Actually, we’re just anticipating the media bias vis a vis Benedict XVI’s upcoming visit:

With a papal visit less than two weeks away, American readers can anticipate a spate of “analysis” stories, assessing the health of US Catholicism and predicting the content of the Pope’s message to America. Be forewarned: most of this coverage will be grossly inaccurate.

Writing for National Review Online, George Weigel cites a tendentious Washington Post piece as the early favorite for what he calls the Father Richard McBrien Prize in Really Inept Vaticanology. Weigel makes a strong case; the Post piece is definitely a contender. But there will be others, equally wrongheaded, before Pope Benedict’s visit is finished. The Boston Globe has not yet weighed in with its editorial opinion, and Father McBrien himself can never be counted out. This competition will be fierce.

The most popular theme for simplistic journalists is the contrast between the blithe spirit of American cafeteria Catholics and the inflexible dogma of the Roman Pontiff. (If you see the term “Panzerkardinal” in what purports to be a news story, you’re probably reading another entry in Weigel’s competition.) It’s easy to see the papal visit as a confrontation: the Vatican enforcer coming to town to bring order to American chaos.

We can expect the MSM to trot out the usual suspects – the Catholic theologian who stands athwart Catholic teaching; the pro-abortion Catholic; pro-female priest Catholic…heck, one of these days I’m sure we’ll come across the differently-abled, transgendered person of color Catholic (who wants to be a priest and nun, at the same time), just to make certain all bases are covered. The general line of these stories is to demonstrate that the Church is out of step with its membership and this is the reason why the Church in America shed so many members over the past few decades…such a line makes for, perhaps, a nifty narrative for an ignorant editor, but it doesn’t even touch upon the truth.

The Catholic Church is not, however, a democracy – truth cannot be decided by popular vote. It doesn’t matter if the MSM could demonstrate that every single Catholic in America is opposed to a particular item of Catholic doctrine – it wouldn’t change. Doctrine is something that comes from God and to determine just what shall be obligatory on believers is something only discovered after very careful – and, usually, very long – deliberation all up and down the line in the Catholic Church. You’ll never hear such phrases as “lightening fast” and “lickety split” applied to the way the Church considers matters of faith and morals. So, the crtitics will hammer away – female priests! Married priests! Birth control! Abortion! Such matters have been settled, and won’t be unsettled unless something extraordinary happens…and that thing won’t be the carping and complaining of certain people who really wish Truth could bend to their desires.

As for me, Ive decided that I’m going to keep track of “Panzerkardinal” during the Pope’s visit – for my own amusement (and for a future “What Media Bias?”), I want to see how many times it is used over the next month.

Well, Mussolini made the trains run on time – and at least one San Franciscan is convinced that Obama will make the bus run on time:

Obama fever has overtaken San Francisco. Undeterred by the conspiracy theories, hatred, and vitriol spewed by Obama’s 20-year “like an uncle to me” pastor, Jeremiah Wright, local liberals are in thrall to their perceived savior. They seem to think that every problem, no matter how trivial, can be solved by Saint Obama.

As a case in point, an elderly man I was chatting with yesterday at a city bus stop about MUNI delays (a time-honored tradition in San Francisco) concluded by stating, “I hope Obama gets elected so these things will be fixed.” So, along with ending poverty and creating world peace, Obama’s going to make the buses run on time.

Playing devil’s advocate, I responded, “He’s not the Second Coming, you know,” to which the man responded, “yes, but neither is she, or he,” referring to Hillary Clinton and John McCain. “But no politician is,” I answered, “and this is a local issue, anyway.” “I’m just sick of this world, he said”, sighing, “and Obama can fix it.”

Given that the bus arrived seconds later, perhaps he was onto something.

You liberals out there do realise that Obama is just a rather conventional liberal as well as being a product of the notoriously corrupt Chicago Democratic machine, aren’t you? These are not the usual ingredients for a person who will actually change things…but, I guess it doesn’t matter. After all, the guy who thinks that Obama will fix all problems is probably one of those convinced that Chimpy McSmirk BusHitler lied us into Iraq for oil/Haliburton/Likud/what have you.

