Month: October 2005

I Am Not Very Impressed With George Will

BUT ON THIS ISSUE THE MAN IS RIGHT.

In an advance copy of his new column that is making its way around the blogosphere (found above on Southern Appeal, which is a hotspot of Miers analysis), Will tears into the Miers nomination.

EXCERPTS:

Senators beginning what ought to be a protracted and exacting scrutiny of Harriet Miers should be guided by three rules.

First, it is not important that she be confirmed.

Second, it might be very important that she not be.

Third, the presumption — perhaps rebuttable but certainly in need of rebutting — should be that her nomination is not a defensible exercise of presidential deference to which senatorial discretion is due.

It is not important that she be confirmed because there is no evidence that she is among the leading lights of American jurisprudence, or that she possesses talents commensurate with the Supreme Court’s tasks. The president’s ‘‘argument’’ for her amounts to: Trust me. There is no reason to, for several reasons. . . .

READ THE WHOLE, MUST-READ THING.

How Things Could Go Ill

Earlier I looked at how things could go well based on the Harriet Miers nomination. Now let’s look at how they could go ill:

  • Harriet Miers gets confirmed by the Senate and goes onto the Court.
  • Sometime before November 2006 it emerges that she OR Roberts OR both are not really anti-Evil Decision after all. (This could happen even before her confirmation.)
  • Bush is exposed as having FOOLISHLY put pro-Evil justices on the court.
  • Pro-lifers are so disgusted, dismayed, BETRAYED, and ANGRY that they STAY HOME on Election Day.
  • Pro-Evil people win more seats in the House and Senate, possibly even enough to change which party controls one or both of the houses.
  • Or at least there are enough new pro-Evil senators elected that, combined with the weak-kneed and outright pro-Evil Republicans in the Senate (e.g., Arlen Spectre inter alia) that even when a third and possibly a fourth slot opens on the Court, it is not practical to get anti-Evil justices appointed and, in any case, we will be unable to get the needed five votes for the foreseeable future.
  • MILLIONS MORE CHILDREN THEREFORE DIE AS THE ABORTION HOLOCAUST IS EXTENDED THROUGH THE PRESIDENT’S FOOLISH ACTIONS.
  • The resulting debacle becomes the Exemplar Par Exellence that the OSTENSIBLY pro-life party WILL NOT DELIVER THE GOODS WHEN IT HAS THE CHANCE and results in a permanent alienation of the pro-life movement from that party.
  • Unfortunately, the party that is NOT ostensibly pro-life does not suddenly become pro-life either (it already having embraced abortion as a sacrament), leading to pro-lifers having no major party to support that will further their goals.
  • This leads to many pro-lifers simply checking out of the political process altogether, refusing to vote for anybody. They thus fail to do the good with their votes that they could do if they weren’t so bitter and demoralized.
  • Various attempts are made at forming or envigorating third parties that WILL be pro-life, but that’s a process that will take a generation AT BEST to achieve results, meaning that
  • MILLIONS UPON MILLIONS OF MORE CHILDREN DIE.

That’s how things could go badly.

Problem is: This scenario at the moment seems AT LEAST as likely and possibly MORE LIKELY to me than the "How things could go well" scenario.

I don’t think that the president and his advisors realize just how THIN THE ICE IS THAT THEY’VE BEEN SKATING ON.

There is NO ROOM for a pro-Evil justice getting onto the Court at this point. If EITHER Roberts OR Miers OR Nominee #3 turns out to be pro-Evil, the "How things could go ill" scenario begins to unfold, and once it starts unfolding, it may well be unstoppable.

Given the "I don’t have a litmus-test on abortion" hogwash that has been talked up of late, the odds are not at all unreasonable that one or more of these nominees will turn out to be pro-Evil. When the people in the White House (and the nominees) tell us that they AREN’T ASKING the abortion question, I have to take them at their word.

Now, I don’t care a flip about political parties. But I do care about babies DYING, and the prospects that may unfold in the wake of the current Supreme Court nominations could lead to an awful, AWFUL lot of babies dying.

"Trust us" is the message that is coming out of the White House.

I’m sorry, but I’m just not in a trusting mood at present.

How Things Could Go Well

Nobody except perhaps the president and some of his associates really know how Harriet Miers would be as a justice.

