Wednesday, August 14, 2013
Rats Are Still Comrades
Posted By Lloyd Billingsley On August 14, 2013 @ 12:35 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 2 Comments
Angela Davis at Occupy Oakland General Strike on 11/2/11
“The California prisoners’ hunger strike is a courageous call for the California prison system to come out of the shadows and join a world in which the rights and dignity of every person is respected.”
That’s the closer of an oped piece by Angela Davis, “professor emeritus of history of consciousness and feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.” There’s a lot more to professor Davis, and her latest cause could also stand some scrutiny.
Peter Coyote, Susan Sarandon and other Hollywood celebrities have signed a letter of support for prisoners engaged in a hunger strike over conditions in the security housing unit at Pelican Bay State Prison. Professor Davis claims such solitary confinement constitutes “torture.” But according to the liberal editorial board of the Sacramento Bee, which has been critical of Pelican Bay in the past, the stars “ought to save their outrage.”
The inmates fomenting the hunger strike, who claim their human rights are being violated, “include killers and leaders of the most brutal gangs in the prison system. They are from the Aryan Brotherhood, Black Guerrilla Family, Mexican Mafia and Nuestra Familia.” Prison officials say the hunger strike “has nothing to do with conditions and everything to do with gang leaders wanting to get into the general population so they can more readily conduct their gang business.” The Bee agrees, and adds some detail.
The security housing units are stark, “but it’s not as if they are rat-infested, medieval holes. Many inmates have cellmates and can talk through the locked doors to their neighbors. Pelican Bay inmates have televisions, with 23 channels, including the four broadcast networks, PBS, BET and ESPN, plus educational and self-help channels and Bible channels in English and Spanish.” Inmates have to “work” to get in such units. That is, they commit acts of violence. “For the safety of other inmates,” the Bee said, “that’s where some of them should remain.”
These are “gang leaders who masquerade as human rights advocates” and the celebrities “diminish their credibility” by embracing their cause. As readers of this profile will understand, it’s a bit different for Angela Davis, who does have some knowledge of violent prisoners such as Black Panther George Jackson, responsible for killing a guard at Soledad Prison.
As this article described it, Davis brought the “arsenal of weapons” to spring Jackson. On August 7, 1970, “George Jackson’s 17-year-old brother, Jonathan, charged into a Marin County courtroom and took several people hostage, including Judge Harold Haley, the prosecuting assistant DA, and two jurors. The assailants taped a sawed-off shotgun (owned by Davis) to Haley’s chin. In the ensuing escape attempt, a shootout took place during which Haley’s head was blown off, and Jonathan Jackson was killed.”
Davis fled but was arrested in New York. At her 1972 trial more than 20 witnesses implicated her in the plot to free Jackson, but she was acquitted. That made her a national figure and helped launch her political career.
In 1979, she won the International Lenin Peace Prize, awarded by East Germany, a totalitarian state that shot people for the crime of attempting to leave the country, a practice Davis never criticized. The Lenin Peace Prize helped her rise in the Communist Party USA, a creation of the Soviet Union, whose vast Gulag prison system never bothered Angela Davis, a faithful soldier in totalitarianism’s alibi armory.
In 1980 and 1984 Davis was CPUSA vice-presidential candidate, on the bottom of the ticket under white Stalinist Gus Hall. She and Hall lost, but that defeat, her advocacy for totalitarian dictatorships, and her involvement in Soledad case, could not prevent Davis from becoming professor of history of consciousness and feminist studies at UC Santa Cruz. As such, Angela Davis is a highly paid and pensioned member of California’s ruling class. She is also, like the Pelican Bay hunger strikers, masquerading as human rights activist. But on another level, her activism makes perfect sense.
In George Orwell’s Animal Farm, the question arises about the place in the revolution of wild, non-domesticated creatures. The revolutionary leaders decide that, yes, rats are comrades. Likewise, in the view from the Hollywood and academic Left, violent criminals like the Pelican Bay gang bosses are simply more victims of capitalist injustice. That’s why Hollywood stars and Angela Davis support them.
Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.
“The California prisoners’ hunger strike is a courageous call for the California prison system to come out of the shadows and join a world in which the rights and dignity of every person is respected.”
That’s the closer of an oped piece by Angela Davis, “professor emeritus of history of consciousness and feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.” There’s a lot more to professor Davis, and her latest cause could also stand some scrutiny.
Peter Coyote, Susan Sarandon and other Hollywood celebrities have signed a letter of support for prisoners engaged in a hunger strike over conditions in the security housing unit at Pelican Bay State Prison. Professor Davis claims such solitary confinement constitutes “torture.” But according to the liberal editorial board of the Sacramento Bee, which has been critical of Pelican Bay in the past, the stars “ought to save their outrage.”
The inmates fomenting the hunger strike, who claim their human rights are being violated, “include killers and leaders of the most brutal gangs in the prison system. They are from the Aryan Brotherhood, Black Guerrilla Family, Mexican Mafia and Nuestra Familia.” Prison officials say the hunger strike “has nothing to do with conditions and everything to do with gang leaders wanting to get into the general population so they can more readily conduct their gang business.” The Bee agrees, and adds some detail.
The security housing units are stark, “but it’s not as if they are rat-infested, medieval holes. Many inmates have cellmates and can talk through the locked doors to their neighbors. Pelican Bay inmates have televisions, with 23 channels, including the four broadcast networks, PBS, BET and ESPN, plus educational and self-help channels and Bible channels in English and Spanish.” Inmates have to “work” to get in such units. That is, they commit acts of violence. “For the safety of other inmates,” the Bee said, “that’s where some of them should remain.”
These are “gang leaders who masquerade as human rights advocates” and the celebrities “diminish their credibility” by embracing their cause. As readers of this profile will understand, it’s a bit different for Angela Davis, who does have some knowledge of violent prisoners such as Black Panther George Jackson, responsible for killing a guard at Soledad Prison.
As this article described it, Davis brought the “arsenal of weapons” to spring Jackson. On August 7, 1970, “George Jackson’s 17-year-old brother, Jonathan, charged into a Marin County courtroom and took several people hostage, including Judge Harold Haley, the prosecuting assistant DA, and two jurors. The assailants taped a sawed-off shotgun (owned by Davis) to Haley’s chin. In the ensuing escape attempt, a shootout took place during which Haley’s head was blown off, and Jonathan Jackson was killed.”