Back in 2004, I often noted the Democrats’ disconnect from reality, and I think it has only gotten worse. We do live in an Age of Lies, and I think that some people are so far gone in them – and so comfortable holding them – that there is not much we can do for them. We just have to work our way around them – and our primary task in 2008 is to beat Obama (should he gain the nomination) without pushing these people off the deep end. They’re already convinced that 2000 and 2004 were stolen by EEEVIL Republican conspiracies, and if they feel another election has been stolen from them, there’s no telling what these poor fools might do. Best thing for us to do – win big in November; so big that even a lefty who thinks Obama will make the trains run on time understands he was beaten fair and square.

Who better to help Hillary solve our home lending crisis than a person who sits on the board of a bankrupt lender?

WASHINGTON – Hillary Clinton spends considerable time on the campaign trail bemoaning unscrupulous lenders who have left millions of Americans scrambling to keep their homes but all the while her campaign manager, Margaret “Maggie” Williams, has sat on the board of one of the nation’s once-largest and now-bankrupt sub-prime mortgage lenders.

Clinton Communications Director Howard Wolfson told FOXNews.com late Sunday that Williams, a longtime Clinton ally, didn’t join Clinton’s Democratic presidential campaign as a volunteer until after Delta Financial Corporation — for which Williams is a director — went bankrupt in December 2007.

That’s more than seven years after Williams joined New York-based Delta Financial in 2000. She became a director one month after a federal settlement was reached with the lender over discriminatory lending practices. More recently, Delta has been accused by consumer advocates of pursuing predatory practices throughout the housing boom and bust.

As of September 2007, Williams owned 12,500 shares of Delta’s common stock, and by 2007 had earned at least $175,000 for her board obligations, according to company filings available in the Securities & Exchange Commission online database.

I guess nobody at Clinton, Inc thought to ask, huh?

In Obama’s failure to anticipate that Wright might be a problem and Hillary’s hiring Maggie Williams away from a bankrupt lender we can see a certain pattern emerging about both Democratic candidates – they’re both incompetant managers. No surprise, really – neither of them has ever had to produce an actual result in a day’s work. All they have are words – poll-tested, focus-grouped highly polished words which are designed to prevent the communication of actual information. Given their absolute lack of real world experience, we can expect that either of them – installed in the White House – will just make one after another management mistakes. This is not a supposition – its a promise; they don’t know what they are doing, and will be playthings in the hands of those in their Administration who do know what they are doing.

And the really scary thing? One of them might very well win in November.

Discussed over at Battle Born Politics.

Excellent news:

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has said France will send more troops to bolster Nato’s mission in Afghanistan, subject to certain conditions.

Mr Sarkozy, who is on a state visit to Britain, said he would make the offer at next week’s Nato summit in the Romanian capital, Bucharest.

Britain and the US have frequently called on other Nato members to send more soldiers to fight the Taleban.

The Nato-led force, Isaf, currently has over 43,000 personnel in Afghanistan.

In a speech to the British parliament in London, Mr Sarkozy said the Taleban could not be allowed to regain power.

“In Afghanistan something essential is being played out,” he said.

“France has proposed a strategy to its allies in the Atlantic alliance to enable the Afghan people and their legitimate government to build peace.

“If these proposals are accepted, during the summit in Bucharest, France will propose reinforcing its military presence.”

France already has troops in Afghanistan but like all other NATO forces – other than US, UK and Australia – they work on such restrictive rules of engagement as to be useless in a military sense except as static, garrison troops. President Sarkozy’s proposal indicates that the French military will engergetically engage in battle – and this, in turn, might get the Germans and others to step up to the plate. In the end, we are all in tihs together, and it will be over a lot faster if all concerned put some will into the fight.

The problem with Europe seems to be a lack of will to live, and a resultant unwillingness to fight. But it wasn’t always so – less than 100 years ago, France sternly sacrificed its manhood on the anvil-altar of Verdun, fighting for the core principle that governments must derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. The great-grandsons of those brave men now hold the destiny of France – and, perhaps, Europe – in their hands. President Sarkozy has made a brave offer, we’ll now see if there is any will to live in France, and Europe.

I know, hard to believe that a liberal can fail, especially one who spoke of hope and change in his election campaign…but it does seem to be the case:

BOSTON — Gov. Deval Patrick has lately addressed doting crowds around the country as a surrogate for Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, his friend and fellow gifted orator. Last month, Mr. Obama even acknowledged borrowing language from Mr. Patrick’s stump speeches, casting a flattering light on a novice politician barely known outside Massachusetts.

But there is no such glow at home for Mr. Patrick, the first Democrat to lead his state in 16 years and the nation’s second elected black governor.

