GORDON GEKKO IS A DEMOCRAT

By Ann Coulter
http://www.anncoulter.com/
March 25, 2009


How did Republicans get saddled with Wall Street? Obama just got the biggest campaign haul from Wall Street in world history, and Republicans still can't shake the public perception that they are tied at the hip to Wall Street bankers who hate them.

It's as if National Rifle Association members conspired with Republicans to bankrupt the country and everyone blamed the Democrats for being shills of the NRA.

Maybe if the financial capital of the nation were located in Salt Lake City, rather than Manhattan, the financial community would support Republicans. But Wall Street is a street located in New York City.

No one in the top echelons of the financial industry who has a weekend place in the Hamptons is a Republican.

No, there is one. Teddy Forstmann. He has to throw his own parties and fly guests in. Otherwise, if they want to go to any half-decent parties, bankers must be Democrats. At their income bracket, multimillionaires will trade a little extra tax money for good cocktail parties.

Even the "Republicans" on Wall Street don't care about national defense or social issues. They just want to trade with China and hire illegal aliens.

Last September, The New York Times reported that individuals associated with the securities and investment industry had given $9.9 million to the Obama campaign, $7.4 million to the Hillary Clinton campaign and only $6.9 million to the McCain campaign. Either they're all Democrats or some commodity named "hope" was going through the roof last year.

Employees of Lehman Bros. alone gave Obama $370,000, compared to about $117,000 to McCain. (No wonder Bush let them go under.)

According to an analysis of Federal Election Commission records by the Center for Responsive Politics, the top three corporate employers of donors to Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Rahm Emanuel were Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and JPMorgan. Six other financial giants were in the top 30 donors to the White House Dream Team: UBS AG, Lehman Bros., Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch and Credit Suisse Group.

Since 1998, the financial sector has given a total of $37.6 million to Obama, compared to $32.1 million to McCain. But Obama ran for his first national office only in 2004. So McCain got less from the financial industry in a decade that included two runs for president than Obama did in four years.

As we've seen in recent weeks, Wall Street gets what it pays for. Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd included language in the stimulus bill allowing executives of the bailed-out banks to collect million-dollar bonuses.

And yet the Democrats' endless favors for their Wall Street friends never sticks to them because everyone treats Democrats' shilling for their own contributors as if it's a Nixon-goes-to-China moment.

On the March 23 edition of MSNBC's "Hardball," The Nation's David Corn said: "Remember -- What was it? A year or two back when there was talk about taxing hedge fund managers at the rate that the rest of us pay? Who intervened in that? Chuck Schumer."

But Corn then quickly added that this "got a lot of Democrats really mad. Here was a Democrat, you know, getting in the way of a populist issue at a time when the economy was already heading in the wrong direction."

Which Democrats got "really mad"? Chris Dodd? George Soros? Warren Buffett? Jon Corzine? Tim Geithner? Roger Altman? Bob Rubin? Jamie Dimon? Lloyd Blankfein?

Corn's formulation was wonderfully subtle: Admit that a Democrat preserved a sweetheart deal for hedge fund managers -- but then claim that his fellow Democrats were furious with him.

People are more likely to believe something if they think they came to it themselves. Hearing a liberal muse on TV that it was an aberration for Chuck Schumer to intervene to protect hedge fund managers -- risking the wrath of other Democrats -- the average person thinks: So Democrats must be the party of the people. I always thought George Soros was a Democrat, but he must be a Republican.

Democrats take care of the financial industry -- and the financial industry takes care of Democrats. After honing his financial skills as the bagman for Bill Clinton's White House, Rahm Emanuel was hired by the investment bank Wasserstein Perella, where he worked for 2 1/2 years.

For that, Emanuel was paid more than $18 million. (Maybe Rahm Emanuel was the Democrat livid at Schumer for preserving a sweet tax deal for hedge fund managers!)

Democrats have a beautiful system: They're showered with Wall Street money, but they also get to pillory Republicans for being the party of "Wall Street." The bankers don't care if Democrats attack them. They still get their bailout money.

Today's Tune: Elvis Presley - Fever

(Click on title to play video)

THE AMERICAN "ERA"

National Review
23 March 2009
http://www.nationalreview.com/

Happy Warrior

Writing about Europe a couple of pages back, I didn’t mention Canada - mainly because Canada isn’t in Europe, although it has a European mien. But, when I do raise the subject of Her Majesty’s northern dominion in this space, American conservatives sometimes query the relevance: “What’s Canada to do with me?”

Hey, wake up and smell the syrup! The road to hell is paved with Trudeaupian public policy. Every malign Canadian idea (from multiculturalism to socialized health care) heads south a generation later, while every America idea (from the First Amendment to non-confiscatory taxation) foolish enough to attempt the journey north gets gunned down on the 49th parallel.

For decades the quickest way for the Canadian media to kill any proposal has been to affix the words “American-style” to it: “American-style health system”, “American-style gun laws”, “American-style deregulation”… Now that America has adopted every Euro-Canadian fancy and stuck a few extra zeroes on the end for good measure, Canuck liberals are going to find a new bogey man. They’re thin on the ground. And “New Zealand-style deregulation” doesn’t have quite the same bloodchilling ring to it.

“Obama’s budget serves as a watershed for our own conservatives, who have spent their adult lives looking enviously at the United States,” wrote Jonathan Kay in Canada’s National Post. “Question: How many of us self-proclaimed Canuck right-wingers would move south right now..? America is now like just about everywhere else in the West -- a bloated nanny state led by a big-spending liberal.”

In geopolitical terms, this is all very odd. How in an unprecedented moment of supposed unipolar hegemony did the hegemonic unipole wind up taking on all the characteristics of the Liliputian pipsqueaks? In his address to Congress in 2003, Tony Blair said, “As Britain knows, all predominant power seems for a time invincible but, in fact, it is transient. The question is: What do you leave behind?”

Britain left behind the first global language; the legal system of a quarter of the world’s nations; three-sevenths of the G7 major economies; 12 of the 25 jurisdictions with the highest GDP per capita; the four wealthiest countries with large populations (over 20 million); the key regional players in almost every corner of the globe, from South Africa to India to Australia; the least worst part of China; and, of course, the unipolar hegemon lui-meme.

Not bad for an empire that, in the bleak assessment of Sir Richard Turnbull, Britain’s High Commissioner in Aden, would be remembered for only two things – “the popularization of Association Football [soccer] and the term ‘f**k off’.”

The United States, by contrast, is the first non-imperial superpower. At the dawn of the American moment in 1945, it chose to project itself not in traditional great-power ways but by creating the UN and other transnational institutions in which it consciously diminished its own voice and artificially inflated everybody else’s. Over time, all these American-created, American-funded transnational institutions became explicitly anti-American, to the point where it seems entirely routine for the representative of a genocidal regime in Sudan to be elected to the UN “human rights” council and announce from his plush Manhattan office that he wants to make Guantanamo Bay the main focus of his term.

America garrisons not distant ramshackle colonies but its wealthiest allies – Germany and Japan – to the point where almost every other western nation now budgets for an ever more minimal, perfunctory military, entirely confident that US defense welfare is a permanent feature of life. Troops from India, the dominions and the colonies provided a third of Britain’s military manpower in the First World War, and half in the Second. By comparison, America heads a military alliance of non-military allies in which it expends vast amounts of diplomatic energy trying to persuade the world’s richest countries to cough up a token detachment of non-combat troops to man the photocopier back at barracks while the Third Infantry Division slogs up into the mountains to do all the fighting.

And, while one can admire the antipathy to empire, harder to explain is the reluctance of America to export its founding ideas. Dozens of new nations have come into being since 1945, a lot of them with the aid of American blood or treasure, and yet not one was encouraged to adopt a US model of government. If England is the mother of parliaments, America is a wealthy spinster with no urge to start dating.

I’m not indulging in the misplaced anglophilia to which American conservatives are sometimes prone. Contemporary Britain is an unlovely place sinking into a hell of Hogarthian depravity from which there are no easy roads back: Consider what LBJ’s Great Society did to the black family, and then imagine it applied to the general population. The Britannic inheritance will last longer in India and Australia than in the mother country.

But I do worry about whether America’s disinclination to sell the world its own best ideas has led to some of the world’s very worst ideas coming home to roost. Individual freedom is on the skids everywhere. Britons and Canadians fought tyranny abroad only to enter the 21st century enthusiastically embracing incrementally the control-freak caprices and micro-regulatory regimes of their old enemies. The world could use a bold standard-bearer for liberty. If not America, who?

‘Green Hell’ Coming Soon to a Life Like Yours

by Marc Morano
http://www.humanevents.com/
03/25/2009

Don’t say you were not warned. A new book has debuted just in time to help save the humans from the “save” the Earth crowd. The book serves as a chilling warning to modern society.

