Prayers for two slain police officers here at home

Two police officers, responding to a 9/11 call, were killed.  This as much of our country ratchets up anti-police rhetoric, and yarns about cops as killer Nazis.  This is one area that Trump has helped.  After eight years of Obama assuming the worst in any case of a police shooting, Trump has made clear that support for our law enforcement officials is non-negotiable.  That seems to have helped. 

And of course we have no way of knowing what motivated this.  Though it's enough to know that when we disdain our police officers on a public and executive level, it's not difficult to think average criminals will feel more at ease about challenging, and even attacking, those same police.

This especially hits home as one of my sons considers a career in law enforcement.  Like having a child who wishes to join the military, there's a love/hate with that.  If he would rather do something like basket weaving I'd prefer it.  Nonetheless, it's a noble career and one we're proud of.  But pardon me if, as the Kaepernick syndrome continues, I become less and less tolerant of those who focus on the worst of police to define police. 

All of this is to say that we don't know why these two heroes were slain.  It could be unrelated.  But it would be better to live in a nation where we didn't have to wonder.  Prayers for them and their families.  Two sets of families just lost their fathers and husbands, sons and brothers.  Pray for strength and peace for them, and for those two officers who gave their last full measure of devotion to our nation.

The Riddle of Steel

Is kicked around by John C. Wright.  There has been a sudden flurry of Conan talk on the old blogosphere.  John Wright has been going through some of the stories, and Donald McClarey recently posted on Conan's creator, Robert E. Howard.

I, for one, have never been a big fantasy fan.  I like The Lord of the Rings despite the fact that it's fantasy, not because.  I appreciate the love and passion that Tolkien emptied into his work.  You almost think you can get Tolkien if you knew nothing other than LoTR.

Narnia, esp. Wardrobe, was never the same.  It was clear allegory.  I got that even as a kid when I first heard of the book.  It took me about three minutes to figure out the connection to the Gospel narrative.  So I don't consider it fantasy, just a useful tool for a bigger point.

Harry Potter ultimately left me under impressed.  Even checking my basic lack of interest in fantasy at the door, I tend to agree with my boys' assessment.  When Rowling kept the story simple and based on her experiences of lost love, loneliness and that longing for loved ones gone, there was a charm and a brightness in her books.  But as she tried to leap up to the level of grand epic, she made, what my boys say, is a universe too big for her talents to fill.

I've read others over the years, including White and Burroughs and Lovecraft.  I've tried to get interested in fantasy or sci-fi, I just can't.  Unfortunately, my wife remains our resident sci-fi expert.  My problem is that most such stories become nothing other than history or current events with aliens and spaceships.  That's certainly true once they make it to film.  I can sit down and watch some Star Trek or Deep Space Nine episode and see nothing other than a run of the mill TV drama, just with the trappings of space fiction.  Why need spaceships and monsters when I can read history or current events?

Nonetheless, I'm aware of the Conan stories.  Like most without much care for the genre, I know of Conan from Milius's movie, which always struck me as a wonderful film despite itself.  It's principle actors were struggling with basic English, or had never acted, and were carrying a significant Hollywood production on their shoulders.

Despite it all, good directing, a compelling story, a capable cast of supporting actors, and wonderful cinematography help keep the movie on a higher plane than it should have been.  And that's not counting the almost legendary musical score that some consider one of the best in motion picture history.

The 'riddle of steel' that everyone is chatting about is from the movie.  I wouldn't presume to suggest what the real riddle is all about.  To me, it was that people are made stronger than the things they are able to make themselves.  But that's just me.  I pretend to have no expertise in the matter.  My mind is too meat and potatoes for delving deeply into such things.

I am, however, beginning to read the actual stories, owing in part to the sudden flurry of references.  We'll see.  I decided not to go in order, but to pick random ones.  They might not be high literature, but I will say they're a fun romp.

Seamless Garment Catholics, where art thou?

Asks Austin Ruse.  Yep.  I noticed the same thing here.  The Left, in addition to ignoring or excusing things like violence, property destruction and even torture when it comes to attacking the non-Left, is pushing the boundaries of abortion, euthanasia and assisted suicide.  They convinced half the world that when the right doctors say a baby's life is beyond hope, the state should step in and tell parents they must let the baby die.  They rejoice with Iceland as abortion helps find a final solution to the Down Syndrome problem.  It is everything we saw over the last century, reignited for a new generation taught to venerate themselves and their libidos above all gods.

And in it all, the Seamless Garment Catholics are silent.  Deafeningly silent. Some use the old pro-choice narrative that women are forced to terminate their pregnancies because of sexist men or the evils of Capitalism.  Hand out money and abortion will disappear, according to that selective use of convenient data.  Others, of course, deflect the entire issue to one of human hearts.  Abortion, like murder and rape, will always be with us.  Abortion, however, must stay legal because it will always be with us while we try to chance hearts and all.  