Mr. Patrick, who easily won office in 2006 after dazzling voters with a message of hope and change, suffered a nasty defeat last week at the hands of the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives, which quashed his proposal to increase revenues by allowing three resort casinos in the state. None of the governor’s major policy proposals have cleared the Legislature, in fact, and he and Salvatore DiMasi, the speaker of the House, have taken to trading barbs publicly.

Mr. Patrick is faring better than a year ago, when he was under siege for spending more than $10,000 on drapes for his State House office and upgrading his state car from a Ford Crown Victoria to a Cadillac. (He later agreed to reimburse the state for the drapes and part of the car lease.) By his third month in office, Mr. Patrick had announced that his wife was being treated for depression, and by his fourth, he had overhauled his staff.

But even now, governing is not coming easily for Mr. Patrick, 51, a former civil rights lawyer and corporate executive who came to Massachusetts on a prep school scholarship in the ’70s.

So why has he struggled for traction in a heavily Democratic state with a Legislature that should be on his side?

He blames Speaker DiMasi, a veteran of Beacon Hill who embraces old-school ways of doing business and holds far more sway than the governor over his members. Mr. Patrick believes his casino bill could have passed if Mr. DiMasi, who said gambling would be a scourge on the state, had not pressured lawmakers to oppose it.

Why casinos? ‘Cause you’ve got a liberal in charge – and that means if there’s a budget shortfall (which there is in Massachusetts), then the only thing a liberal can think of is how to increase revenues…never a thought to how to cut spending or better run the government. Its also rather typical of a liberal that he’s blaming someone else for his defeat – it isn’t that Mr. Liberal Hope and Change had a bone-headed idea, its that Someone Else failed to deliver the goods. DiMasi might be a lot of things and, sure, he was clearly opposed to the idea of casinos (as should everyone – really, leave casinos to the professionals in Las Vegas…everyone else always seems to make a hash of it, and you can never get “Vegas” anywhere other than Vegas), but its not like he can actually order everyone around – might it be that a majority of the Legislature just decided that casinos weren’t a good idea? Well, you’ll never get a Liberal Hope and Changer to admit that…liberals never make mistakes, you see?

Poor Massachusetts – saddled with an uber-liberal Governor, a Democrat controlled legislature…and Ted Kennedy at the top fo the nauseating heap! I’ll bet they’re starting to regret their choice in 2006…

The headline:

US Deaths in Iraq Approach 4,000

Odd headline, isn’t it? I mean, they’ve been “approaching” 4,000 since, oh, 3,900 was reached…why put this out now? And why not wait for 4,000?

My guess is that the good news is coming out of Iraq all too rapidly these days and that public opinion in the US is turning towards continued support for the long-haul…and that, of course, will damage Democratic prospects in 2008. So, change the subject – use dead American servicemember’s as a prop in a leftwing morality play, courtesy of the supposedly unbiased MSM.

Of course, the loss of life is a sad thing – but the problem with concentrating on numbers like that is that it fails to put into context just what they died for. Its not like they were killed in a traffic accident just on their way home from work, now is it? Here is some of what they’ve been doing lately:

Tip leads Iraqi National Police to large munitions cache

Coalition forces kill 17 terrorists including six likely suicide bombers, detain 30 suspects

Suspected IED emplacers attacked in vicinity of Samarra

One terrorist killed, 21 detained in operations against al-Qaeda

Plenty to write about – and plenty which is interesting, newsworthy and likely to generate readership/viewership. Why write about the number of dead rather than write about the actual war? Can anyone find a headline from, say, June of 1944 which says that “US Deaths in Europe Approach 200,000”, rather than talking about what the troops were doing?

The kook left gets a little kookier – Barbara Ehrenreich in The Nation:

There’s a reason Hillary Clinton has remained relatively silent during the flap over intemperate remarks by Barack Obama’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. When it comes to unsavory religious affiliations, she’s a lot more vulnerable than Obama.

You can find all about it in a widely under-read article in the September 2007 issue of Mother Jones, in which Kathryn Joyce and Jeff Sharlet reported that “through all of her years in Washington, Clinton has been an active participant in conservative Bible study and prayer circles that are part of a secretive Capitol Hill group known as “The “Fellowship,” also known as The Family…

…The Family takes credit for some of Clinton’s rightward legislative tendencies, including her support for a law guaranteeing “religious freedom” in the workplace, such as for pharmacists who refuse to fill birth control prescriptions and police officers who refuse to guard abortion clinics.

