THE FRIEND OF MY ENEMY SHOULD NOT BE MY PRESIDENT

JUST LOOK AT THE COMPANY KERRY KEEPS

Let's accept the notion that John Kerry could handle the presidency. Let's accept the notion that he's a good guy, not really a liberal--almost what you might call a Republican.

Nonetheless, I cannot in good conscience vote for the man, simply for the company he keeps.

I know we shouldn't judge people on that basis--unless we are law enforcement officers. Police and FBI agents and detectives and those who are standing between evil and ordinary people very often find themselves having to do just that. If you hang out with criminals, the cop's radar perks up and focuses on you. What may seem like a coincidental meeting often turns out to be a solid connection.

And who are John Kerry's friends? I'm not talking about his so-called "Band of Brothers"--a bunch of vets who served with him in Vietnam, never saw him again until he decided to run for president, and now follow him everywhere like puppies. I'm not even talking about his main squeeze, John Edwards, whose hail-fellow-well-met motivational seminar friendliness only makes the physical closeness of the two even more creepy.

No, I am speaking of his Hollywood pals, his international buddies, and the legions of screaming, WTO-protesting wackos that trail in his wake and desire nothing more in the world than to remove President Bush from office, by any means necessary.

John Kerry and John Edwards are constantly harping on this weird idea that they have some magical psychological rapport with foreigners that will enable them to persuade world leaders to act outside their interest and against their will to support the US under a Kerry Administration. Remember, the King of All Political Media, Bill Clinton, was unable to do any of that, resulting in the rest of the world nurturing legions of terrorists while Jamie Gorelick built an impenetrable wall between the CIA and all the information they needed to know what was going on.

And even if they could, we must wonder why.

Why would the French, the Germans, the Russians suddenly decide to throw their lot in with us, after losing all that terrific oil-for-food program money? Why would they want a new president?

Answer: because they have been bested by President Bush, and they don't like it. Because they hope to be able to pick up where they left off, exploiting the Iraqi people and ripping off all the peoples of the world through the corrupt bureaucrats at the U.N.

Who hates George Bush?

Easy. Michael Moore, Al Franken, Jeanene Garafolo, Alec Baldwin, Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins, Barbara Streisand, and their crowd. Also, Howard Dean, Dennis Kucinich, Al Sharpton, Al Gore, and theirs. Add to that the populations of France, Spain, and much of Great Britain. And--most troublesome of all--the mullahs in Iran, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Moqtada alSadr, North Korean nutcase Kim Jong Il, the government of the Sudan, the government of Syria, Yasser Arafat, Hezbolla, Hamas, and the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.

These are not people and nations whose respect I want. These are people whose opinions I do not respect (and they return the favor) and nations who pose a danger to every American, red and blue, liberal and conservative, from sea to shining sea. These are entertainers who have no respect for the presidency, no taste, and no class. They are politicians whose ideas are the remnants of ages long past and administrations of failure. They are nations where slavery (sexual and otherwise) is practiced, where children are exploited, where heads and hands are cut off and tongues cut out as routine punishment, where women are subjugated, where justice has no meaning and revenge no limits.

I cannot imagine why we would want to elect the president they think we should have.

Recommended reading:

THE UNSPEAKABLE AND THE UNSPOKEN

THE UNSPEAKABLE AND THE UNSPOKEN

Increasingly, the media hatred of George W Bush is becoming transparent and its cozy hand-in-glove relationship with those who would depose the President is being laid bare.  Perhaps the most stark rendering of this tableau can be seen in the recently and repeatedly told tale of two sets of American images. 

The first set, of course, came to our attention when America was dunked unceremoniously into a cesspool of pornographic photos of Iraqi prisoners being toyed with by sexual sadists disguised as United States soldiers.  The media loved this story as much as it loved to pretend to hate it.  It was vile, reprehensible, disgusting--but no story ran without another display of the grinning face of Lynndie England lording it over a pyramid of naked Iraqis.

For more than a week, day in and day out, every time the news cycled, the image was thrown in our face again, along with dark intimations that the Secretary of Defense somehow should be held accountable for the midnight games of perverts drunk on unrestrained power thousands of miles from Washington.  Moreover, one pundit after another fretted endlessly that for some inexplicable reason, President Bush didn't seem to be losing popularity in the face of this horrific scandal.  I even heard one say that the reason the American people still supported Rumsfeld was that there was a lot of ground to make up from its formerly "idolatrous" coverage of the Secretary.

In other words, the people will only think what the media tell them to think, and if, by some malfunction of the public mind, they do not, it is only because the media has not sufficiently browbeaten them with the facts.  How the people interpret the facts for themselves has nothing to do with it.

And then came the inhuman, inhumane, and brutal murder of Nick Berg.  Except, truly, "murder" is too genteel a word for it.  That word conjures images of the pearl-handled revolver in the handbag, the bustling clean-up work of the crime scene squad, the legalistic courtroom accusation.  And "execution" seems not quite right either, for that carries with it the resonance of a quick and official, almost merciful, death at the hands of the state--or at least of professionals who pride themselves on a code of conduct.  Even "beheading" doesn't carry the right image, because there was no quick, clean slice as we imagine with a guillotine or even (forgive me, PETA) the hard snap of a chicken's neck as the cleaver smacks the stump.

