Month: March 2010

"An important question is whether the Church should investigate and discipline severe ethical transgressions of its leaders as do other major organizations, including corporations. It appears that when it comes to ethical and leadership failures, Pope Benedict believes the answer is "no," that the Church—which serves God—should not be held even to the same standards as responsible corporations—servants of Mammon," – former GE executive Ben Heineman in Business Week.

And this is the case Benedict is making: because we are the church, we need not observe the same moral standards as secular institutions. Even child rape must be dealt with entirely internally and secretly – and even then, no actual firings in any way commensurate with the offense. And now that we know that Ratzinger chaired an actual meeting that agreed to transfer a pedophile priest to therapy and another parish, rather than fire him immediately and report him to the authorities, we know how far up that attitude goes.

That's why there really is no solution apart from a mass resignation at the top of the Church and some attempt to start over.

It seems mercifully as if the worst of the abuse is behind us. But those who enabled the abuse still run the church. This strikes me as somewhat similar to the US torture issue. By now, no serious person can deny that the US tortured prisoners and that the president authorized it. But few can actually own this yet and follow it to its inevitable conclusion. Similarly, it is so mind-blowing to think of the Catholic Church as an international conspiracy with respect to raping and abusing children with impunity for decades that few of us can get out of the denial that everything is somehow still ok.

But it isn't ok. If the Pope had any true sense of personal responsibility for enabling the abuse and rape of children, he would resign immediately. And if the Pope cannot take that personal responsibility for something so vile, something that wounded so many, something that violated core, basic levels of human trust, then what is he doing as a moral leader of any kind?

His clerical power may remain; but his moral authority is finished.

A brutal and personal attack:

I … think that for David to have leveled the charge that Arthur Brooks caved in to donor pressure, knowing that the charge would be picked up and spread beyond recall, knowing that such a charge strikes at the core of the Institute’s integrity, and making such a sensational charge without a shred of evidence, is despicable.

David tells Politico this:

“There's a lot about the story I don't really understand. But the core of the story is the kind of economic pressure that intellectual conservatives are under. AEI represents the best of the conservative world. [AEI President] Arthur Brooks is a brilliant man, and his books are fantastic. But the elite isn’t leading anymore. It’s trapped. Partly because of the desperate economic situation in the country, what were once the leading institutions of conservatism are constrained. I think Arthur took no pleasure in this. I think he was embarrassed. I think he would have avoided it if he possibly could, but he couldn't.”

Mike Allen adds:

Ask other AEI scholars how they felt about David’s mail and packages piling up outside his office.

Frum, who will be 50 in June, had been on the payroll since leaving the Bush White House in 2003. He acknowledges he was very seldom at the office. But he maintains he developed and spread conservative ideas — AEI’s stated goal — with the 300,000 words a year that he writes for his blog, FrumForum.com; his weekly columns for CNN.com, The Week, and the National Post of Canada; his biweekly offerings for TIME and American Public Media’s “Marketplace”; and his three TV and three radio appearances in a typical week.

But doesn't he get paid by CNN and Time as well, for example?

(Photo: Brendan Smialowski/Getty.)

If the bullet was randomly fired, then there was no violent targeting of Eric Cantor's office, and he needs to retract his claim. Republicans can admit error can't they? I mean: it isn't compulsory to avoid the truth, is it?

Phil Lawler qualifies the NYT report on the Milwaukee case:

Should the Vatican have acted faster? Yes. Should the accused priest have been laicized? In all probability, Yes again. Nevertheless, before assigning all blame to the Vatican, consider these factors:

1. The allegations of abuse by Father Lawrence Murphy began in 1955 and continued in 1974, according to the Times account. The Vatican was first notified in 1996: 40 years after Church officials in Wisconsin were first made aware of the problem. Local Church leaders could have taken action in the 1950s. They didn't.

4. Having called the Vatican's attention to Murphy's case, Archbishop Weakland apparently wanted an immediate response, and was unhappy that the CDF took 8 months to respond. But again, the Milwaukee archdiocese had waited decades to take this action. Because the Milwaukee archdiocese had waited so long to take action, the canonical statute of limitations had become an important factor in the Vatican's decision to advise against an ecclesiastical trial.

His bottom line:

This is a story about the abject failure of the Milwaukee archdiocese to discipline a dangerous priest, and the tardy effort by Archbishop Weakland–who would soon become the subject of a major scandal himself–to shift responsibility to Rome.

Its support just sank 7 points in one week – down to a 21 percent favorable rating. The short term impact of healthcare reform seems to be a small but real bump for the Dems and Obama, and a narrowing of the intensity gap between the two parties.

I have no doubt about the anti-incumbent populism out there. But I do doubt the idea of an unstoppable Republican wave. The reforms in healthcare – the ban on pre-existing conditions abuses, universal access to insurance – are popular when broken down as campaign slogans. And it will be very easy for Democrats to say that the Republicans voted against all of them, because their behavior this past year has been so aggressively hostile. If the economy recovers some more … Obama is a good closer.

Max Boot is afraid that health reform will make America spend less on defense, like Europe does. Greg Scoblete isn't sure this would be such a terrible fate:

A lot of countries are currently policing sea lanes – including Europe! The U.S. can spend less on defense and still field a capable navy. When it comes to stopping WMD, how large a role is the military really playing here? It was the CIA and other allied intelligence services that uncovered and put a stop to the AQ Khan network. The military clearly has a somewhat larger role to play in stopping terrorism, but if you don't conflate "stopping terrorism" with "nation building" this isn't hugely expensive either. We don't do a large amount of "responding to genocide" in the first place. Rogue states like Iran and North Korea tend to be regional problems with a very limited ability to strike directly at the U.S., and even a decreased defense budget would more than enable us to respond to an act of aggression from third-rate powers.

Evan Osnos is in China:

What does it feel like to live in China now that Google has departed? The number of times that I’ve received that query from friends in the U.S. in the past forty-eight hours has startled me. They are the short, concerned missives that I imagine one receives when a cable-news crawl mentions that a tornado has wiped out your hometown. I am getting the sense that, for more than a few people, the mental image of life without Google lies somewhere between a power outage and that apocalypse movie with Will Smith, in which he is avoiding zombies and hunting deer on overgrown Manhattan streets.

Nate Silver reads them. He focuses on the Quinnipiac poll:

Quinnipiac found about a 4-5 point bump in support for the health care bill itself, although a larger bump (8 points) in Obama's handling of the issue. Obama's overall approval rating, on the other hand, was little changed.

What's a bit more surprising is that Quinnipiac also found a decent-sized bump in approval of the Democrats in Congress: from a pathetically low 30 percent to a not-quite-as-awful 36 percent. And most of the bump came from independent voters, among whom approval increased from 19 percent to 33.

That's a big jump from independents. Getting something done matters to them. Now regulate Wall Street and get that debt commission going.