Newt and the Pope: Responsibility has been Shifted

So first there was this issue with sexual abuse of children by a number of Roman Catholic priests in the Boston Archdiocese over many decades but that was just a function of the decadent, permissive society in America. And anti-Catholic propaganda. Don't forget that any negative publicity about the behavior of the Church of Rome is always just anti-Catholic propaganda regardless of how true and accurate it may be.

Then it seems that the same thing happened in Canada and it even had implications for the government of Quebec because they lack total separation of church and state. But that was simply infection from the decadent, permissive society in America which didn't have adequate border controls to prevent French or other Canadian Catholics from independently abusing children. Just more anti-Catholic propaganda inspired from south of the Canadian border even though it mostly occurred before the first story about such abuse appeared in a U. S. newspaper.

Then, horror of horrors, the same behaviors showed up in Ireland. Ireland! Saints preserve us! The Americans have infected the people whose monasteries "saved civilization"! And those horrible anti-Catholics have infiltrated the Irish press too!

And then some German choirmaster named Ratzinger seems to have physically abused choirboys. And those anti-Catholic newspaper people, clearly non-Aryan, not echt Deutsch, and probably under the influence of the Elders of Zion have constructed the falsehood that this choirmaster is the brother of Pope Hitlerjugend I, alias Josef Ratzinger, Benedict XVI.

And worst of all, those decadent, permissive Americans have reared up again, this time in Wisconsin to put forward the obviously contumacious and defamatory charge that Pope Hitlerjugend I himself, as Cardinal Ratzinger, covered up the abuse of deaf children by a priest. These anti-Catholics have gone so far as to dress up some hired shill to pose as the retired Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert G. Weakland to falsely confirm the pope's involvement.

Clearly there is a vast conspiracy of Jews, atheists, Protestants, apostates and (fill in the name of the group that you, as a good Catholic, hate most here) to defame Pope Hitlerjugend I.

So, let me get this right. The Roman Catholic Church covered up sexual and physical abuse of children for decades. Any insinuation that the current pope while Archbishop and then Cardinal of the Munich Archdiocese may have known about the actions of priests, choirmasters or his own biological brothers is clearly defamatory. The current pope, whose portfolio as one of the most powerful cardinals in the Vatican at the time, was the ultimate Vatican official overseeing complaints such as those of the magnitude of the Wisconsin situation against priests had no knowledge of these cover ups. The current pope who, as cardinal, engineered the exit from the Boston Archdiocese to a sinecure in Rome far from the reach of American laws and victim lawsuits of Bernard, Cardinal Law was unaware of any of these egregious abuses. And it necessarily follows, as day follows night, that any doubts about Pope Hitlerjugend I's story are biased and unwarranted attacks on his office and the Roman Catholic Church.

We can't call this "blaming the victim" exactly because the Roman Church has avoided doing so. They leave that to various radical Catholic lay organizations for the sake of plausible deniability. However, it is certainly an absolute evasion of responsibility and a craven form of misdirection.

Simultaneously with this continuing tale of a Roman Catholic Church we have a very similar tale in American politics. Former Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich, perhaps the person who best typifies the cravenness, fraud, deception, vileness and lies what are the core of the Republican Party has gone the whole hog. Rather than taking the Vatican route of farming out blaming the victims of abuse, Newt has embraced that role himself.

The lunatics of the Tea Party Movement, whipped up to a frenzy by neo-fascists like of Michelle Bachmann, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Tom Tancredo, John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, started making threats against and vandalizing the offices of Congresspersons who voted for the Health Care Reform Bill. They sent envelopes of white powder (hopefully inert) to at least one Congressperson, Faxed and phoned in threats against not only the Representatives but against their families and even grandchildren, all for having the temerity to extend a basic right to health care to all Americans. At this juncture one might think that a group of cool-headed adults might step forward to discipline the out-of-control children before someone really gets hurt. Falsely presenting himself as such a grown-up, Newt came forward to insist that the Democrats who enacted the bill were responsible for the frenzy.

Of course! It should be obvious to everyone. The victims of the lunatics he and his cohorts have been whipping into a frenzy since November 4, 2008 were at fault because they weren't Newt. I expect that his excuse for his adulteries with his employees resulting in his second and third marriages had nothing to do with his ego or psychopathology but rather with the fact that wives 2 and 3 wore provocative clothing or gave signals that they wanted him to violate his marriage vows.

