Theoconservative Joseph Bottum hails Bush’s Inaugural Speech as a Thomist classic. Money quote:
President Bush’s opponents should be afraid of this speech because it signals the emergence of a single coherent philosophy within the conservative movement. Natural-law reasoning about the national moral character gradually disappeared from America in the generations after the Founding Fathers, squeezed out between a triumphant emotive liberalism, on the one side, and a defensive emotive Evangelicalism, on the other. Preserved mostly by the Catholics, natural law made its return to public discourse primarily through the effort to find a nontheological ground for opposition to abortion. And now, three decades after Roe v. Wade, it is simply the way conservatives talk – about everything.
So those conservatives who favor different philosophical traditions have been put on notice. A particular theology now defines the conservative “movement.”
THE CIRCLE CLOSES: The somewhat hideous sight of Jewish cultural critics rhapsodizing about the brilliance of Mel Gibson’s pornographic “Passion” was perhaps merely the logical consequence of the degeneration of the American right. But this piece strikes me as a new nadir. Money quotes from Rabbi Daniel Lapin:
You’d have to be a recent immigrant from Outer Mongolia not to know of the role that people with Jewish names play in the coarsening of our culture. Almost every American knows this. It is just that most gentiles are too polite to mention it … The sad fact is that through Jewish actors, playwrights, and producers, the Berlin stage of Weimar Germany linked Jews and deviant sexuality in all its sordid manifestations just as surely as Broadway does today. Much of the filth in American entertainment today parallels that of Germany between the wars.
Yes, the man knows these were the exact sentiments expressed by Adolf Hitler. He even quotes the Fuhrer. He simply believes that Hitler had a point. When Jews peddle filth, they’re asking for it. Jonathan Rowe caught this. The piece of entartete Kunst that Lapin is repelled by? “Meet the Fockers.” I kid you not.
The Dish 