The Electoral College Still Makes Sense Because We’re Not A Democracy

By Donna Carol Voss

http://thefederalist.com/2016/09/16/the-electoral-college-still-makes-sense-because-were-not-a-democracy/

September 16, 2016

The Electoral College has been on life support since a chad—specifically a “hanging” chad—tipped the White House to George W. Bush in 2000. The painful reality of how our Constitution works was never more apparent. The Gore/Lieberman ticket won the popular vote 50,994,086 to 50,461,092 but lost the electoral vote 266 to 271.

There was a lot more to it, but the punchline is that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Bush the winner because he won the electoral vote. It’s a tribute to the American national character that we weathered that cataclysm without civil war, but it left a bad taste in the electorate’s mouth.

During the 2016 Republican primary, when it looked as if Donald Trump would win the popular vote but still not reach the delegate threshold for nomination, that bad taste turned sour. Riding high on populism and “throw the bums out,” Trump complained that the election was rigged because the people wanted him, and whomever the people wanted, they should get. Fortunately for the country, Trump reached the delegate threshold, and we were spared a debacle that would have made 2000’s cataclysm look like a lemonade stand.

Cue the national election. No controversy, scandal, “info dump,” lie, corruption, defection, or dirty trick has been left unturned. Why would election night go smoothly? Frankly, the plane is going down no matter who wins; it’s only a question of water or land and how many survivors there will be. Chances aren’t looking good for the Electoral College.

“This is a democracy,” the people cry. “It should be one person-one vote, and that stupid Electoral College needs to go!” Poor Electoral College. So misunderstood. If the Electoral College has to go, it has to go, but we should at least buy it dinner first. While we’re at it, we might as well get to know it better.

Trust History: You Don’t Want Mob Rule

The sad lot of the Electoral College is that what you see isn’t what you get. Like the counter-intuitive fact that a tire blowout on the right requires a steering wheel correction to the left, the EC works backwards. What appears to deprive the populace of its power to decide a president is the very mechanism that preserves its power. It works that way because this isn’t a democracy; not a pure one.

“Pure democracy” is just another phrase for “mob rule.” Dictatorship of the majority means 51 percent of the citizenry rule the other 49 percent. That minority has no rights except those the condescending majority grants. It works well for those in the 51 percent, not so much for those in the 49. Plato knew it, and James Madison, who knew his Plato, did too. Plato and Madison both recognized that justice and liberty for the minority is possible only when power is shared between groups in society.

Plato’s “Republic” heavily influenced Madison and the other framers to devise a Constitution that protected the minority. Plato held that the ideal, i.e., just, form of government was one in which power was shared correctly between workers, warriors, and rulers. Madison held that the ideal, i.e., American, form of government was one in which power was shared correctly between judges, lawmakers, and rulers.

Inspired as it is, our Constitution protects the minority while preserving the best of democracy: we the people elect representatives to run the government (republic) and we do so by majority vote (democracy). Ergo, this is a democratic republic. Ergo, an Electoral College.

The Electoral College Balances Voting Power

The purpose of the Electoral College is to balance voting power across states so no one region of the country can gain too much control. If a president is elected by a simple majority of votes, a candidate who is wildly popular in one region (e.g., Ted Cruz in Texas, Mitt Romney in Utah) can ignore smaller regions and campaign only where large majorities are possible. Or a candidate who kills in California and New York can write off “flyover country” completely.

If, however, the Electoral College elects a president, a candidate who is wildly popular in one region must also prevail in a number of sub-elections to win. The Electoral College ensures a better result for the country as a whole than the democratic power play wherein 51 percent of us matter and 49 percent of us don’t.

Think of the Electoral College like the World Series. One person-one vote equates to the World Series Champions being determined by total number of runs scored. If the Dodgers win the first game 10-0, and the Yankees win the next four games 1-0, the Dodgers win the series. Even though the Yankees bested the Dodgers in four games, it doesn’t matter because the Dodgers scored 10 runs to their 4. One anomalous game decides the whole series. Without the Electoral College, a few heavily populated states decide the whole election.

So, the poor Electoral College sits condemned before its last meal because its power is misunderstood. How ironic—and tragic if no stay-of-execution arrives—that those who clamor for “one person-one vote” are seeking more power at the expense of power they already have.

Donna Carol Voss is a political commentator and the author of four books, including the recently released "Nothing to Apologize For: The Truth About Western Civilization." Follow heron Twitter.

How Do You Solve a Problem like AOC?

By Michael Walsh

https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/20/how-do-you-solve-a-problem-like-aoc/

March 20, 2019

I first noticed something was up in the New York City backwater called the 14th Congressional District when a friend across the aisle, a well-respected political columnist, tweeted out the news of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “upset” victory against the incumbent Democrat, Joe Crowley, just minutes after it happened.

Who cares? thought I.

