First, a disclosure: I am a Catholic who comes from a long line of deeply ethnic old believers. I’ve had my bewilderments with the Church hierarchy, and my critiques and condemnations of some of the actions of some within the hierarchy as well…. but also hold to the deep social teachings from the heart of the Church which share their core with other philosophies and other faiths’ tenets, especially the Jewish concept of tikkun olam, to attempt, as one can, to take on the repair of the world soul.

Catholic social teachings speak against dictatorial power, do not support politics that omit the poor and needy, disapprove the slighting of the preciousness of the life force, turn from the idea that preemptive war is desirable, refuse the idea that humans are to be exploited and used instead of treated with decency, reject that people are to be put to death… and much more. Catholic social principles are hard to live by sometimes, but without them, the belief is the world would be far more vulnerable to becoming a soul-less wasteland.

My father, a tailor from the old country, used to warn that it was suicide to speak of politics and religion in the same breath, that it brought out the scorn-demons on both sides. But, in our time, it cannot be avoided apparently, for the Pope is about to land in the USA to visit only two cities; New York City and Washington D.C., the USA’s pinnacles of politics and politicos…

Too, the Pope is seemingly avoiding the Boston Archdiocese and Los Angeles and Chicago where live mountains of Catholics, but also where the Church hierarchy markedly looked the other way and literally obstructed child victims from justice as they were being sexually predated upon by certain priests in the last place on earth one would ever imagine a child would be unsafe…

Those scars will never be talked away. Not by popes nor apologists. Never.

But, in another turn, already the media’s guesses and analyses are flying about the Pope’s hidden motives and overt intents to meet with pols and those in power here, and to speak at the UN; some will worship without questions, some will demonize without facts. But, many in media will have space to speculate about what the Pope will, won’t, say, what he meant, didn’t mean, what he will support and what he will condemn, whose campaign he will lean more toward supporting–without meaning to.

Some will imagine how the Pope will interfere, admonish, try to corral the free speech and thought of Catholic Universities some of which have, amongst other structures, gay and lesbian sacral groups, and so on.

I’d suggest to look for the humanity in whatever Pope has to say or do, to rest on that wherever, whenever that might occur. Just my two cents’ worth from meeting tens of thousands of people a year when I teach… Far more than admonishments and punishments, the people of the earth are in need of love without academic précis, and fully worthy of unconditional blessing…

for the rhizome, the living life force underground, ever glows and thrives on warmth and light and water, rather than on opprobrium, exile, and scorn.

While the debate in the United States seems to center around whether with Barack Obama, there is any there there, it seems that in some places he is regarded as the Democratic answer to the much vaunted Republican idea machine. Alfredo Toro Hardy of Venezuela’s El Universal writes, ‘Confronted with the flood of proposals from their Republican counterparts, the fonts of Democratic thought seem to have dried up. … As if by magic, these past limitations seem to be disappearing due to the impact of the Obama phenomenon. He has been responsible with offering Democrats and his campaign a ‘vision’ which, combined with his oratory and charisma, offers a solid counterweight to the strong conservative tendency that characterizes the national mood.’

By Alfredo Toro Hardy

Translated By Barbara Howe

March 13, 2008

Venezuela - El Universal - Original Article (Spanish)

Democrats have begun confronting some serious limitations. Their lack of policy proposals and ideas has often played into the hands of Republicans - and at times when the Republicans have been particularly prolific in this regard. It’s from the right-wing side of the political spectrum that the majority of the ideas which have fed the public life of that country have emerged Read the rest of this entry »

Say what you will about William F. Buckley’s contributions to conservatism and civil discourse. They were immense. But he picked a really lousy time to die.

Republican conservatism today bears scant resemblance to the movement that Buckley nurtured over a half century as the founder and longtime editor of National Review, a widely read syndicated columnist and host of the popular Firing Line program on PBS.

There is no question that Buckley’s greatest achievement was making conservatism respectable.