In short, abortion has become the topic that moved from the key moral crisis of our age, to one of many moral crises of our age, to now that pesky problem that nobody wants to deal with.  The Seamless Garment insists it still cares, but in the face of ever growing pride in abortion and expanding the way we can eradicate the crippled human that interferes with our lifestyle, those old Garment Catholics have become as quiet as church mice. 

The Left is founded on heresy.  It denies Jesus as the Christ.  It rejects the God of the Bible as revealed by Jesus.  It has spent decades teaching one generation after another to despise the Christian Faith and the civilization it built.  It has taught the world that there is nothing beyond this life worth caring about, that humans are just animals threatening the planet through global warming, and that the sanctity of life stops dead where it ceases to benefit the all important individual. 

It is fast becoming one of the great and terrible scandals of the Church's long history that so many Catholics, and Catholic leaders, desperate to remain relevant to an emerging heresy, have taken this horrifying assault on the most innocent of these and swept it under the carpet.  Or they use calumny and judgmentalism and lies to justify why they have long stepped aside and let the abortion and euthanasia juggernaut continue apace. 

They're not forced to do this at gunpoint.  There are no gestapo agents on the corner compelling us to hide our concern under a bushel.  There are no gas chambers or gulags.  Even then I could sympathize.  This is nothing other than giving way to what must be the greatest threat the Church has ever faced, and all because of the fear that up and coming generations won't like us or think we're cool, and that those awesome places that give out the best awards will shun us.  That these reasons are enough to compel believers to put blinders on and step over the mountain of corpses washed away through the tides of this billowing storm cloud on the horizon will no doubt be one of the great scandals in the long history of scandals in the Church.

God and future generations have mercy on our wretched uselessness. 

Sorry President Trump, but no

Like torture, there are some things that are supposed to be done by 'them', not 'us.'  It's not surprising that we are losing this notion in our country.  Today's conservatives being yesterday's liberals, it's not hard to imagine that some of those things that set America apart will quickly disappear.

Growing up, we didn't torture.  Oh, I'm sure we did.  Somewhere in some back room some government official tortured someone.  We had Andersonville.  Wounded Knee.  Nor were we always angels in other places and times.  But the ethic, the common decency we claimed, was that we didn't torture.  It wasn't part of our policies, our way of life.  It wasn't something we made a standard operating procedure.  It was something 'they' did, the bad guys, the Nazis, Vietcong, Soviets.  Heck, the American Indians.

That's why, in WWII, Germans fled west to fall into British and American hands, rather than those of the Soviets.  It's why British historian John Keegan wrote so complementary of his experience as a young child in England first encountering American soldiers.  One thing that set the Americans apart, he recollected, was that they seemed to have everything that nobody else had, but they also seemed to love sharing it.  See an American GI walk in, and kids ran to him because there was a good chance he would hand out what he had: gum, chocolate, other trinkets and treats. Even though those treats were meant for him, the GIs became known for giving them away, especially to the children in the areas they entered.  That was not, incidentally, the reputation held by Germans, Japanese, Soviets, Vietnamese and other warriors over the last century.

What post-moderns have forgotten, and the Left is to blame for wanting them to, is that at its worst, America was no different than any other culture or nation or kingdom or empire in history.  In an era when, from Native and Central Americans, to African empires, to Ottoman sultans, to Asian kingdoms, people still went out and took what they want from others, by force if need be, the worst that can be said is that Americans did it too.

At a time when slavery was ubiquitous, and an industry far older than the oldest profession, and universal across the seas of time, Americans owned slaves, too.  What made Western Europe and America the freakish exception is that we finally decided to banish the entire practice outright.  Never in history had it been done in such a way so completely.

America is filled with people, and as such, will have bad things and do bad things.  Sometimes, like the interment of Japanese citizens, it is especially horrible only when compared to America's lofty ideals.  Compared to those who fell into the hands of the Japanese Empire or Nazi Germany or the Soviet Gulags, those who went into American internment camps came nowhere close to the terrors of which other nations were capable.

But that doesn't matter.  We are a nation of the highest ideals, and such failures cannot be overlooked, excused, or dismissed.  Whether the Trail of Tears or Jim Crow, America wears these failures and sins like a ribbon of repentance, because of the highest ideals to which we strive.  The Left's fault is that it has worked tirelessly to convince people that no other nations or societies ever did the evils that America did, while almost any other nation or civilization was, in fact, superior to ours.  At the same time, on the other hand, it insists that America alone should be held to the impossible standard of near perfection, or deserve to be condemned far more than any other nation in history.

Nonetheless, I stick to the idea that America will only survive if we keep our standards high.  If some, like those on the Left, abuse that, hopefully up and coming generations will be smart enough to see the problem.  But hold those standards we must, which is why when so much of our media culture and political culture in the 90s worked to convince Americans that we needed to move into a post-character and post-morals era, the result could only be a cancer in the soul of our country.