Be prepared the next time your child comes home from school with some nice “green” project or attempts to lecture you about how you “should” be doing more “sustainable” activities to “save” the Earth. You will be ready to confront teachers, political leaders, neighbors, and annoying aunts with the astounding new book by Steve Milloy titled Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them.

Milloy, the publisher of the daily must read JunkScience.com (http://www.junkscience.com/), has issued the most startling warning to human civilization: that the “green” agenda is in reality an anti-human agenda. The book serves as a comprehensive detailed guide to the command and control agenda of the environmental movement.

Green Hell sounds the alarm unambiguously: “Make no mistake: Living green is really about someone else micro-regulating you -- downsizing your dreams and plugging each one of us into a brand new social order for which we never bargained.”

With passages more apt for the horror section at any book store, Milloy lays out the threat from the looming green menace. “Green ideologues are bursting with an impatient zeal to begin dictating, through force of law, your mobility, diet, home energy use, the size of your home, how far you can travel, and even how many children you can have.”

Milloy reveals how the well-funded eco-alarmist industry is literally hell bent on a “permanent restructuring of life as you know it.”

Despite the fact that the science behind global warming fears continues to be rebutted by growing numbers of prominent scientists and in peer-reviewed scientific journals, the political “consensus” appears about to commit the U.S. and the world to a massive tax and regulations of the economy. After all, as Milloy points out, science has never stood in the way of the green agenda before and they are licking their tofu at the “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to advance their agenda dramatically” under Barack Obama -- the nation’s “first green President.”

“The greens, you see, have personalized climate change. It’s your fault. It’s your commute, your home, your purchase. Even your eating is a problem,” Milloy writes. “In sum, the better you have it -- the more immoral you are,” he adds.

Smart growth? Milloy reveals it as “the ultimate in Soviet-style central planning.”

The modern flush toilet? Milloy reports it is considered “unsustainable” and should be discouraged with a “toilet tax and replaced by a “dry” toilet.

Running out of food? Milloy notes that “we have so much corn we can afford to turn it into ethanol and burn it as fuel. We have so much farmland that the federal government actually pays farmers $1.8 billion per year not to grow crops on 34 million acres in order to prop up prices.”

Enjoy controlling the temperature of your own home? You may not have that “luxury” in the future. Milloy reports The California Energy Commission “proposed the installation in home of ‘programmable control thermostats’ that would be controlled remotely by utility companies.”

Worried your kids are being indoctrinated into being young little foot soldiers in the green agenda? To borrow a phrase from Time magazine: “Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid.” Milloy reports that the green movement has recruited young children and is “using them strategically as cute, cuddly messengers of planetary doom.”

Worried about energy? Milloy reports that unfounded climate hysteria may make California-style “rolling blackouts” part of your very near future. “Of the more than 150 coal plant proposals submitted” in 2007, “an astounding fifty-nine of the proposed plants were cancelled, abandoned, or put on hold.”

Green Hell reveals that abundant and affordable energy is the cornerstone of a prosperous life. Before the widespread use of carbon based energy, life was nasty, brutish and short.

Milloy points out that global warming may be a moral issue after all. Depriving the residents of the developing world from affordable energy and modern necessities based on unfounded eco-fears is nothing short of immoral. Milloy reports that New York Times Columnist Thomas Friedman recently “cried out to India, ‘No, No, No, Don’t Follow Us’” in response to India’s plan to introduce the $2500 car to the general public.

But, is it “moral” for white wealthy Westerners to preach “Don’t Follow Us” to the estimated 1.6 billion people of color in the developing world who lack running water and electricity?

Green Hell serves as a guide, a warning and a reality check to those worried about uncorrupted science and, quite simply, human life. Mankind must not forget that carbon based economies have been one of the greatest liberators of mankind in the history of our planet.

Life used to be nasty, brutish and short before widespread use of carbon based energy. The unprecedented advances in the 20th century stands as a testament to carbon based energy. Will the developing nations’ poor residents be allowed to prosper like the Western world or will they descend into a “Green Hell” of poverty, misery and death? Green Hell serves as wake up call against complacency and a guide to battle the anti-human green juggernaut.


Mr. Morano is the former communications director for the Senate Environment & Public Works Committee and former advisor and speechwriter for Sen. James Inhofe. Morano will be launching a new climate and eco-news center as a special project of CFACT.org .

Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto

By Thomas Lifson
http://www.americanthinker.com/
March 23, 2009

Mark Levin's new book, published today, is essential reading. It is a remarkable work on several different levels. It takes no degree of clairvoyance to predict that it will become an enormous best seller and very soon begin to influence the national political debate.

Liberty and Tyranny artfully presents a harmonious marriage of the timeless with the timely. On the one hand, the book is a thorough yet compact briefing on the major political issues of this era. On the other hand, the author brings to bear the principles of the American Founders and Framers of the Constitution (and the great thinkers who guided them), illustrating, dissecting, and explaining our current political arguments, while enlightening the reader with the genuine wisdom bequeathed to all of us -- the sacred trust of the Founders, embodied in the Declaration of Independence, The Constitution, and Federalist Papers, all of which are quoted and applied with insight and precision.

Think of it as an outstanding tutorial in applied political philosophy, and you will begin to grasp the scope of Mark Levin's achievement. The fact that the book is lucid, unpretentious, and utterly accessible to anyone who cares to focus and think, means that it will elevate the quality of political thought and dialogue across a broad swath of the American populace.

If you care passionately about America, and worry for its future -- and who doesn't, given the current national leadership? -- then you owe it to yourself to buy and devour this marvelous work. It is an essential antidote to what ails America at the moment.

Each chapter is a well-constructed essay, so the reader is quite free to read it a little at a time. But, unlike so many contemporary political works, it is also a well-constructed and coherent whole. So you may be tempted to stay up all night reading it as soon as a copy comes into your hands.

Conservatives who read Liberty and Tyranny will be supplied with ample ammunition to outsmart, outthink and out-reason their liberal friends who are brave enough to actually engage in a serious political debate with them.

The overall plan of the book is simple and logical. Chapter One, "On Liberty and Tyranny," lays out the basic conceptual scheme. Levin contrasts two opposing political philosophies currently in contention: The Conservative versus the Statist. He grounds the Conservative in the values and insights on human nature of the American Founders, and does so economically and convincingly. For the other side of the debate, he quite correctly rejects the label "liberal", because in current usage the term has become entirely divorced from its literal meaning. He writes:

The Modern Liberal believes in the supremacy of the state.... For the Modern Liberal, the individual's imperfection and personal pursuits impede the objectives of a utopian state. In this, Modern Liberalism promotes what French Historian Alexis de Tocqueville called soft tyranny, which becomes increasingly more oppressive, partially leading to hard tyranny.... As the word "liberal" is, in its classical meaning, the opposite of authoritarian, it is more accurate, therefore, to characterize the Modern Liberal as a Statist. (p.4)

The following nine chapters, plus an epilogue containing Levin's own manifesto -- the political changes he posits as desirable (and with which I agree) -- are organized thematically, with titles such as On Prudence and Progress, On Faith and the Founding, On the Welfare State, and On Self Preservation (i.e., national security), wherein he encapsulates nearly all the major political issues of our day, providing essential up-to-date information, while also weaving in the wisdom a timeless thinkers ranging from Alexander Hamilton to St Augustine. As the book progresses, the chapters become more and more focused on current political disputes. But the beauty of the structure is that the principles discussed in the earlier chapters are brought to bear on the subsequent topics.

I am proud to note that American Thinker's Lee Cary is quoted in the book's chapter, "On Immigration." Considering the company Dr. Cary is keeping as a source for the book, this is a high honor indeed, both for him and for AT.

The epilogue, wherein Mark tells us what we conservatives can do, and where he outlines what changes he sees as necessary to beat back the now-ascendant forces of statism, may certainly spark some disagreement, because Mark pulls no punches. He is setting a lofty target, but one that is amply justified by the clear-headed research and writing that went into the body of the text.

Fans of Mark Levin's syndicated radio show will recognize the voice of the hard-hitting champion of conservatism they know and love. But there is also, for those unfamiliar with Mark's radio work (but perhaps propagandized by liberal media into dismissing him as a crazy right wing radical), a remarkable and persuasive tone, based on solid research, extensively documented, and unchallengeable reason. This book could actually change some minds, especially as the nation’s peril becomes more and more apparent.

All in all, Mark Levin has given us a remarkable gift. Read this book, and buy copies for those you care about, too. Anyone from a clever high schooler to a scholar of political philosophy can benefit from reading Liberty and Tyranny.

Thomas Lifson is editor and publisher of American Thinker.

Reading Flannery

O’Connor’s fiction is abrupt and rude. Just like divine grace.

By Ralph C. Wood
http://www.nationalreview.com/
March 25, 2009, 4:00 a.m.

Flannery O’Connor is an offensive writer. Readers who haven’t dipped into her stories and books sometimes don’t know where to begin with this author, who was born on this day in 1925.