What drew Clinton into the sinister heart of the international right? Maybe it was just a phase in her tormented search for identity, marked by ever-changing hairstyles and names: Hillary Rodham, Mrs. Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton and now Hillary Clinton. She reached out to many potential spiritual mentors during her White House days, including New Age guru Marianne Williamson and the liberal rabbi Michael Lerner. But it was the Family association that stuck.

Sharlet generously attributes Clinton’s involvement to the under-appreciated depth of her religiosity, but he himself struggles to define The Family’s theological underpinnings. The Family avoids the word Christian but worships Jesus, though not the Jesus who promised the earth to the “meek.” They believe that, in mass societies, it’s only the elites who matter, the political leaders who can build God’s “dominion” on earth. Insofar as The Family has a consistent philosophy, it’s all about power–cultivating it, building it and networking it together into ever-stronger units, or “cells.” “We work with power where we can,” Doug Coe has said, and “build new power where we can’t.”

Interesting. Here’s a 2002 Los Angeles Times article on the group – which doesn’t quite paint it in that sinister a light, which thus proves that the LA Times is also deep in the sinister heart of the international right.

That aside – what the article shows is two things:

1. The far left really has it in for Hillary.

2. The far left cannot imagine anyone just being a Christian – if you are such, it must be for a nefarious purpose. They ain’t buying any of that “love your neighbor” nonsense…they know that what Christians want is to oppress everyone and force people to believe the world is 6,000 years old.

I didn’t know – but am pleased with the knowledge – that Hillary attends Bible study. Naturally, I’d prefer it for her to attend RCIA, but any exposure to the Word of God is a good thing. Given that we recently found out that Gorbachev was a closet Christian and this might have helped him to pursue a reasonable course, it can only be good for Hillary to get a bit of God into her worldview. Some day, she might even wake up from the haze of anti-human, far left policies which have infected far too much of what was once an honorable (though still mistaken) liberalism. Only in the minds of the hate-filled left can the fact that someone is seeking after the truth be considered evidence of evil intent.

Ok, boys and girls, here’s you big chance to just have at it…lefties, you want to endlessly rehash the reasons we went to war? Here’s you thread. RIghties, been burning for the 1,000th opportunity to make lefties look like fools over their views on the war? Here’s the place.

Alternately, you can discuss the continuing Obama saga; why Hillary is suddenly so quiet. Why recent polling shows McCain doing better and better against either part of HillBama. Why President Bush seems in such a fine mood these days. Why commodity prices took a dump the other day and why some have opined that oil prices will start to slide later this year.

Have at it.

Me? I think the cretin is dead – a grease spot in the Toro Bora: honestly, how hard would be be to get a good, clear picture of Osama holding up a recent newspaper, if his troops wanted to really prove he’s alive? Anyways, bin Laden, of someone claiming to be him, has issued a new series of threats:

DUBAI (Reuters) – Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden threatened the European Union with grave punishment on Wednesday for publication of cartoons mocking Islam’s Prophet Mohammad.

In an audio recording posted on the Internet coinciding with the birthday of Islam’s founder, bin Laden said the drawings, considered offensive by Muslims, were part of a “new crusade” in which Pope Benedict was involved.

“Your publications of these drawings — part of a new crusade in which the Pope of the Vatican had a significant role — is a confirmation from you that the war continues,” said the Saudi-born militant leader, addressing “those who are wise at the European Union”.

You are “testing Muslims … the answer will be what you shall see and not what you hear.”

The usefullness of this diatribe is that it does serve to remind that the enemy is the enemy of us all – right, left; Christian, atheist; black, white…it doesn’t matter: if you are not Islamist, the Islamists have you scheduled for slavery, or for the chopping block. It doesn’t matter how much anyone tries to talk to them; doesn’t matter how much pressure is put on Israel; doesn’t matter if we close Gitmo and pull out of Iraq – the enemy is still going to be our enemy and they will attack us with all their might as often as they can. The pity of it all is that so many people from the most base of motives simply refuse to see things as they are – this war might well have been completely won by now if all of those who are enemies of the Islamists had stood together…but, no, people on the left preferred to hate President Bush…hating him, after all, is a lot less risky than standing up to people who cut off your head if you get in their way…