Crowley, one of the last of the Irish machine politicians, had safely sailed to reelection to the House for a decade, often without even a primary challenger. But the 29-year-old AOC, as she is colloquially known, beat him in the primary with 57 percent of the vote—a number that sounds impressive until you realize that it was a mere 15,897 votes to Crowley’s 11,761, a difference of 4,136 votes. In the foregone-conclusion general election, she beat the Republican tomato can, Anthony Pappas, 110,000 to 18,000. Pappas was so indifferent to the outcome that he brushed aside offers to help and did not actively campaign.

Naturally, the media went wild immediately. Literally overnight, this former intern for Ted Kennedy, an ethnic Puerto Rican, became a national celebrity; you can tell the stories were prepped and in the can once her victory was assured.

Crowley’s name stayed on the fall ballot, under the rubric of the Working Families Party, but like the GOP candidate, he did not campaign. His reward was to land a choice spot last month as a lobbyist with the law firm of Squire Patton Boggs, whose bipartisan ranks of swamp-dwelling trough snouts include former Speaker of the House John Boehner, former Senator Trent Lott, and other Washington hacks. With his future assured, and his services to the latter-day equivalent of Tammany Hall rewarded, he finally got around to giving up his government parking pass just this week.

In other words, the fix was in. Clearly, somebody was behind the rise of Ocasio-Cortez and that somebody didn’t care much about the niceties of getting her elected—including elements of her “girl-from-the-Bronx” biography, her actual residence, and her campaign finances. Tant pis!

Democratic firebrand Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rode into office railing against the influence of big money and hidden donors in U.S. elections. Yet the political operation that helped elect her to Congress was itself less than transparent—exposing her to attacks from conservative foes.

The New York congresswoman raised a hefty $2 million for her 2018 election while refusing to take money from business-related political action committees. Of that, 61 percent came from individuals giving less than $200—the highest rate of small-dollar funding among current U.S. House members.

At the same time, Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign committee and two PACs paid almost $900,000 to a consulting company for campaign services, providing few details on what the money was for or who ultimately received it.

That’s the question, isn’t it? Two million dollars for 15,000 votes and a shoo-in general election? Her mission accomplished—the first term is the hardest election to win—she’s been “quietly removed” from the board of the Justice Democrats PAC, according to the Daily Caller:

Democratic Rep. Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez and her top aide are no longer board members of the outside PAC credited with orchestrating her political rise, according to a corporate document filed Friday to a Washington, D.C., agency.

The New York Democrat and her chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, who served as her campaign chair, joined the board of Justice Democrats in December 2017, according to the political action committee’s website. It also said the two held “legal control over the entity” at the same time it was playing a key role in supporting Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign prior to her shock victory over incumbent Democratic Rep. Joe Crowley in June 2018.”

“Orchestrating her political rise.” You have to admit the timing was impeccable. The three freshwomyn—AOC, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib need only a fourth to bring on the apocalypse, having quickly established themselves as the new triumvirate of the Democrat Party. The girl named for a city in Egypt, has openly sassed Maerose Prizzi, the speaker of the House, who, when it came time to offer even the most oblique censure of Omar’s blatant anti-Semitism, wound up deploring all “bigotry” instead, including “Islamophobia.”

Ocasio-Cortez is, as Obama was when the media invented him, too young to run for president for this cycle, but she can squeak in just under the wire in 2024 if her handlers deem that her time has come. Even then, if the example of Obama is any guide, that might be too soon: imagine if Hillary had been the nominee in 2008 and then a more mature and even more radical Obama had come along in 2016, on the tails of her two “moderate” terms; as it was, he was too inexperienced and frankly, too lazy, fully to implement the plan his backers had in mind for him.

And so, as the Democrats bum-rush to the 2020 starting gates, the two cheeks of their party have swung into view. Yes, they have become the party of peons and plutocrats, but for our purposes—and for AOC’s—they will soon be the party of geriatrics and the turkettes, who loathe their masculine forbears with true “feminist” ignorance and impatience. They know this is the last roundup for superannuated pols like Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders and even the former Nancy d’Alesandro, the pride of Ballamer, and that the future—one version of it, anyway, belongs to them:

For make no mistake: these neo-Socialists—whether they call themselves national or international and whether white, brown, or black—are all fascist brothers and sisters under the skin, bent on both submission and punishment. Behold how far and how fast even the “moderate” Democrats have adopted such things as reparations, the elimination of ICE, the abolition of the Electoral College, overt infanticide and other extremist positions—if that’s the platform they hope to run on next year, then they have well and truly earned their sobriquet, the Evil Party.

There are some signs that such extremism is turning off voters; despite the media’s cheerleading, AOC has seen her popularity polls crater; it seems that the more sensible Americans see and hear of her, the less they like her. Which means there’s hope for the Republic yet—but this is no time to get complacent.