It is almost impossible to read O’Connor without revulsion — so frequent are the deaths, so maniacal the characters, so uninviting the fictional world. There we encounter, for example, a club-footed delinquent who lies and steals because, he says, he’s good at it; a little rich boy who drowns himself in search of the salvation his parents hold in contempt; a baptizing backwoods prophet who has spent time in an insane asylum and who deafened his own nephew with a shotgun blast; a failed white liberal writer who contracts a lifelong disease while seeking to celebrate a secular communion with black dairy workers; a mass-murdering misfit who guns down a complacent grandmother while complaining that Jesus has “thown” everything off balance; and a self-satisfied farm wife who thanks Jesus daily for making her both white and prosperous — until she is slugged in the head with a psychology textbook thrown by a Wellesley student.

Yet the offense is precisely the point of Flannery O’Connor’s work. Her fiction creates scandal just as the Gospel often becomes a snare and a stumbling block. Some readers see their own condition mirrored in O’Connor’s grotesque characters, and thus seek to discern the Mercy that is given in extremis to almost all of them. Other readers turn away in wrath, outraged that O’Connor turns her keen satiric eye on secular sophisticates and cultured despisers of religion. They cannot forgive her sympathetic treatment of shouting fundamentalists and fire-breathing street preachers. Contempt for the sweated Christianity of such folks is, after all, the last acceptable form of cultural bigotry in our time.

This is hardly to say that O’Connor puts an imprimatur on her rabid believers. Their virulent anti-Catholicism and obscurantist anti-intellectualism are often pathetic and comic at once. Her rabid unbelievers are equally scandalous, for they are vehemently determined to deny God and to live as if all things were permitted. In either case, O’Connor’s characters wrangle with the large and hard questions that the suavely civilized and merely urbane often seek to ignore: namely, whether they will live in radical obedience or radical defiance of God.

When asked why her fiction, like that of so many other Southern writers, is filled with freaks, O’Connor wryly replied that Southerners “are still able to recognize one.” To discern deviations and distortions, O’Connor explained, one must first have a clear vision of the Norm. The rural and “Christ-haunted” South, as she called it, has retained such a vision because the popular imagination has remained essentially Biblical. When the folk religion is shaped by the Biblical narrative — of creation and fall, of Israel’s election and Christ’s incarnation, of the crucifixion and the resurrection, of the church as God’s own people and the Second Coming as history’s consummation — then even the barely literate possess the ultimate criterion for measuring themselves and everything else.

The best place to begin encountering O’Connor’s radically Christian work is not with her most famous story, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” Many people are left sleepless after reading it. I would recommend a later short story entitled “Revelation,” since it is perhaps the most redemptive of her works. One might then progress to other stories that don’t conclude with violent death, perhaps “The Enduring Chill” and “Parker’s Back.” Along the way, one would do well to take up O’Connor’s magnificent letters in The Habit of Being. Her lively correspondence with all sorts and conditions of letter-writers constitutes, by my reckoning, an unparalleled epistolary witness. Readers get to listen in as O’Connor makes stunning discernments of people and events, often in jocular and self-mocking ways. But we also follow her sardonic though faithful embrace of the suffering that led to her death from lupus in 1964, at age 39.

From these stories and letters, one should proceed to the two volumes of short fiction entitled A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge. The film version of “The Displaced Person,” one of her finest works, is set on the O’Connor farm in rural Georgia, and it is available from PBS. Only after such preparatory work should readers approach her brilliant but difficult novels, The Violent Bear It Away and Wise Blood. Throughout their scrutiny of O’Connor’s fiction, they should also examine the splendid volume of posthumously published essays and speeches, Mystery and Manners. All of her published fiction, as well as excerpts from her letters and essays, can be found in a handsome hardcover edition entitled The Collected Works of Flannery O’Connor, from the Library of America.

The key to comprehending Flannery O’Connor’s life and work is to remember that, in her lexicon, divine grace is never synonymous with human graciousness. On the contrary, it is often abrupt and rude and disrespectful of ordinary proprieties, for the skin of human resistance is exceedingly thick. When asked why her characters meet such violent self-awakenings, O’Connor replied that it’s because their heads are so hard. Grace must wound before it can heal, she declared, and her fiction is filled with both woundings and healings. O’Connor wittily consoled readers that, while a lot of folks get killed in her fiction, nobody gets hurt. In her unsentimental reckoning, there are states of thriving but damnable life far worse than a grisly but saving death. Thus is O’Connor’s fiction comic in a precise Dantesque sense: It does not close down toward tragic and final defeat, but opens out toward drastic, even eternal, hope — often at the threshold of total ruin. And this is why, though lean and angular, her fiction will endure.

— Ralph C. Wood is a professor of theology and literature at Baylor University and the author of Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South.

Muslim Hate

Media Silence

By Nonie Darwish
http://www.frontpagemag.com/
Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Western media vigorously report on politically incorrect speech, except the type coming from Muslim leaders. Such outrageous speech is a daily diet on Arab TV. The following is a recent statement:

“The Jews are the Enemies of Muslims regardless of the occupation of Palestine; we will fight, defeat and annihilate them until not a single Jew remains on the face of the earth.” (January 2009, Egyptian cleric Muhammad Ya’qoub).

On February 1, 2009, prominent sheikh Yousef Al-Qaradhawi, on Al Jazeera TV, called the holocaust "divine punishment" for the Jews and encouraged Muslims to do same by saying: "Allah willing, the next time will be at the hand of the believers [i.e. Muslims]." He then added that he would "shoot Allah's enemies, the Jews."

In September 2008, Sheikh Nabil Al-'Awadhi, a Kuwaiti government-appointed preacher said that "Europeans are immoral, unclean and cowardly.” Egyptian Cleric Alaa Said said in January: “Jews spread wars, homosexuality and corruption in the world.”

Egyptian cleric Ahmad Abd Al-Salam accused Jews of “Infecting food with cancer and shipping it to Muslim countries.” Also in January, Egyptian cleric Zaghloul Al-Naggar called on “waging war against the Jews, who are devils in human form.” In 2001 I read in the front page of an Egyptian newspaper that Israeli Viagra is flooding Egyptian markets to sterilize Egyptian men.

Egyptian cleric, Hazem Shuman, recently said “We must teach our children to hate the Jews.” Even the Mumbai terror attack was blamed on Zionists by Pakistani security expert Zaid Hamid; the theme was that, of course, in addition to the 9/11 terror attack itself and the 2004 Tsunami being all done by the Jews, some Muslim leaders proclaimed. Muslim clerics do not find it at all unholy to express delight and exuberance when catastrophes hit the West, such as the destruction by hurricane Katrina or the current economic crisis. Last October, in a Friday sermon at the Tehran University, Iranian leader Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, said that the U.S.'s economic crisis was "divine punishment" that had made Iranians very happy.” Across the Muslim world, non-Muslim Westerners are referred to as "wicked," "corrupt," "our clear enemies" and “the great Satan.”

Many Muslim journalists and professionals promote the same message. Egyptian female lawyer Nagla Al-Imam said on Arab TV last October: “Arab men should sexually harass Israeli women. Leave the land so we won’t rape you.” Egyptian intellectual, Galal Amin, said last February that “Israel was behind the attempted assassination of Naguib Mahfouz,” an Egyptian Nobel prize winning author, who was stabbed in Cairo by a radical Muslim. Syrian economist Muhammad Sharif Mazloum last October, said: “Jews assassinated President Kennedy and are also responsible for today’s world wide economic crisis.” Kuwaiti professor, Abdullah Al-Nafisi, on Al-Jazeera TV, suggests anthrax attacks on the White House and prays for the bombing of a nuclear plant on Lake Michigan.

For the Western mind, it is hard to even imagine going to a church or synagogue to hear preachers cursing, threatening and inciting violence and annihilation of whole groups of people. Because this does not make sense to Westerners, they immediately accept the claims that such preachers are just a fringe minority, an extreme sect or cult, such as Jim Jones. But that claim is dishonest, since hate propaganda is the rule and not the exception in Muslim preaching. It must go hand in hand with demands for conquering other people, otherwise jihad will end.

Hate rhetoric comes into Muslim homes in America via satellite dishes directly from the horse’s mouth in the Muslim world. Is it any wonder that in recent Muslim demonstrations in Florida, demonstrators were telling Jews to “go back to the ovens”?

We must never underestimate the power of hate propaganda, because, quite simply, it works. Believe it or not, if you grow up hearing ‘holy’ cursing day in and day out, it can feel and sound normal, justified and even good. Evil, especially coming from religious leaders, is powerful especially if no one opposes it. That is why I decided to end my subscription to satellite Arab TV, simply because I could not take it any more. I now rely on Memri.org for information on Arab media.