THAT’S PART OF THE PROBLEM.

But since we don’t know, let’s consider how things could go well or ill based on how things unfold. In this post we’ll consider how they could go well.

  • The pro-life movement is at a crucial juncture. Until this year there were three votes against The Evil Decision on the court (Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas). Overturning The Evil Decision is crucial to ending abortion in this country, even though getting it overturned will only be the BEGINNING of a huge, HUGE fight to end it.
  • The question is how to get the extra two votes needed to overturn.
  • So Bush used his first nomination to put Roberts on the court, Roberts presumably being a vote to overturn, but without a papertrail so that he couldn’t be effectively blocked by the pro-aborts in the Senate. That delayed having a huge nomination fight, which is good because you can only have so many huge nomination fights before the public gets tired of them and turns against you, starting to demand that you nominate someone who can get through more easily.
  • I mean, the American public probably isn’t up for three Judicial Armageddons in a row, so if you can sneak an anti-Roe vote onto the Court without it triggering an Armageddon then that’s what you want to do.
  • Originally, Roberts was meant to replace O’Connor (who was pro-Evil Decision), which would have presumably put us up at four votes to overturn.
  • Unfortunately, because of Rehnquist’s untimely death, the expedient thing to do was slot Roberts in for Rehnquist, and that kept the vote tally at three to overturn (Scalia, Thomas, and presumptively Roberts). That’s okay. Rehnquist needed to be replaced with an anti-Evil Decision vote. That had to happen, anyway.
  • So we’re back to replacing O’Connor. Again, the public can only take so many Armageddons, and the one that gives us the fifth vote gainst the Evil Decision will be the Mother Of All Armageddons, so why not save your capital for when you need it? If you can slip in another stealth anti-Evil Decision vote and avoid an Armageddon, so much the better.
  • Thus you might pick your former personal attorney, who you may know or have strong reason to think will be willing to overturn, even if that isn’t visible to the public, and that would put four votes to overturn on the Court.
  • You’re then in an optimal position, when the time comes, to put a fifth anti-Evil Decision vote on the Court. You haven’t spent all your capital on two prior Judicial Armageddons, so you’re in the best position you can be when going into the confirmation process for the fifth and crucial vote.

That’s how things COULD go well.

Unfortunately, this scenario is predicated on a number of things:

  1. John Roberts is really a vote to overturn. (Probably, but not a certainty.)
  2. Harriet Miers is really a vote to overturn. (I have no clue whatsoever at this point.)
  3. Bush is really willing to put five votes to overturn on the Court and is capable of implementing a plan of this trickiness (I’m sure he or the folks around him could think of this; it’s willing to DO it that’s the quesiton, and I’m not confident that Bush is up for that.)

So I’m uncomfortable with the whole thing.

UP NEXT: How things could go ill.

ATTENTION POLLSTERS!

Y’all might wanna give me a call for one of your presidential job approval polls.

In the wake of the Miers nomination, my personal presidential job approval has flipped from being a "hold your nose," barely-ranked-in-one-category to being markedly in the other, at least for the moment.

I suspect the same is true of a lot of other people.

Be sure to call them, too.

More on all this as the day progresses.

Lark News On The Other Hand . . .

. . . is much more dependable than The Onion. It’s like The Onion except it’s MUCH less offensive.

Oh, and it’s about Christianity.

Here’s a sample story:

Hip youth pastor now completely unintelligible

AUSTIN — After immersing himself in popular slang phrases, youth leader Dave Jackson has become completely unintelligible to members of his church, even the youth.

"We stopped understanding him about a month ago," says Tanya Gooden, 17, of his youth group. "It was a slow process. Now when he preaches we have to assume a lot of things by his tone, not his words."

Jackson, tracked down at his church office, told a reporter, "Fo shizzle, my nizzle, it’s the big mack tizzle, you trackin’? The get-down was off the hook, bra. Big-time ace. Dey scened until the old folk rolled in and the crew got dot gone. Good Sunday, bra."

Jackson can no longer speak plain English even if he wishes to. At times he desperately tries to cross the chasm of incomprehension he has built. For senior pastor Rich Leonard, that’s not good enough.

"He’s about to shizzle himself right out of a job," Leonard says [SOURCE].