Every socialist demagogue of the 20th century started life as an underestimated figure: Mussolini was expelled from the Italian Socialists as too radical; Hitler was a comic-opera figure who wound up in Landsberg prison; Lenin was exiled twice; Stalin was a seminarian who had lost his Orthodox faith and found a substitute in the writing of Karl Marx. Ilhan Omar may not be the brightest bulb in Minnesota, much less in Congress; Rashida Tlaib’s naked hatred for the West may be jarring; and AOC’s vapid, goofy “Green New Deal” narcissism will strike mature adults as risible and clownish, not to mention ruinous.

Just remember this: they mean it. As Rosemary says in “Rosemary’s Baby”:

Wake up, America. For, as scary as this may sound, after Joe and Bernie and Nancy comes le deluge.

How do you solve a problem like Omar, Tlaib, and Ocasio-Cortez? By making sure their first terms in Congress are also their last.

Michael Walsh is a journalist, author, and screenwriter. He was for 16 years the music critic and foreign correspondent for Time Magazine, for which he covered the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. His works include the novels As Time Goes By, And All the Saints (winner, 2004 American Book Award for fiction), and the bestselling “Devlin” series of NSA thrillers; as well as the recent nonfiction bestseller, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace. A sequel, The Fiery Angel, was published by Encounter in May 2018. Follow him on Twitter at @dkahanerules

No Rowing Experience? No Problem. Here’s a College Scholarship

The press is ignoring the role that universities and Title IX played in the Varsity Blues scandal.

By DANIEL MCGRAW

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/no-athletic-experience-no-problem-heres-a-college-scholarship/

March 20, 2019

About five years ago, I heard about some interesting urban growth rumblings in my hometown of Cleveland, Ohio. Some of the locals had discovered that the Cuyahoga River was a great place to have rowing leagues. You know, the sport with coxswains and sculling boats where you use your leg strength to move through yucky waters, all the while trying to avoid the 700-foot Great Lakes freighter with 45,000 tons of cargo on the starboard side.

In other words, it was sort of a more elite version of summer softball leagues, in a river that went up in flames in 1969 and helped start the EPA. “We row on a crooked river that used to catch fire,” one of the longtime women rowers told me. “There’s something very blue-collar and being a scrapper about doing that.”

But there was one thing that was very odd in this movement that seemed more Connecticut country club/preppy than Ohio steelworker/football. Around that time, a number of high schools and clubs were springing up for teenagers who wanted to row, with the unspoken truth that rowing could lead to admission in an elite college—especially for the young women.

One parent told me, “Most of the girls on any high school rowing teams get accepted for a college scholarship of some sort, and if they get that, it can save us about $10,000 to 15,000 a year.”

It wasn’t cheating in any way; it was a response to how the NCAA had changed the college admissions market. College athletics, in response to Title IX requirements that attempted to level the playing field among men’s and women’s athletic scholarships, had decided that the growth of women’s rowing would be an easy way to equalize things.

And of course, this was mostly about men’s football.

In 1990, there were 305 female rowers at 12 U.S. colleges, most of them on some scholarship. Last year, there were 7,277 female rowing spots at 145 schools. But the number of female rowers in high school hadn’t grown that much, something parents had figured out. The odds of your daughter getting into a good school with a discount on tuition were much better if she rowed in the afternoon on a crooked river that used to burn, instead of sitting at home and staring at her phone.

I was reminded of this huge influx of female rowers into collegiate life by the recent “Varsity Blues” scandal. This controversy is rife with intrigue: cheating on standardized testing exams like the ACT, the children of wealthy parents being falsely designated as athletes, and hundreds of thousands of dollars paid in bribes to coaches and admission officers.

The initial reaction was that a few bad apples were spoiling it for the rest of us, and they should be punished for their audacity. But missing from the discussion for the most part was that the college admissions system now allows a number of students to be accepted through the back or side doors, making these bribery cases not the exceptions for a few, but the expected for the many.

“Many sports—particularly squash, lacrosse, fencing and rowing—are pricey to play, so rich kids get opportunities that are out of reach for the poor,” Rick Eckstein, professor of sociology at Villanova University, wrote in The Conversation last week.

“It is not unusual to have 30 or 40 players on a college soccer or lacrosse team,” he continued. “Most will never play. [Women’s rowing teams] often have more than 100 rowers. Most will never get into a boat. Many will quit the team after one season but remain students.”

Many are focusing on how Hollywood actress Lori Loughlin and her husband paid a $500,000 bribe so that their two daughters could be admitted to the University of Southern California as recruits for the school’s women’s rowing team. Prosecutors claim that neither of the girls is actually a rower.

But missing from the discussion is how women’s rowing got so big in numbers—and how so many of its scholarship recipients never even rowed in high school. In fact, Full House’s Aunt Becky was so out of touch with the real world of admissions that the $500,000 bribe she paid to take care of her “social media influencer” daughter most likely wasn’t even needed.

