Blogs For Victory

How instructed Catholics view the matter:

So, Dr. Barack Obama is now an alumnus of Notre Dame. And, Our Lady Weeps for him and all who continue to be deceived by the siren song of the culture of death. The event is over but the work only begins. We need to pray for the grace of conversion for the President. Can you imagine what might happen if Dr. Barack Obama of Notre Dame was converted and recognized the truth concerning the inviolable dignity of every human life, which includes our smallest neighbors? It can happen. As I prayed the Holy Rosary today I prayed these words attributed to Bernard of Clairvaux:

“Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to thy protection, implored thy help, or sought thine intercession was left unaided. Inspired by this confidence, I fly unto thee, O Virgin of virgins, my mother; to thee do I come, before thee I stand, sinful and sorrowful. O Mother of the Word Incarnate, despise not my petitions, but in thy mercy hear and answer me”. The intercession of the Mother of God is extremely powerful!

I believe that the events which led up to this commencement will go down in history as the beginning of a New Catholic Action in America. Our Bishops must meet and deal with what just occurred. We need their immediate and decisive pastoral and corrective action concerning the very nature and obligations of all Catholic Colleges and Universities. The confusion arising out of the opportunistic use of piecemeal quotes from Catholic Social Doctrine to promote the Culture of Death and the use and abuse of Catholic platforms to promote this error has gone on for too long.

Curiously enough, I do believe he will be converted – freed from the poison of Jeremiah Wright, Obama is now in a position where orthodoxy has its chance. We must pray for him – that the father of those two delightful girls comes to understand the truth of the matter. It might not happen while he’s President, but I believe it will happen, in the by and by.

Quite stunning:

In his bid for re-election, New Jersey’s Democratic Governor Jon Corzine trails Republican challenger Chris Christie by nine percentage points. The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of Garden State voters shows Christie with 47% of the vote and Corzine with 38%.

The Governor does better when matched against Republican Steve Lonegan. In that case, it’s Lonegan with 42% and Corzine just a point behind at 41%.

Now, Corzine has actually climbed out of the polling cellar but its never good for a man seeking re-election to be sitting at 38% less than six months prior to the vote. Right now, things are looking up for the GOP in New Jersey and Virginia, States won by Obama just this past November. These States were harbingers in 1993 and 2005. Will they be again?

Charlotte Allen takes the atheists to task:

I can’t stand atheists — but it’s not because they don’t believe in God. It’s because they’re crashing bores…

…My problem with atheists is their tiresome — and way old — insistence that they are being oppressed and their fixation with the fine points of Christianity. What — did their Sunday school teachers flog their behinds with a Bible when they were kids?…

…Maybe atheists wouldn’t be so unpopular if they stopped beating the drum until the hide splits on their second-favorite topic: How stupid people are who believe in God. This is a favorite Dawkins theme. In a recent interview with Trina Hoaks, the atheist blogger for the Examiner.com website, Dawkins described religious believers as follows: “They feel uneducated, which they are; often rather stupid, which they are; inferior, which they are; and paranoid about pointy-headed intellectuals from the East Coast looking down on them, which, with some justification, they do.” Thanks, Richard!

Dennett likes to call atheists “the Brights,” in contrast to everybody else, who obviously aren’t so bright. In a 2006 essay describing his brush with death after a heart operation, Dennett wrote these thoughts about his religious friends who told him they were praying for his recovery: “Thanks, I appreciate it, but did you also sacrifice a goat?” With friends like Daniel Dennett, you don’t need enemies.

They are crashing bores – arrogant, too. But in the end, I don’t believe in atheists – meaning, I don’t believe there is, has been or ever will be any person who will be entirely convinced there is no God. Atheism is an attitude – a self-centered, elitist conceit about one’s supposed intellectual superiority coupled with a desire to have this alleged superiority acknowledged by others.

This is the only way to explain the phenomena of atheists who sue in court to, say, have a prayer said at high school graduation banned. If you were really convinced that God didn’t exist then you simply wouldn’t care that some words were said to what you consider to be a non-existent entity. A truly intellectual person would understand that others do believe it and have this need and so common courtesy means you’d not stand in their way…and you wouldn’t be spreading absurd theories about how Christians are just waiting for their chance to start burning heretics at the stake, unless the ACLU stops them from having a Nativity scene at town hall.