By not reporting on Islamic hate rhetoric, Western media is selectively normalizing hate speech for one particular group against another and developing a double standard that is detrimental to peace and democracy. The cancer of hate speech and anti-Semitism is already in Europe and on American college campuses. No one should be above criticism and exposure, especially those who issue Fatwas of death. Courage and honesty are needed in our media. [Frontpage encourages all of our readers to buy Nonie Darwish's new book, Cruel and Usual Punishment: The Terrifying Global Implications of Islamic Law.]

Nonie Darwish is an American of Arab/Muslim origin. A freelance writer and public speaker, she runs the website http://www.arabsforisrael.com/. Her new book is Cruel and Usual Punishment: The Terrifying Global Implications of Islamic Law.

On the Parole of Terrorist Sara Jane Olson

By Ron Radosh
http://pajamasmedia.com/

March 22nd, 2009 12:20 pm

I know that most PJM readers- being conservatives- do not read The New York Times. For that reason, I want to suggest they immediately turn to the wonderful Op-Ed by writer Caitlin Flanagan, on the parole last week of Sara Jane Olson, a.k.a. Kathleen Soliah, the name she took as part of the 1970’s “Symbionese Liberation Army,” a radical terrorist group that made the Weather Underground look like amateurs.

SLA members Michael Bortin, William Harris, Sara Jane Olson and Emily Montague appear in a Sacramento court in February 2002 on robbery charges. Associated Press file photo by Rich Pedroncelli

Ms. Flanagan presents the strongest case possible for how hypocritical it is for the courts to allow Olson to serve her parole at home in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she lives with her husband, a wealthy doctor and their children. Olson, after all, was taking part in a bank robbery when a gunshot killed a guard, and when she kicked a pregnant bank teller in the stomach. The teller later miscarried. Her group also tried their best to assassinate police offers.

The excuse for their actions, of course, is that they carried them out for idealistic reasons. As Flanagan writes, they claim they were only reacting to the terrible times in which they lived, in which the U.S. was waging a horrendous war in Vietnam which they opposed. Pace Bill Ayers, whom as we all know, makes similar excuses for his own behavior in that era, which to this day he does not regret.

At least the founder of the Weather Underground, Mark Rudd (whose book I review today) admits the truth in his new memoir Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen. Unlike Ayers or Olson, Rudd acknowledges that their goal was not to build a peace movement opposed to the war, but to engage in guerrilla warfare at home, waged through terror and violence, for the purpose of overthrowing our democratic government. Yet in his conclusion, Rudd too contradicts all he writes earlier, arguing that there was an “idealism inherent in our rebellion.” If so, it is the kind of idealism that leads to murder of innocents, one of which the 20th Century World was all too familiar from the likes of Hitler and Stalin.

Despite writing a top notch critical article, Flanagan herself makes on error. She writes that they “combined a set of generally laudable goals- they wanted to end poverty, improve public schools and eradicate sexism and racism- with the leadership and tactics of an unrepentant street criminal with a gun fixation.” Their so-called laudable goals, however, were but an excuse for the criminal activity which made them distinguishable from others who truly wanted to attain justice.

If they wanted to improve public schools and end racism, one must ask why the SLA murdered the first African-American Superintendent of Schools in Oakland, Marcus Foster. Perhaps Ms. Flanagan forgot that. As I recall, the SLA’s argument at the time was that Mr. Foster was a front for the white power structure, who was fooling the black population into believing the schools must be made better under the system. Some laudable goal.

At any rate, the parole board in California should get lots of letters endorsing Flanagan’s main argument: her criminal behavior must be punished, and the parole terms others - especially poor African-American parolees- never get, should be immediately rescinded. Let Ms. Olson live in a half way house in San Francisco or Oakland, far away from her nice suburban home and family. She can wait for reuniting with them another few decades.

Today's Tune: The Waterboys - Because The Night / The Pan Within

(Click on title to play video)

Film Review: "I Love You, Man"

by Roger Ebert
Chicago Sun-Times
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/frontpage
March 18, 2009

I would like to have a friend like Sydney Fife. I think a lot of guys would. Even though it's funny, charming and light-hearted, that may be the basic appeal of "I Love You, Man." Sydney represents the freedoms most men hesitate to give themselves, maybe through fear of ending up alone, arrested or locked inside behavior that looks fun when you're young but crazy when you're older. The great thing about Sydney is that he lives your fantasies so you don't have to yourself.

Peter (Paul Rudd) needs a Sydney (Jason Segel) in his life. He has been told this by Zooey (Rashida Jones), the girl he plans to marry. She would, however, have preferred a less extreme case than this Sydney. Peter is a real-estate agent who is hopelessly, even touchingly, clueless when it comes to seeming the least bit cool. One of those really nice guys, who, when the chips are down, has no idea where to look, what to say, how to move or how to extricate himself gracefully from an impossible situation. He gets along great with women but has no male best friend and actually needs to find one to be best man at his wedding.

Because this is a rom-com, various obligatory scenes are necessary; Peter goes shopping for a best friend on some man dates with guys met on the Internet, with predictable results. The movie feels locked into formula until the appearance of Sydney, met while scarfing free food at Peter's open house for the home of Lou Ferrigno. Segel brings sunshine into the movie; we like his character even more quickly than Peter does.

Sydney lives in a little frame cottage a block up the street from the Venice Beach boardwalk. This house was cheap in, oh, say, the Depression. Now it only looks cheap. We never see its interior; Sydney escorts Peter directly to his "Man Cave," a converted garage in the backyard where he keeps all his toys: drum set, guitars, music system, flat-screen TV, movie posters, lava lamps, weird souvenirs, recliner chairs, wet bar, fridge, wall hangings, even an area dedicated to ... well, never mind.

Jason Segel plays Sydney as a man thoroughly comfortable in his own skin, an unapologetic hedonist who uses his intelligence as a comic weapon. Essentially, the whole movie is based on the fact that he is able to create an actually plausible, human best friend. Incredibly, this is the first time I'm aware of seeing him in a movie. I apparently saw him in "SLC Punk" and "Slackers" (zero stars), but never saw his recent "Forgetting Sarah Marshall." I think he's a natural for Walter Matthau, and both Segel and Rudd would be perfect for a SoCal retread of the classic British one-upmanship comedy "School for Scoundrels."


Jason Segel gives Paul Rudd a concert bro-hug in "I Love You, Man."

Rudd is also very good and very funny, using delicate timing to create a man who is never quite right for the room. Observe his attempts to look loose and casual. He even pulls off sincere scenes with the lovely Rashida Jones, and sincerity, as we know, is the downfall of many a rom-com and almost all buddy movies. I believe my Little Movie Glossary even contains an entry about an obligatory moment in all buddy movies in which one of the characters says, you guessed it, "I love you, man."

John Hamburg, who co-wrote and directed, populates his film with many other gifted comedy actors, including J.K. Simmons as Peter's father, Jane Curtin as his mother, Andy Samberg as his gay brother, and Jon Favreau and Jaime Pressly as a married couple from hell -- their own. Lou Ferrigno finds the right note as the client about to fire his real-estate agent, who has asked himself the question, "How many people want to buy a mansion in Beverly Hills with a statue of the Incredible Hulk in the garden?

"I Love You, Man" is, above all, just plain funny. It's funny with some dumb physical humor, yes, and some gross-out jokes apparently necessary to all buddy movies, but also funny in observations, dialogue, physical behavior and Sydney Fife's observations as a people-watcher. I heard a lot of real laughter from a preview audience, not the perfunctory laughter at manufactured payoffs. You feel good watching the movie. That's what comedies are for, right?

Paramount and DreamWorks present a film directed by John Hamburg. Written by Hamburg and Larry Levin. Running time: 104 minutes. Rated R (for pervasive language, including crude and sexual references).

The Toxic Assets We Elected

By George F. Will
The Washington Post
Tuesday, March 24, 2009; A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/


With the braying of 328 yahoos -- members of the House of Representatives who voted for retroactive and punitive use of the tax code to confiscate the legal earnings of a small, unpopular group -- still reverberating, the Obama administration yesterday invited private-sector investors to become business partners with the capricious and increasingly anti-constitutional government. This latest plan to unfreeze the financial system came almost half a year after Congress shoveled $700 billion into the Troubled Assets Relief Program, $325 billion of which has been spent without purchasing any toxic assets.

TARP funds have, however, semi-purchased, among many other things, two automobile companies (and, last week, some of their parts suppliers), which must amaze Sweden. That unlikely tutor of America regarding capitalist common sense has said, through a Cabinet minister, that the ailing Saab automobile company is on its own: "The Swedish state is not prepared to own car factories."

Another embarrassing auditor of American misgovernment is China, whose premier has rightly noted the unsustainable trajectory of America's high-consumption, low-savings economy. He has also decorously but clearly expressed sensible fears that his country's $1 trillion-plus of dollar-denominated assets might be devalued by America choosing, as banana republics have done, to use inflation for partial repudiation of improvidently incurred debts.