First, a little history. When Title IX was enacted in 1972, college administrators had one thing to figure out when it came to sports. Men’s football had about 100 scholarships for each big-time school. If you wanted to balance out the men’s and women’s sports scholarships awarded, you either had to cut some men’s sports’ scholarships or find a women’s sport to add to the equation.

Women’s rowing was chosen as the football equalizer. Because one race had eight scullers, 60 women were needed for a full rowing team. Those weren’t exactly football numbers, but they were close.

Many schools got on that bandwagon, and women’s rowing jumped by a huge amount in the 1990s. NCAA’s Division 1 rowing had only seven schools with teams and 204 rowers in 1990. By 2000, that had leapt to 82 schools and 4,485 rowers on scholarship. By last year, there were 88 schools with 5,526 women rowers.

The problem with all this is that the number of females rowers did not keep pace with the number of rowers needed in college. In 1990, there were only 688 rowersin high school programs, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations. Last year, that number had grown to 74 schools with 2,094 rowers, but still far less than what the college needed to fill its boats.

To hear some tell it, women’s crew coaches are handing out scholarships like candy.

The NCAA found this to be somewhat of a problem. “A significant percentage of college rowers participated in other sports during high school and did not begin rowing until college,” it said in a 2015 study. It found that only 46 percent of college rowers had ever even rowed for a high school or a club team during their high school years.

The New York Times noticed this in 2004 and ran a story: “Never Rowed? Take a Free Ride.” They documented a five-foot-nine, 250-pound French horn player and music major who went to Ohio State University and was encouraged to start rowing. “She had never played a sport before. …Finally, she decided to give it a try. Suddenly, she had a new hobby—and a new way to pay her college education.”

In 2007, The Virginian-Pilot put it this way in an article about the University of Virginia women’s NCAA crew team: “To hear some tell it, women’s crew coaches are handing out scholarships like candy.” The piece also noted that because the mens’ team is not NCAA-sanctioned, they are like night and day on campus. “The men receive no funding from the athletic department, have no scholarships to give and ‘tend to live in a very hand-to-mouth kind of way,’ said their coach, Will Oliver.”

Some schools have noticed the problem in recent years. The Seattle Times found that the University of Washington was artificially inflating the women’s rowing roster to meet Title IX requirements in relation to football numbers so it could keep federal funding.

An investigation at the University of Iowa found, “Gender equity advocates say the popularity of college football—a multibillion-dollar industry—has pushed athletic departments across the country to add more benchwarmers to women’s [rowing] teams to comply with Title IX, the federal gender equity law, while avoiding the cost of starting new women’s sports.”

So while the Ivy League elites and Hollywood actresses are being accused of horrible scheming for their own good, it’s the colleges that have set this elaborate scam.

Want a scholarship? Go row. Why the hell not? Just pretend to row. That’s all we need.

Daniel McGraw is a freelance journalist and author living in Lakewood, Ohio.

The 'Second Christ': The Life of Saint Francis of Assisi

By Jack Kerwick
https://townhall.com/columnists/jackkerwick/2019/03/17/the-second-christ-saint-francis-of-assisi-n2543062
March 17, 2019


St. Francis embracing the crucified Christ (Bartolome Esteban Murillo, 1668-69)

The Lenten season is here once again and Catholics the world over are preparing for Easter Sunday. In doing so, it is to the lives of holy men and women from over the centuries and millennia that all Christians, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, should turn in their quest to become more Christ-like. 

Saint Francis of Assisi is as good a place to begin as any, for such was the power of his example that he has enjoyed for centuries the unique distinction—one, tellingly, that neither the original twelve Apostles nor even Saint Paul succeeded in obtaining—of being regarded as “the Second Christ.” 

Saint Francis was born Giovanni Bernardone in Assisi in either 1181 or 1182.  His father was Pietro Bernardone, an Italian silk merchant, and his mother a French woman of whom little is known.  His father, who was away on business when his son was born, was reportedly upset when he discovered that his wife had baptized the baby with the name of “Giovanni,” after John the Baptist.  The last thing that Pietro wanted was for his son to become a holy man; rather, he wanted for him to become a man of the world, a businessman that would follow in his own footsteps both in the silk industry as well as with respect to being a Francophile, like Pietro.  

Thus, his father renamed the baby who would become known as the Second Christ as “Francesco,” which essentially means “Frenchman.” 

By the standards of the world, Francis had it good. He is said to have been handsome, charming, jocular, popular, and, of course, affluent. Though good-natured enough, Francis was filled with pride and sought attention by, among other things, dressing colorfully.  He was a ring-leader of sorts of a group of young men known for their proclivity toward acting recklessly by way of excessive drinking and other antics.  Francis himself would retrospectively concede that this was a period of his life during which he “lived in sin.” 

Francis was very much of the world, seeking, as Saint Augustine put it centuries earlier, “love of self to the point of contempt for God.” Francis thirsted for worldly glory. 

And so he went off to war. 


Upper level of the Basilica in Assisi with Equestrian statue of St Francis

Assisi declared war on another Italian city called Perugia, and Francis happily participated. 