CHT to the reader who e-mailed!

Bd. John Paul I?

Johnpauli_4

It would not surprise me in the slightest if someday the Church canonized all of the popes of the twentieth century. During the first few centuries of Christianity, God blessed the Church with saintly pontiffs to lead us through the Age of Martyrs (the first non-saint pontiff was Liberius in the fourth century), and it seems fitting that he would grant the Church another slew of saintly popes for the Second Age of Martyrs through which we now appear to be passing.

Already, we have St. Pius X and Bd. John XXIII. Causes have been opened for Pius XII, Paul VI, and John Paul the Great. And, as if in a nod that canonization does not depend on what you do but rather on the person you become by grace, there is even an active cause open for Pope John Paul I, the September Pope of 1978, who is now being reported to be on the fast-track to beatification:

"Pope John Paul I, who died in 1978 after a reign of only 34 days, could be the next addition to the growing list of possible papal saints.

"The beatification process for the Italian pontiff has moved swiftly ahead since its 2003 launch, the official in charge of the cause said in an interview marking the 27th anniversary of the pope’s death.

"’We have testimony of an apparent miracle which we are evaluating and which we are thinking of presenting to the Vatican,’ Monsignor Giorgio Lise told a Catholic website."

GET THE STORY.

Interestingly, I have only been able to find discussion of John Paul I’s possible beatification on stridently radical traditionalist sites, where there is the usual teeth-gnashing over "Vatican modernists … obviously trying to canonize the whole New Religion by putting each and every one of their leaders on the road to ‘sainthood’" (source) and bewailing of a supposed desire by the Church to "canonise these popes to prove the holiness and rightness of Vatican II" (source).

Why the news of JPI’s road to beatification has only appeared to come to the attention of those who sneer at the possibility, I don’t know, but I decided to rectify the situation by posting notice of it here.

From The Onion

Every blue moon or so, I’ll log in to The Onion just to see if they have anything funny. They usually do. Occasionally, they have something brilliantly funny. Unfortunately, they schmutz up their comedy with so much foul language and offensive content that it’s not enjoyable or recommendable, and so I seldom go there.

But here’s a good piece I just found:

Congress Abandons WikiConstitution

September 28, 2005 | Issue 41•39

WASHINGTON, DC—Congress scrapped the open-source, open-edit, online version of the Constitution Monday, only two months after it went live. "The idea seemed to dovetail perfectly with our tradition of democratic participation," Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said. "But when so-called ‘contributors’ began loading it down with profanity, pornography, ASCII art, and mandatory-assault-rifle-ownership amendments, we thought it might be best to cancel the project." Congress intends to restore the Constitution to its pre-Wiki format as soon as an unadulterated copy of the document can be found [SOURCE].

The problem of finding an unadulterated copy is more difficult than you might think since the fact is that we’ve had a functional WikiConstitution for a while now. For the last number of decades, nine black-robed hackers have been logging in without authorization to made changes in American constitutional law without going through the democratic process spelled out in the document itself.

Um. . . . That’s Not Hatred

CHT to the reader who alerted me to the following story.

It seems that the Washington Nationals have suspended a volunteer chaplain for nodding his head in response to the wrong question.

The question was put to him by player Ryan Church, who was asking advice about his former girlfriend, who happens to be Jewish.

According to Church, he’s what happened:

"I said, like, Jewish people, they don’t believe in Jesus. Does that
mean they’re doomed? [Volunteer chaplain] Jon [Moeller] nodded, like, that’s what it meant. My
ex-girlfriend! I was like, man, if they only knew. Other religions
don’t know any better. It’s up to us to spread the word" [SOURCE].

Following this, the Washington Post got ahold of the story and published a front-page piece on it, following which Moeller was suspended as chaplain and Church issued an apology in which he distanced himself from "call[ing] into question the religious beliefs of others"–something that he apparently had just done!

The suspension and apology followed complaints from Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld, and Orthodox rabbi in Washington. According to the WaPo story linked above, Rabbi Herzfeld stated that "the locker room of the Nationals is being used to preach hatred."

Elsewhere he is quoted as saying: "The Nationals did a good job about bringing hate into the locker room."