Davis fled but was arrested in New York. At her 1972 trial more than 20 witnesses implicated her in the plot to free Jackson, but she was acquitted. That made her a national figure and helped launch her political career.
In 1979, she won the International Lenin Peace Prize, awarded by East Germany, a totalitarian state that shot people for the crime of attempting to leave the country, a practice Davis never criticized. The Lenin Peace Prize helped her rise in the Communist Party USA, a creation of the Soviet Union, whose vast Gulag prison system never bothered Angela Davis, a faithful soldier in totalitarianism’s alibi armory.
In 1980 and 1984 Davis was CPUSA vice-presidential candidate, on the bottom of the ticket under white Stalinist Gus Hall. She and Hall lost, but that defeat, her advocacy for totalitarian dictatorships, and her involvement in Soledad case, could not prevent Davis from becoming professor of history of consciousness and feminist studies at UC Santa Cruz. As such, Angela Davis is a highly paid and pensioned member of California’s ruling class. She is also, like the Pelican Bay hunger strikers, masquerading as human rights activist. But on another level, her activism makes perfect sense.
In George Orwell’s Animal Farm, the question arises about the place in the revolution of wild, non-domesticated creatures. The revolutionary leaders decide that, yes, rats are comrades. Likewise, in the view from the Hollywood and academic Left, violent criminals like the Pelican Bay gang bosses are simply more victims of capitalist injustice. That’s why Hollywood stars and Angela Davis support them.
Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.
Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://frontpagemag.com
URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2013/lloyd-billingsley/rats-are-still-comrades-2/
No Restroom for the Virtuous
Governor Moonbeam makes sexual fluidity official in planet California.
California passed a landmark law Monday that allows transgender students to use restrooms and locker rooms designated for either gender, as well as play on either girls' or boys' sports teams.(AP)
We lost Pluto as a planet some years back. I can’t remember the nit astronomers picked with the large frozen rock named after Mickey’s dog when they voted it off the planetary island. But we still have nine planets if we count California, which we should.
Silliness knows no bounds on the left coast. There is no idea crack-pot enough not to be championed, even made law, in the nation’s most progressive and politically unhinged state. There apparently is no utter nonsense immune system in Sacramento. The latest evidence for this being a bill signed into law Monday by Governor Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown which declares that California school children are whatever sex they think they are, not necessarily the sex their anatomy assigns them to.
So henceforth and hereafter, if a government school student in California has a penis and testicles, he is not necessarily, as the entire human race has comfortably assumed for centuries, male. He is whatever he (or she) thinks she (or he) is, on any given day. The new expression for this sexual fluidity is “expressed gender.” If this sounds a lot like being able to say you are something that you aren’t, that’s because that’s just what this means.
Government school children in California may now use whichever restroom they choose and may go out for any boys or girls school athletic team they wish. This legislation was brought about for the care and comfort of what are called transgendered students, whether the transgendering has been surgical or just in the student’s mind. This fits neatly with the Gospel According to the Left, which holds that sex of the old-fashioned anatomical kind is of no account, that men and women and boys and girls are interchangeable, and there are all manner of niche sexes out there, combinations and permutations to be discovered, appreciated, and catered to. California may be the first state in the nation forced to outlaw personal pronouns, there being too many possibilities for the human mind to grapple with in its progressive precincts.
This surreal legislation, no one should be surprised, was written by a Democrat, one Assemblyman Tom Ammiano of — big surprise coming here – San Francisco. (If California is a planet, San Francisco is its brightest and gaudiest ring.) Ammiano, who is gay, insists his legislation will make school life easier for transgendered students. He has so far, however, had little to say about the chaos this will cause the overwhelmingly larger group of students who are comfortable with the sex assigned to them at birth. Carlos Alcala, a spokesman for Ammiano, gave the following world-class understatement to the San Jose Mercury News: “Clearly, there are some parents who are not going to like it.” Ya think? Probably a student or two as well.
Alcala added, “We are hopeful school districts will work with them (parents, presumably) so students aren’t put in an uncomfortable position.” California school and state legislative officials are indeed working on this difficult mission. My sources in Sacramento tell me that restrooms in California schools and state buildings will soon carry the following designations: Men, Women, Whatever, Work in Progress, No Preference, I Feel Very Strongly Both Ways, Not Applicable, Ecumenical, and Who Am I to Say?
This is insane stuff, of course. Just one more indication of decadence in a culture growing more dysfunctional by the day. But folks in less febrile regions shouldn’t laugh too hard at California’s expense, though the temptation to do so is almost irresistible. California, as well as being its own planet, is also a leading cultural indicator. What starts in California eventually metastasizes to flyover America. Sadly, what happens in California does not stay in California. Would that it did.
The Cause for a Modern Prophet
Prolific and paradoxical, Gilbert Keith Chesterton was as witty as Wilde, as original as Joyce, and as clever as Kafka
August 12, 2013
When even mass-circulation British newspapers cover a story about the Church and beatification, you know it matters. The Daily Mail recently reported that, “Author G. K. Chesterton, best known for his Father Brown stories, has been put on the path to sainthood – with the blessing of the Pope. Just days before he was elected Pope in March, the then Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, wrote to a Chesterton society in Argentina approving the wording of a private prayer calling for his canonization.”
I wrote a biography of Gilbert Keith Chesterton in 1988, and it was at a conference about the man’s life and work in 1986 at the University of Toronto that I met the woman whom I would marry, obliging me to leave Britain and come to Canada. We also named our first child Gilbert in honor of the man. (Our son’s middle name, though, as romance must not lead to cruelty!)
Should the great GKC be acknowledged as a saint? I'm not sure, really, but I do know that we are generally not well served by journalism today. Catholic journalists in particular sometimes seem more intent on pleasing their secular friends than in defending the Church. Oh, for another Chesterton, who wrote the truth of permanent things, of first things, of Catholic things. His cause has been discussed and promoted for some time, and in many ways it’s never been so fitting.
Born in 1874 in London, England, he enjoyed the best in British private education but chose not to go to university, which partly explains his visceral refusal to adopt convention and think and write within partisan definitions. He drifted into journalism but once afloat he sailed perfectly, and often against the wind.
