The Dish

 Last week Steve Clemons whacked White House reporting. Fallows responds:

During a campaign, reporters can and do see many of the juicy moments. Not all, but a lot. Campaigns are big and sprawling and chaotic. They can't afford to freeze anybody out, notably starting with the press. Everybody wants to talk about what's going on, and many people have seen some interesting version of reality. So campaign books can have a relatively high "saw it myself" quotient, and in general they are believable.

Once an Administration begins, however, the available vignettes are more like the five-remove puppet show.

They represent administered rather than observed truth. By definition, reporters aren't there to see the big moments; also by definition, the people who are there to see have distinct self-interest in distributing certain versions of reality. By the time historians get around to sorting the evidence, they have a better chance of weighing the biases of the various early accounts. But when you read "inside" tales of Administrations still in power, bear in mind the back-story, motivation, and stylized kabuki-esque rituals behind any anecdote therein.

My Sunday column:

If you were responsible for handling the case of a priest who you knew had abused, raped and molested up to 200 deaf children for decades, would you not believe it was your business to resolve it swiftly? Would you be concerned, as the documents from the case reveal he was, about the risk of “increasing scandal” and the “need for secrecy”? Would you encourage the archbishop to drop the trial in view of the priest’s ailing health and imminent death?

I can only speak for myself — a wayward Catholic sinner, a married homosexual who still clings to the truth of the Gospels and the sacredness of the church. I wouldn’t do any of those things. Full stop. If I knew I had any role — witting or unwitting — in allowing children to be raped by someone I could have stopped, by someone over whom I had authority, I would not be able to sleep at night. I would be haunted for the rest of my life.

The thought of covering up for someone who forced sex on deaf children in closets at night is incomprehensible to me. Allowing someone who had raped three children to go elsewhere and rape many more, when you were explicitly warned that this man was a walking danger to children? I don’t want to sound self-righteous, but: no. Never. Under any circumstances; in any period of time; for whatever reason. Even if my failure were mere negligence, my conscience would be racked.

So, why, to ask the obvious question, isn’t the Pope’s?

Avalon Harbor, Catalina, California, 9 am

Greenwald exposes a Douthat fantasy.

The Sunday Times poll gives them a ten point lead – which would give them a clear 20 seat majority. The poll of polls puts the result at Tories: 37; Labour 31; Lib-Dems 19. The key issue? Whether fiscal retrenchment will kill off a fragile recovery. Labour already has plans to increase the equivalent of FICA taxes. The Tories are pouncing:

The chancellor is planning to increase national insurance contributions by 1% for both employers and employees from April 2011 and appeared to concede to the Treasury select committee of MPs that the tax rise could affect jobs. He had told MPs he would not be specific but “we said we think the impact [on jobs] is manageable, it’ll be limited, because you’ve got to take into account everything else that’s happening at the time”.

The Conservatives have insisted they will not introduce the rise on incomes below £35,000. They have won the support of some business leaders who backed the national insurance pledge made by the shadow chancellor, George Osborne, by writing to the Daily Telegraph to warn that increasing national insurance would damage business as the country emerges from recession.

Four chicks act like their boyfriends. Doesn't suck:

A reader writes:

As a child, I spent many days in the "public" rooms of a Catholic rectory, where the priest had been a second father to my father. My father's parents had died in the flu epidemic in Boston in 1917, and my father was raised by a spinster sister/brother combination, always under the supervision of Fr. (later Msgr.) Doolan. Monsignor Doolan was a second father to him. (I've changed his name to ensure anonymity).

One summer, I must have been eight or nine years old, a new curate, let's call him Father Callaghan, said he would take me to a Red Sox game to get me out of the gloomy rooms. I was thrilled! Fr. Callaghan was funny and friendly and full of vitality: not at all like a priest, I thought.

I ran to my parents to tell them of this magical intervention. I'll never forget old Msgr. Doolan, with his cigar-stained lips and dyspeptic expression, rising from his chair and shouting, "No!"

No? Why, "No!?" 

The monsignor summoned my father for a whispered consultation. My father listened, nodded, and then turned to me and said, "No." Nobody would tell me why, so I threw a tantrum.

Years later, when I was in college–Holy Cross College, as a matter of fact–I asked my father why the monsignor wouldn't let me go to a Red Sox game with Fr. Callaghan. "Because Fr. Callaghan did bad things to little boys," my father told me, "and we didn't want that to happen to you."

"But it was okay if it happened to other kids?" I said.

All my father could do was shrug.

Story of more than one Catholic generation, and not only in America, it's now clear.

A reminder of some basic truths: Karl Rove was never a conservative in anything but a nominal sense. He was an opportunist and a radical.