Maybe I'm being picky, but that is why I'm against this.  I know it isn't as if we've never had them before.  But optics and all, times being what they are.   Like torture, growing up I learned that Americans don't do military parades.  Nazis did.  The Soviets did.  North Korea and China do.  When we did, like Teddy Roosevelt's little naval tour of the world to flex American muscles, it was setting us up for bad days ahead.  So we don't do that, or at least shouldn't.  Because we have a different understanding of our nation.  We don't need to military to keep us in line. We need it to protect us from those who have military parades.  We lead by example, not by show.

The Left seeks to burn to ashes everything upon which America was built, everything that made us a beacon to the world.  The danger will be that in the vacuum created, we will replace it with the same egregious philosophies that have doomed so many societies before us.  Whether the Right or Left, Trump or Obama or another president, it doesn't matter.

Each time we take a step away from what set America apart, we come that much closer to being what made other countries the enemies of all we represent.   Which would be a travesty.  Because the world can't afford to lose a country whose military develops as its main reputation the handing out of  candy to war weary children, whether it realizes it or not.  If the Left, which is primarily responsible for helping us forget America's greatness, happens to think the parade is wrong.  Oh well, broken clocks and right twice a day as they say.

I don't live in Canada and that's a good thing

Canada is well on its Bolshevik way toward ending that pesky freedom and liberty garbage.  Here, everyone's favorite liberal version of Dan Quayle warns Facebook to crack down on 'Fake News' or face the crushing gauntlet of government regulations. 

Problem?  Could someone please provide a working definition of Fake News?  I hear this word quite a bit, but it never seems to mean the same thing.  Before we start moving governments in to crack down on the free exchange of ideas, could we at least settle on an official definition.

Mark Shea is dead wrong

About the growing and expanding Culture of Death.  Mark writes a post that more or less says the American Right is hellborn Satanic racist Nazi to the core - but we're still called to love their miserable, evil, racist, deplorable souls.

Fair enough.  The Right, like anything involving people, has its bad elements and, being a human invention, its errors. There is a radical Right, a racist Right, an alt-Right, and all manner of evil to be found on the Right.  Smart people with more than two brain cells know it.  Likewise there is also a radical Left, an alt-Left, a movement filled with all the same loathing, hate, demonic, slaughter, racism and hellborn evil as the radical Right.

That's where Mark swings and misses by a mile. 

Part of Mark's justification for his move toward the Left is that liberals are, in the end, just fine and swell people.  They're nice, kind, caring, witty, compassionate, loving.  Oh sure, they have their rough edges.  Sometimes, for reasons not quite clear, they embrace bad things like abortion rights.  But on the whole, they're good to the core.  Not like non-repentant conservatives who aren't really Christians and who are rotten and evil to the core.

This is a major rationale for Mark's current ministry.  This is how he explains assuming the best interpretations of what American liberalism has to offer while assuming the worst of conservatives.  This is how he assumes that liberals would never do anything like use the poor or the immigrant as human shields for their agendas, while he knows full well conservatives do nothing else but use the unborn as human shields.

This is a major confession of faith for Mark.  But it's obviously wrong.  It's so wrong that it boggles the mind.  You just can't get more wrong than that.  It's so wrong that Mark himself once mocked the notion.  When the Tuscon shooting happened, Mark openly mocked the liberal media narrative that somehow conservatives,  being conservatives, were simply a bunch of brainless murdering zombies waiting for someone to drop the Queen of Diamonds so they could go on killing sprees.  Mark rightly saw that this notion, that righteousness and sin are based on what color state people live in, is not just heretical from a Christian viewpoint, but idiotic. 

So this very thing Mark once called out as stupid at best, is now his justification for running to the left of center.  The problem is, it requires either a deliberate misrepresentation of the truth, or a dangerously ignorant level of denial. Take, for instance, this statement from his post:

I have never encountered a single abortion apologist–not one–who speaks with glee over the death of an aborted child. 

Sorry, but I posted on this growing trend in 2012.  It has only grown since.  The idea to bring abortion out of the shadows and into the light, with pride and glee and encouragement, has  been one of the most frightful developments in the long, sad history of abortion in America. And it is spilling over into the proud and open push for assisted suicide, euthanasia, and even questioning the justification of violence in the name of shutting down free speech for those who don't conform.  There are connections there not difficult to miss.

As for the fact that they don't say the word 'baby', or believe it is a baby?  Who the hell cares?   Slave owners were convinced that Africans weren't real people, worthy of the same rights as actual (Read: White) people.  The Nazis were absolutely convinced that Jews and other minorities didn't warrant being called truly human.  That people bent on slaughter will use euphemism rather than the truth to justify evil (something Mark used to point out, BTW), is irrelevant.  The fact that the growing 'proud to have abortions' movement might avoid the term Baby because they've convinced themselves there is no human in the womb is not a damn bit different than the fact that Nazis, in their minds, weren't sending real human beings to their deaths. 

If Mark lived in Nazi Germany in the 40s, would he excuse the Nazis just because they had convinced themselves Jews weren't really people?  I have a feeling not. When a Catholic apologist, speaking in the name of Catholic teaching, must embrace such flawed justifications for his political positions, red flags must be waved.

