Month: March 2010

Either way.

Panama City, Panama, 12 pm

Musings On Iraq muses:

The next several weeks and months will be taken up by this arduous process of putting together a new ruling coalition. Both Allawi and Maliki have warts on them that will make it hard for them to find friends. The Prime Minister has the upper hand however right now. The reason why might have been best summed up by a member of the [Kurdistan Democratic Party] who said that they had to choose between the bad, Maliki, and the worse, Allawi. Given that dilemma, the Prime Minister appears to be the lesser of two evils. Since Maliki needs them more than they need him however, their price may be him not remaining in power.

Sprung dives in. Bernstein does too.

Frum gives his own version of events. On the conversation with Bartlett:

Did AEI muzzle healthcare scholars? I fear that in reproducing in print a private conversation from some months ago, Bruce Bartlett made a transmission error. I did not report as fact that scholars were laboring under any restrictions. What I did say was that AEI was punching way below its weight in the healthcare debate. I wondered, not alleged, wondered, whether AEI scholars were constrained by fear of saying something that might get them into trouble. To repeat: this was something I asked many months ago in private conversation, not something I allege today in public debate.

Bruce corrects the record.

That's something the US may be holding in reserve with respect to new settlements in East Jerusalem.

George Weigel, once a staunch defender of cultist and multiple child-rapist Marcial Maciel, a man protected by both Woytila and Ratzinger for years, now blames gay former archbishop, Rembert Weakland, and Laurie Goodstein of the New York Times for airing the hideous story of how a Catholic priest was able to rape countless deaf children in Milwaukee for decades. All of it is now a liberal media conspiracy against the church:

[T]he crisis of sexual abuse and episcopal malfeasance has been seized upon by the Church’s enemies to cripple it, morally and financially, and to cripple its leaders. That was the subtext in Boston in 2002 (where the effort was aided by Catholics who want to turn Catholicism into high-church Congregationalism, preferably with themselves in charge). And that is what has happened in recent weeks, as a global media attack has swirled around Pope Benedict XVI, following the revelation of odious abuse cases throughout Europe. In his native Germany, Der Spiegel has called for the pope’s resignation; similar cries for papal blood have been raised in Ireland, a once-Catholic country now home to the most aggressively secularist press in Europe.

But it was the New York Times’ front page of March 25 that demonstrated just how low those determined to bring the Church down were prepared to go.

Notice how Weigel still blames the revelation of child abuse in Boston on the Globe, rather than, say, Cardinal Law, who was rewarded for covering up and enabling the rape of children by a sinecure in Rome and a right to elect the current Pontiff. Yes, he's still there, sitting pretty. And, although Weigel concedes some errors in the church, he argues in the case of the rapes of deaf children for decades in Wisconsin, that the current Pope had nothing to do with ignoring this case of abuse, even though it was referred directly to his office in 1996:

The New York Times made available on its own website the supporting documentation for the story. In those documents, Cardinal Ratzinger himself does not take any of the decisions that allegedly frustrated the trial. Letters are addressed to him; responses come from his deputy.

So it was the deputy's fault. Ratzinger never signed anything. Even though Weakland went directly to Rome, he never actually got to meet Ratzinger. The future Pope kept his distance, but didn't actively shut down any investigation; his deputy merely recommended suspending it because of Murphy's illness and age. Case closed for the theocons.

Once again, there is "non-responsibility" for failing to act, and for allowing the investigation to peter out because of the priest's impending death in 1998. Once again, there is an attempt to blame all this on a liberal media conspiracy. Once again, the person at the top never bears responsibility because someone lower down will protect him. And once again, on both Weigel's and D'Souza's pieces, there is no explicit account of what was actually done to these vulnerable children, even within the confessional itself.

Again, what matters is the reputation of the church, not the raped psyches and violated souls of children.

They still don't get it.

And those who put the prerogatives of power and institutional reputation over the lives of vulnerable children never will.

He means not what he seems to say. Steinglass counters:

The point here is that for Dennis Ross to say “Jerusalem is Israel’s capital, and Jerusalem must never again be divided” is not the same as saying “Jerusalem cannot be the capital of an independent Palestine.” The US envisions a future in which Israel considers Jerusalem its capital and has sovereignty over Jewish neighborhoods, Palestine considers Jerusalem its capital and has sovereignty over Arab neighborhoods, there are no hard barrier walls dividing the city, and security and other municipal arrangements are worked out in negotiations.

So undivided means a city divided under two separate sovereignties but without any actual wall or barrier to police it. And that's a fact. Yes, there's a reason this stuff is esoteric. Plain English cannot account for the political and rhetorical bullshit on all sides.