If, on the other hand, what you’re really about is insisting how smart you are then what you’re really trying to do is hide any reference to the one entity who is and always will be so vastly smarter than you that you are reduced to absolute insignificance in and of yourself. For some people the problem is that they are created – can’t stand the thought that they didn’t just will themselves into existence and thus became the smartest person in the room. So, they cook up absurd theories of universes creating themselves and look down upon those poor fools on their knees in prayer.

Meanwhile, we’re just sorry for them; and we’ll keep praying for them. Its so hard to see some of our fellows so cut off from reason and love – so unwilling to first admit to the superior and then realize you can endlessly draw upon this superior for whatever it is you need. Its like watching a man die of thirst in the desert for simple unwillingness to walk to the lake – he wants the lake to come to him and prove to him it exists, then he’ll deign to admit to the existence of the lake.

Victor Davis Hanson looks at an alternate version of history, where Sarah Palin was elected president in 2008, but has made the same choices, mistakes, fumbles that Obama has, and offers the different reaction from the media for them.

This is one of my favorite parts:

IT’S THE MATH, STUPID!
“Well,” lectured Paul Krugman, again in the Times, “we were worried that they didn’t teach math at Idaho U., and now we know for sure they don’t. Is it $1.6 trillion, $1.7 trillion, or $2 trillion in red ink this year? Are we supposed to be impressed that she offers ‘fiscal sobriety’ by cutting 0.003 percent of the budget? She gives out money to those who don’t pay taxes and calls it a tax cut. And now Queen Sarah tells us that in four years she’ll ‘halve’ the deficit, as if she hasn’t borrowed another $5 trillion in the meantime. Does she think we’re morons? How many ‘Drill, baby, drill!’ oil wells can she tap into up there in Alaska to pay for the extra $11 trillion in debt she’s saddling us with?”

Read the whole thing.

A Founding rightwing extremist explains the opposition to President Bush:

Men often oppose a thing merely because they have had no agency in planning it, or because it may have been planned by those whom they dislike. – Alexander Hamilton

Newsbusters usefully notes that long before it became the contentious issue of May of 2009, news reports were indicating – quite calmly and with no heated Pelosian denials – that Pelosi and others were, indeed, briefed on the CIA’s interrogations:

In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA’s overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.

“The briefer was specifically asked if the methods were tough enough,” said a U.S. official who witnessed the exchange.

Congressional leaders from both parties would later seize on waterboarding as a symbol of the worst excesses of the Bush administration’s counterterrorism effort. The CIA last week admitted that videotape of an interrogation of one of the waterboarded detainees was destroyed in 2005 against the advice of Justice Department and White House officials, provoking allegations that its actions were illegal and the destruction was a coverup.

Yet long before “waterboarding” entered the public discourse, the CIA gave key legislative overseers about 30 private briefings, some of which included descriptions of that technique and other harsh interrogation methods, according to interviews with multiple U.S. officials with firsthand knowledge.

With one known exception, no formal objections were raised by the lawmakers briefed about the harsh methods during the two years in which waterboarding was employed, from 2002 to 2003, said Democrats and Republicans with direct knowledge of the matter. The lawmakers who held oversight roles during the period included Pelosi and Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) and Sens. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) and John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), as well as Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.) and Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan).

Individual lawmakers’ recollections of the early briefings varied dramatically, but officials present during the meetings described the reaction as mostly quiet acquiescence, if not outright support. “Among those being briefed, there was a pretty full understanding of what the CIA was doing,” said Goss, who chaired the House intelligence committee from 1997 to 2004 and then served as CIA director from 2004 to 2006. “And the reaction in the room was not just approval, but encouragement.”

That was from December of 2007. So, why are we talking about it, now? Because the left was trying to gin up war crimes trials against President Bush and his Administration – our side fought back by pointing out the rank hypocrisy of people like Pelosi on the issue and then Pelosi went and lied about what she knew and when she knew it. The whole fracas is the fault of the left and Pelosi’s routine dishonesty in her political actions. Had the left not been determined to “keep hate alive” vis a vis the Bush Administration had not Pelosi’s default position been to be dishonest, none of this would have ever been an issue.