If it was a neoconservative brain trust that was the engine behind the ascendancy of George Walker Bush and helped open the door to the extremists who have hijacked his beloved GOP, it was Buckley more than anyone else who was responsible for the nomination of Barry Goldwater in 1964 and the coming of Ronald Reagan in 1980, who checked the liberal advances made since the New Deal in the 1930s.

Buckley, ever the independent and outspoken thinker, had been one of the first conservatives to break with Bush. I can only imagine that he went to his grave embittered over how his legacy has been so tarnished by self described conservatives drunk with power who champion fear mongering and cultural warfare above all else.

Buckley, who died this morning, was 82 and had been suffering from diabetes and emphysema.

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That’s about it, then, isn’t it—-all the talk about McCain as the new type of Republican moderate destined to lead the party back to its roots? I’m guessing that this latest news will put an end to talk among disenchanted Democrats of voting for him in November. 

Today, McCain voted legislation that intended to do exactly what he himself has advocated: adopted the Army Field Manual interrogation standards for the US government. Anti-torture advocates, such as the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, supported this crucial  bill. McCain himself said in a Republican debate in November that the Army Field Manual should be ‘the gold standard for interrogations.’

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by Damozel |  Hurray!  Ann Coulter has semi-endorsed Hillary, sort of!  Ed Morissey asks "Has Ann Coulter jumped the shark?"He wonders if this will finish her off with anyone who still takes her seriously, assuming anyone still does. Jill Miller Zimon has the video right here. Is this the greatest campaign season ever, or what? It’s not exactly fair on Hillary, but I can’t help chortling madly as I watch it again and again and again.

So. Ann too is well and truly infected, as the Captain puts it, with “McCain Derangement Syndrome.”  You might be surprised by her extreme solution to it, but I’m not.  True, from Duncan Hunter to Hillary might strike some as something of a leap, but McCain has the power to drive neocons right over the jagged edge, bless him. This campaign season, liberal is the new conservative!  

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Unless Rudy Giuliani pulls off a Florida surprise in next Tuesday’s primary, there are now three Republicans with some chance of winning their party’s presidential nomination: John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Mike Huckabee. Recently, I speculated on who might be the vice presidential running mates of Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama in the event that one of them becomes the Democratic nominee for president. But what about the remaining Republican contenders?

Each would have their own particular needs when it came to selecting running mates. In this post, I want to address what and who McCain will likely need in a running mate.

McCain should, by all rights, be the clear frontrunner, given the usual orderly succession of Republican presidential politics. That he isn’t results in part, from the fact that neoconservatism, with its advocacy of Wilsonian intervention in foreign affairs, has at least temporarily changed the definition of conservatism. Additionally, on at least two major issues–immigration reform and campaign financing–McCain has departed from conservatism. Some will also mention his opposition to President Bush’s 2002 tax cuts. Others will excoriate his participation in the Gang of Fourteen, ignoring how the compromise struck by those US Senators in 2005, made it possible for the President’s conservative nominees for the US Supreme Court to be confirmed without controversy.

Be that as it may, McCain, an orthodox Goldwater-Reagan conservative who is an advocate of strong national defense, restrained government spending, Second Amendment rights, and an end to abortion, doesn’t have the luxury that Ronald Reagan had in selecting running mates in 1976 and 1980. Read the rest of this entry »

In March of 2005, I wrote a post at the Centrist Coalition, in which I predicted that Hillary Clinton would be the frontrunner for the 2008 Democratic Presidential Nomination. In that post, I criticized her both for her support for the Iraq War and her pandering to social conservatives.

