First Door on the Left

Thank God we have Mark Noonan to explain…

I guess, when you get right down to it, the problem with the left – the reason they disagree – is that they are largely alienated from God or any sense of the sublime. Materialists and entirely Earth-bound in their views, the people of the left take a cold view of their fellow human beings. Both right and left view humanity as a collection of perverse creatures, but the right has the saving grace of believing in the ability of people to freely choose redemption, while the left figures it must force everyone to be good. The left only believes Charity (forced or voluntary), but has no room for Faith and Hope.

He’s such a smart, smart man. Whatever would we do without him? It’s simply amazing how somebody who is so extremely right could understand so much about the left. We should all be thankful that he is around to let us know how we feel and what we believe.

Teacher accused of giving ‘liberal’ quiz

BENNINGTON, Vermont (AP) — A high school teacher is facing questions from administrators after giving a vocabulary quiz that included digs at President Bush and the extreme right.

Bret Chenkin, a social studies and English teacher at Mount Anthony Union High School, said he gave the quiz to his students several months ago. The quiz asked students to pick the proper words to complete sentences.

One example: “I wish Bush would be (coherent, eschewed) for once during a speech, but there are theories that his everyday diction charms the below-average mind, hence insuring him Republican votes.” “Coherent” is the right answer.

Ex-FEMA Head Starts Disaster Planning Firm

DENVER (AP) — Former FEMA Director Michael Brown, heavily criticized for his agency’s slow response to Hurricane Katrina, is starting a disaster preparedness consulting firm to help clients avoid the sort of errors that cost him his job.

”If I can help people focus on preparedness, how to be better prepared in their homes and better prepared in their businesses — because that goes straight to the bottom line — then I hope I can help the country in some way,” Brown told the Rocky Mountain News for its Thursday editions.

Brown said officials need to ”take inventory” of what’s going on in a disaster to be able to answer questions to avoid appearing unaware of how serious a situation is…

”I’m doing a lot of good work with some great clients,” Brown said. ”My wife, children and my grandchild still love me. My parents are still proud of me.”

A very strange world indeed.

The Catholic church seems to be obsessed with gays.

Priests Citing New Problem in Gay Policy

A day after the disclosure of a new Vatican directive that deters most gay men from joining the priesthood, some priests say they are shocked by one easily overlooked clause. It says that spiritual directors and confessors in seminaries “have the duty to dissuade” any candidates “who show deep-seated homosexual tendencies” from joining the priesthood.

These priests said this would turn the confessional and spiritual counseling sessions, which seminarians previously regarded as private and supportive meetings, into a tool for weeding gay men out of seminaries.

They seem to think that keeping gays out of their priesthood will solve their problem with child molesters.

It won’t.

The vast majority of child molesters are not gay.

I guess the Catholic church has to live and learn, just like the rest of us.

Schmidt

Freshman Republican Weathers Backlash

Rep. Jean Schmidt flung the word “coward” at a decorated war veteran from Pennsylvania last week, but the Ohio Republican’s comments landed with a splat in her own Cincinnati district, where some supporters are backing away as she scrambles to explain what she meant.

Judging by her words yesterday — the first after avoiding the public for three days — Schmidt doesn’t understand what the fuss is about, and sees herself more as victim than villain. “I am amazed at what a national story this has become,” she said in a statement. “I have been attacked very personally, continuously since Friday evening.”

Many people are unsympathetic. NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” lampooned her, the Cincinnati Enquirer’s editorial page — which endorsed her congressional bid — said she was “way out of line,” and the friend she claimed to be quoting on the House floor last week declared yesterday that he had said no such thing.

This lady stands up on the floor of the United States House of Representatives and calls a Marine colonel with a bronze star and two purple hearts who saw combat in Vietnam and retired after 37 years in the service a coward, and she is the victim.

Yep, she’s a Republican.

Harold Meyerson, Washington Post…

Exit Strategy in Search of a Party

George W. Bush has precious little to be thankful for this Thanksgiving, and nothing whatever when it comes to his adversaries. Beset at every turn, the president and his men have been pining for some patsies, some loudmouth liberals, some effete elitists whom they can demonize in the best traditions of the party of Richard Nixon.

Instead, look who’s come after them in the past half-year: Cindy Sheehan, whose down-the-line dovishness is more than offset by her standing as the mother of a soldier killed in Bush’s war; Patrick Fitzgerald, the straight-arrow boy prosecutor out of New York’s Irish working class; and now John Murtha, the toughest and most decorated Marine in the House, who represents a Pennsylvania district straight out of “The Deer Hunter.”

Not a Michael Moore in the bunch. Nothing there for the Roves and the Reeds and the Swift Boat slanderers to work with.