This was, by far, something more primitive than any of that.  This was unprofessional, barbaric, and clumsy.  The hooded cowards in the video sawed the boy's head off while he screamed.  It was official only in the sense that it was sanctioned by the state where al-Quaeda operatives and their sympathizers reside in their foolish imaginations, a "nation" where Sharia law rules and great powers are at the mercy of brutal marauders with seventh-century values and twenty-first century weaponry. A nation that must never be brought into being.

The video of the act makes the tame still photos of the cruel yet idiotic mopes in the Iraqi prison pale by comparison.  It lays bare the difference between those we fight and those we are.  For America did not display her shameful photos in glory, but in penance.  There is no equivalent response in the soul of the American patriot to the leaping, gibbering joy of the barbaric madmen who revel in hacking off the head of an innocent, a stranger, a man who came only to help.

The video was deemed too repulsive to show.  Suddenly, the media became squeamish.  They had told us, with great sanctimony, that the posed photos of humiliation were a necessary truth that we simply could not turn away from.  To have hidden the photos from the public would have been false to the ugly truth about war that the media wanted us to know as much of as we could stomach.  Yet I suspect it had nothing to do with the public's need to know the truth, but only with the media's deep desire to tell the ugliest truths they can find about America and Americans.  Because the press powers-that-be knew (or, at least, hoped) that when we had reached our limit, our rage would turn not on the malefactors in the jails--but upon the figurehead/scapegoat president they so fervently wish to topple.

And so the members of the press, while still frowning to show the depths of their extreme displeasure, refused to display for the American audience any but a shadow of the screaming evil that fell upon Nick Berg.  Some showed a few still photos of the young man before the deed was done.  Almost none showed any of the video.  And once their brief moment of dim recognition was over, they went right back to showing us the full-color photos of American shame.

Shame on them.

Some might be surprised that I, a Christian mother of three small boys, enthusiastic recipient of traditional values-oriented emails urging my help in fighting porn and violence on television, would want the media to display such grotesque images.

But it is precisely because of those very values that I am outraged that the American media has chosen to depict what happened to Nick Berg with taste and decorum.

Because if ever there was a moment when the American people needed to see the full-face ugliness of the enemy we face, it was when that video rippled across the Internet.  If ever there was a time to set aside the politeness of international diplomacy, not to shy away from the blood-soaked rage that animates al-Quaeda and its allies around the world, it is right now.  If we don't comprehend--NOW--the depths of depravity we are up against, we will forever be at the mercy of the thug, the pirate, the gang.  Not only in Iraq, but in the everyday moments of our own lives. 

Yes, absolutely, for the soul of America, we must punish those who violated our core principles in American uniform by humiliating and maltreating people at their mercy in the darkness of a prison cell.  But for the same reason, we must go past the apology and the self-flagellation and remember what we are fighting for.  Senator Kerry and Senator Kennedy want to paint this military adventure as another Vietnam.  But they could not be more dangerously wrong. 

When we left Vietnam, ignominiously, defeated, denied the will to win by faux-idealists at home destroying morale as part of their "Question Authority" project, the Vietnamese people experienced persecutions, executions, and massacres on an horrific scale, and the killing fields of Cambodia ran red with the blood of intellectuals as the Communists rolled over them.  Though it is no longer popular to remember (indeed, it never has been, as we were not well-informed of it at the time), the result of American withdrawal was military and material catastrophe for the Vietnamese we had fought for, and generations of moral retardation in America. 

And there lies the difference.  When we left Vietnam, they suffered the murders; we merely grew sicker in the soul.  But today there are no borders left.  Already we have lost 3000 on our own soil (not even counting the international atrocities that prefaced the main event--the Khobar Towers, the USS Cole, the despicable drowning of wheelchair-bound Leon Klinghoffer on the Achille Lauro).  Already we know that their hatred of us will not be stopped by the civilized niceties of national boundaries.  They have come after us before.  And they will again.

If we believe, or come to believe, that it is somehow in our interest to leave Iraq to the Iraqis before they are able to stem the tide of terrorism, our leaving will not guarantee our security.  Instead, it will diffuse the firestorm of Iraq throughout the world, civilized and less so.  If we truly believe that running away will stop Americans from dying at the hands of Islamofascist terrorists, we are fooling ourselves.

They know where we live. 

SENATOR KERRY'S CHOICE

THE BISHOPS KNOW THEIR DOCTRINE; KERRY KNOWS ONLY HIS PRO-CHOICE BENEFACTORS

By
Kerry Jacoby

It is time for Senator Kerry to examine his conscience and decide what he truly is.

And it is not only Senator Kerry who must make this choice, but Senator Kennedy, Senator Feinstein, Mario Cuomo, and all those who stand on the razor-thin ledge called "personally pro-life, but--." By this they generally mean that they are, in fact, Catholic in heritage, but because they are (usually) Democrats they feel obliged to pay homage to their pro-choice masters. Although politicians and professional observers of the political scene are howling at the very idea, the Vatican has made it crystal clear--though not in so many words--that one cannot, technically, be both pro-choice and a good Catholic. It therefore follows that politicians attempting to present themselves as such ought to refrain from receiving communion, and priests ought to refrain from giving it to them.

