
For democracy dies in darkness, and this can't happen again.
SOURCE
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Mueller Report a Damning Indictment of Media
The fact is that after nonstop allegations and insinuations that Trump was a Manchurian candidate and a puppet of the Putin regime, there appears to be no evidence whatsoever to back up those claims.
This, after devoting almost endless airtime to the issue.
A NewsBusters report found that: “From January 20, 2017 (Inauguration Day) through March 21, 2019 (the last night before special counsel Robert Mueller sent his report to the Attorney General), the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts produced a combined 2,284 minutes of ‘collusion’ coverage.”
As The New York Times’ Peter Baker wrote on Friday, the release of the report would serve as a “reckoning” for Trump, Mueller, and the media.
The result comes as vindication for some in the media like Mollie Hemingway of The Federalist, and a few others who remained skeptical of all the rumors and poured cold water on the rush to indict the president on what seemed to be flimsy charges from the outset.
But for the rest of the who perpetrated the collusion narrative, this isn’t working out so well.
Of course, this indictment in the minds of viewers won’t cause media figures to retreat in shame. But it will likely further deepen Americans’ distrust of the media establishment.
From BuzzFeed’s publishing of the Steele dossier to CNN’s botched story (later retracted) that Congress was investigating a “Russian investment fund with ties to Trump officials,” the media has made numerous errors that turned out to be drive-by hits. These errors received little mainstream attention as reporters moved on to new stories—a new attempt at “resistance” reporting, as former ABC host Ted Koppel called it.
This coverage fueled the wild fantasies of progressive activists around the country: bizarre viral Christmas songs and stories of elderly critics attempting to stave off death to see the Mueller report, to name just a couple.
All for nothing.
Trump is now 2-0 against the media—first, beating Hillary Clinton after reports said it could never happen, and now, coming out on top in the Mueller report.
Trump takes a lot of flak for his attacks on the press, but it’s clear that the media itself has done the most lasting damage to its own credibility, only ensuring that Trump’s criticisms leave a mark.
As Matt Taibbi, a journalist who published a scathing critique of the media, wrote:
“This has been a consistent pattern throughout #Russiagate. Step one: salacious headline. Step two, days or weeks later: news emerges the story is shakier than first believed. Step three (in the best case) involves the story being walked back or retracted by the same publication.”
Taibbi wrote that the “sheer scale” of this media failure will have ramifications for years to come.
“We’ve become sides-choosers, obliterating the concept of the press as an independent institution whose primary role is sorting fact and fiction,” he wrote.
Is there any doubt that this is true?
SOURCE
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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.
Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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