As I already said, I've long ceased to listen to Mark.  All his credibility left the building long ago.  I comment on him because friends still like pestering me by sending links to his blog by email or Facebook.   I would no more care to read his blog than I would visit some radical atheist or anti-Catholic blog.  But this is dangerous.  The post looks like a contrite 'I need to love these wretched sinners' confession.  But it is wrong.  Demonstrably wrong.  Dangerously wrong.  So wrong that it risks being complicit in the move to broaden the very Culture of Death that the New Prolife Christian movement claims to oppose.  And it rests its downplaying of the manifold sins of liberalism on stupidity and falsehood.  Stupidity and falsehoods that Mark, ironically, taught me to notice in suspect arguments all those years ago.

Should Jordan Peterson be feared?

Asks the Guardian.  This is in a long and respectable series of left wing media articles asking the same thing about other threats to liberal dogma.  In the 1990s, we were asked if Rush Limbaugh should be feared.  Later that same decade, we were asked if Promise Keepers - that movement that called on men to be better husbands, fathers and people in general - should be cheered...or feared.

Asking if those who threaten or challenge the dogmas of the political left should be feared is a subtle, backhanded way of fear mongering.  It immediately puts up warning signals for the under informed.

I'm not saying Peterson is right about everything.  I'm sure he isn't. I get the feeling he wouldn't say he knows everything.  Though the things the article suggests are just 'conspiracy theories' are, in fact, legitimate concerns for anyone who values freedom.  The attempts to use central governments to crush freedom of expression and thought in the name of transgender sensitivities has been one of the most naked assaults on free speech and liberty since the attack on Christian business owners not wishing to endorse gay weddings.

Likewise, calling Peterson's realistic appraisal of kids who want to change the world before making their beds pseudoscience comes hard from the side insisting that genitals and gender are not related, and laws must be passed to protect them from the need for puppy rooms until the world conforms to their reality.  It takes more than anyone from the Left nowadays to sound credible when accusing someone of anything 'pseudo.'

Nevertheless, there's a trend there, this movement against freedom of thought and expression.  And it's a trend that Peterson has latched onto and condemned with a public clarity and intellect we've not seen since the late William F. Buckley, Jr.  That has the Left quaking, and this is the same attack from the old liberal arsenal.  That attack is a pincer movement involving two lines of assault.  Discredit him as somehow an idiot, dolt, moron.  That's where the 'conspiracy theories' comes in.  Just the name suggests some loon sitting in a basement in his parent's house.

The other, of course, is evil.  Fear.  This person is dangerous, a threat, a villain.  The Left has long established that to not be liberal is by default to be stupid, evil or both.  That's been going on for decades.  It's how, for the longest time, liberalism could insist it was about tolerance of everything except stupidity and hatred.  Out of dumb, blind luck, to not be liberal was to be stupid and/or evil.  So there you go.

How well Peterson will weather the assaults remains to be seen.  He caught the Left off guard on the now legendary Channel 4 interview.  They won't make that mistake again.  Next time they'll have him in awkward poses where he can't appear relaxed, they'll set him up so physically he can't look as congenial.  They'll take his makeup off.  Something.  Something to discredit him or in some way cripple him before he opens his mouth.  Then, of course, it will get nasty.

So we'll see.  But it's a song and dance I've seen many times over the years, and it reminds me that there is nothing at all tolerant or diverse about the Left, and never has been.  And the main instrument of that intolerance and condemnation is that thing we used to call the news media, that now only deserves to be called a ministry of propaganda; a ministry whose job is to eradicate all who refuse to convert to the Left's new evangelization.

Take that Iceland

Iceland is leading the charge to once and for all eliminate Down Syndrome.  Note, it's not by curing Down Syndrome. It's by aborting out of existence those who might have Down Syndrome.  This is the horrifying, evil and demonic side of the modern Left that 'New Prolife Christians' must account for. 

This is all part of the drugs, sex, narcissism and hedonism promised by the modern Left.  No amount of human death and oppression is too much as long as it centered on my awesomeness as the center of my own creation.  The world exists to affirm me.  Governments exist to punish those who don't affirm me and give me whatever I want, whenever I want, as often as I want and with whomever I want. 

As the Church and the broader Christian faithful struggle with squaring that round hole of allying with the emergent Left, things like this must no longer be ignored.  They cannot be dismissed as a distraction from evil traditionalists.  They cannot be excused as some strange unintentional side effect of pure and wonderful people who only want to give peace a chance.  They certainly can no longer accept the modern 'it's evil society's and Capitalism's and sexist men's fault!'.  I've never seen anywhere in the historic Christian faith that says we can blame others for sin and that's good enough.

Nope, Gerber smacks down this creeping evil emerging from the secular Left; this genocide for genitals that calls on a replay of the old Nazi concepts of creating the perfect human race.  Only this time it's for our greed and debauchery, rather than some lame nationalism or racial superiority.  The reasons might have changed but the evil is still there. 

