The Dish

Bishop Robert C. Morlino of Madison, Wisconsin chastises Catholics who dissented over HCR:

So, we had a trade organization — the Catholic Health Association — which calls itself “Catholic” and we had religious Sisters who call themselves Catholic, saying, “Sorry, bishops, you got it wrong, here is the teaching of the Church.” The Lord Jesus Christ, unworthy though the bishops are, called the bishops to lead the people in faith; He did not call anybody in the Catholic Health Association and he did not call any of the Sisters in Network.

The bishops are called to teach, sanctify, and govern. But, as I said before, with regard to the Holy Father, if people will not recognize authority, then they cannot lay responsibility at the feet of those to whom they are disobedient. The pope and the bishops are only responsible when their authority is accepted. The then-Cardinal Ratzinger himself has said, in our contemporary world, the word “obedience” has disappeared from our vocabulary and the reality of obedience has been anathematized.

Probably not the best time for a Wisconsin bishop to lecture laypeople on the social contract.

(Hat tip: Carl Olson)

Black market dealers in California are worried that legalizing pot will drive them out of business. Nick Gillespie rightly feels no pity:

Legalizing any product will almost certainly reduce its price, even if you factor in a heavy vice or excise tax which will be attached to legal weed. And it will definitely encourage more people to start growing and selling pot, increasing supply and, ceteris paribus, driving down prices. So we can all understand why pot growers might be nervous at the prospect of legalization. And hopefully they can understand why their fears about competition are no more compelling than those of any producer in a free-market economy.

(Image: Medicinal marijuana user Dave Karp smokes marijuana at the Berkeley Patients Group March 25, 2010 in Berkeley, California. California Secretary of State Debra Bowen certified a ballot initiative late Wednesday to legalize the possession and sale of marijuana in the State of California after proponents of the measure submitted over 690,000 signatures. The measure will appear on the November 2 general election ballot. By Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

"'Take up your arms’ means voting,” – Sarah Palin.

Well: what can they say? A reader writes:

I used to Read First Things about 15 years ago, and I liked it.  I was always a pretty orthodox Catholic and it took an intellectually rigorous approach to Catholic issues and occasionally made a few political comments which I sometimes agreed with and sometimes didn't.  Something snapped in the Bush years, though.  The whole organization (led by Neuhaus) descended deeper and deeper into neocon unreality.  Anyway, I was reading something about how the Corner over at National Review, which never stops touting Catholic doctrine when it is convenient to its causes, has been utterly silent on the crushing scandal in Rome.  And I thought I would check out First Things' site, which I hadn't been to in a while.  It was astonishing. 

There are seven blogs there.  I scrolled down the first page of all of them.  I would estimate that about 80% of the posts were anti-Obama diatribes or links, or anti HCR, or anti Democrats generally.  And in those seven blogs' first pages, most of which cover at least two or three days' worth of posts, this is the only mention of the doings in the Vatican — and you'll never guess who gets the blame.

A reader nails it:

I stumbled upon this Roger Cohen article from November. It's interesting. That wasn't a great point in Obama's term, and I think he represented the conventional wisdom quite well. Reading it helps clarify for me how much stronger Obama's position is now. The fundamental question in the article is, "Can Obama close anything? Is there a middle game?"

Let's take a quick glance at the current landscape: Obama has passed the biggest reform of our health care system in decades, including near universal coverage; for all the criticism Obama took about the length of his Afghanistan deliberation, including that he was projecting a lack of resolve that would undermine the cause, we now have an undeniable momentum that's likely making some a little too optimistic; the Administration's efforts in Pakistan have resulted in some very positive trends, including an increased willingness to take on the Taliban; the reset with Russia has resulted in a new nuclear arms treaty, along with moving the Russians far closer in line with us in terms of sanctions on Iran; the economy is poised to start creating jobs; so on and so on.

It really is too easy to forget that anything meaningful or hard requires a long game.

But no one should doubt Obama's talent, strength, and ability to adapt to the job by this point. Perhaps I'll be proven wrong very soon, but I think we're entering a new stage in terms of coverage.

Concrete, big achievements tend to act as anchors. News cycles faster than ever before, but now there's an undercurrent of undeniable success and progress.

What I find remarkable was the discipline with which Obama didn't take the bait from the far right and play this game on their terms. It took the British Tories a decade and a half to lose the "Nasty Party" label. Even now it haunts them with moderate voters. Maybe America is completely different and an anti-gay, anti-green, anti-universal healthcare, pro-torture right can ride success in this country. But I suspect that Obama has called this one right; and once confidence returns that he can deliver, the energy will return.

Shorter version: the GOP just had a premature political ejaculation. Obama, meanwhile, has just got his groove on.