Six months later, I wrote a follow-up post in which I lamented that anti-war Democrats who have relentlessly criticized Bush for invading Iraq would nonetheless rally around the candidacy of Hillary Clinton who voted in favor of the 2002 resolution that gave Bush the authority to invade Iraq:

And here’s the sad part. All of the Democrats who have been denouncing the Iraq War for the last two and a half years will flock to Hillary Clinton and proclaim her the savior of the Democratic Party, seemingly oblivious to the fact that she, like Bush, was responsible for a war that sent a couple thousand American soldiers to their deaths and claimed the lives of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians. We can expect Clinton and the DLC to advertise the fact that the Bush administration STILL has not apprended Osama Bin Laden, and instead of arguing for a more humble and realistic foreign policy that rejects the naive notions of the current administration’s War on Terrorism, Clinton and the DLC will argue that the War on Terrorism was not fought HARD ENOUGH and that it would had succeeded had Bush not bungled it all up.

Sure enough, Senator Clinton announced her candidacy in December 2006, and she’s been leading in the polls ever since.

Senator Clinton’s candidacy was initially met by fierce criticism from anti-war activists within the party–many of whom thought her sudden conversion from war-supporter to war-opponent less than 14 months before the 2008 primaries smacked of political opportunism and were further angered when she refused to apologize for voting for the 2002 resolution that sent our country on the path to war with Iraq.

Yet Senator Clinton was not about to be denied her party’s nomination. Just as President Bush has employed revisionist history to explain why we went to war with Iraq, so to has Senator Clinton in order to justify her support for the 2002 resolution. Last February, I wrote a post at the Coming Realignment in which I argued that Senator Clinton was retroactively attempting to alter her justification for supported the war in the first place. Senator Clinton argued that she only supported the 2002 resolution in order to put pressure on Saddam Hussein to allow weapons inspections and that she did not support the invasion itself. However, as I pointed out then, a March 2003 video depicting a meeting between Hillary Clinton and members of Code Pink (a group of left-wing activists) shows that this was not the case at all. As the video clearly shows, Hillary Clinton supported the invasion of Iraq (with or without international support) less than two weeks before our government’s “shock and awe” campaign in Baghdad commenced.

As Hillary Clinton’s lead over her Democratic rivals increases, I continue to be astounded by how easily Democrats are willing to support a Senator who for four years, supported this misguided war in Iraq. This is the same Hillary Clinton who criticized Russ Feingold for daring to suggest that we withdraw from Iraq back in 2005.

A hawk…A panderer…A political opportunist…

But a neocon?

That’s what libertarian Radley Balko argues in an article over at Reason. As he sees it, a Hillary Clinton presidency wouldn’t be all that different from a George W. Bush presidency, and he provides an account of some of the political positions taken by Senator Clinton that suggests a strong neoconservative streak in her:

Then there is Hillary Clinton on the issues. Cato Institute President Ed Crane recently wrote a piece for the Financial Times pointing out that when you strip away the partisan coating, Mrs. Clinton’s grandiose, big-government vision is really no different than that envisioned by the neoconservatives so loathed by the left. Clinton, remember, not only voted for the Iraq war, she still hasn’t conceded she was wrong to do so, and has made no promise to end it any time soon.

In fact, the L.A. Times reported last week that Clinton has refused to commit even to pulling U.S. troops from Iraq by 2013, which, if elected, would be the end of her first term. TV journalist Ted Koppel recently told NPR that Clinton has admitted the U.S. would still have troops in Iraq at the end of her second term.

The 1990s, remember, weren’t exactly a decade of peace. Bill Clinton ordered more U.S. military interventions than any other post-WWII administration, and there’s no reason to think any of them were over Hillary’s protestations. She supported the U.S. military campaigns in Haiti, Kosovo, and Bosnia. She once boasted that as the tension in Kosovo mounted, she called her husband from her trip to Africa and, “I urged him to bomb.”

Hillary Clinton voted for both the Patriot Act and its reauthorization. She voted for building a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border. She voted to loosen restrictions limiting the federal government’s ability to wiretap cell phones. In the past, she has supported a robust role for the federal government in enforcing “decency” standards in television and music. She teamed up with former Sen. Rick Santorum on a bill calling for the federal government to restrict the sale of violent video games.