Score one for Gerber.  Penalty flag on those New Prolifers who avoid like a plague such ugly things championed by the Left.  When a mere corporation takes a stand for what servile Christians bury their heads in the sand to avoid, it's time to rethink the current strategies.

The Buckeye Whisperer strikes again

Purdue.  Ranked #3 in college basketball.  The last time Purdue lost at home was in 2016.  Ohio State was in a rebuilding year.  Coach Thad Matta was forced to leave suddenly after a crumbling record and legitimate health problems.  A beloved coach, nobody begrudged the problems that simply were overwhelming him.

All Buckeye fans hoped for was a few years to let new coach Chris Holtmann turn the program around and get it back on its feet.  Brought in at the last minute, in summertime, barely enough time to get his luggage unpacked, we figured that was as much as we could give him.

And then?  Magic.  Ohio State continues to - win.  Except against Penn State in one of the most freakish buzzer beaters of all time (OSU made the winning basket with only a couple seconds left, only to have Penn State make a desperation shot that sank the net and won with 0.00 on the clock), OSU has won one game after another.  Already entrance into the playoffs is assured.

Then there was last night.  Against the Purdue gauntlet, everyone assumed that OSU would lose.  Our main hope was that they would put in a good showing.  For most of the game, that was a hope that looked to be fleeting.  Purdue just wouldn't miss 3 point shots.  We had foul trouble.  Our one key 3 point shooter was suspended.  At one point we were behind by almost 10 points.

Once again, however, by the end of the game, it was a neck and neck race to the finish.  OSU stayed behind and played catch up.  We would get close, but Purdue would score.  One foul after another.  And all of this at Purdue in front of one of the loudest crowd's I've heard.

Yet when it was over, we had won.  At the last second we made the rebound, pushed ahead by a point, and held Purdue to a last second desperation pass and a valiant, but ultimately failed, final shot to regain the lead.

Of course Holtmann gives the team and former coach Matta full credit.  Sports tends to bring out the mature adult in people.  And the team itself plays with about as much teamwork as I've seen in years.  Plus they don't break.  They don't lose their cool.  Even being a dozen points behind with minutes left, they seem to stay calm and collected.  And I don't think I've seen a coach with such an end game approach as Holtmann.

Whatever he does, he does it right.  True, it's Matta's team, and Thad deserves credit for the talent.  But it was his team and it was foundering.  Now it's the top team in the Big Ten, and some are beginning to wonder just how far they'll make it during March Madness. Not bad for a coach dropped into a crumbling program at the eleventh hour. 

Oh, and I'm glad my son got me to buy a couple tickets for the upcoming OSU v Iowa game.  It seemed a brush off just to go to an OSU basketball game this year.  I have a feeling we'll be among thousands more fans than we thought.

Why Jordan Peterson matters

Is best summed up in this piece, discussing the need for Freedom of Speech.  The fact that the article must be written reveals the great threat of our time.  Terrorism, domestic and foreign, is nothing compared to the growing argument that Free Speech is Hate Speech, which therefore must be condemned and banned.

That the Left has now opened the gates to defending those who use government intimidation, physical violence, assaults, censorship and other authoritarian tactics shows that the usual institutions who used to be guardians of the Word are fast emerging as its staunchest enemies.  Where is the world of art and entertainment, where is the press, other than standing firmly behind this movement to redefine who does and doesn't have the right to express themselves?

Today is a good day to reflect on this because, as Donald McClarey points out, it's also Ronald Reagan's birthday (and Donald McClarey's, too!).  Reagan was one of the most optimistic people to sit in the White House.  Sometimes that didn't serve him well.  But despite his optimism, he was no fool.  He understood that even America could sell its birthright of freedom for a bowl of stew.  He knew that we were not just one day away from poverty, but one generation away from totalitarianism.

This revolution against liberty and freedom has been generations in the making.  Jordan Peterson has emerged at the right time to call this movement out for what it is.  While he acknowledges the threats that come from the radical response to this Leftist movement, he knows that the core of the problem is the Left's growing insistence that there is no right to not be a Leftist.  He knows that the Left would redefine freedom and liberty to mean the freedom to conform to the Left under threat of physical violence and government retribution.  In the end, it was Jordan's exposure of the hypocrisy behind one of the Left's biggest tools for accomplishing this - banning hate to avoid offending - that has made Jordan a star.

Whether or not Jordan lasts or is merely a blip on the screen doesn't take away his importance.  He has sounded the warning bell by word and deed.  A storm is rising, and it seeks to undo everything that the long, agonizing march toward freedom and liberty strove for over the centuries.  And once it's gone, as Reagan understood, it won't be coming back any time soon.

Hillary Clinton continues to gift Conservatives

By  dragging out the tired old 'sexism', 'misogyny', or anyone else's fault she lost to Donald Trump.  That is, she lost to Donald Trump.  Heh.  There's something delightful about watching her play the three year old throwing a tantrum and insisting it's everyone's fault but hers.