On the fashionable nationalism of the Edwardian age, for example: “My country, right or wrong, is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, my mother, drunk or sober.” On literature: “A good novel tells us the truth about it hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.” On being controversial: “I believe in getting into hot water, it keeps you clean.”
Books came early and frequently. Greybeards at Play in 1900, Twelve Types in 1902, and a biography of Robert Browning the following year. Then in 1904 one of his finest works, The Napoleon of Notting Hill. Ostensibly about a London district declaring independence from Great Britain, at heart it explained Chesterton’s belief that the state was more often than not a problem rather than a solution and the greater the intervention of government the more profound the damage to the governed.
He married Frances Blogg is 1901 and they had an intensely happy, though childless, life together. She was a steadying influence on his notorious untidiness and lack of organization. "Am at Market Harborough”, he once wrote to her. “Where ought I to be?” Her reply was, "Home.” At a time when H.G. Wells was celebrating infidelity and George Bernard Shaw deconstructing marriage, Chesterton insisted that family was at the epicenter of any civilized society.
In 1922 he finally became Catholic. “The fight for the family and the free citizen and everything decent must now be waged by the one fighting form of Christianity”, he wrote. And, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried."
Step forward the grand knight of the Church. With his brother Cecil and the journalist and author Hilaire Belloc he embraced Distributism, based on concepts of family autonomy and small-scale production leading to authentic democracy. It was neither socialist nor capitalist, and never liberal in the contemporary sense. “A citizen can hardly distinguish between a tax and a fine, except that the fine is generally much lighter", and "Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists."
He possessed a sparkling ability to hold up a mirror to the addled society around him and show its absurd reflection. “Journalism largely consists of saying Lord Jones is Dead to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.” And, “The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.”
He wrote biographies of St. Francis, St. Thomas Aquinas and Charles Dickens, compilations of columns and journalism, autobiography and works of apologetics and history such as Orthodoxy, Heretics, and The Everlasting Man. There was also poetry—The Ballad of The White Horse and Lepanto—and the creation of the priest detective Father Brown.
He was as witty as Wilde, as original as Joyce, and as clever as Kafka. Yet he remains an icon to far too few, partly because he spoke and wrote as a Catholic. In the final years of his life Chesterton predicted that the absolutes of right and wrong would become blurred, religion publicly condemned, that we would care more for animals than babies and we would worship sex while mocking love. We would, he said, be governed by whim and fashion. “Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around." He was, quite clearly, not only a genius but a prophet.
But there was also the brief and shallow swim in the dark waters of anti-Semitism, and I predict that this will be highlighted by his opponents when Chesterton is considered for sainthood. I devoted an entire chapter to this issue in my biography, and I have a particular sensitivity towards the subject because my father was Jewish. Chesterton’s brother Cecil may well have been a genuine anti-Semite, but I do not believe this for a moment of Gilbert, or for that matter of Belloc. Gilbert in particular was too loving, too generous, too Christian to hate.
He did make some hurtful and thoughtless comments, in particular after his brother’s death, but when the testing time came—the rise of the Nazis—he was as active as he was angry. While many on the left were unsure how to respond to Hitler’s pagan racism, and some even sympathetic, Chesterton demanded that the Jewish people be protected and rescued. He was vehemently anti-Nazi before it was fashionable and before it was safe.
Context, timing, and nuance are everything, and a foolish comment about Jews before the Holocaust is somewhat different from indifference during it or hostility after it. Frankly, I am not sure if I will ever pray to Chesterton, but I know I pray all the time of my gratitude that he lived, thought, and wrote.
About the Author
Michael Coren
Michael Coren is the host of The Arena, a nightly television show broadcast on the Canadian network Sun News, and a columnist whose work appears in numerous publications across Canada. He is the author of 14 books, the most recent of which isHeresy: Ten Lies They Spread About Christianity. His website is www.michaelcoren.com, where his books can be purchased and he can be booked for speeches.
Michael Coren is the host of The Arena, a nightly television show broadcast on the Canadian network Sun News, and a columnist whose work appears in numerous publications across Canada. He is the author of 14 books, the most recent of which isHeresy: Ten Lies They Spread About Christianity. His website is www.michaelcoren.com, where his books can be purchased and he can be booked for speeches.
Obama’s Gay-Rights Hypocrisy
The president wags his finger at Putin while kowtowing to Islamic leaders.
Turkish Shiite women hold a poster of Iraq's top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, during a demonstration in Istanbul, Turkey, Sunday, Feb. 26, 2006. (AP)
"What,” Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani was asked, “is [Islam’s] judgment on sodomy and lesbianism?”
“Forbidden,” he curtly pronounced. “Those involved in the act should be punished. In fact, sodomites should be killed in the worst manner possible.”
So what does Barack Obama have to say about that?
Cynically mounting his high horse last week in the cozy confines of Jay Leno’s late-night TV comedy program — a venue popular with his ill-informed admirers, one where hypocrisy won’t be noticed, much less challenged — the president declaimed, “I have no patience for countries that try to treat gays or lesbians or transgender persons in ways that intimidate or are harmful to them.”
This was his purported human-rights rationale for canceling a summit meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin, who in June signed an anti-gay law banning “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations.” Obama told Leno that “making sure people are treated fairly and justly” is a “precept that’s not unique to America” and “should apply everywhere.”
Seriously?
Does the president truly mean what he said? Or was he just pandering to dreamy millennials and the Hollywood glitterati, who are too uninformed or in the tank to mark the chasm between his righteous finger-wagging at Putin and his kowtowing to Islamic leaders? The answers depend on whether he finally condemns sharia’s oppressive and often brutal strictures against homosexuality, which are zealously enforced in most Muslim countries.
That brings us back to Ayatollah Sistani. He is not some wild-eyed al-Qaeda jihadist. Sistani is the most influential sharia jurist in Shiite Islam. He is Iraq’s grand ayatollah, and he was considered a critical ally of the post-Saddam democracy project by the Bush administration and the State Department — which were apparently unembarrassed by his directive that Muslims avoid physical contact with non-Muslims because, as Sistani put it, it is akin to touching “urine, feces, semen, dead bodies, blood, dogs, pigs, alcoholic liquors, and the sweat of an animal that persistently eats filth.”