This might surprise some, but in principle I don’t have a problem with the Nationals suspending Chaplain Moeller. If they’re a private organization, they can have whatever kind of chaplain they want, including none at all. They also have the right to tell whatever chaplains they may have that "There are certain subjects we don’t want you to go into when you’re here; if you feel that you can minister to the players under these conditions, fine; otherwise, you’ll need to conduct your ministry elsewhere."

If the Nationals has such a policy and Chaplain Moeller was in violation of it then it is fair to suspend him. If they don’t have such a policy but are choosing to implement one now then Chaplain Moeller should have the policy explained to him and then he should be allowed to decide whether or not he feels he can minister under those conditions.

I do take exception to the remarks attributed to Rabbi Herzfeld, however. It is not "hatred" to propose a particular set of criteria for salvation and then conclude that those who do not meet those criteria are not saved. That’s a theological opinion, and it may be right or wrong, but it isn’t itself hatred.

Hatred might motivate it. A person might be drawn to a particular set of criteria because he hates a group and wishes to exclude them from salvation. But the mere fact that an individual concludes that some people aren’t saved is not itself evidence of hatred.

I don’t know how much experience Rabbi Herzfeld may have in talking with conservative Protestants, but there are a great many of them who are in no way motivated by hatred for the Jewish people, yet who believe that all Jewish people will be lost unless they accept Jesus as the Messiah.

The vast majority of them are not motivated by hatred in coming to this conclusion. They come to it because they sincerely believe in the necessity of Christian faith for salvation, and they happen to believe in a this necessity in an un-nuanced way that leads them to conclude that all who lack explicit Christian faith are unsaved.

That’s a theological opinion–one that I and my Church regard as inadequate–but it’s not an expression of hatred.

In fact, as evidenced by the somewhat inarticulate Mr. Church, it’s often serves as the occasion for showing love. Though human sinfulness can get in the way even here, it is in principle an act of love to share with someone what they need to be saved. It’s a spiritual work of mercy, and the belief that all non-Christians are doomed is often the occasion among conservative Protestants for renewed calls to reach out to them and share with them what they will need to be saved, for they are recognized as people who God loves and who he wants to save and who Jesus also died for. Conservative Proestants are regularly taught that people of other faiths are no better or worse than they themselves are and that all stand in need of God’s mercy.

I say all this as one who many conservative Protestants would not count as a Christian.

Many would regard me as automatically doomed because I am a Catholic. There is often even more antipathy toward Catholicism than toward Judaism in their circles because Catholics are believed to represent a false Christianity. By striking "closer to home" as it were, Catholicism is perceived as a much greater theological threat than Judaism.

But those conservative Protestants who believe that I am doomed because I am a Catholic don’t hate me.

They may disagree with and even loathe the faith to which I subscribe, but I’m not going to go around accusing them of "hate" just because they think I don’t qualify for salvation as they understand its terms.

There are far too many false accusations of hatred and "hate speech," and they have contributed to the development of a culture of victimization that threatens the fabric of American society.

Fundamentally, it is a disservice to the truth and to society to go around proclaiming "Hate! Hate!" where there is no hate.

DUTCH TAX SHELTER: Witchcraft 101

The Netherlands, the country that has legalized everything from prostitution (WARNING: Evil file format! [.pdf]) to euthanasia, is now giving tax breaks to student witches:

"Dutch tax authorities have allowed a woman to deduct the 2,210 euros it cost her to take a one-year course in witchcraft, an inland revenue official said Wednesday.

"The 39-year actress and artist learned how to use crystal balls and prepare herbs, and also spells and other witchcraft skills at the course held in the country’s northwest.

"’The woman used the training in order to start … giving workshops, so she used it to extend her professional knowledge,’ the tax official told Reuters.

"Margarita Roland, who gave the course and whose Web site (http://www.heksehoeve.nl/) [Editor’s note: The site is in Dutch and its URL was published by the source article. –MA] shows her with a broomstick and pointed hat, said she teaches apprentices all they need to know to become a witch, using magic as a force for good.

"’A witch is a wise woman or man who knows about the magic of life in general and the magic of the earth in particular," said Roland, known as the ‘witch of Appelscha’ after her home town."

GET THE STORY.

Does anyone have any idea how the Netherlands became the center of kookiness in Europe?