And because it's so true, I must post the clip I think of every time she give's her 'everyone else is to blame' talk:

I have no idea what will happen with Trump or what he will do, but every day I'm more and more convinced that a Hillary Clinton presidency could well have ended the American experiment where it stood.

The Left's new Red State Scare

Exhibit A.  MSNBC host Joy Reid posted this little Twitter gem after Trump's speech.

So?  What's the big deal Dave?  When I was at Patheos, I posted a whimsical little piece suggesting that not everything in America's past was bad, and that in our zeal to change everything in the universe, we might have lost a couple things worth keeping.  I suggested that all things considered, that period of time after WWII but before the youth revolutions had some good points.

The most common retort?  Sure Dave, go back to a time when women were barefoot and pregnant and dying in back allies, while Blacks were lynched and LGBT people murdered.  It was the dark ages of America's long history of Nazi level racism and genocide.

That was the assessment of the age of Eisenhower, Elvis and Uncle Miltie.  It's what the Left, through the Democrats, and with help from the press and entertainment industries, have worked tirelessly to convince each up and coming generation: the United States has always been the real Nazi Germany, and the kids are called to rise up and throw the Beast into the trash heap of history.

They are told to hate the United States and, to a broader extent, the Western and Christian tradition.  They are to be like a young woman I worked at a publishing company with years ago when I first became Catholic. She was working on her Masters here at Ohio State.  She had gone to Boston College and lived abroad during her undergrad years.

Her appraisal of the Cold War?  Completely on America, its imperialist government and vile military industrial complex.  The famous 'we will bury you' quote?  We said it first.  The Soviets, though far from perfect, were the brave defenders against America's lust for world dominion.  That was someone raised roughly in the late 80s and 90s, going into college around 9/11.

That's what Ms. Joy and colleagues have labored for decades to accomplish.  The Democrats replaced Blacks, Jews and any other minorities with WASPs once the Civil Rights movement made it clear that hating on Blacks was no longer wise politics.  In keeping with the party's long history, they would need another "Them" to teach Americans to fear, hate and resent.

And the card fell to WASPs.  That group was high on the list of baddies as I grew up in the 70s and 80s.  There was a dark time in American history, when white people from Protestant backgrounds called the shots, but we were slowly coming out of the darkness and into the light.  The fact that many of us were actually WASP, and yet ate up the narrative, shows just how powerful guilt is when it comes to propaganda in a Christian based civilization.

Of course in no time Protestant was broadened to Christian in general.  Likewise, Europe, which was already busy trashing itself into a stupor of narcissism and apathy, was more than happy to throw the entire Western tradition onto the bonfire of its vanities.

All of this couldn't have come at a more advantageous time as the West, through sheer introspection and the desire to do the right thing, was handing the countries it had conquered back to their original owners.  And those owners, as Solzhenitsyn once pointed out, might not be ready to let bygones be bygones - forgiveness as mandatory being a uniquely Christian characteristic.

So faced with cultures and societies chaffing at what they perceived as the unique evil of Western imperialism, and an internal movement within the West more than happy to join in and stoke the fires of bitterness, resentment, and revenge, we have the Left pushing the narrative that you can draw a line before 1963, and all you get is racism, homophobia, sexism, Jim Crow, military imperialism, government corruption, white racist men, and cowering minorities.  Any other interpretation of that time is akin to Nazi propaganda and places the denier squarely in the circle of the Alt Right.

Like whipping a donkey (no pun intended), Reid's tweet was supposed to trigger that well established narrative, that to be in the 50s is to be an Fascist, racist nation just like the Red States want.   It's an America the Left hates, and hopes youngsters will grow to hate just as much.  Whether it will work remains to be seen.  The growing number of groups jumping on the bandwagon for a post-American world suggests it will require quite a turn around from where we've been going if we don't want America to join the has-beens of history.

The Left's concern for women and minorities stops

Where concern for women and minorities cease being convineinet for the Left.  Case in point.  The NYT unpacks example 13,983,198,047,139,872  of the Left yucking it up over what the Left would scream about if screaming benefited the Left. That would be the accusation in Michael Wolff's tabloid style book that Nikki Haley, minority female political power house, is doing the dirty deed with our president in mile high club.

We've seen it before.  The horrible, sexist, misogynistic insults leveled at Sarah Palin.  Heck, leveled at Sarah Palins daughter.  Sex jokes by David Letterman leveled at Palin's underage daughter. Mocking Palin's special needs child.  Saying Palin should stay home and take care of her child like a woman should.  Sexist and personal insults aimed at Michele Bachmann.  Antisemitic attacks at Joe Lieberman when he left the Democrat party.  Sexist and racist slams at Condoleezza Rice.  Racist digs, insults and stereotypes fired at Clarence Thomas, Herman Cain, Ben Carson.  The attacks on women who accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault and rape. Why the list goes on and on!  Yes, the Times piece is an opinion, but at least it acknowledges it.  That's something.