Yet Assisi lost, with most of its soldiers being killed. Francis had been taken prisoner and his life spared only because it was known that his was a family of means, a family, that is, that was capable of paying ransom for him. After spending one year of being confined to a dark dungeon, Francis was freed.

However, he resumed his old ways, and still longed for Earthly glory. So, when the Fourth Crusade was under way, Francis used his father’s resources to purchase a gold-decorated suit of armor, an exquisite cloak, and a horse so that he could become a crusader.  He assured his associates that he would return a prince. 

Given his resolve, one can imagine the shock of his contemporaries who knew him when, in less than one day, Francis returned.   Francis, who always wanted nothing more than to be loved by the world, suffered a dramatic reversal of fortunes as those who knew him mocked and disparaged him, charging him with, among other things, being a coward. His father too expressed rage after having invested in that first-rate suit of armor that Francis had now decided not to use. 

So what happened?

Francis claimed that while on his journey, the Lord spoke to him in a dream, assuring him that Francis’s priorities were radically misplaced and instructing him to return home.  It would be a while, but through much prayer and time alone—including time alone in a cave, where he broke down in tears as he lamented his sinful life—Francis drew nearer to God.  

When he encountered a leper one day, Francis—the man who had virtually every worldly good for which a person could wish—was repulsed by the leper’s sight and stench.  Yet he embraced the man and kissed his hand.  The leper reciprocated.  Overcome with joy, Francis waved to the leper as Francis rode off on his horse, satisfied that he had done what God willed for him to do.

This event marked a turning point on Francis’s spiritual quest, but, as we will see, he still wasn’t as enlightened as he would become. 



Basilica of Saint Clare in Assisi, Italy

While praying at the church at San Damiano, Francis heard Christ speak to him: “Francis,” he heard Jesus say, “repair my church.”  This ancient church was in need of much work, and so Francis assumed that Christ wanted for him to attend to this particular church. He didn’t yet realize that it was the Catholic Church as a whole to which Francis was commanded to minister.  

Francis took fabric from his father and sold it.  The proceeds he gave to the bishop for the San Damiano church. When his father discovered what his son had done, Pietro charged Francis with theft and essentially disowned his son in front of the bishop and the people of Assisi.  Francis would no longer be entitled to his father’s inheritance from this juncture onward. Francis’ response, however, was revealing:

He in turn disowned all worldly possessions, in effect taking a vowel of poverty. Moreover, he used his father’s treatment of him as an opportunity to…rejoice. Francis paid back his father the money that he had taken and, in front of the townspeople, joyfully declared: 

“Pietro Bernardone is no longer my father. From now on I can say with complete freedom, ‘Our Father who art in Heaven’” (emphasis mine). 

It was at this moment that Frances took comfort in knowing that, ultimately, he had but one true Father, a Parent who would never disown him. 

Singing blissfully, Frances went off into the woods, into the bitter cold, wearing rags. 

And when bandits jumped him, threw him in a ditch, and stole what little clothing he had left, Francis climbed out of the hole and…sang.   

Within time, this once-worldly man, this man who not only possessed every conceivable Earthly good, but who relished in worldliness, became a living inspiration to his contemporaries. He rebuilt, with his bare hands, stone-by-stone, the church at San Damiano.  But he also began to rejuvenate the Church, the Bride of Christ that had become corrupted by greedy clerics, by way of his example of piety.

To underscore this last point: Francis was no fire-and-brimstone preacher.  While sleeping outdoors and begging for scraps of garbage to eat, he was always careful to show nothing but tender mercy to even those of the Church’s members who were most scandalous.  For example, when informed of a priest who had been openly living with a woman, the informant asked Francis if this meant that the Eucharist had been corrupted.   Francis responded by seeking out the guilty priest, kneeling before him, and kissing his hands.

Francis’s rationale for his action was that the priest’s hands had touched the Body and Blood of Christ.

His lifestyle began winning over people, folks from all social strata: merchants, educators, university students, and churchmen from the fields and the towns.  Francis refused to be recognized as their “leader.” Instead, he treated everyone as an equal, a child of God who, as such, was entitled to be treated as a being with an inherent dignity.  

He did, though, insist that those who would follow his example—Francis had no interest in founding an “order,” for he rejected what he took to be the military connotations of this concept—should do a few simple things, prescriptions that he lifted straight from the Scriptures, specifically, from the New Testament.  Those who wished to follow him needed to: (1) sell all that they had and donate the proceeds to the poor; (2) take nothing with them on their journey to spread the Gospel; and (3) assume their cross daily.

His following grew into the thousands even before Francis passed to glory at the young age of 44. 