From Mexico, America is receiving needed instruction about fundamental rights and the rule of law. A leading Democrat trying to abolish the right of workers to secret ballots in unionization elections is California's Rep. George Miller who, with 15 other Democrats, in 2001 admonished Mexico: "The secret ballot is absolutely necessary in order to ensure that workers are not intimidated into voting for a union they might not otherwise choose." Last year, Mexico's highest court unanimously affirmed for Mexicans the right that Democrats want to strip from Americans.

Congress, with the approval of a president who has waxed censorious about his predecessor's imperious unilateralism in dealing with other nations, has shredded the North American Free Trade Agreement. Congress used the omnibus spending bill to abolish a program that was created as part of a protracted U.S. stall regarding compliance with its obligation to allow Mexican long-haul trucks on U.S. roads. The program, testing the safety of Mexican trucking, became an embarrassment because it found Mexican trucking at least as safe as U.S. trucking. Mexico has resorted to protectionism -- tariffs on many U.S. goods -- in retaliation for Democrats' protection of the Teamsters union.

NAFTA, like all treaties, is the "supreme law of the land." So says the Constitution. It is, however, a cobweb constraint on a Congress that, ignoring the document's unambiguous stipulations that the House shall be composed of members chosen "by the people of the several states," is voting to pretend that the District of Columbia is a state. Hence it supposedly can have a Democratic member of the House and, down the descending road, two Democratic senators. Congress rationalizes this anti-constitutional willfulness by citing the Constitution's language that each house shall be the judge of the "qualifications" of its members and that Congress can "exercise exclusive legislation" over the District. What, then, prevents Congress from giving House and Senate seats to Yellowstone National Park, over which Congress exercises exclusive legislation? Only Congress's capacity for embarrassment. So, not much.

The Federal Reserve, by long practice rather than law, has been insulated from politics in performing its fundamental function of preserving the currency as a store of value -- preventing inflation. Now, however, by undertaking hitherto uncontemplated functions, it has become an appendage of the executive branch. The coming costs, in political manipulation of the money supply, of this forfeiture of independence could be steep.

Jefferson warned that "great innovations should not be forced on slender majorities." But Democrats, who trace their party's pedigree to Jefferson, are contemplating using "reconciliation" -- a legislative maneuver abused by both parties to severely truncate debate and limit the minority's right to resist -- to impose vast and controversial changes on the 17 percent of the economy that is health care. When the Congressional Budget Office announced that the president's budget underestimates by $2.3 trillion the likely deficits over the next decade, his budget director, Peter Orszag, said: All long-range budget forecasts are notoriously unreliable -- so rely on ours.
This is but a partial list of recent lawlessness, situational constitutionalism and institutional derangement. Such political malfeasance is pertinent to the financial meltdown as the administration, desperately seeking confidence, tries to stabilize the economy by vastly enlarging government's role in it.

georgewill@washpost.com

Special Envoy to the Taliban

How Jeremiah Wright can serve his country.

by P. J. O'Rourke
The Weekly Standard
03/30/2009, Volume 014, Issue 27


"  .  .  .  part of the success in Iraq involved reaching out to people that we would consider to be Islamic fundamentalists, but who were willing to work with us  .  .  . "

--President Obama, interview with the New York Times
published March 7, 2009

I've been pondering President Obama's idea to split the Taliban and get some of those maniacal fanatics on our side for a change. It's a magnificent idea. It's not, mind you, a good idea. But it's magnificent--grand, sumptuous, rich, splendid--a great, big, thought-filled ideal of an idea, the kind you'd expect from deep-thinking, idealistic Barack Obama. Boy, is this a thinking man's administration. They are thinking so hard over at the White House, having such bright, shining, effulgent, coruscating thoughts, that if you're a thoughtful person like me (and I'm sure you are), you can't help being carried away with enthusiasm. The next thing you know you're thinking yourself.

Of course I'm not an Ivy League-educated thinker like Obama. But I've got a notion that might help the president. I have the perfect person for the job of splitting the Taliban. I know who the president should appoint. Only one man fills the bill as Special Envoy to the Beard-o's and Weird‑o's to Get Them Quarrelling Among Themselves. That man is the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

I suppose the president isn't listening to me. I'm a Republican, a conservative, and I think the opinion that Rush Limbaugh voiced on Obama's efforts at economic stimulus was too much of an attaboy. But victory in Afghanistan is not a partisan issue. Even I am not Republican enough to wish for an Obama failure in Kabul. Furthermore, I know what I'm talking about. I've seen the Muslim world as an adult, without the distractions of rambunctious Indonesian madrassa schoolmates with their noisy games of dodge-fatwa.

The president isn't listening to me. And Jeremiah Wright isn't speaking to the president. So there are a couple of practical problems with my plan. But President Obama isn't the kind of fellow who'll let something as mundane as reality interfere with hope and change.

Splitting the Taliban is the same hope-to-hell, change-a-roo that the FBI used to destroy Boston organized crime. The FBI gave sympathy, comfort, and wire tap information to Whitey Bulger, Steve "the rifleman" Flemmi, and other members of the Winter Hill Gang. This caused a split between Irish mobsters and Italian mafia. Now all of Boston's organized crime figures are on the lam or in jail and--bonus--so are most of the Boston FBI agents. Organized crime has been eliminated in Boston. Crime is no longer elitist and exclusionary; it has been returned to the common people of Roxbury, Dorchester, and Jamaica Plain.

To give another example, there's the financial bailout strategy to split the assets of troubled banking institutions. Good assets will go to a "good bank." Bad assets will go to a "bad bank." I'm opening a checking account at a bad bank ASAP. New customers at bad banks won't get good things like toasters, they'll get bad things like liquor and guns. And the personalized checks in bad bank checkbooks won't have pretty pictures on them, they'll have printed messages: "This Is a Stick-Up."

Therefore President Obama shouldn't let the fact that Pastor Wright and I are ticked off at him stand in the way of high hopes for big changes in Islamic fundamentalism any more than I let the fact that Pastor Wright is a left-wing loony stand in the way of how much I love the guy.

I'm serious about that. Jeremiah Wright is a kick-ass preacher of the Christian gospel. In his infamous post-9/11 "America's chickens are coming home to roost" sermon, Wright talks about Psalm 137, the reggae song one, "By the rivers of Babylon. " Wright points out that "this psalm is rarely read in its entirety." Easy to see why when you get to the end and hear the psalmist describe the fun the Hebrews will have when they defeat the Babylonians. "Look at the verse, Verse 9," Wright says,

"Happy they shall be who take your little ones and dash them against the rocks." The people of faith .  .  . moved from the hatred of armed enemies to the hatred of unarmed innocents. The babies. The babies. Blessed are they who dash your babies' brains against a rock.  .  .  . Yet that is where the people of faith are in 551 B.C., and that is where far too many people of faith are in 2001 A.D.

Whew. A message applicable to Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike, not to mention Bob Marley. On the other hand Wright draws some conclusions from the gospels that I wouldn't. But so did St. Paul (I Corinthians 7:1, "It is good for a man not to touch a woman").

There's a love of rhetorical skill in the Muslim world. Osama bin Laden doesn't just go on tape cassettes and say, "America sucks." He recites poetry, he finds things that "America sucks" rhymes with. On the flip side of the orthodoxy coin, Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses is hardly a Unitarian mumble of skepticism about the formal doctrines of established religion. The Koran itself is oratory, dictated by the prophet, who could not read or write. (One wonders a bit about Christ's literary, as opposed to rhetorical, learning. In Luke, when Jesus goes to the synagogue and reads from the Book of Isaiah, he gets the text wrong--and improves it.)

Preachers at black churches are the last people left in the English-speaking world who know the schemes and tropes of classical rhetoric: parallelism, antithesis, epistrophe, synec-doche, metonymy, periphrasis, litotes--the whole bag of tricks. A speaker of Arabic can't buy a fig in the market without using most of these at least once. And embodied in a love for rhetoric is an embrace of contradiction--which, in the form of oxymoron, is itself a rhetorical trope.

In 1984, before Obama was born, I was covering the civil war in Lebanon. I was in the southern suburbs of Beirut, an area controlled by Hezbollah, and I got stopped at a checkpoint by teenage Islamic fundamentalists waving their guns around with the safeties off. I turned over my American passport, and one young man began yelling at me. He yelled at me for half an hour, sticking his gun in my face and shouting about how all the terrible things in the world were America's fault--poverty, war, injustice, Zionism. And then, when he was done yelling, he handed back my passport and said, "As soon as I get my Green Card I am going to dentist school in Dearborn, Michigan."

That brings me to another point in favor of letting Pastor Wright deal with the Taliban. They hate America. He hates America. Wright's "God Damn America" sermon, which Obama slept through in 2003, should give the pastor and the Taliban numerous talking points and a basis of mutual interest upon which to build the trust and understanding needed for progress and prosperity in Afghanistan.

