Month: January 2006

A love-fest with Blair and the Tories. Transcript of the interview with the Times here.

"I regret that phone call. I made a mistake and I left the impression that the truth does not matter. And I am deeply sorry about that, because that is not what I believe. I called in because I love the message of this book and–at the time, and every day I was reading e-mail after e-mail from so many people who have been inspired by it. And I have to say that I allowed that to cloud my judgment. And so to everyone who has challenged me on this issue of truth, you are absolutely right." – Oprah Winfrey, today.

Their new Constitution pledges the following:

"The freedom of communication, and mail, telegraphic, electronic, and telephonic correspondence, and other correspondence shall be guaranteed and may not be monitored, wiretapped or disclosed except for legal and security necessity and by a judicial decision."

On paper, they have more freedom than Americans. Long live King George.

The meme spreads. Money quote:

"The final problem with Gonzales’ theories of unfettered executive authority is that they, as the lawyers say, prove too much. The Article II plus AUMF justification for warrant-less spying is essentially the same one the administration has advanced to excuse torture; ignore the Geneva Conventions; and indefinitely hold even U.S. citizens without a hearing, charges, or trial. Torture and detention without due process are bad enough. But why does this all-purpose rationale not also extend to press censorship or arresting political opponents, were the president to deem such measures vital to the nation’s security?"

Indeed. And, er, gulp.

This survey is pretty devastating about McCain’s chances of getting through the primaries. If the Republican blogosphere is any guide …

A reader insists I have been wrong all along:

I’ve written you before that it was too early to press the Panic button because of PB16.  His first encyclical affirms what many readers already knew: this is a complex thinker with a penetrating insight into how God’s message can illuminate the world’s current strengths and ills.  Proper self-love surely is in danger in the West, including the proper placing of Eros and Caritas within the human equation.  Benedict describes this consumer-driven culture with uncanny accuracy:

"‚ the contemporary way of exalting the body is deceptive. ‚ man himself becomes a commodity ‚ he now considers his body and his sexuality as the purely material part of himself, to be used and exploited at will ‚ as a mere object that he attempts, as he pleases, to make both enjoyable and harmless‚ it is more or less relegated to the purely biological sphere. The apparent exaltation of the body can quickly turn into a hatred of bodiliness."

Such widespread phenomena in our society as narcissism, cosmetic surgery addiction, bulimia, anorexia, the worship of the thin and the muscular and contempt for the overweight are only the most visible and extreme manifestations of a loss of healthy self-love. But with eros restored (not ‘reduced’) to its proper place, caritas comes to the fore more effectively than ever.

I slept around a lot in my heyday and while the pleasure was ‚Äì well, pleasurable – I regret the times (the vast majority to be blunt about it) where there was no genuine affection and caring shared with the other guy. I was spending precious coin, wasting something I’ll never get back: innocence. Now that I’ve settled down and put eros more in its proper relationship with the rest of my totality, caritas is in its right place too. I’m more tolerant, helpful, loving, kind,  generous; it takes a real effort not to like people. It’s like regaining one’s sanity. I’m sorry he’s turned out to be a hardass about gay priests, but overall, PB16 understands this.

I think it’s imperative that wounded Catholics like yours truly keep an open mind about this Pope. I’ve never doubted his intellectual gifts. I would dearly love to be proven wrong. This Encyclical certainly seems like a step in the right direction.

There are signs of a shift. A reader emails:

"I am an evangelical Christian and, from the beginning, an opponent of many Bush administration policies (and no, I don‚Äôt think this is an oxymoron). I regularly read your blog because you have spoken with greater moral clarity on torture than many who purport to speak for all evangelicals (we’re a complicated bunch, not a monolithic group).
Over the past week, I have seen some public signs of hope and conscience from within the evangelical movement. One was Charles Marsh’s fine op-ed in last Friday’s New York Times, in which he called on evangelicals to repent of their support of the Iraq war. Then yesterday I received my February edition of Christianity Today with the cover story: ‘Why Torture is Always Wrong.’ I recommend both pieces to you, and I am heartened that there are some evangelicals guided by faith and conscience rather than ideology, power and political expediency.
I teach at a university that identifies itself with the evangelical tradition, and this week students organized forums and protests on the issue of torture, and that offers some hope as well. But I realize that these recent examples do not make up for the fact that most evangelicals have allied themselves with a government and a Republican Party that sees itself above the law, considers secrecy and deceit as standard procedure, undermines its moral authority through the use of torture, and wallows in corruption and greed. The moral compromises here, facilitated by an unhealthy obsession with issues of the culture wars, corrode the soul of the evangelical movement and bring shame to the name of Christ."

Caesar and God: it’s the same old dilemma. Even when the Caesar is called Bush.

They’re still on board – but getting a little worried. Christianity Today looks at the shifting political landscape.

The Pentagon has its own domestic spying program as well. Money quote:

"A Pentagon memo obtained by Newsweek shows that the deputy Defense secretary now acknowledges that some TALON reports may have contained information on U.S. citizens and groups that never should have been retained. The number of reports with names of U.S. persons could be in the thousands, says a senior Pentagon official who asked not be named because of the sensitivity of the subject."

Be warned. King George is watching.

Here’s the nightmare we foreign policy neocons haven’t fully come to grips with. What if a country democratically elects a terror-sponsoring leadership? We already know that democracies, like Britain or Holland or France, spawn Islamofascists among their citizenry. Now, in the Palestinian territories, we have an aggressively terrorist democratically-elected regime. And the margin is a landslide. We can hope that eventually citizens demand accountability from their leaders and will nudge them toward the civilizing aspects of democratic goverrnment: building roads, running schools, delivering services. But what if even this is all done within a theocratic-terrorist paradigm? Democracy is not itself a panacea. It never was. What happened yesterday represents one critical pillar beneath the Bush foreign policy crumbling into dust.