St. Francis Preaches to the Sultan by Bonaventura Berlinghieri (Detail of the altar panel depicting scenes from the life of St. Francis. Florence, S. Croce, Bardi-Chapel)

Other noteworthy facts regarding the life of this outstanding person and disciple of Christ include, but are not limited to, the following:

(1)During the Fifth Crusade, in order to put a stop to the warring between Christians and Muslims, Francis left Italy and traveled to Syria with an eye toward converting the Sultan and however many practitioners of Islam would lend him a hearing.

Francis and his companions were imprisoned. Mercifully, their lives were spared. Moreover, the Sultan was charmed by Francis and reportedly remarked: “I would convert to your religion, which is a beautiful one—but both of us would be murdered.” 

Francis and his friends were freed.

(2)Francis saw God’s blessedness incarnated in all of creation—not just in humanity, the crown jewel of God’s handiwork.  It is precisely because of the intensity and inclusiveness of his vision that Francis is known as the patron saint of the environment. 

In other words, Francis saw all creatures, animals, plants, the planets, moons, and stars as his brothers and sisters in God.  Even death itself Francis acknowledged as an intrinsic feature of the reality that God authored. 

Francis’s vision he beautifully articulated in his Canticle of Brother Sun and Sister Moon.  The following excerpts concisely encapsulate his theocentric reading of the cosmos:

Praised be You my Lord, with all Your creatures, 

especially Sir Brother Sun, 

Who is the day through whom You give us light. 

And he is beautiful and radiant with great splendor, 

Of You Most High, he bears the likeness.

Praised be You, my Lord, through Sister Moon and the stars, 

In the heavens you have made them bright, precious and fair.

Praised be You, my Lord, through Brothers Wind and Air, 

And fair and stormy, all weather’s mood, 

by which You cherish all that You have made.

Praised be You my Lord through Sister Water, 

So useful, humble, precious and pure.

Praised be You my Lord through our Sister,

Mother Earth

who sustains and governs us, 

producing varied fruits with colored flowers and herbs. 

Praised be You, my Lord, through Sister Death, 

from whom no one living can escape. Woe to those who die in mortal sin! Blessed are they she finds doing Your will.

(3)Such was Francis’s compassion for all of creation that he supposedly preached to birds, imploring them to be thankful for their elegant clothing, their freedom, and the fact that God attended to them with care.  


St. Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio (Sisters of St. Francis of Sylvania, Ohio)

Another account is that of a wolf who had been devouring the residents of a town.  The townspeople wanted the wolf dead.  Francis, though, intervened on behalf of the wolf and persuaded the latter to forego its predatory ways.  

The wolf subsequently became a pet to the community.  The people who at one point wanted to kill the wolf now made sure that he was fed and treated with compassion. 

Francis’s lifestyle of poverty and traveling caught up to him.  He became blind and was racked with other ailments. He nevertheless remained joyful.  It was after he was afflicted with blindness that he wrote his Canticle thanking God for Brother Sun, and it was during his trials, while approaching his deathbed, that he prayed to God to share in Christ’s Passion.  Upon seeing a vision of the Lord, Francis’s prayer was answered as he received the stigmata. On October 4, 1226, Francis went home to his Father in Heaven.

During this Lenten season, and every season, let us remember the man who memorably remarked that while as Christians we do indeed have a duty to follow our Lord’s injunction to preach the Gospel to all nations, we should use words only when necessary. 

Take It Easy, Ann, and Train Your Fire Elsewhere

By Ed Morrow
https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/17/take-it-easy-ann-and-train-your-fire-elsewhere/
March 17, 2019

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

You know we like you, Ann. We’ve liked you for years. We’ve bought your books by the boxcar. We like the way you say stuff to TV cameras that other conservatives wouldn’t whisper into their pillows at 3 a.m. We like the way you make hostile crowds laugh while looking sideways at each other to check if it’s OK. We aren’t so sure about you getting chummy with Bill Maher—he’s just using you and doesn’t really like you like we do.

But liking you aside, we regret to say, you are, as President Trump says, “wacky.” We’ll hold off on the “nut job” part.

You have always been a loose cannon, routinely firing off remarks that your fans have had to explain as innocuous to the perpetually offended. You were just tweaking them, we insist, and they were trying to turn a tweak into a deadly insult for which they could demand an effusive apology followed by your exile from polite society.

Often, it was an enjoyable kerfuffle, for you are a funny member of the punditry. But sometimes defending your more provocative remarks was tiresome. Why make us fight peculiar, unnecessary battles of no strategic value? We dutifully did, wondering, a little bit, if maybe you might be just stirring up a fight to get the world to watch you wave your banner high above a tumultuous scuffle that you pointlessly provoked. You aren’t shy, and we like that, but conservatives are conservatives because they believe in Americanism, not Coulterism.

This brings us to what you’ve been up to recently.

We, too, are disappointed that President Trump hasn’t built a nice, tall wall along our southern border, one that a curious giraffe might strain to peer over but not illegals, not even if two or three stood upon each other’s shoulders. We, too, think that open borders will destroy the America we love and that millions of illegal immigrants love to immigrate  into illegally. But we don’t think Trump is, as you declare, a “con man,” an “idiot,” a “liar,” “lazy,” “incompetent,” and so on.