Not for lack of trying. For the past two weeks, with his control of Congress in jeopardy, the president has been saying that those who question his manipulation of intelligence in the run-up to the war are threatening our guys on the ground in Iraq. It’s a time-honored tactic that goes back to Nixon: conflate criticism of the war with contempt for our troops and our nation…

Still, the Democrats stay largely mute. Some believe that the nonexistence of an alternative policy that will actually make Iraq a more sustainable nation means we have to stay there. More believe that while the administration has made a hash of its war in Iraq, it will wage a relentless and quite possibly more effective war on the Democrats domestically should they call for bringing the troops home. Judging by its performance in the Murtha matter, the Bush White House is aching for the opportunity.

But it’s not 1969. There is no silent majority to be rallied in support of the war, just a frustrated minority. The streets are quiet. Demonstrators are decorous. The audience for Dick Cheney’s hatchet jobs has dwindled. The president’s credibility is reaching Nixonian depths. The Democrats have been pushed to the brink of opposing the war, but there — on the brink — they totter.

And so, on the most urgent question confronting America today, we have reached an absurd and exquisite equipoise. The Republicans cannot credibly defend the war; the Democrats cannot quite bring themselves to call for its end. And the war goes on.

Cheney to Headline DeLay GOP Fundraiser

HOUSTON – A hurricane-postponed GOP fundraiser for embattled Congressman
Tom DeLay will be held Dec. 5 and feature Vice President Dick Cheney.

The event in Houston had been scheduled for September, until Hurricane Rita struck. The Houston Chronicle reports top-dollar tickets are $4,200.

That price will get those people a spot in a VIP reception and a photo with the vice president.

For half that amount, donors get to attend a reception and have their picture taken with the Sugar Land Republican.

Those just wanting to get into the event must pay $500.

DeLay this year was indicted in Austin on conspiracy and money laundering charges related to donations for 2002 Texas House races.

Two questions came to mind as I read this article:

1) Is it really a good idea for the Vice President of the United States to be associating with, let alone raising money for, an accused felon?

2) Why would anybody pay $4,200 to have their picture taken with this grumpy old fart?

angry old man

Okay, three questions.

3) Why would anybody have to pay $4,200 to have their picture taken with this grumpy old fart? He’s the Vice President of the United States, not the Vice President of the Republican Party (although you would never know it from his actions).

Save yourself the four grand and just photo-shop, turkey…

Cheney turkey

Eugene Robinson in today’s Washington Post…

The administration is losing the public debate because of its many missteps and failures, but also because of its insistence on conflating the war in Iraq with the larger “war on terror.” Does anyone understand what “war on terror” means? The country was attacked by a murderous association of Islamic fundamentalists led by Osama bin Laden. Last we heard, he was still alive and well, probably in some cave in northwestern Pakistan. That’s a long way from Iraq.

The president says that Iraq is a test of our nation’s resolve, that anything less than victory will confirm the enemy’s view that America lacks the stomach for a fight. But “stay the course” doesn’t play as a strategy when the course seems to lead nowhere. What is victory in Iraq? When will we know we’ve won? When the simmering, low-level civil war we’ve ignited sparks into full flame and somebody takes over the country? When a new government in Baghdad declares its eternal brotherhood and friendship with Tehran?

The mess that George Bush and Co. have created in Iraq doesn’t have an unmessy solution. Murtha’s plan — just get out — isn’t really attractive, but at least it’s a plan. The saying goes that when you’re in a hole, the first thing to do is to stop digging. But the president, like the optimistic kid in the old joke, just keeps burrowing deeper into the pile of manure, even though by now we can be pretty sure that there’s no pony down there.

You lucked out, but you knew your luck would not last forever. I usually give you a reading assignment on Sunday. Yesterday, for whatever reason, I did not. I’ll make up for it today. You may thank me later.

Read Paul Krugman’s column from today’s New York Times. In it, he writes…

The fact is that we’re not going to stay in Iraq until we achieve victory, whatever that means in this context. At most, we’ll stay until the American military can take no more.

Mr. Bush never asked the nation for the sacrifices – higher taxes, a bigger military and, possibly, a revived draft – that might have made a long-term commitment to Iraq possible. Instead, the war has been fought on borrowed money and borrowed time. And time is running out. With some military units on their third tour of duty in Iraq, the superb volunteer army that Mr. Bush inherited is in increasing danger of facing a collapse in quality and morale similar to the collapse of the officer corps in the early 1970’s.

So the question isn’t whether things will be ugly after American forces leave Iraq. They probably will. The question, instead, is whether it makes sense to keep the war going for another year or two, which is all the time we realistically have.

Go, read the entire column. Please don’t comment until you have.