- If Philosophers Were Cooks.
- A splendid rant against Tea Party slanders of OWS.
- Imagine more interviews went like this.
- Wanted: Gullible religionists; must be willing to sell soul.
- A whack to the OWS ego.
- We didn’t start the fire …
- But we’ll toast our own over it.
- Pure fun.
Rod Dreher stumbled onto a “recipe” for Bolognese Machiavelli, and asked how other philosophers would write a recipe. As I “go to press,” he’s up to 11 comments, but more are literary than philosophical. Still, Hemingway and Alexander Pope are worthies.
A few choice words from “econoblogger” Karl Denninger for the Tea Party and its antipathy to OWS.
And the rest of the choice words.
It’s hard to summarize such splendid fulmination, but I’ll give it a try … Oh, heck! No I won’t.
I’m amused that Rod Dreher refers to the “rant” being “almost Kunstlerian in its spittle-flecked grandeur.”
An imaginary TV interview about homosexuality and the Church, with a tenacious provocateur host and an uncommonly irenic pastor/interviewee.
May I ask why more pastors can’t be like this one (no, I don’t mean imaginary; I mean calm and reasoned, but resolute)? Do the ranters want to fill up their pews with self-righteous prigs who think they’re better morally because their sexual sins and temptations are “straight”?
This President – hands down, the worst on freedom of religion and conscience in modern American history – gears up to see what useful religious idiots he can line up to back him in 2012.
Will Douglas Kmiec pay tribute to retain the Ambassodorship to Malta he got for yeoman service in 2008?
Tony Campolo? (You just know Frank Schaeffer and Jim Wallis will.)
Truth be told, I expect some defections, because my characterization of the Administration’s record on religious freedom and freedom of conscience is the sober truth. I’ve long had a personal maxim: in a regime of strict separation of Church and state, as the state gets bigger, the Church gets smaller.
No ranting and raving here, but a CatholicVote.org writer, Tom Hoopes, who wants to like OWS is nevertheless uneasy:
The Occupy Wall Street movement’s centerpiece is the “Declaration of Occupation,” which lists grievances and takes its stand. You won’t find children anywhere on their list of what is wrong with corporate America.
But corporate America’s worse crimes relate to children and families.Corporations deliberately activate children as an economic force independent of their parents, twisting their minds with slick marketing tools. Corporations peddle pornography for profit regardless of the harm to the common good. Abortion is a big business and Planned Parenthood is its biggest moneymaker. But none of these cardinal corporate sins are anywhere on the list of grievances.
So, that they don’t mention children worries me.
After noting that they don’t seem religious, either, Hoopes delivers a whack to the collective OWS ego:
So what would change if we magically placed the Occupy Wall Street creed into the hearts and minds of Wall Street bankers?
Nothing. In fact, we don’t even need to imagine that. Both worlds already believe the same things:
- They both believe that we as individuals, and no God, make our reality;
- They both believe that we can define the moral principles of the economic order;
- They both believe that the individual is the fundamental building block of society;
- They both believe that America’s founding principles are not lodestars shining with the power of the natural law but quaint antiquated notions helpful sometimes but in need of revision.
Oooh! That smarts!
Poisoned politics? The Right could use “We Didn’t Start the Fire” as a theme song. It all started with Bork:
It is, to be sure, completely understandable that the Democrats wanted to keep Bork off the court. Lewis Powell, the great moderate, was stepping down, which would be leaving the court evenly divided between conservatives and liberals. There was tremendous fear that if Bork were confirmed, he would swing the court to the conservatives and important liberal victories would be overturned — starting with Roe v. Wade.
But liberals couldn’t just come out and say that. “If this were carried out as an internal Senate debate,” Ann Lewis, the Democratic activist, would later acknowledge, “we would have deep and thoughtful discussions about the Constitution, and then we would lose.” So, instead, the Democrats sought to portray Bork as “a right-wing loony,” to use a phrase in a memo written by the Advocacy Institute, a liberal lobby group.
The character assassination began the day Bork was nominated, when Ted Kennedy gave a fiery speech describing “Robert Bork’s America” as a place “in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters,” and so on. It continued until the day the nomination was voted down; one ad, for instance, claimed, absurdly, that Bork wanted to give “women workers the choice between sterilization and their job.”
Conservatives were stunned by the relentlessness — and the essential unfairness — of the attacks. But the truth is that many of the liberals fighting the nomination also knew they were unfair. That same Advocacy Institute memo noted that, “Like it or not, Bork falls (perhaps barely) at the borderline of respectability.” It didn’t matter. He had to be portrayed “as an extreme ideological activist.” The ends were used to justify some truly despicable means.
George Will examines why Hoosier voters may turn Richard Lugar out of office. Part of it is that he’s above the partisan bullshit that began with Bork.
Darn shame. They’ll do it, if at all, without my help. (I believe that’s my first endorsement of this primary season.)
* * * * *
Bon appetit!
Having become tedious even to myself, I’m Tweeting more, blogging less. View this in a browser instead of an RSS feeder to see Tweets at upper right.
I also have some succinct standing advice on recurring themes. Maybe if I link to it, I’ll blog less obsessively about it. But I did revise it today.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 