Ah, what tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive…

Michael Gerson notes Ms. Sykes’ asperity regarding Rush Limbaugh and others of the politique adroit:

The first response to the performer on a public stage wishing the death of a stranger for political reasons was discomfort. Wanda Sykes had “crossed a line” at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner in accusing Rush Limbaugh of terrorism and treason, mocking his past drug addiction and wishing his kidneys would fail. But a counterreaction soon developed: Humor often is transgressive, and if you can’t take it, don’t dish it, and let’s everyone lighten up a bit, and can’t anyone take a joke anymore?

The initial reaction was more human…

…civility has an unavoidably moral component. The proper treatment of others conveys regard and demonstrates self-control. Rudeness sets out to dominate and humiliate. This is not only true in politics. “Precisely because rudeness is quite common,” says philosophy professor Emrys Westacott, “it is not a trivial issue. Indeed, in our day-to-day lives it is possibly responsible for more pain than any other moral failing.” Verbal violence can leave people smarting for days, or scarred for years, or pushed like a vulnerable middle-schooler toward suicide. Such hostility is broadly and correctly condemned. Why does politics seem to numb this rudimentary moral sense?

The answer, of course, is the infectious nature of incivility itself. Every excess provides the excuse for greater and opposite excess — a search for more vicious put-downs and more startling obscenities. Avoiding this escalation is one of the primary challenges of the schoolyard and one of the important attributes of a citizen. Everyone has grievances; fewer have the courage of manners. All of us need more of it.

Indeed. We’re caught in a bind – people have staked out positions and the more stupid the position staked out, the less likely a person is to surrender it. While there are some on the right who have fallen in to this trap, most are on the left…thus for each conservative who calls the Code Pink ladies traitors, there are a score of leftists who will call mild disapproval of gay marriage as proof of “homophobia”. The reason why con artists do well is that they work on the fact that people will do just about anything to avoid being noticed as a fool. Its the underpinning of the Big Lie – the Big Embarrassment. Admission of error is, next to forgiving, the hardest thing a human being can do. And if one is desperate to avoid exposure as an idiot, then just pushing on further becomes a natural thing…rather than admit to being an idiot on, say, the issue of Affirmative Action, leftists are now pushing for the even greater idiocy of reparations. On and on it goes.

How to stop it? I don’t think we’ll be able to any time soon. Too much of the elite in our society are caught in the fool’s bind. If you think its hard for a screeching demonstrator on the street to admit to error, imagine how hard it is for people with Ivy League degrees to do so. I expect, actually, a higher and higher level of incivility as time goes on until the political left is utterly crushed.

How many times will Obama have to bow to President Bush’s superior war leadership before liberals start to realize that President Bush was right about the war?

President Obama’s endorsements of Bush-Cheney antiterror policies are by now routine: for example, opposing the release of prisoner abuse photographs and support for indefinite detention for some detainees, and that’s just this week. More remarkable is White House creativity in portraying these U-turns as epic change. Witness yesterday’s announcement endorsing military commissions.

White House officials insist that their tribunals will be kinder and gentler, stressing additional due-process safeguards for terrorists on trial for war crimes. But the debate that has convulsed the political system since 9/11 isn’t about procedural nuances. It has been over core principles, with Democrats decrying a “shadow justice system” and claiming that “Our Constitution and our Uniform Code of Military Justice provide a framework for dealing with the terrorists.”

The latter quote is from a speech by Senator Obama in 2007 denouncing “a legal framework that does not work.” He also referred to the civilian criminal justice system and courts martial that Democrats then claimed, and many still claim, are the right venues for antiterror prosecutions. After the Supreme Court’s Boumediene decision gave terrorists habeas rights, Mr. Obama again laid into the Bush Administration’s “legal black hole” and “dangerously flawed legal approach,” which “undermines the very values we are fighting to defend.”

At least some people in the White House must now be embarrassed by their boss’s switcheroo…

Indeed. Look, credit to Obama for doing the right thing here and in other aspects of anti-terror policy. While I do worry that not enough grit is evident in the Obama Administration to tough it out when things go wrong, I am pleased that – for the most part – Obama’s campaign rhetoric about the war has proven to be just that: campaign rhetoric. Dangerous and slanderous rhetoric, to be sure. It is now abundantly clear that the decision to oppose President Bush’s war policy was based entirely upon the desire to be in opposition rather than the result of careful reasoning.