When you describe him as such, you aren’t adding an inch to that wall. You are making it easier for his opponents to stop him from building it. They’re delightfully using your words to mock Trump and you.They think the Twitter spat you started with the president is hilarious. Of course, Trump is at fault, too. He shouldn’t let you bait him into responding to your taunts, but it is in his nature, as we all know, to snap back when he is criticized.

Trump may be president, but millions of people voted for someone else. All of Hollywood and all the news chatterers hate his every atom. Three-quarters or more of the world believes what they’ve heard about him and hate him, too. Most of the leaders of his own party want him to go away so they can roll over and get their bellies scratched by those they claim to oppose. You should be a little charitable. You’ve made a career out of getting people angry with you. Trump is a relative newbie at it, and look at how he’s leapt far past your efforts. Shouldn’t that get a little respect from you?

You say Trump should have done more for the wall before the midterms, when Republicans had both the House and the Senate and he held the presidential pen, but his position wasn’t as strong as you seem to think. There was absolute opposition from the Democrats and just tepid support from Republicans. He chose to work on the economy first, knowing that a bad economy would produce midterm results that would worsen the situation. A good economy didn’t give him the electoral results he hoped for, but did forestall a blue tidal wave that surely would have strengthened the impeachment effort.

You may remember that before Trump had even sat down in the Oval Office the Democrats had set up the Russian collusion hoax and the deep state was humming away, scheming their feverish dreams of presidential perp walks accompanied by the sounding of sanctimonious horns of outrage by the media. Trump forced from office would have meant open borders for the remaining years of a crippled Pence presidency then borders opened wider under a Democratic president ushered in like Jimmy Carter to cleanse a supposedly disgraced White House.

Imagine a Carter with our new socialist kiddies in Congress handing him idiocies to sign. Trump’s emphasis on the economy prevented that, at least for now.

The government shutdown was a Hail Mary that failed. It’s easy to say Trump should have held out, but the Democrats made it clear they would be delighted to see the economy tank while the media blamed Trump and the Republicans. It would be “happy days are here again,” with Trump as Hoover and whatever Democrat next nominated as FDR reborn. A couple more weeks of media bleating about federal workers facing foreclosure and rummaging through dumpsters for food would have pushed skittish Republicans into open rebellion. Trump had to cave. Declaring a national emergency to build the wall was his fail-safe.

What we need from you, Ann, isn’t recriminations about what might have been. The question for conservative punditry is where to direct attention now. Twelve Republican senators voted to block Trump’s emergency declaration. Which of them do you consider idiots, con men, liars, and incompetents? I suggest Mitt Romney checks off a lot of those boxes and you could add a few more unpleasant characteristics. He says he’s against open borders but cringes at the word “wall.” He prefers “barrier.” I suspect the Democrats could get him to accept a speed bump somewhere between Las Vegas and the Utah border at some rest area on I-25.

The Despicable Dozen need to be chased out of the weeds and run up to the top of the nearest bare-branched tree to be exposed so their constituents can know them for what kind of critters they are. You are a clever writer. Write them up nice and proper, and do it quick.

And how about Democrats from conservative constituencies? Maybe you could spook a few of them into remembering that Americans don’t like illegal immigration. Go after the leaders of the opposition, and it will stiffen the spines of the wall builders.

We need the border wall to preserve America as a great nation, but it isn’t all we need. As illegal immigration is reduced from the south it will increase elsewhere and there are other foreign and domestic threats to America.

Conservatives got lucky in 2016. The electorate recognized Trump as the better alternative to the Wicked Witch of Chappaqua. It may be different in 2020. The Democrats might pick a less odious candidate. If they successfully block the wall and disappointed wall supporters blame Trump, he might lose their votes. This could cost him the election and that means no wall at all. And no conservative response to those other foreign and domestic threats.

So, Ann, please lay off Trump. There are other targets better deserving your fire. We don’t need you going all wacky and doing a Rosie O’Donnell impression. One of her is one more than enough.

The Bulwark Embarrasses Itself Further With Attack on Victor Davis Hanson

BY ROGER KIMBALL
https://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/the-bulwark-embarrasses-itself-further-with-attack-on-victor-davis-hanson/
March 14, 2019

Being of a charitable disposition, I early on decided that the kindest response to The Bulwark, the NeverTrump redoubt started by Bill Kristol following the implosion of the Weekly Standard, was silence. If this tiny cohort of bitter and unhappy souls was determined to embarrass themselves in public, the best we could do was turn away. Non ragioniam di lor, as Dante says in another context, ma guarda e passa. It would be cruel to let daylight in upon madness.