Wright has progressed rather prosperously himself damning America. You begin to suspect that Wright's hatred of America is not unlike the hatred of America exhibited by the teen at the Hezbollah checkpoint. That kid's about 40 now, a prominent orthodontist in Bloomfield Hills, and I bet he voted for John McCain. "I stopped by to tell you tonight that governments change," is a less radio-talk-show-quoted passage from the "God Damn America" sermon. Imagine Wright's surprise when the change of government came from a member of his own congregation who would diss him worse than John McCain ever did.

Wright is amusing on the subject. In April 2008, after Obama had washed his hands of Trinity United Church of Christ, Wright told the National Press Club in Washington, "So when Jesus says, not only you brood of vipers, now he's playing the dozens because he's talking about their mamas. To say brood means your mother is an asp, A-S-P. Should we put Jesus out of the congregation?"

In my experience the Muslim world's love of language extends to that natural consequence of having a mouth on you, humor. I was in Kuwait during the run-up to the Iraq war. A shopping center got hit by an Iraqi missile. I went to see the damage and I found a perfume shop where every bottle had burst from the warhead concussion. An American store owner would have been on his cell phone screaming at his insurance agent. The Kuwaiti proprietor was seated comfortably in an armchair, sipping a cup of coffee. When I entered he smiled, gestured at the heaps of broken glass, and said, "Special price."

There is no downside to sending the Reverend Jeremiah Wright to Afghanistan. We'll be able to claim success, because the Taliban will split. The Afghans themselves say that if you put two Afghans in a room you get three factions. Never mind that the Taliban is unlikely to split in a way that leads to a peaceful, law-abiding Afghanistan that doesn't harbor terrorists. The last time there was an Afghanistan like that was in 1.6 million B.C., before humans had arrived in the region. Shipping Wright through the Khyber Pass will also get him out of the United States, much to the relief of the president, the first lady, and most United Church of Christ congregations other than Trinity's. Then there is the off chance that Pastor Wright, with his gifts of oratory, humor, and Afghan-level ability to make everyone furious, will convert the natives. I'm for it. And I'm glad President Obama is "willing to work with" religious fundamentalists. He'll need to when the 2012 GOP national convention is filled with mujahedeen.

P. J. O'Rourke is a contibuting editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

Today's Tune: Marty Stuart - Tempted

The One True Church

by Richard John Neuhaus
First Things (April 2009).
The Public Square
http://www.firstthings.com/

Richard John Neuhaus died on January 8, 2009, at the age of seventy-two—a great loss to the magazine, to American public discourse, and to his many friends.
We present here a previously unpublished essay, “The One True Church,” which he wrote in New York during his last months.

My church is better than your church. It sounds like the stuff of schoolboy quarrels on the playground: My dad can beat your dad! Yet, sad to say, that is how many Christians have understood recent statements on Catholic ecclesiology. In 2000 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a document called Dominus Iesus and then, in 2007, reiterated its main points in “Responses to Some Questions Regarding Certain Aspects of the Doctrine on the Church.”


Christ Handing the Keys to St Peter 1481-82
Pietro Vannucci Perugino
(1450-1523)
fresco, Sistine Chapel, Vatican

The gist of these is that, with important qualifications related to Eastern Orthodoxy, non-Catholic churches are not to be called “Church” in the proper sense of the term but are better described as “ecclesial communities.” This was widely decried by many non-Catholic (and some Catholic) theologians as a departure from, if not reversal of, the teaching of the Second Vatican Council. It was, we were told, a body blow to ecumenism, the quest for visible unity among ­Christians.

I have on occasion offered this proposition: “The Catholic Church is the Church of Jesus Christ most fully and rightly ordered through time.” Some of my critics have questioned whether that is adequate. To say that it is the most fully and rightly ordered, they contend, implies or at least invites the inference that other communities are also the Church of Jesus Christ, albeit not so fully and rightly ordered.

To think more fully about this, we need to clarify what the Catholic Church claims for herself and what she does, and does not, acknowledge with respect to other Christian communities. My own thoughts are occasioned by two essays I read recently: one by Avery Cardinal Dulles in a volume called Vatican II: Renewal Within Tradition and the other by Christopher J. Molloy, an essay titled “Subsistit In: Nonexclusive Identity or Full Identity?” that appeared in The Thomist.

Before we can get anywhere with this discussion, two stipulations must be firmly in place. The first is that we are not engaged in a rivalry between our side and some other side. Some years ago, when William F. Buckley heard that a prominent Protestant had entered into full communion with the Catholic Church, he exclaimed: “This is great news. It’s like the Yankees stealing the star pitcher from the Red Sox.” That is an understandable tribal response, but it takes us back to the squabbling of boys on the playground. Questions of great theological moment are at stake. In these matters, Catholic and non-Catholic alike should have as their one concern the question of what Christ intended, and still intends, for his one Church—it being understood by all that, in the deepest meaning of the term, there can finally be only one Church, since the Church is the Body of Christ, of which Christ is the head, and there is only one Christ.

Tribalism has no place in this discussion. As John Paul II reminded Catholics in his 1990 encyclical Redemptoris Missio, being a Catholic is not reason for proprietorial pride but for profound gratitude for a grace received, all undeserved on our part. Moreover, a Catholic who does not earnestly want to recognize and rejoice in the gifts of grace to be found in other Christian communities will almost certainly be more hindrance than help in this discussion.

The second and related stipulation is that we are not comparing an ideal depiction of the state of Catholicism with less flattering depictions of other communities—or vice versa. It is not a matter of what we like or dislike in this community or that. I have decided views on certain Orthodox and Protestant virtues that Catholics might well emulate. As Malloy writes, in reflecting on the uniqueness of the Catholic Church “one can affirm both the essential fullness of the ecclesial reality of the Catholic Church and the concrete poverty and woundedness of her lived life, together with her practical need of the expressive ecclesial riches found outside her visible boundaries.” Not only can one affirm both, one must affirm both.

Subsistit In

With those two stipulations firmly in place, one notes that the chief reason the documents of 2000 and 2007 were viewed as setbacks to ecumenism is that, for a long time and in many quarters, the teaching of the Second Vatican Council was gravely misrepresented. Cardinal Dulles writes that there still exists a general impression that Vatican II mandated a revolution in Catholic ecclesiology. He cites writings by John O’Malley as well as those by Gregory Baum, who claims the council reflects a “Blondelian shift” from “extrinsicism” toward experience and immanence. The Church is what you experience it to be. Richard McBrien speaks of “Copernican” and “Einsteinian” revolutions that overcame the unhealthy “ecclesiocentrism” of the past. Others claimed the council teaches that the Catholic Church is but one church among many. Some went further, saying that the Church is not only not the ordinary means of salvation; it is an extraordinary means for people who happen, for one reason or another, to be Catholic.

So what is to be made of all this? A good place to start is with what the Second Vatican Council actually said. Lumen Gentium, the Constitution on the Church, reads: “This is the one Church of Christ which in the Creed is professed as one, holy, catholic, and apostolic, which our Savior, after his Resurrection, commissioned Peter to shepherd, and him and the other apostles to extend and direct with authority, which he erected for all ages as ‘the pillar and mainstay of the truth.’ This Church, constituted and organized in the world as a society, subsists in the Catholic Church, which is governed by the successor of Peter and by the Bishops in communion with him, although many elements of sanctification and of truth are found outside of its visible structure. These elements, as gifts belonging to the Church of Christ, are forces impelling toward catholic unity.”

Much ink has been spilled in unpacking those three sentences, with most particular attention being devoted to the words “subsists in” (subsistit in). Much is made of the fact that the first draft of the constitution said that the Church of Jesus Christ is (est) the Catholic Church, which suggests that the final wording is a weakening of a straightforward identity of the Church with the Catholic Church. Both Dulles and Molloy point out, however, that subsistit in did not replace est but replaced adest in—“is present in”—a phrase that appeared in an intermediate draft. As a matter of fact, subsistit in was proposed by Sebastian Tromp, who had been a staunch proponent of the earlier est and the position that the Church of Christ is identical with the Catholic Church. In addition, the great majority of conservative bishops at the council voted in favor of the final draft, which clearly suggests that they did not think subsistit in was a watering down of the Church’s self-understanding.

A few years before he became pope, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger explained it this way:

"The word subsistit derives from ancient philosophy, as it was later developed among the Scholastics. It corresponds to the Greek word hypostasis, which of course plays a key role in Christology in describing the union of divine and human natures in the one person of Christ. Subsistere is a special case of esse. It refers to existence in the form of an individual subject. . . . With the word subsistit, the Council wanted to express the singularity and non-multipliability of the Church of Christ, the Catholic Church: the Church exists as a single subject in the reality of history. But the difference between subsistit and est also embraces the drama of ecclesial division: for while the Church is only one and really exists, there is being which is from the Church’s being—there is ecclesial reality—outside the Church."