In calling for homosexuals to be “killed in the worst manner possible,” Sistani was not being even slightly controversial. He was reciting mainstream Islamic doctrine — again, not al-Qaeda doctrine, Islamic doctrine.
The teaching is firmly rooted in the Koran, which recounts in several passages Allah’s destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, whose people, ignoring the admonitions of Lot, rampantly practiced the “abomination.” Homosexuality is decried in Sura 7:80–81 as “lewdness such as no people in Creation [ever before] committed”; men who “practice your lusts on men in preference to women,” the scripture adds, are “transgressing beyond bounds.” (For more of the same, see also, e.g., Sura 7:82–84, 11:69–83, and 29:28–30.) Further, in an authoritative hadith (the hadith are Mohammed’s sayings and doings), Islam’s prophet orders Muslims: “If you find anyone doing as Lot’s people did, kill the one who does it, and the one to whom it is done.”
So crystal clear is the doctrinal consensus on this point that there is no daylight between Sistani and mainstream Sunni scholars. Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi — the renowned Muslim Brotherhood sharia jurist, Al Jazeera celebrity preacher, designated terrorist-organization emir, International Union of Muslim Scholars leader, Hamas facilitator, and . . . Obama administration consultant for whose deputy the White House recently rolled out the red carpet — has explained:
We must be aware that in regulating the sexual drive Islam has prohibited not only illicit sexual relations and all that leads to them, but also the sexual deviation known as homosexuality. This perverted act is a reversal of the natural order, a corruption of man’s sexuality, and a crime against the rights of females. [The sheikh applies the same reasoning to condemn lesbian relations.--ACM]
The spread of this depraved practice in a society disrupts its natural life pattern and makes those who practice it slaves to their lusts, depriving them of decent taste, decent morals, and a decent manner of living. The story of the people of Prophet Lot . . . as narrated in the Koran should be sufficient for us. Prophet Lot’s people were addicted to this shameless depravity, abandoning natural, pure, lawful relations with women in the pursuit of this unnatural, foul, and illicit practice. . . .
Muslim jurists have held differing opinions concerning the punishment for this abominable practice. Should it be the same as the punishment for fornication [In certain situations, extramarital heterosexual fornication is punished “only” by scourging.--ACM], or should both the active and passive participants be put to death? While such punishments may seem cruel, they have been suggested to maintain the purity of the Islamic society and to keep it clean of perverted elements.
Qaradawi is echoed by the popular Saudi sheikh Muhammad Saalih al-Munajjid, whose Q&A-format Islamic tutorial website, islamqa.com, is translated into eleven languages. In “The Punishment for Homosexuality,” Sheikh Munajjid asserts: “The crime of homosexuality is one of the greatest crimes, the worst of sins and the most abhorrent of deeds, and Allah punished those who did it in a way that he did not punish other nations.”
Then there is Reliance of the Traveller, the classic sharia manual endorsed by both the faculty of al-Azhar University in Egypt (the ancient seat of Sunni learning) and the International Institute of Islamic Thought (the Muslim Brotherhood’s think tank — on whose board Qaradawi has sat). Reliance elaborates that the “wicked practice” of “sodomy” is an “enormity” that is “even viler and uglier than adultery.” (The manual elsewhere explains that, for heterosexual fornication, the marital status of the “fornicator” or “fornicatress” determines whether the punishment is death or scourging.) Thus, the manual instructs, “The Prophet . . . said: ‘Kill the one who sodomizes and the one who lets it be done to him’; ‘May Allah curse him who does what Lot’s people did’; ‘Lesbianism by women is adultery between them.’”
Saudi Arabia and Iran both proclaim themselves “pure” Islamic states in the sense that sharia is the law of the land. Homosexuality is thus categorically prohibited, and the death penalty (not to mention other cruel corporal punishments) is officially imposed. Similarly, several other Islamic countries prominently incorporate sharia into their legal codes — e.g., Indonesia, Malaysia, Mauritania, Morocco, Nigeria, Qatar, Pakistan, and Sudan — and formally forbid homosexuality, with varying degrees of prohibition and punishment.
That, however, is not the half of it. As I detail in Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy, Islamic supremacists shrewdly comprehend that controlling culture is more important that dictating law. The game is either (a) to enshrine sharia in a nation’s law generically (i.e., without getting into the grisly details), as do the constitutions of Afghanistan and Iraq, both birthed by the U.S. State Department; or (b) to soft-pedal talk of sharia but champion a revival of Islamic culture, the stratagem perfected by Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Once this is done, formally enacting sharia’s specific provisions is unnecessary: The regime’s overt reverence for Islam green-lights the de facto and often vigilante enforcement of sharia standards.
Thus, for example, post-Saddam Iraq is among the world’s most notorious practitioners of anti-gay persecution. There is no formal law on the books forbidding homosexuality, but Sistani’s brutal injunctions are broadly observed. In Egypt, even under Mubarak’s “secular” regime (i.e., even before the recently ousted Muslim Brotherhood government ushered in a full-blown sharia constitution), homosexuals were routinely arrested — usually under the pretext that they had violated other laws — and subjected to savage treatment in the country’s many Islamic-supremacist strongholds. And in Erdogan’s increasingly Islamic-supremacist Turkey, homosexuals are subjected to harassment not only by mobs but also by the police, even though gay-advocacy groups are ostensibly permitted to operate.
In the greater scheme of things, Putin is a piker when it comes to oppressing homosexuals. Undeniably, he is resuscitating the stigmatization of gay life as a means of promoting traditional, procreative relationships — in a desperate attempt to reverse Russia’s death-spiral population decline. But a law banning pro-gay propaganda does not hold a candle to sharia’s license to brutalize and kill people over their sexual behavior.
So will President Obama call out King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia the way he called out Putin? Will he start lecturing and cutting off American aid to violent and thin-skinned Muslim populations? Will he start demanding that Islamic leaders in the United States loudly and unambiguously call for reform of anti-gay laws and practices in Muslim countries?
If I were Jay Leno, I wouldn’t hold my breath.
— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute. He is the author, most recently, of Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy.