I said nothing when, for one of their opening acts, editor-in-chief Charles Sykes pronounced anathema upon me and Henry Olsen, the distinguished ethics and public policy scholar, for the sin of supporting the president of the United States on some issue or other. I was planning to continue to follow Wittgenstein’s advice at the end of the Tractatus and pass over in silence the twisted attack on Victor Davis Hanson’s new book on the president, The Case for Trump, by Hudson Institute Fellow Gabriel Schoenfeld, but the ad hominem viciousness of the piece together with its surreal mischaracterization of Hanson’s argument prompts me to weigh in.

“This is not to say that Hanson’s book lacks value,” Schoenfeld writes:

As a part of a larger phenomenon, it is instructive in its way. Anyone with an iota of historical awareness is familiar with the fact that intellectuals in Europe and the United States lauded Joseph Stalin even as he sent millions to the Gulag and their death. By the same token, Adolf Hitler, one of the 20th century’s other mega-mass murderers, also found his share of admirers in the academy …

And they’re off! Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist and military historian, has said admiring things about certain of Donald Trump’s policies -- his judicial appointments, for example, his handling of the economy and attention to modernizing our military -- ergo he is an intellectual in the service of evil. Hanson treats this calumny with some portion of the contempt that it deserves.

“Schoenfeld,” he writes:

… insinuates that I am a racist for not calling out Donald Trump’s alleged bigotry. For a supposed racist enabler, I have an odd way of living -- in the house where I was raised in an impoverished multiracial rural community, part of an extended family that is far from exclusively “white,” and teaching for over 20 years at a state university attended mostly by minority students, many from communities near my home. If advocating melting-pot policies of assimilation, integration, and intermarriage -- and living in minority neighborhoods and putting one’s children in underperforming but diverse public schools -- is also proof of past “service to a genuine evil,” I plead guilty.

That answers the ad hominem part of Schoenfeld’s effusion. What about his estimation of the president’s supposed “evil”? “Trump’s economic agenda.” Hanson points out:

… has done far more for minority job seekers than have the policies of past Republican or Democratic presidents. Unlike many of his opponents in the Democratic party, Trump does not deprecate Catholicism. He has been on the forefront in calling out the new generation of progressive anti-Semites in Congress. No president has been more adamantly opposed to abortion on demand, which has devastated the African-American community, and which a number of black leaders have called black “genocide,” and whose effects in the past have earned either at best liberal assent or at worst outright progressive support for eugenics. In 2020, for all those reasons and others, Trump may well receive a higher percentage of the black, Hispanic, and Jewish vote than, for example, Mitt Romney in 2012.

The point is, these policies have had a palpable and beneficent effect on millions of people, helping to lift them out of poverty, to secure them against the depredations of criminals and dependency-inducing government intervention. They are, in a word, morally positive policies.

It is a favorite trope among critics of the president, including ones more circumspect and temperate than Gabe Schoenfeld, to argue that Donald Trump is a man of bad character and draw all sorts of dire inferences from that contention. I have had occasion to challenge that trope myself -- here for example, and here -- but Hanson gives a fuller account than any I have seen of exactly how it is that Donald Trump’s presidency, for all its rhetorical bluster and occasional crudity, has been a salubrious and morally uplifting enterprise.

The emotive, moralistic side of Schoenfeld’s argument is the thing that most readers will come away with. He thinks Donald Trump is a bad man, and he believes that anyone who does not repudiate him is a patsy, a collaborator in evil, or both. But he also endeavors to support this torrent of temperament with a bill of particulars. This is where his piece becomes truly embarrassing. Discussing and dismissing the importance of the infamous dossier compiled by Christopher Steele and surreptitiously paid for by the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s campaign as oppo-research against their political opponent, Schoenfeld asserts that it is unimportant because there was no effort to broadcast its smears against Trump before the election. “Why,” Schoenfeld asks, “did [the Democrats] not leak the dossier, already in their possession, to the media before the election when it could have done the Trump campaign serious damage?" Unsurprisingly, this is a question that Hanson opts not to entertain.”

Hanson answers this preposterous claim in great detail, but let me merely recapitulate what the unidentified Twitter maven known as Undercover Huber says about this:

Undercover Huber@JohnWHuber

THE CLINTON FUNDED STEELE DOSSIER WASN’T USED IN THE MEDIA BEFORE THE ELECTION says @gabeschoenfeld

Except:
—The Weekly Standard
—New Yorker
—Yahoo News
—Mother Jones
—Slate
—NBC
—MSNBC

And by the Clinton campaign:
—Press release “bombshells”
—Tweets read by millions

THREAD

3,222

8:09 PM - Mar 12, 2019

There follows a thread which cites chapter and verse, destroying any last shred of credibility that might have been attached to the scarecrow that is Gabe Schoenfeld.

To date, the only response from this fellow of the Hudson Institute is a tweet that links to Victor Davis Hanson’s rebuttal under the rubric “He doth protest too much.” As of this writing, every single response to that feeble rejoinder is along the lines of this pithy but not inaccurate comment: “He destroyed you.”