A big reason the Left had difficulty getting traction in the 'Trump is Scum' line of attacks in 2016 is that most people have memories.  Something the dear readers at Patheos just couldn't, or wouldn't, grasp.  Despite all attempts by our modern Leftist culture to the contrary, many people still believe there should be some consistency in morals. If Conservative Evangelicals could be accused of hypocrisy for turning a blind eye to Trump's sins and wrongdoing, the Left (which told the world such things don't matter anyway) had a difficulty time convincing the world that all the things it had recently done, advocated, excused, defended and even endorsed were suddenly horrible and unforgivable.

But the larger issue is that nagging question: Does the Left really care about minorities and women?

When Matt Lauer subjected Hillary Clinton to a harsh interview, within 24 hours it was common knowledge that it was evidence of misogyny. But when Nikki Haley is smeared with the most base, sexist lie, it’s met with little more than a collective shrug.

A huge, massive, gargantuan part of the Left's selling strategy is its eternal care about minorities, Blacks, Muslims, Women, Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans, Jewish Americans, and any other designated minority. 

Yet, does it really care?  Or does it see these groups as useful tools - useful fools - for its political designs; fools that are easily, and even gleefully, thrown under the bus (or sent to the back of the bus?) when their worth to the Left's political machinations no longer makes the grade?  Given the ups and downs and inconsistencies over the last 20 years, it's an argument without anything near a clear and obvious answer. Unless you want to go with the more obvious "No, it doesn't care."  Then it makes perfect sense.

If the Catholic Church is going to change we must get rid of that lousy Bible rubbish

That thought kept going through my mind as I read this.  I must say, having lost almost everything we had to become Catholic, I'm shocked and a bit nauseated to see how quickly it is crumbling before the post-modernist, leftist assault.

Granted, I'm a little sympathetic.  The Church is being assaulted like it has never been assaulted before.  From almost every side, every aspect of Church teaching is being challenged and attacked.  The Church's understanding of the cosmos, of the world, of history, the worth and accuracy of the Holy Scriptures; the Faith's teachings on humanity, the nature of human beings, human relations and morality, the family and its role in society; human sexuality and procreation; the ideals of the faithful living in the material world; the nature of revelation, salvation, redemption; the importance of eternity vs. the primacy of the material existence, the superiority of the individual vs. community; the Truth of the Incarnation, Resurrection, the exclusive claims of the Gospel - why the list goes on and on.

It reminds me of that scene at the end of The Empire Strikes Back.  Luke is fighting Darth Vader in the climatic duel, when suddenly Vader begins using a little bit of the ol'telekinesis against him.  One huge piece of metal after another is hurled at Luke who, at first, defends himself against the pieces, but soon begins to succumb to being hit from one side here, the other side there.  Eventually, out the window he goes.  That's what I think of as I watch the Church, and the Faith in general, seem to wobble at the knees as they attempt to stand their ground against multiple attacks from all sides.

What's worse, the attacks don't just come from without, but from within.  As I said here, there are now Catholic blogs on Patheos that are playgrounds for those who wish to advocate for late term abortions, gay marriage, gender obscurity, sex, drugs, Communism, Marxism, anti-Catholicism, radical feminism, anti-white racism, Hitler's Pope theories, and just about anything else, all without too much worry about being called out by the Catholic bloggers in question.  And those are just the blogs on Patheos. It can get crazier as we move on.

Nonetheless, much of this is far beyond where all but the most radical liberal Protestant denominations I knew of were back in the day.  Instead of the Barq of Peter, the Church increasingly acts like the Titanic.  It's as if it's going down fast, and Catholics - and Catholic leaders - are scrambling to find whatever convenient life boat happens to be available.  And the best ship they have found is the good ship S.S. Secular Marxism with a drug induced porn party on board.

It makes you wonder if the Church has gone through this in the past, and we just never really read it that way.  After all, there wasn't much in Jesus' teachings that suggested torturing and launching crusades was the better way to make disciples of the nations.  And yet there was a time - a significant period of time - when the Church did just that.

Could it be we're heading into another period that will require endless counter reformations and councils to get things right?  Are we going into an era over which future Catholics will hang their heads in shame?  I don't know.  I'm no prophet.  I can just tell a train wreck when I see it.  And the unraveling of the Church before this sustained assault, and the growing number of Catholics who seem absolutely delighted at the developments, however understandable, makes me sometimes lament the decision we made.

But then I look at the same problem across Evangelicalism and Protestantism and am reminded that the Church is not alone, either in giving way before the storm, or having those brave souls willing to sound the alarms and stand firm on the Rock once and for all.  It's just that the Church, above all other Christian traditions, is supposed to be the Rock against which the storms of the latest are bound to break, not the other way around.

Heh

The senators who voted for Infanticide

Because that's what late term abortions are.  Plain and simple.  You know it.  I know it.