People listen to Newt, this neo-fascist scum bag, because of his position and the cash that ultra-rightist plutocrats keep funneling to him to keep him in the limelight. Yet ultimately he's in the same position as the current pope. Gingrich and Ratzinger are both attempting, through propaganda that might even give Josef Goebbles pause, to misdirect the focus from their own immoral, dishonest and, in some cases, criminal acts to save their own skins. Their standard enemies receive their blame because their egotistical self-absorption cannot admit of the least fallibility on their parts.

And, frankly, I am pleased, even ecstatic in both cases.

Newt and Pope Hitlerjugend I both are bent on the marginalization of their institutions. They are moving farther and farther into the ultra-fascist right both in political and religious doctrine. They reflexively excuse their worst followers while refusing to reform in ways that might gain them broader power. The scandals in the Church of Rome will continue to multiply and fester. Over 30 years of right wing popes have skewed the curia and the College of Cardinals toward fundamentalist hard liners making serious reform of the church all but impossible. The fanatics and con men that Rupert Murdock and Roger Ailes promote on Fox News along with scum like Newt Gingrich, John Bolten, Dick Cheney, Bill Kristol and the Tea Party lunatics are dragging the Republicans so far to the right that they can't even see the territory of Conservatism any longer. Even some of those who watch Fox News are inevitably going to find this extremism distasteful.

Within the Republican's corporate controlled hierarchy the purges have already begun. I have not the slightest mote of sympathy for David Frum. He's an amoral ideologue with no loyalty to anyone but the person who pays his bills. Still Frum's fate this week demonstrates that the Republican's circular firing squad has loosed its first volley. That he is, so far, the only one not to kowtow quickly enough to evade the whizzing bullets indicates the absence of anyone amongst the Republicans who isn't somewhere to the right of Benito Mussolini.

Senator John McCain, one of the very few Republicans who can fool people into thinking he's a moderate even after he opens his mouth, has claimed that Democrats will get even less cooperation from Republicans following the passage of Health Care Reform than they got before passage. How he figures that Democrats will have less than zero cooperation and even more unreasoning opposition I don't quite know but I'm sure that the neo-fascist opposition will figure it out. President Obama this week challenged the Republicans to "bring it on." I sincerely hope that they do.

If the Democrats are smart (always an iffy proposition) and emboldened (which they now are) their next legislative priority will be Senator Dodd's Banking Reform Bill. I eagerly await the spectacle of Republicans tying themselves in knots to defend their masters in the biggest banks.

The Tea Party Movement is an arranged marriage of ultra-rightists, the lunatic Libertarian fringe and some confused and worried people gullible enough to be suckered in by Republican fearmongering. Quite a substantial portion of those folks didn't like giving taxpayer money to big banks and investment houses that had just fleeced them of their retirement funds. Some will be dumb enough to stick with the right wingers but a substantial number are going to walk, run or just drift away as the Republicans insist that this isn't the right time or way to reform the banking system. The status quo in financial markets is a disaster for the small investors, homeowners, parents trying to save for a child's college education and middle-aged folks looking hard toward retirement. I fervently hope that the Republicans will defend that status quo. Such blocking of financial reform will dissolve the Tea Partiers leaving only the hardcore fully brainwashed by Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck. I only hope that the Democrats can time exposure of the Republican's suicide pact so that it falls after their lunatic fringe has picked slate after slate of unelectable ultra-rightists giving the Democrats say, 67 Senate seats and about 300 House members.

I wish I could say that I thought that the Roman Catholic Church could save itself. As an institution and as currently organized I wish it the same quick, dramatic, self-inflicted and painful demise I wish upon the Republican Party. Still it saddens me to say so because of the many, many decent, caring priests, nuns and brothers I have known to work and sacrifice for those in need of comfort and of the most basic needs for food, shelter, clothing and respect. I know that those people of sincere and deep religious calling are pained by and ashamed of the actions of their church hierarchy. Most are attached to their church in ways I respect even as I fail to understand them. Still I can feel that pain and shame and wish they did not have to go through it. I'm sure that they know far better than I that they are the source of any vitality in their church and sole hope for its survival if, it manages to survive rotting from both head and core. Pope Hitlerjugend I and his curia and College of Cardinals are the cancer that is killing their church just as Newt and his neo-fascists are the cancer killing the Republican Party.

Taking The Prize

In Richard Rhodes magisterial work The Making of the Atomic Bomb he recounts how the Nobel Prize committee was concerned for the safety of Italian physicist Enrico Fermi. Fermi’s wife, Laura, was Jewish and Fermi himself was no friend to Mussolini’s Fascist Regime. Members of the selection committee for the 1938 Physics prize made overtures in advance of the award to see if Fermi would be ready to leave Italy if the Nobel could get him and his family out to Stockholm and safety while providing them a financial buffer. Thanks to the award of that Nobel Prize in Physics the first controlled nuclear fission reaction happened in a squash court at the University of Chicago and not within the confines of Mussolini’s Italy or Hitler’s Germany.