Tuesday, August 13, 2013
Benghazi and the Banality of Evil
August 13, 2013
President Barack Obama and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton honor the Benghazi victims at the Transfer of Remains Ceremony held at Andrews Air Force Base, Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, September 14, 2012. An attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya claimed the lives of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, Information Management Officer Sean Smith, and security personnel Tyrone S. Woods and Glen A. Doherty on September 11, 2012. [State Department photo/ Public Domain]
Is it just me, or is the string of distractions that seem to pop up right on cue every time new light is about to be shed on the Benghazi story getting a little old?
Months late, CNN has gotten around to "breaking" a story that might help to complete the disturbing puzzle for the mainstream public, namely the allegation that Benghazi was the hub of a CIA weapons-running operation. Within hours, this was washed from the headlines by the "chatter" indicating an imminent terror plot that required the United States to close numerous diplomatic facilities. (Hurray, NSA!) And then, within days, the mainstream media was "breaking" the news that the first charges had been laid in connection with the Benghazi attack. (How convenient.)
True to pattern, a mainstream media outlet will get its "honest journalism" points, lifting the lid on the facts just long enough to release a little pressure before the pot explodes, but guaranteeing that by Sunday morning Benghazi will once again have been buried by supposedly more urgent issues.
As many of us have been observing since the fall of 2012, the Benghazi outrage -- an attack that, due to the Obama administration's aggressive passivity, became a massacre -- is the "scandal" that will never go away. And yet the story never achieves the fever pitch of many past, far lesser abuses of power, because the administration, in cahoots with its propaganda wing in the American news media, always finds a way to tamp down the big questions at the very moment those questions threaten to break loose in the American consciousness.
After their initial issuance of official lies regarding a nonexistent spontaneous protest over a video no one in Libya cared about, the two leads in this drama treated the world to a remarkable performance of "The Pair That Wasn't There." First, we had Hillary Clinton, the incredible disappearing woman, whose opening trick was to concede her first big scene, the sweep of Sunday political shows in the first days of the story, to her understudy, Susan Rice. Rice's scripted litany of lies was subsequently defended by the president on the grounds that poor Ms. Rice didn't know what she was talking about. (So why was she chosen to deliver the administration's first official sit-down interview accounts of the attack?) Clinton followed this auspicious opening by turning down a cordial invite to Congress in favor of an urgent State Department trip to...Australia. And then, to top it all off, she went to bed and bumped her head and couldn't get up for several weeks, or at least not up to Capitol Hill.
When at last she testified before Congress, four months after the attack, and two months after she was asked to testify, her only memorable line was "What difference -- at this point -- does it make?," thus punctuating her disappearing act with a classic "They'll never catch me!" flourish for the audience. As I have previously contended, the key words in Clinton's famous argument for ignorance were "at this point." That was her big "oops" moment, when her words and exasperated intonation revealed far more than was prudent. What she revealed was that her own, and the entire administration's, manner of addressing Benghazi was built on a strategy of delay: say anything, leave the country, maneuver around all direct questions, claim to be conducting one's own internal investigation, all in the hope that the fog of time will obscure the most horrendous details of this affair, or at least prevent those details from gathering into a complete and coherent picture in the public's mind. Her indignant qualification -- "at this point" -- suggested a woman flustered at being pressed on matters she could not answer directly without destroying her own career, and perhaps bringing down an entire corrupt administration, but who genuinely believed that she had stalled long enough to dull such pointed interrogation.
And then there is her partner in "scandal," President Obama, who makes plain old Clintonesque hiding and lying look like a cheap stunt. He has taken obfuscation and dissembling to a whole new, delightfully unforeseen level: he can hide the truth even from himself. For weeks, in a variety of formats, from nationally televised presidential debates to TV interviews, he recited an absurdist script that evoked a man whose essence had become so detached from his existence that we were left to wonder whether he even knew he was the one telling the lies. Obama has become a perfect microcosm of the Western democratic political establishment in its hundred-year leftward trajectory: a one-man kabuki performance which presents its falseness so consistently and committedly that it begins to displace reality in the minds of the enthralled/enslaved public.
On Benghazi, Obama's carefully memorized recitation, from which he never strayed, and which he never dared to embellish, was this:
As soon as we found out the Benghazi consulate was being overrun, I was on the phone with my national security team, and I gave them three instructions: Number one, beef up our security and procedures, not just in Libya, but in every embassy and consulate in the region. Number two, investigate exactly what happened, regardless of where the facts lead us. ... And number three, we are going to find out who did this and we are going to hunt them down.
We now know that Obama was informed of the attack almost immediately, and that he discussed it at a previously scheduled meeting with Leon Panetta during the early moments, after which he never made a single follow-up phone call to inquire about the status of the violence. And yet his public self-defense was that while American government representatives were under deadly attack, he gave three completely genericinstructions, all of them focused on long-term bureaucratic action, and none of them intended to address the murderous assault currently underway. It must never be forgotten that this list of absurdly inappropriate responses was meticulously scripted after the fact by handlers who presumably calculated that it was the best light in which Obama's inaction could be framed.
And now another dark facet of Benghazi, long discussed in the non-American media, as well as in the American alternative media, has made its way into the U.S. mainstream. In citing reports that the CIA has been using intimidation tactics to scare agents out of telling all they know, CNN notes that the many CIA agents in Benghazi on September 11 may have been part of a weapons-running operation intended to deliver arms to Muslim rebels in Syria. (The news here, of course, is not the weapons-running operation, which has been discussed in detail for ten months, but the fact that a U.S. government propaganda tool mentioned it.) The full import of this possibility must not be overlooked, or allowed to remain in a separate compartment of our minds, detached from the Obama-Clinton cover-up efforts. Putting the two parts of this story together may clarify even further the level of immorality that has been, and continues to be, perpetrated by the central players in this atrocious drama.
We know there were requests for extra security in Libya in the months prior to the attack, and that these requests were turned down. We know Clinton and Obama spoke once while the Benghazi massacre was ongoing, but not until several hours after it began. We know that long before speaking with Obama, Clinton contacted then-CIA director David Petraeus, "to confer and coordinate," as she told the Senate hearing, "given the presence of his facility, which of course was not well-known but was something that we knew and wanted to make sure we were closely latched up together." "Coordinate" and "latch up" in what sense? Getting their stories straight before being questioned? (Remember, this coordinating and latching up was taking place while their employees were under deadly assault.) We also know that none of these top-level decision-makers took any steps to activate U.S. resources in an attempt to rescue the besieged Americans during the seven-and-a-half-hour attack. Quite the contrary.