The elements of sanctification and truth to be found outside the boundaries of the Catholic Church are ecclesial elements. Can there be ecclesial elements without ecclesia? Obviously, some fine but important distinctions are in order. The late Johannes Cardinal Willebrands, longtime head of the Secretariat for Christian Unity, was fond of saying, “Christ and the Church are coterminous.” I take that to mean that, if one is in a living relationship with Christ, one is also in relationship with his Church, for body and head cannot be separated. Therefore communities of faith outside the Catholic Church are ecclesial communities.

And therefore Lumen Gentium says that non-Catholics who are baptized and believe in Christ are in a “certain but imperfect communion with the Catholic Church.” The goal of ecumenism is not to create a unity that does not exist but to bring to fulfillment the very real unity that is already there between Catholics and non-Catholics who are brothers and sisters in Christ. (For purposes of this discussion I leave largely aside the situation of the Orthodox, who have valid ordination and other sacraments and adhere to apostolic teaching. Among the Orthodox, according to Catholic doctrine, there are not just ecclesial communities but “particular churches,” although they are, in the language of CDF, “wounded” by the lack of full communion with the ministry of Peter exercised by the bishop of Rome.)

Realizations of the Sacrament

Molloy and others speak of the “full,” “complete,” “total,” and “exclusive” identity between the Catholic Church and the Church of Christ. Such language can easily mislead and is understandably offensive to non-Catholic Christians. The intention, however, is to underscore that the Catholic Church is nothing less than the Church of Christ and to counter any suggestion that the Catholic Church is—albeit the most fully and rightly ordered—only one church among other churches. Again, this is not a matter of boasting or of ecclesial rivalry, which should have no place among followers of Christ. It is a matter of being as faithful as possible to what Christ intended his Church to be.

Since Christ is manifestly present in other communities, and since Christ, the head, can never be ­separated from his Body, the Church, how are we to understand the presence of the Church in these communities that possess “ecclesial elements”? One formulation is offered by John Paul II in his 1995 encyclical Ut Unum Sint: “Insofar as these kinds of elements exist in other Christian communities, the one (unica) Church of Christ has an efficacious presence therein. On this account, the Second Vatican Council speaks of a certain, albeit imperfect, communion. The constitution Lumen Gentium highlights that the Catholic Church knows that ‘for many reasons she is joined’ to these communities in a certain real communion of unity in the Holy Spirit.”

Molloy puts it this way: “Dominus Iesus states not that the Church of Christ exists only in the Catholic Church . . . but that the Church of Christ exists fully only in the Catholic Church. The same document affirms that non-Catholic communions with valid orders and a valid celebration of the Eucharist [i.e., Orthodox] are ‘true particular churches.’ Therefore, the Church of Christ can exist elsewhere, though not fully.” Then one must ask, what Church is it that exists in the Orthodox particular churches and in the non-Catholic ecclesial communities? The answer would seem to be that the Church that exists elsewhere than in full communion with the Catholic Church is the Catholic Church.

An implication of that answer is that everyone who is baptized and believes in Christ is Catholic, although in imperfect communion with the Church. Some Christians who are quite sure that they are not Catholics may view that claim as an instance of outrageous ecclesiastical cheekiness, of recruiting by definition people who do not want to be Catholics.

Others, more charitably, may view it as the best that Catholics can do, given their peculiar ecclesiology. Yet others may recognize it as a consistent working out of what it means to be in continuity with the apostolically constituted Church as a distinct society through time. They might further recognize that the presence of the Catholic Church in their ecclesial communities gravitates toward full communion with the Catholic Church. Again the words of Lumen Gentium: “These elements, as gifts belonging to the Church of Christ, are forces impelling toward catholic unity.”

Does this mean that all Christians are members, or partial members, or something like honorary members of the Catholic Church? The Church does not say so. In the 1943 encyclical Mystici Corporis Christi (On the Mystical Body of Christ), Pius XII addressed the meaning of membership in the Church, but, as Cardinal Dulles writes, Vatican II took a somewhat different approach. The emphasis of Vatican II is on the Church as sacrament, which, he says, is of “foundational importance” to the ecclesiology of the council, appearing four times in Lumen Gentium and six times in other documents of the council.

Dulles explains: “Avoiding the term ‘member,’ which had become bogged down in controversy, [the Council] spoke of perfect and imperfect realizations of the sacrament. The sacrament of the Church is fully realized only in the Catholic Church, the visible and grace-filled society in which the bonds of professed faith, ecclesiastical government, and sacramental communion remain fully intact. These bonds belong together insofar as the true Church indefectibly possesses them all. But the bonds are separable in the sense that some may survive in the absence of others. Non–Roman Catholic communities may possess some authentic ecclesial elements and be able to make fruitful use of them as channels of grace.”

I would only offer what I am sure Cardinal Dulles would recognize as a friendly amendment, namely, that such communities do possess such elements and do make fruitful use of them. The Council teaching readily recognizes the evidence of Christian faith and holiness outside the boundaries of the Catholic Church; evidence, one might add, that is sometimes more conspicuous than the evidence found among some who are in full communion with the Church.
And yet there is no denying that Dominus Iesus of 2000 and “Responses to Some Questions” of 2007, both interpreting Vatican II according to the hermeneutic of continuity, were viewed by many as a cause of ecumenical scandal.

These documents said nothing new but simply aimed at correcting misunderstandings and misinterpretations of the Church’s teaching that had occasioned serious ecumenical confusions. Some Protestants thought that repeating the points in 2007 was rubbing it in a bit, but I suppose CDF had its reasons. In any event, we do Christian unity no favors by fudging what we actually believe.

Moreover, most non-Catholic Christians in the West do not bridle at the claim that what is authentically Christian in their communities is derived, in one way or another, from the apostolically continuing tradition that is the Catholic Church, beginning with the canon of Holy Scripture and the Christological and Trinitarian definitions of the early councils. Of course, what they have selectively received from the Catholic Church they have revised and reformed according to their understanding of the Bible or of the needs of the time, and such changes are the subject of continuing ecumenical conversation. People of goodwill do not take umbrage at the claim that such elements are “gifts belonging to the Church of Christ [and] are forces impelling toward catholic unity,” although they have their own ideas about what form that unity should take.

All Christians can agree on the formula that there is finally only one Church because there is only one Christ and the Church is his Body. Of course, Catholics are insistent that the one Church is both visible and invisible. But all affirm the maxim extra ecclesia nulla salus—at least to the extent that one must have heard the preaching of the gospel or read the Bible, both of which are impossible without the Church. As for saying that these other associations are ecclesial communities rather than churches in the full sense—as, for instance, the “particular churches” of Orthodoxy are churches—this should cause no hard feelings. Such communities do not claim to be what the Catholic Church claims to be.

They readily acknowledge that they are human associations united by common belief and purpose. The Presbyterian Church USA was formed in 1983, the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod in 1847, and the Southern Baptist Convention in 1845, while the Episcopal Church claims a more venerable, or at least longer, legacy reaching back to Henry VIII’s styling himself Supreme Head of the Church in England in 1534. True, there are Landmark Baptists and sundry Campbellites who claim they have uniquely preserved or restored the true Church of the New Testament, but most of them do not take that improbable claim very seriously today, and those that do are not part of the ecumenical project.

Most Fully and Rightly Ordered Through Time

In sum, Catholics should not fear offending our ecumenical partners by affirming what we believe the Catholic Church to be. To be sure, that affirmation has weighty implications. For instance, Lumen Gentium also says, “Whosoever, therefore, knowing that the Catholic Church was made necessary by Christ, would refuse to enter or to remain in it, could not be saved.” But that, too, should not offend non-Catholic Christians, since we can all agree that such a person would be acting against his conscience and his sure discernment of the will of God. If he continues on that course without repentance, he could not be saved. It is quite a different matter with those who do not know—i.e., do not recognize the truth—that the Catholic Church is what she claims to be. They are wrong about that, of course, but that, presumably, is one reason why they are not Catholics.

And so I think I’ll stay with my admittedly provocative title, “The One True Church.” In accord with the Church’s teaching and appreciative of the scholarship of such as Cardinal Dulles and Christopher Molloy, I will also continue to make the case for the proposition that “the Catholic Church is the Church of Jesus Christ most fully and rightly ordered through time.”

Chicago Way extension runs right through D.C.

By John Kass
Chicago Tribune
http://www.chicagotribune.com/
March 21, 2009

President Barack Obama must not have had his Hopium before appearing on "The Tonight Show" last week, because he really screwed up.

No, not the screw-up in which he abandoned his trusty teleprompter to ad-lib a joke about how he's such a lousy bowler, just like someone in the Special Olympics.

If Obama were a Republican, he'd be toast, since Republicans have been cast as unfeeling monsters in the two-dimensional cartoon that is American politics on TV. But Obama is a Democrat, beloved by the glassy-eyed media as a symbol of hope and change, even if guys from Chicago's City Hall run his administration. So the gaffe will soon wash over him.

Yet it's that other screw-up that is most illuminating—the one that was overshadowed by his unfortunate Special Olympics wisecrack.