What? How can this be? Do we not have separation of church and state? How dare the religious authorities even whisper advice to politicians about how they ought to vote? Isn't there something downright communistic about the very notion of such a thing?

In a word, no.

The Church isn't telling John Kerry or anyone else what he should think or how he should vote. There's no "threat" involved here, despite pro-abortion politicians' best efforts to paint this move as some form of mystical blackmail. In fact, it's very odd to think that such clear-headed and otherwise secularly-oriented politicians as these would be the least bit bothered by the inability to receive communion. After all, they seem undisturbed by the cognitive dissonance of being pro-choice and Catholic or pro-gay and Catholic. They pay no heed to the official teachings of the Church on any other matter or at any other time. Indeed, not long ago on the Floor of the Senate, Mrs. Feinstein waxed philosophical with the very un-Catholic position that perhaps one was not really a baby until one came home from the hospital!

What the no-communion-for-pro-choice-politicians rule is doing is protecting the souls of those politicians. They may not believe it, but for once "it's for your own good" really applies. The Bible admonishes us to examine ourselves before taking the Body and Blood of the Lord, lest we eat and drink condemnation upon ourselves. It is the responsibility of those who administer communion to remind us of this, and the responsibility of the shepherds of our souls to see to it that we are in alignment with the will of God.

In the worldview of Catholicism, to take communion while in flagrant sin (as those who advocate the abomination of abortion are) is to compound a mortal sin with a sin against the Body and Blood of Christ. Redemption becomes that much more difficult, for one's initial sin is intensified. Even for Protestants, taking communion in unrepentant sin varies from a risky proposition to a forbidden act. Given the Scripture, it is hard to imagine a Christian position that would encourage its members to take communion while in unrepentant sin.
Those who object to the bishops' position misunderstand the direction of the directive. It does not dictate how the politician must vote or what stance he or she must take on the tricky question of abortion. It only clarifies the consequences of that choice for those who would be Catholic. Advocating the murder of children in the womb is simply something that disqualifies one from being a good Catholic. Some folks think that's unfair. But nobody ever said that religions and religious organizations had to be fair, within the bounds of their own structures. Indeed, to do such a thing would itself violate the First Amendment right of free exercise of religion.

Religions have rules. Mormons can't smoke or drink. Neither can Pentecostals. Most Christians are circumscribed in their behavior by the restrictions of their doctrine. Majorities of Protestant groups forbid adultery, fornication, and homosexuality; others add restrictions of dress. Catholicism, as it happens, has a thing about abortion. In some cases, violating these rules renders one ineligible for membership, though usually still welcome in fellowship. And the benefits and obligations of membership vary, as well.

Kerry is welcome to be pro-choice, if that is where his conscience leads him. But if he chooses to elevate his own wisdom over the two-thousand year consistent teaching of the church, he has chosen a religion that is not Catholic, and a Lord that is not the Christ of Catholicism. At that point, his membership is void, and he is barred from the privileges thereof, one of which is taking communion.
The problem lies in the transparently false Catholicism practiced by politicians whose only interest in religion is in the photo opportunities it provides for them so they can appeal to people in the "red" states, where folks are largely pro-life. Truly they must hold a low opinion of such benighted souls, for their pretense is entirely superficial--they call themselves "Catholic," yet agree with the church on fewer issues than they do with President Bush. They are not "personally pro-life," unless by that they mean that they personally would find it distasteful to crush the skull of a baby in the birth canal in order to administer a partial-birth abortion. They are, in fact, personally pro-choice, and they are publicly Catholic only in the sense that they want to go to Mass and take communion, because to publicly NOT do so would be to admit to themselves and others what they in fact are: apostates.

This may seem a harsh, even medieval, word, but it is backed up by the catechism of the Catholic church, which assigns to abortion a special category of sin. To commit or participate in an abortion is an excommunicating act, one by which the perpetrator is separated from the church and from God in the spiritual realm, regardless of what any earthly authority says about it. In other words, the minute the act is committed, one is no longer a Catholic and is forbidden to receive communion.

While Kerry and his ilk do not actually participate in abortions, the Church has recently clarified the position on those who advocate abortion and concludes that they are guilty of the same sin as those who commit the act. Therefore, pro-choice politicians are not only guilty of a mortal sin against the body and blood of Christ, but they are also no longer Catholic the minute the words drift from their lips.

Now, of course, since we have freedom of speech, Kerry can call himself a Catholic, if he wishes. He can also call himself a Klingon, a race car driver, or a bowl of porridge. But there are certain rules by which those things are defined, and since he does not conform to any of them, he cannot be any of them. In other words, he can call himself anything he chooses (pun intended), but saying something doesn’t make it true.

So now it is time for politicians claiming to be pro-choice and Catholic to decide. Whose side are they on? What do they desire more? To be on the right side of God? Or to be on the right side of NOW?

God and Mammon await their decision.