It is here that we must drag the facts out of their separate compartments, and bring them together into a coherent picture of the decision-making process that led to the deaths of several Americans, the injury of others, and an elaborate cover-up operation.
On July 30, 1945, the USS Indianapolis delivered uranium to be used in the Hiroshima atomic bomb, and was then torpedoed by a Japanese submarine, sinking in minutes. Most of the 1,196 crewmen survived the sinking of the ship, but several hundred died in the ocean over the next few days, many by shark attack. (This disaster was famously memorialized through actor Robert Shaw's fictional reminiscence in Steven Spielberg's Jaws.) Upon being hit, the Indianapolis sent distress signals, which were ignored. For a long time, however, the U.S. government claimed that the men were not rescued because no distress signal was ever sent, on account of the secrecy of the mission. The purpose of this false official story was perhaps to hide the gross failure in the chain of command which led to the single greatest loss of life in U.S. Navy history.
Benghazi represents the evil sister of the Indianapolis story. In this case, we know for a fact that numerous "distress signals" were sent. We also know that those urgent messages were not trapped in the lower reaches of the chain of command due to drunken intermediaries or skeptical officers. The truth of this disaster made it to the top of the hierarchy very quickly, while there was still time to act. And yet Obama, and the administration official most closely associated with the situation, Clinton, did not act. They walked away. They stopped talking. They lied, hid, and spit bullets at anyone who dared to doubt their veracity. (Remember Obama's threatening glare at Romney during the second presidential debate as he warned his rival not to question his concern for his underlings? It worked: Romney effectively ceased to question Obama on Benghazi from that moment on.)
What can be said with certainty is that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton demonstrated the moral frigidity of tyrants during and after the Benghazi attack. This is true regardless of how the attack occurred, particularly in light of the fact that there was never any evidence whatsoever for the one and only story to which the administration tried to cling until contradictory evidence forced them to abandon their hopes of having any official story at all.
The remaining question for an honest and rational observer is whether the whole truth could be even uglier than the partial picture we have been sickened by since last fall. If the gun-running scenario is verified, the answer to that question will be yes. For then we will have a president and secretary of state of the most powerful nation on Earth finding out that their covert effort to smuggle arms to Muslim rebels has been hijacked by Muslim terrorists, and deciding that protecting themselves from exposure to a major scandal is a more urgent priority than defending the lives of their countrymen. Those who still have a conscience have been asking how Obama and Clinton could have responded so soullessly, so inhumanely. This alleged CIA operation may provide the missing piece that solves the puzzle, and in so doing demonstrate the logic of the self-obsessed progressive power monger to a degree that is as clear as it is revolting.
The timing of the attack, and the fact that the attackers had to have known that the ambassador would be in Benghazi that day, would -- especially if one knew that Benghazi was the center of a U.S.-led weapons-running operation -- make a carefully planned assault, rather than random mob violence, the obvious default assumption, even "before all the facts were in." Their twisted stratagems in the Middle East apparently having been torpedoed by terrorists, Obama and Clinton froze in their tracks -- because they were suddenly faced with the inescapable reality that those tracks could no longer be covered -- and determined that in the name of preserving their own power, the drowning men ought to be left to the sharks. They chose to allow the lives of their representatives to go to waste, if necessary, rather than draw the spotlight onto themselves by "getting involved." Time was spent cobbling together a semi-plausible cover story in those hours before Clinton and Obama made their first public statements -- time that might have been spent planning and ordering a rescue effort.
The decision was not logical; it was the confused calculation of people whose only urgent concern was to avoid getting caught in bright lights that would expose their dirty hands. They buried their heads under the pillows and tried to wish their exposure away. They behaved like poorly raised children, prepared to sacrifice anyone or anything to save themselves from punishment. (Such behavior falls within a consistent pattern for both Clinton and Obama.) They behaved, in other words, like leading progressives. And in the aftermath of a disaster they helped to enable, and did not try to mitigate, they have done everything in their power to avoid having the unvarnished facts revealed in a timely fashion, thus spitting on the graves of the men whose deaths might have been avoided in the first place, if only the most powerful man and woman in the world had been in possession of even a fragment of the moral substance with which we have to assume they were born.
(Simple thought experiment: Imagine yourself in their respective positions, in the late afternoon of September 11, 2012, hearing early reports of an ongoing attack on your diplomats and agents in Libya. How would you feel? How often would you demand updates? Would you order your civilian and military experts to come up with response options immediately? Or would you go home and effectively take the phone off the hook, or call your fellow bigwigs to "coordinate" and "latch up" the public statements you'll have to give in the morning?)
The decision-making process I have described above is admittedly a speculation based on available evidence. In defense of this speculation, however, it seems to me to be the most generous light in which we can frame the actions of Obama and Clinton regarding Benghazi. The truth regarding their motives and responses cannot be any better than this; it may, however, turn out to be worse.
The question is, will mainstream America ever start to care enough to do something about it? In this regard, Benghazi is a symbol of the current predicament of Western civilization. The fact that Obama was re-elected president of the United States while this story was still fresh, and that Clinton is casually presumed to be the presidential frontrunner for 2016, elevates Hannah Arendt's famous concept, the banality of evil, almost to the point of being definitive of this final stage of modernity's decay. Millions of ordinary people close their eyes and walk "forward" on demand -- without evil intent, perhaps, but without the reason and judgment that men must possess if they are to discern and avoid evil outcomes.
In such an era, evil outcomes are guaranteed.
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/08/benghazi_and_the_banality_of_evil.html#ixzz2bqPxiUmC
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What Obama Can’t Admit
He’s still insisting that health care will be cheaper under ACA, despite evidence to the contrary.
Do you believe the president or your lying insurance premium?
Soon, that will be the most important question about Obamacare. President Barack Obama continues to insist that under the law, as he said in his pre-vacation press conference, people are going to be able to “sign up for affordable quality health insurance at a significantly cheaper rate than what they can get right now on the individual market.”