Obama told Jay Leno he was surprised that those greedy AIG executives who helped lead the country into financial ruin were in line to receive $165 million in bonuses paid for by bailout cash authorized by his administration.

"Stunned, stunned is the word," said Obama.

Stunned?

It turns out that his Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner—who didn't pay all of his federal taxes but was still deemed worthy by Obama of collecting yours—knew all about the AIG bonuses weeks ago.

That was long before Washington Democrats began shrieking in pretend outrage over the bonuses, as if they didn't vote for them, sort of like Chicago aldermen shrieking about corruption from the 5th Floor.

It's like Mayor Richard Daley saying, "Gee, I dunno" when news breaks that his nephews are in another multimillion-dollar government deal. Or that time that Daley gave $100 million in affirmative action contracts to men he knows well, yet was stunned to learn later that they were white guys, not black females.

These days, the Washington Way is looking just like the Chicago Way. Those of us from Illinois can see it, what with City Hall guys pulling White House strings.

Then again, we're not surprised because we don't get the high-grade Hopium out here in the Midwest. The good stuff must be reserved for the Beltway media establishment, since they're the ones feeling tingles running up their legs.

Yet even they'll figure out that the Chicago Way runs along Pennsylvania Avenue, once the Hopium wears off and the tingling stops. It'll probably take about eight years for their heads to clear.

In the meantime, all last week, the ludicrous Angry-Democrat-vs.-Greedy-AIG slapstick was highly entertaining, except when you realize the premise of the joke is that American taxpayers are so stupid we'll believe anything.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced she'd tax those arrogant AIG guys and take the money back. This is the same Pelosi who is extremely wealthy, worth millions, yet she jets coast to coast on weekends on your dime, because she's the speaker. Why doesn't she buy her own jet and have the unemployed AIG guys serve drinks to the real estate lobbyists?

At her news conference Thursday, Pelosi became so upset over AIG questions that she cut off reporters by saying, "New subject, or else," and naturally, being under the influence of primo Hopium, they changed the subject.

But all this false congressional outrage and shrieking and fingerpointing should be understood for what it really is: Political buttocks-covering by Democrats who are worried about the 2010 elections, and afraid of losing their greatest symbolic weapon: The Evil Rich Guy.

That's another cartoon, like Mr. Burns on "The Simpsons," who steps on the backs of the humble working man. Now, though, the Democrats aren't fighting Mr. Burns, they're giving him a boost so he can step on our necks with a pair of snazzy AIG loafers.

What they're trying to drown out with all their screaming is that the Democrats knew all about the $165 million to the AIG suits. And the Obama White House knew all about it too.

In fact, it was a rather brave New York Democrat, Rep. Joseph Crowley, who asked Geithner about the AIG bonuses in a hearing before the House Ways and Means Committee. Not yesterday, or a couple days ago, but on March 3.

"Just last month," Crowley told Geithner, "AIG paid 343 employees of AIG FP—their Financial Products division that created the financial hole that AIG is in, and in turn a multibillion-dollar bill for American taxpayers—$56 million in bonuses and are slated to pay an additional $162 million in bonuses to 393 participants in the coming weeks," Crowley said."And there's more," Crowley said. "Further bonus payments totaling approximately $230 million are due to 407 participants at AIG's Financial Products division in March 2010. This makes no sense to my constituency."

Sadly, it makes perfect sense back here, where we get only that weak schwag Hopium. They cut the deal in some back room, and Geithner is being measured as the fall guy. It sounds just like Chicago's City Hall.

I'm stunned, really.

Stunned is the word.
jskass@tribune.com

AIG execs the new 'enemy combatants'

The first two months of the Age of the Hopeychange have been unexpectedly inept.
By Mark Steyn
Syndicated columnist
Orange County Register
http://www.ocregister.com/
Friday, March 20, 2009

Are you outraged by these AIG bonuses?

No, no. For Pete's sake, you're an A-list congressional big shot. Try to get a bit of feeling into "outraged." The president's teleprompter puts it in italics, bold, capitalized and underlined: OUTRAGED !

That's better. Don't forget to furrow your brow and fume. No, not like a camp waiter when you send back the arugula salad drizzled in an aubergine coulis. We're looking for primal, righteous anger: You're outraged, OUTRAGED that bonuses are being handed out at companies the American taxpayer is bailing out. Yes, to be sure, the bonuses were specifically provided for in the legislation, but, like all busy senators and congressmen, you don't have time to read every footling trillion-dollar bill before you vote in favor of it. And yes, true, the specific passage addressing these particular bonuses was, in fact, added to the bill in your name, but that was nothing to do with you – you just did that because the White House asked you to, and just because their people called your people and some intern in your office drafted some boilerplate with your name on it is no reason for you to be denied 10 minutes of grandstanding on MSNBC. It's an outrage to suggest you're anything other than outrageously outraged!

To his credit, the hopeychanger-in-chief has had some difficulty doing the outrage kabuki with a straight face. In the middle of his press conference the other day, he got a tickle in his throat and departed from his telepromptered script to joke: "Excuse me, I'm choked up with anger here." How the assembled hacks laughed! Why, it was almost as funny as his gag on "The Tonight Show." Referring to his 129 score at the White House bowling alley, the president cracked that "it was like the Special Olympics." Ha-ha! What a card that Obama is when he unplugs the prompter and kicks loose a little. Maybe next time he can toss in that the Dow Jones has got "Down" syndrome – geddit? Oh, come on! Don't be so uptight and politically correct!!! And besides, anyone who says the president shouldn't be doing crip jokes is a racist.

Frank James of the Chicago Tribune criticized the president's bon mot more in sorrow than in anger: "Obama seems to be a fairly sensitive and compassionate man who wouldn't purposely set out to offend the disabled."

Are you sure about that? He might be "a fairly sensitive and compassionate man." Alternatively, he could be a mean, self-absorbed S.O.B. who regards anyone other than himself as intellectually disabled. The truth is we don't know, because in the course of the presidential campaign the press declined to do even the most elementary due diligence on him. And, like Congress with the stimulus, the electorate didn't bother to find out what's in there before they voted for it.

Still, on the basis of its first 60 days, this is a very odd presidency. In between appearances on Jay Leno and his "March Madness" picks, Barack Oprompta also found time to compare AIG executives to suicide bombers:

"Even though it makes you angry because you're thinking I was responsible, and these folks are irresponsible, and somehow I'm paying for them, it was the right thing to do to step in. The same is true with AIG. It was the right thing to do to step in. Here is the problem. It's almost like they've got, they've got a bomb strapped to them, and they've got their hand on the trigger. You don't want them to blow up, but you've got to kind of talk them, ease that finger off the trigger."

Right. It's like you're at the Jay Leno post-show party and suddenly you notice this AIG vice-president has wandered in, with six figures of bonus strapped to his waist, and he's yelling "Allahu akbar!," which is Arabic for "I'd like to deposit this in my Cayman Islands account."

Maybe Obama's teleprompter had a wild night on the tiles and inserted his terrorism speech into the middle of his bonus outrage. But, if not, we now know why the White House announced that they'll no longer be using the term "enemy combatants" for the Gitmo crowd. They're reserving that designation for AIG execs, most of whom will shortly be extraordinary-renditioned to Saudi Arabia where a touch of the old electric cattle-prods should soon have their bowling scores heading south.

Any sentient being dumb enough to fall for this AIG huffin' an' a-puffin' from Barry, Barney, Doddy and the gang is a fool who deserves the vaporization of his assets that the national political class is lining up for him. As Charles Krauthammer pointed out, the $165 million in bonuses is less than 1/18,500th of the $3.1 trillion budget. The massive expansion of government the president is planning is forever, and will ensure you that end your days in what Peggy Noonan calls "post-prosperity America." More immediately, what message do you send to the world when legal contracts can be abrogated by retrospective confiscatory bills of attainder? You think that's going to get anyone investing in America again?

The investor class invests in jurisdictions where the rules are clear and stable. Right now, Washington is telling the planet: In our America, there are no rules. Got a legally binding contract? We'll tear it up. Refuse to surrender the dough? We'll pass a law targeted at you, yes, you, Mr. Beau Nuss, of 27 Plutocrat Gardens, Fatcatville. If you want a banana republic on steroids, this is great news. So cheer on thuggish grandstanding by incompetent legislators-for-life like Barney Frank if you wish. But, in any battle between the political class and the business class, you're only fooling yourself if you think it's in your interest for the latter to lose.

The first two months of the Age of the Hopeychange have been an eye-opener. I expected it to be ideologically distasteful to me, but I didn't expect it to be so inept. Not because I had any expectations of President Obama's executive skills. But I assumed he'd have folks around him who could take care of details like governing, while he pranced around as the smiley-face hopeychange frontman. But the bench is still empty save for a handful of mediocrities. And the disconnect between the smoothly scripted mush and what's actually happening makes the telepromptered cool look even more ridiculous.