One of the problems with the emergent Left is that we've lost a powerful trump card in the debate.  Used to be that we could point to old, pre-Christian societies to say that, despite the methods sometimes used, the world was better off as the Christian world view, however problematically, made its way to the corners of the globe.

We could point to things like matricide, patricide, human sacrifice, suttee, and others that non-European, non-Christian cultures did as evidence that we're better off than they were.   We could say that ditching the Judeo-Christian world view could plunge us back into an age where such heinous practices reemerge as the norm.

Now, as we have even Catholic outlets becoming sounding boards for bringing those practices back in the form of assisted suicide, euthanasia, and late term abortions, we've lost that argument.  Increasingly, people have moved from not caring about returning to such a world, to actually wanting to return to such a world.

I've said we're going to have to wake up and realize the old pagans have been reborn, and are now working on evangelizing the Christian Faith.  For 2000 years, the Christian faith went into the world, however imperfectly, sometimes brutally and sinfully, under the charge to make disciples of the nations.

Now, the nations are making disciples among the Christian faithful.  Will we pull out in time?  Will we see the writing on the wall before it's too late?  Hard to tell.  If these well known and politically powerful Catholic Senators, and the subsequent silence from Catholic circles and leadership, says anything, I'm not confident we'll make it without a test by fire.

The Memo

What I've told me boys:  I doubt this whole Memo release will be a big deal.  My guess is we already know most of what it says.  There probably won't be much 'there' there. 

Nonetheless, those parties in question, including the FBI and the Democrats, are going bat nuts trying to keep it hidden.  When did anyone ever associate the Left with 'we must protect our government institutions by keeping documents hidden'? 

That alone is enough for me to want the memo released.  Even now, CBS is interviewing Adam Schiff, the lead crusader to remove Donald Trump, as the exclusive voice for the issue.  The interview is basically the CBS hosts asking Schiff if it's true the GOP and Trump are wrong and don't know what they're talking about, and Mr. Schiff agreeing. 

So the sheer panic I'm seeing suggests, even if there's no 'there' there, then there is something valuable in its release.

Liberal author celebrates train wreck that kills driver

Because the train was filled with GOPers.  OK.  This means nothing other than the fellow is obviously a partisan jerk who doesn't care about human suffering if it serves his biases.  That 0happens.

Meanwhile, that paragon of good taste, who a well known Catholic host once called the greatest American author, decides to use the fatal accident to score a few points:

I post these because the typical narrative of our society, egged on by the press, Hollywood, liberal pundits and activists, and even academics, is that conservatives are always the mean ones, the ones who say things like this.  Liberals are too kind and tolerant and nice and all that jazz.

Nope.  Both liberals and conservatives are quite capable of being nasty.  Likewise, both can produce very kind and thoughtful individuals.  Trying to rest easy based on the idea that 'I'm on the side of the really swell types' is an exercise in stupidity at best.

Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin talk

Here:

I have only begun to pay attention to Jordan Peterson.  Like most Christians, I see some issues in his 'up by the bootstraps sans God's grace' approach. Plus it appears a lot of the universals he has gleaned from his cognitive studies seem to have rather culturally specific conclusions.

I know less about Rubin and Shapiro.  That I've heard them called bigots, sexists, misogynists, racists, homophobes, transphobic, ignorant, stupid, evil, Alt-Right and fascists/Nazis by those on the always tolerant and open minded diversity loving Left is enough for me to give them a chance.

I'm sure they're not party-line old time religion.  At least Peterson's biggest contribution is speaking up against the clear and obvious grab for a leftist authoritarian terror state before which so many Christians and Christian leaders are caving.  The others? We'll see. 

But here it is.  Watch, listen, learn.  No need to agree with everything.  As Dr. Dave Gushee used to tell us, you can glean from people you disagree with. 

This is called getting ahead of the story

In preparation for the release of a memo that Democrats desperately don't want released, we have this story.  Yesterday it was floated that senior FBI officials really, really don't want the memo released because it contains what could be called inaccuracies.

Now Adam Schiff, lead Democrat in the drive to remove Trump from office, is accusing the Republicans of tampering with the memo itself.  That is, trying to fake it.  You know, like adding to an old signature in a yearbook.  That sort of thing.

Of course there was an explanation given by the Republicans, that the changes were due to a request by the FBI and, you mow, the Democrats. 

But that doesn't matter.  Most people operate on a Headline News mentality.  That is, they see the headline, and that's the news.  They don't dig deeper.  That is what Schiff is counting on.  That is what the press editor who composed the headline is counting on. 

And that, if nothing else, is enough to make me want to see the memo.  When was the last time the Left looked at possible government violation of rights and said, 'Nah, it's no big deal, we don't need to see more'?  The fact that the press, the press that still venerates era of Watergate journalism, seems content with the memo staying hidden is enough to suggest something is going on.

Personally I don't think there will be much 'there' there.  But the dogged fight to keep it hidden by those who once would have jumped over barbed wire to see such a thing released is enough for me.