This has been his sales pitch for his health-care law from the beginning, and it’s never been true. But admitting that Obamacare will mean higher rates for many people is too painful a concession to make, so the president simply doesn’t make it, despite all the evidence contradicting his rote assurances of lower premiums.
The news reports of impending rate shock, driven by the law’s new regulations, keep rolling in, especially in states that don’t already have insurance rules like those in Obamacare. “Some lightly regulated states,” CNN reports, “including Indiana, Ohio, Florida, and South Carolina, have recently released preliminary rate information highlighting steep price increases.” Florida estimates an average premium increase of 35 percent, and Ohio projects an average increase of 41 percent.
It is young and healthy people, forced by the law to buy expensive insurance that they wouldn’t otherwise purchase, who will be particularly hard hit (the idea is that less-healthy people will benefit). Avik Roy of the Manhattan Institute crunched the numbers in California. He found that in San Francisco and San Diego, rates for 25-year-olds in the individual market will roughly double; and in Los Angeles County they will rise by 44 percent.
Small businesses are also vulnerable. According to the Associated Press, “Insurance companies have already warned small business customers that premiums could rise 20 percent or more in 2014 under the Affordable Care Act. That’s making some owners consider not paying for coverage for workers’ families.”
In other words, the president is right that rates will change “significantly,” just not in the direction he has promised since he began talking about health-care reform. As a presidential candidate, he said his reform would lower premiums for families by $2,500 on average. He maintained that the only change for people already with insurance would be cheaper premiums. During the congressional debate over the law, arguments to the contrary were pooh-poohed and scorned by the president’s allies.
Today, those arguments have been vindicated. Avik Roy points out that one PricewaterhouseCoopers study in 2009 that found premiums in the individual market would increase by 47 percent during the next few years was derided by the Left, but may have been too modest in its projection. Yet the president still speaks as if premiums are only going down. Years ago, it could have been chalked up to wishfulness and ignorance of how insurance markets work. Now, it’s simply refusing to acknowledge reality.
Defenders of the law minimize the rate increases by saying people will be getting better insurance for their money. Besides, they add, some low-income people will get subsidies. But this doesn’t change the essential facts. If someone owned a Ford because it suited his budget and needs and then you made him buy a Cadillac, you are making him buy a pricier car. It is still a more expensive car, even if taxpayers offset some or all of the costs.
At least liberal analysts are willing to admit that premiums are going up, which the president can’t yet bring himself to do. Jonathan Cohn, a staunch defender of the law at The New Republic, lamented the president’s misleading remark at his press conference. He wrote of average listeners: “They’d come away thinking their insurance will be cheaper next year. For some, it won’t be. Obama isn’t doing himself, or the law, any favors by fostering a false expectation.”
But that false expectation, surely, is the entire point, and always has been.
— Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review. He is also the author of the recently released book Lincoln Unbound. He can be reached via e-mail: comments.lowry@nationalreview.com. © 2013 King Features Syndicate
Photo: AP
Bill Clark’s Divine Plan
Ronald Reagan’s top hand has died.
By Paul Kengor on 8.12.13 @ 6:08AM
Clark, Bush and Reagan in August 1982
The most important adviser to President Ronald Reagan in his takedown of the Soviet empire has died at the age of 81. His name was William P. “Bill” Clark, known to many as simply “Judge Clark,” and he was one of the finest human beings and Americans that this country has ever known. I can say that without exaggeration and with the intimate knowledge of someone who became not only Clark’s biographer but a close friend.
Actually, it was hard to be otherwise. I never met anyone who didn’t like and come to respect Bill Clark. Think about this: Could you name another person, in the Reagan administration or out, praised by figures as diverse as Edmund Morris and Cap Weinberger, Edwin Meese and Lou Cannon, Maureen Dowd and Michael Reagan, Human Events and the New York Times, Time and National Review, and even Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush? As to the last pair, when we prepared the biography of Clark for publication, it wasn’t a huge surprise when we got endorsements from both Carter and Bush. Only Bill Clark could inspire something like that.
And yet, if you asked Bill Clark how that could be, he would smile and say, “They’re easily deceived.”
No, they weren’t. In Clark’s mind, however, they were. This was a devoutly Catholic man of genuine saint-like charity and humility — praise he would characteristically and insistently deny. In fact, the biggest mistake I made in convincing him to let me be his biographer was allowing him veto power over things he objected to. This wasn’t a mistake for the usual reasons. Indeed, if I want to make a criticism of Clark, he would say “much deserved.” The problem was Clark’s refusal to let me commend him for things indubitably much deserved. Clark wouldn’t even let me call me him a “devout” Catholic. If I recall, we settled on “serious” Catholic. That, at the least, could be rightly said of a man who built a church on his ranch outside Paso Robles, California, and whose only real regret in life was that he didn’t pursue the priesthood, leaving an Augustinian novitiate for good in February 1951.
But there was good reason for that, as Clark often noted. “It wasn’t part of the DP, Paul,” he would tell me again and again. “Not part of the DP.”
The “DP,” which Clark and Ronald Reagan pondered together, was the “Divine Plan.”
To that end, God had another route for Bill Clark: it was to become first a lawyer, a rancher, and then connect with Ronald Reagan in a fascinating ride that altered the course of history.
The two men took that ride together. Fellow ranchers, fellow horsemen, fellow cowboys, they were kindred souls — some said like brothers, others said like father and son. They seemed to intuitively know what the other wanted. They were so close that Michael Reagan, Ronald Reagan’s son, emailed me yesterday to say of Clark’s death: “I have lost my father for the second time … Good bye friend.”
For Bill Clark, the partnership began when he helped Reagan’s 1966 campaign for governor. Once Reagan won, Clark was his top aide, eventually chief of staff. Governor Reagan soon began appointing Clark up through various levels of the California court system, all the way to the state Supreme Court (thus the moniker “Judge Clark”). Clark loved the work, and even commuted to Sacramento via a private plane he regularly launched from the driveway-turned-runway of his ranch.
There was only one thing that could tug Bill Clark away from that job: Ronald Reagan’s need for him elsewhere; his sense of duty to Reagan and country. And so, when Reagan became president in January 1981, he convinced — and it truly took convincing — Clark to come to Washington to serve as deputy secretary of state. As Reagan put it, he needed someone he could trust at State, an “America desk” at Foggy Bottom. Bill Clark was that guy.