The kook left base, of course, just took their marching orders – they were told that President Bush was a war criminal, and that is what they believe…but, what now? The war criminal is now being copied, in great detail and with only cosmetic changes, by The One – what are kook lefties to do now? Hopefully, they’ll start thinking and come to the understanding that their leaders are interested in power and not much else. The path to power was to be paved with making the heroic President Bush into the odious President Bush. Mission Accomplished, as it were. But now Obama has to govern and he can’t afford to allow any weakness on his part to result in even one American death being traced to a change in policy between himself and President Bush. If Obama were to really release the hard-core Gitmo detainees and even one of them were to kill an American in a terrorist act, that would be end game for Obama – he’d be crushed in a landslide in 2012, regardless of what else happened. He knows this – too bad his supporters don’t seem to realize it.

If only liberals would think, they’d understand this:

Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state lives at the expense of everyone. – Frederic Bastiat

And thus we know, in that grandest of Clinton traditions, that she was lying:

Last month Secretary of State Hilary Clinton told Congress that half of the women she had seen in Brazilian hospitals “were fighting for their lives against botched abortions.” After her comments she was asked to produce evidence as to when she had visited the hospitals or statistics to back her claim, but neither she nor her staffers have been able to produce any evidence.

Clinton, who last year falsely claimed that she had been involved in a sniper attack as First Lady when she visited Bosnia, is now making another claim: half the women in Brazilian hospitals are “fighting for their lives against botched abortions.”

After video tapes showed that Clinton was not actually under sniper fire when she was in Bosnia, she said she had a “different memory of the event.” Later she said, “So I made a mistake. That happens. It proves I’m human, which, you know, for some people, is a revelation.”

The National Catholic Register contacted Department of State spokeswoman Laura Tischler to see if there was any record of Clinton’s trip to Brazilian hospitals. Tischler said, “I am unable to confirm where or when the trip she referred to in her testimony was — where specifically in Brazil she was visiting or when the trip occurred.”

Representative Chris Smith, who asked the question that prompted Clinton’s response, remarked, “Pro-abortion activists have a long history of making these type of unsubstantiated claims. That’s how they drive policy — with gross exaggeration of numbers, hyperbole and junk science,” according to the NCR.

Not just pro-abortion people – the left has this penchant for just making up an alarming factoid to buttress whatever argument they happen to be making at the moment. People with retentive memories might recall all the post-Columbine massacre assertions that this or that number of kids were killed by guns every day in America…trouble was, all the figures bruited about exceeded the number of juveniles killed by guns per year. Its always good to pause and think about it each time a liberal makes an assertion.

Hillary’s absurd assertion about the prevalence of post-botched-abortion cases in Brazilian hospitals is one of the easier ones. I mean, honestly, how many people in Brazil are seeking an abortion at any given moment? Not enough, I’ll warrant, to fill up hospital wards, even supposing that all of them were of the botched variety. The pro-abortion loves to put out this sort of nonsense – this way they can paint the pro-life side as heartless and cruel…it is we, on our side, who want women to die…because we hate them, or something. An old – but still used – pro-abortion talking point is the absurdly inflated numbers on pre-Roe deaths from “back alley” abortions…and then, presto, Roe was decided and abortion deaths became such a small number as to never, ever need to be looked in to or studied in any way, shape or form. Apparently scores of doctors stepped forth post-Roe because they all really wanted to perform abortions all along.

Yeah, right – the people who performed the legal abortions post-Roe were the same people performing the “back alley” abortion pre-Roe. All they did was hang out a shingle – and if deaths were rare post-Roe, then they were almost certainly rare pre-Roe because, you know, “back alley” abortions weren’t done in back alleys…they were done on the sly at medical facilities were doctors would bend or break the rules about abortion. Its hard to strip away the thick and varied layers of lies the left has put out about abortion, as well as every other issue advocated by the left. It takes a while to demonstrate just one lie for what it is – and thus liberals glibly lie all the time because they know that not all the lies will be uncovered (I’m talking here, of course, about liberal leaders – the servile rank and file of liberalism doesn’t question anything and certainly doesn’t think anything through…they think they’re saying the truth because liberal leaders told them it was).

The truth, though, will out – we’re going to win this fight because we’re fighting lies designed to facilitate evil. Such things can go on for a while, but not forever…as the USSR and other bits of wickedness learned.