That story came to my mind when I heard the announcement that President Barak Obama was the selected recipient of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize.

Since the award we have been subjected to cogitations by an array of fools, scum and thinkers opining on whether President Obama deserved the prize. Some have objected that there are groups working, often with little recognition, to promote peace in The Congo, Sudan, Liberia, Sierra Leone, the Horn of Africa generally and promoting democracy in China, Burma, Iran, Saudi Arabia and a raft of countries that once were part of the Soviet Union who might lay more claim to this prize. Others, mostly lurking in the neo-fascist shadows of Fox News, the Heritage Foundation and the Weekly Double Standard, have attempted to argue that Obama does not deserve the prize at all based on a thinly disguised version of the racist “it’s just affirmative action” farrago.

I am about as far from knowledge of what goes through the minds of the people who select the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize as one can get. Still that story about Fermi came to mind.

To those who consider themselves members of the political Left who object that President Obama has not yet closed the Concentration Camp at Guantanamo Bay, repudiated all of the odious acts of the previous Administration or withdrawn troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, let me point out that in 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt was awarded the Peace Prize for organizing and hosting the Portsmouth Conference that ended the Russo-Japanese War. At that same time Roosevelt was pursuing a genocidal war in the Philippines and bullying much of Central and South America.

America’s next Peace Prize winner, Elihu Root, was a staunch Republican from Clinton, New York who won the prize for his work in that bugaboo of the xenophobes and jingoists in his own party then as now, international law. Root won despite his record of support for Theodore Roosevelt’s worst imperialist tendencies and service to William McKinley in promoting the overtly imperialist Spanish-American War. In short both TR and Root won their prizes more in spite of their records promoting strife rather than their records of promoting peace.

But let’s go back to the story of Enrico Fermi’s prize in Physics. The Nobel Committee chose Fermi as much because of his future potential as for his past accomplishments and, most significantly, to demonstrate its opposition to Mussolini’s fascism and Hitler’s Nazism. Those wise men, whose formative experience had been the senseless and vicious World War I, now saw their world descending rapidly toward the horrors of World War II. Their practical motive was depriving the forces of fear and violence of a great mind whose genius might be forced to feed the fascist monsters’ military bloodlust. Their ideological motive was to demonstrate their opposition to fascism.

The faces of the committee members have changed many times in the last 71 years but the motive to oppose fascism has, I think, remained constant. I would suggest that the Nobel Peace Prize winners, particularly since 2001, have demonstrated the committee’s increasing fear of America’s descent into fascism.

In 2001, the prize went to Kofi Annan who had capped his service as Secretary General of the United Nations by opposing the Bush Administration’s imperialist militarism. In 2002, as the Bush Administration gear up for an unjustified, ill-planned and ill-executed war against Iraq, the prize went to former President Jimmy Carter for his 21 years of work toward world-wide democracy and peace. Carter, we should note, has been the neo-fascist’s whipping boy since the day of his inauguration and at no time more than during the Bush Administration. In 2005, as the Bush Administration ginned up nuclear fears for a third war against Iran, the prize committee chose Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in good part for his refutations of Bush propaganda. Then in 2007 the Peace prize went to Al Gore for his work in raising awareness of global climate change though no one could miss the rebuke in honoring the man from whom Bush and Cheney stole the 2000 presidential election.

And now we have the selection of President Obama. The president has accepted the prize with characteristic modesty and decency while the neo-fascists scream that he’s done nothing to deserve the prize. That, however, is only in their blinkered and clouded eyes.

Throughout most of the rest of the world Barak Obama has done many things from addressing the Arab-Israeli conflict in real terms to trying to mitigate the world-wide economic collapse created by American financial pirates. But his greatest achievement is neither his personal history, his understanding of Islam nor his skin color. President Obama has done enormous service to world peace simply by not being George W. Bush or, in fact, any other Republican. Just not being a representative of American fascism is to be worthy of the prize in the eyes of those beyond our borders.

And, I believe, the committee that chose him as the 2009 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize also had in mind another factor that may have moved them to significant haste. You see the Nobel Committee awards the prizes to living persons. I suspect that committee members may have worried that their time might be short. America’s reputation for violence and insanity, its racism, its senseless fetishizing of guns and its history of turning character assassination into actual assassination may have influenced the award while the committee had the chance.