For the record, Clark first had to survive confirmation hearings before he could take the job at State. That would have been easy if not for a smarmy, smirking politician on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who deliberately tripped up Clark, turning the good man’s appointment into an international spectacle that humiliated the gentlemanly rancher and thrilled our enemies, especially the Soviets. That man, whose charade that February day was one of the ugliest displays in the history of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was a young senator from Delaware named Joe Biden.
Despite Biden’s antics, Clark’s performance at State blew away everyone. From Time to the New York Times, he was heralded for his steady hand, as Reagan’s reliable counsel. A year later, at the start of January 1982, Clark became Reagan’s national security adviser, head of the crucial National Security Council. It was there, in that seat, that Clark and Reagan, along with the likes of Bill Casey at the CIA and a group of superb staffers, laid the groundwork to undermine the Soviet Union.
That story cannot be given due justice in this short tribute, but, as a quick summary: The most consequential National Security Decision Directives — NSDDs, the formal documents that created official Reagan administration policy — were completed under Clark’s direction. Clark oversaw the development of NSDDs 2 through 120. The goal of these NSDDs was nothing short of revolutionary: to reverse the Soviet grip on Eastern Europe, to liberate Eastern Europe, and even to bring “political pluralism” (as one NSDD put it) to the Soviet Union. These were dramatic objectives that no one but Clark and Reagan thought possible in 1982.
Beyond NSDDs, any student of the Reagan administration knows that the really big things that happened in Reagan’s Soviet policy took place in the two transformational years that Clark headed the NSC: the meeting with John Paul II at the Vatican, the Westminster speech, the Strategic Defense Initiative, the Evil Empire speech, NSDDs 32, 54, 66, 75, just for starters.
When Clark left the NSC position in late 1983, in part due to pressures from White House “moderates” and “pragmatists,” the men surrounding Clark were devastated. They sensed a looming apocalypse; they thought everything they had gained under Clark was suddenly dead. I sat in the tack barn of Clark’s ranch one hot summer day and read their pleas — long, heartfelt, heartbroken letters (which Clark kept). His faithful lieutenants were sure all was lost. Two men, however, were not crestfallen at all: Bill Clark and Ronald Reagan. They just smiled. They were confident the plan was in place. The groundwork had been laid. The DP was ready to prevail.
Clark’s service to Reagan wasn’t over. He went on to serve a short but successful stint as secretary of interior, replacing the embattled James Watt. He also quietly served Reagan throughout the second term in a number of fascinating trouble-shooter and advisory roles that ranged from China’s Three Gorges Dam to Saddam Hussein to Iran-Contra. Virtually none of these tasks made the newspapers, and weren’t supposed to.
But then, alas, came another fascinating twist in the DP. It was what Clark later called a “wake-up call,” or, in his penchant for acronyms, an “AFE” — an Action Forcing Event.
It was March 7, 1988. The 56-year-old Clark taxied into position on the dirt landing strip of his ranch. He decided he was substantially finished with government service and was looking forward to life at the ranch, working cattle, planting olive trees, and developing a vineyard. But his sense of duty to God and country seemed unclear, unsettled. Something wasn’t right.
The night before, Clark had returned from a trip to Europe. He felt jet-lagged, not especially sharp, but his desk at the office in town was piled high with work, and he needed to pick up some fuel. He stepped into his plane and ran up the engine. Early into takeoff, the plane got caught in a crosswind. “I knew right away that I was in trouble,” said Clark. “I lost control.” At about 60 miles per hour, the plane crashed into a supply building to the right of the runway.
Bill Clark lay unconscious in a mangled mess of smoking metal. Ribs broken, shoulder separated, skull fractured, and soaked in blood and fuel, he was alive but hardly out of danger. The engine, simmering hot, was pushed back against his legs, while fuel from the fractured wing-tank sprayed on to the unconscious pilot. For some reason, the plane hadn’t burst into flames. “It should have lit up,” Clark later marveled.
A briefcase in the seat next to Clark contained a Dictaphone/recorder that activated from the force of impact when the plane hit the ground. The audiotape still survives. On the recording, Clark can be heard groaning and calling for help.
Clark’s only coherent plea, “God, please help me!” is immediately followed by the sound of the door being ripped off the plane. Jésus Muñoz, long-time ranch hand and dear friend of Clark to his final hours, had happened upon the crash and raced to the scene. He yanked the door from its hinges and somehow extricated Clark before the plane burst into flames.
Clark remained unconscious for an hour-and-a-half before waking in the intensive care unit at a nearby hospital. He thanked God and then made a decision he had been discerning: He would no longer delay in building that chapel he had thought about over the years. That brush with death, said Clark, was “a little wake-up call … God’s wake-up call.”
“Look,” he told me one summer at his ranch, shyly, sheepishly. “I’m no saint… but the incident helped me decide to go ahead and build the chapel.” To borrow from one of his inspirations, Mother Teresa, he determined to do something beautiful for God, on the ranch property, the same ground where his craft smashed.
Today, that chapel, financed solely by Clark, sits off Route 46 in central California, at the entrance to Clark’s ranch. It’s called Chapel Hill, and is admired by the community and, surely, by the God that Clark dedicated it to.
It contains artifacts collected by Clark and his late wife: originals from 14th to 17th century European monasteries, a special replica from St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, surplus ceiling and stone remnants from the William Randolph Hearst collection at nearby San Simeon. On the exterior of the church is a ceramic mosaic of Saint Francis’ Peace Prayer. It was a prayer that Clark and Reagan prayed together. It’s also reflective of the Franciscan friar’s frock that hangs in the closet of Clark’s ranch house, given to him long ago, but which, having decided not to pursue the priesthood, Clark always felt unworthy to don.
In fact, it’s all so magically and providentially Saint Francis-like. In the hospital, having received God’s “wake-up call,” Clark experienced a Francis-like epiphany, as he felt God calling him to build his church.
Clark gave God that church, and God gave Bill Clark 25 more years.
Fittingly, and finally, it’s in that chapel that the funeral service of Bill Clark, Ronald Reagan’s indispensable man and kindred soul, seriously devout Catholic and seriously good man who literally made the world a better place, will be held this week.
Call it the DP. All part of the DP.
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