Hillary Clinton may be loathed by leading neoconservatives and may loathe them in return. Yet they have more in common with each other than either of them would care to admit. As a U.S. Senator, Hillary Clinton has had seven years to lay out her political positions, and she hasn’t shied away from making speeches or meeting with constituents. But in the end, a politician is judged by how he/she exercises that unique power that distinguishes him/her from the rest of us–the power to vote for or against legislation. And on many of the most controversial and far-reaching pieces of legislation that have been passed these last seven years, Senator Clinton has voted the de-facto neoconservative position.

After 7 years of Bush and Cheney controlling the Executive Branch, I can see why Democrats would want to see change come to the White House.

Unfortunately, Hillary Clinton isn’t that change.

Note: This post was cross-posted at The Coming Realignment.

UPDATE: I want to remind regulars and visitors at TMV to read Radley Balko’s piece over at Reason. It was his article that inspired my post and whose title I surreptitiously stole. Obviously I couldn’t quote his entire article, and there is much that he writes about in terms of Hillary Cllinton and neoconservatism–particularly with regards to executive power–that I didn’t cover in my post.

Editor’s note: Bill Moyers delivered this essay on his PBS program Bill Moyers’ Journal.

Begging His Pardon

by Bill Moyers

We have yet another remarkable revelation of the mindset of Washington’s ruling clique ofneoconservative elites-the people who took us to war from the safety of their Beltway bunkers. Even as Iraq grows bloodier by the day, their passion of the week is to keep one of their own from going to jail.

It is well known that I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby-once Vice President Cheney’s most trusted adviser-has been sentenced to 30 months in jail for perjury. Lying. Not a white lie, mind you. A killer lie.

Scooter Libby deliberately poured poison into the drinking water of democracy by lying to federal investigators, for the purpose of obstructing justice. Attempting to trash critics of the war, Libby and his pals in high places-including his boss Dick Cheney-outed a covert CIA agent. Libby then lied to cover their tracks. To throw investigators off the trail, he kicked sand in the eyes of truth. “Libby lied about nearly everything that mattered,” wrote the chief prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. The jury agreed and found him guilty on four felony counts. Judge Reggie B. Walton-a no-nonsense, lock-em-up-and-throw-away-the-key type, appointed to the bench by none other than George W. Bush-called the evidence “overwhelming” and threw the book at Libby.

You would have thought their man had been ordered to Guantanamo, so intense was the reaction from his cheerleaders. They flooded the judge’s chambers with letters of support for their comrade and took to the airwaves in a campaign to “free Scooter.”

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Earlier this week, President Bush tapped Robert Zoellick, Goldman Sachs executive and former deputy secretary of state, to head The World Bank. And because Bush says so, it’s a go. It is the president of the United States who nominates the World Bank president — and the position is always given to an American — but any nomination is merely a formality. The banks’s executive board will appoint Zoellick just as it appoints (i.e., rubber stamps) every other nominee.

There is no good reason for this to be the case. Why should the president of the United States be the one effectively to fill the position with his (or her) own nominee? Why should the position always go to an American? Why, more specifically, should the position always go to a partisan of the president?

Well, of course, because The World Bank is an instrument of American global hegemony. It always has been. That was the original intent, for all intents and purposes, and nothing has changed. If other countries approved of this, it was only because they approved of American global hegemony at least to some degree. This should change. China, Brazil, South Africa, India, and Russia, along with others, are right to call for a new and open process to select World Bank presidents. But the U.S. will refuse. Why would it agree to have its hegemonic position weakened? (It’s already doing a stellar job weakening itself.)

For, though, it’s Zoellick, and people seem to be happy with his nomination. He’s no Wolfowitz, after all — though, of course, pretty much anyone would have been an improvement over the outgoing president. And is there good reason for them to be happy? Perhaps. He seems to know where Africa is, which is good, and he has already presented himself as an internationalist. An American internationalist, but still. Even the European seem to like him.

BUT: Let’s not give him a free pass just yet.
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