The Nobel Committee, I’m sure, wishes President Obama well and long life just as I do. Yet I cannot but think that some members saw the news footage of neo-fascist lunatics bringing pistols and assault rifles to presidential appearances and thought those pictures a prelude to their worst fears for the President.

So I have to conclude that the award of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama was both earned and timely. Earned by the simple fact of his presidency making the world a less dangerous place and timely because we do not know when the next Timothy McVeigh, Byron de la Beckwith or Eric Robert Rudolph incited by a Rush Limbaugh, James Dobson, Fred Phelps or Glenn Beck will target this good man.

If those considerations entered into the prize committee’s deliberations I am as ashamed for my country as I am proud for President Obama. I am glad he’s been awarded this honor. After eight years of wishing that my president could live up to even the lowest aspirations of my country I find myself in the position of hoping that my country will rise to the least of President Obama’s expectations for it. However, since this award, we seem to have been bent on demonstrating that Americans generally stand shoulder to shoelace with the president.

Code Talkers

No. This has nothing to do with the heroic Navajo who sacrificed much to win the war against Imperial Japan in the 1940s. It certainly has nothing to do with anything one can reasonably call heroism.

No. I am writing about the talking heads like Glenn Beck, Steve Doucey, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and Lou Dobbs. I am talking about the hardcore of racists who have learned to frame their bigotry in code.

When an American president cannot tell the nation’s school children to work and study hard without being accused of “socialist indoctrination” we are off into something other than simple political disagreement. We are in the realm of something darker, more vicious and more odious, something that, if dragged out into the light, would discredit its purveyors completely. This, of course, is why those purveyors take such pains to hide it in irrelevant language, disguise it as religious preference or even claims of upholding the law.

The storm of protest over disseminating President Obama’s speech on the opening of the public school year on September 8, 2009, had nothing to do with conservatism, nothing to do with indoctrination, nothing to do with socialism. It was the most thinly disguised expression of racism yet by the neo-fascists who call themselves Republicans. The accusation of “indoctrination” is of a piece with the “Birther” insanity. President Obama is not “white,” therefore he is not one of “us.” His father was an immigrant from Kenya and, therefore, his Hawaiian birth certificate must be phony. He must have been born in Kenya say O’Reilly, Dobbs and Hannity and many whose fathers were Italian, Greek, German or Polish. Clearly no one whose father or grandfather or some ancestor was born outside the United States can’t be a real American especially if he’s not white. Clearly, if he’s not white, President Obama is out to control the minds of our children and better hide the white women while we’re at it.

Basically, the right wing of this nation is racist at its core. It built itself just as the German Nazis and Italian Fascists did on fear and bigotry. We have simply substituted Afro-Americans and “non Aryan” immigrants for Jews. The fascist America Firsters of the late 1930s dug in while Liberalism fought World War II only to reemerge as the Red Scare McCarthyites of the post-war period. And at the very moment when their heroes, Tailgunner Joe and his vile factotum, Roy Cohn, discredited themselves and their movement, Brown v. the Board of Education came along to reinvigorate the American neo-fascist movement with an influx of racist rednecks. It took a while. After all Dwight Eisenhower sent troops into Little Rock, Arkansas. He was a Republican and a war hero which is why the billboards in the South all demanded, “Impeach Earl Warren,” and never called for Eisenhower’s impeachment. But the cultural shifts of the 1960s that disoriented those who, having lived through World War II, wanted no more upheavals and a nation conditioned to see any cause in which America fought as just, regardless of all contrary evidence, gave the neo-fascists their opening to join sweaty palms with their white racist brethren in Nixon’s “Southern Strategy.”

This marriage of bigotry and fear has a pantheon of Boogie Men. They raise up the straw men of “socialism”, “communism”, “homosexuality”, “indoctrination” even as the Log Cabin Republicans commune with their peers at the country club and indoctrinate anyone within earshot about a “free market” that demands billions of taxpayer dollars to salvage it from their mismanagement. We have had tastes of this vile bigotry before. It has been test marketed with the accusations of homosexuality by Teletubby Tinky Wink and Sponge Bob Squarepants. But now the veneer applied to this racism is getting thinner and more transparent.

Glenn Beck and the rest of the neo-fascists will certainly trot out black and brown friends to claim that they are not racist. Unfortunately, those black and brown right wingers prove nothing of the kind. They merely prove that there are minorities too who are as venal, amoral and self-promoting as there are whites.

We have reached the point at which we need to start calling this racism and bigotry for what it is. We need to drag it out in the light where the good people easily confused by rhetoric can look at this deformed, odious, disgusting thing and shun it before it churns their stomachs further.