“Bibi has the support of Congress. It is solid. It is secure," – Nita Lowey, backing a foreign prime minister in a dispute with her own president.

That's the Vatican's word – not mine – to describe Ratzinger's chairing of a meeting that decided to transfer a known and dangerous child-rapist to therapy and then on to further child-molestation as a priest. Money quote:

Neither the Vatican nor the German archdiocese had previously mentioned in their statements that Cardinal Ratzinger was sent a memo relating to the reassignment of Father Hullermann. In his statement on Friday, Father Lombardi did not comment directly on the memo.

They can't handle this. So they won't. All they have now is denial.

Yglesias zeroes in on one aspect of the termination:

The most surprising thing about David Frum’s apparent parting of ways with the American Enterprise Institute is the extremely mild nature of Frum’s heterodoxy. What he’s been doing for the past week has been to primarily offer a tactical critique of congressional Republicans’ approach to health reform. And if you can’t offer a tactical critique in the wake of an unequivocal defeat then what can you do? I don’t really expect people to welcome sharp disagreement about matters of principle, but when you adopt an approach to blocking a piece of legislation, and then the legislation doesn’t get blocked how are you not going to engage in some spirited disagreement about what went wrong?

TNC compares Frum with me:

It's worth contrasting Frum with Andrew, who I think differs with the right on core goals. Andrew doesn't simply believe the GOP should compromise he thinks the current health care bill is a good idea. Whereas Frum endorsed John McCain (though he was sharply critical of Sarah Palin), Andrew endorsed Barack Obama. Frum coined the term "Axis of Evil" and wrote a book defending the Iraq War. Andrew supported the war, but now regards his support with regret.

But here's where David and I agree: we both grew up when conservatism was intellectually sharp and interesting. Its current brutal anti-intellectualism, its open hostility to moderation in any form; its substitution of purer and purer ideology for actual, pragmatic ideas: these are trends that have left a lot of us on the center right marooned. I think David may well be glad he is now formally ostracized. It will liberate him and his formidable mind. Serious thinking conservatives know that these are times for real re-thinking, not more positioning. Julian Sanchez:

One of the more striking features of the contemporary conservative movement is the extent to which it has been moving toward epistemic closure. Reality is defined by a multimedia array of interconnected and cross promoting conservative blogs, radio programs, magazines, and of course, Fox News. Whatever conflicts with that reality can be dismissed out of hand because it comes from the liberal media, and is therefore ipso facto not to be trusted. (How do you know they’re liberal? Well, they disagree with the conservative media!)  This epistemic closure can be a source of solidarity and energy, but it also renders the conservative media ecosystem fragile.

John Aloysius Farrell:

If AEI was not punishing Frum for his apostasy, then its timing was at the very least awful, and the episode  handled with a clumsiness that Larry, Moe, and Curly would admire. Machiavelli would tell us: If you are going to be labeled as intolerant anyway, you might as well be feared. No one in Washington will respect an institution that failed to foresee how this would play out.

Tunku Varadarajan is vicious:

David is a man I’ve known professionally for almost a decade, and with whom my social interaction has always been very genial. He is a good and energetic man, and has, in the years since he left service at the White House, dedicated himself to being what I call a “polite-company conservative” (or PCC), much like David Brooks and Sam Tanenhaus at the New York Times (where the precocious Ross Douthat is shaping up to be a baby version of the species). A PCC is a conservative who yearns for the goodwill of the liberal elite in the media and in the Beltway—who wishes, always, to have their ear, to be at their dinner parties, to be comforted by a sense that liberal interlocutors believe that they are not like other conservatives, with their intolerance and boorishness, their shrillness and their talk radio. The PCC, in fact, distinguishes himself from other conservatives not so much ideologically—though there is an element of that—as aesthetically.

Tristero:

None of the bozos who require purity tests in liberal and leftwing circles are anywhere remotely as powerful or as influential as the fanatical psychopaths who both fund and staff the conservative think tanks. Nor are they likely to become influential anytime in the forseeable future. I can't think of even a moderately liberal group, let alone a genuinely leftwing group, that funnels staff that have been ideologically vetted into the government at anything close to the level at which the AEI and the Federalist Society pack presidential administrations with the politically correct. Nor does any liberal-leaning group – say, CEIP or CAP – require anything close to the purity of ideology the right does.

Jonah Goldberg:

It seems like the day before yesterday Frum was putting steel in the spine of the GOP on immigration, gay marriage, etc. If he really believed those things then and he believes his new analysis about the GOP now, then he should at least be remorseful about the changing times and the need for the party and movement to moderate. He should be saying things like “I wish I was wrong, but we have to face reality.” He should be celebrating when his thesis has been disproved (as it was, to one extent or another, in every off-year election of the last 12 months). He should be saying, “As much as I disagree with how Rush says X, I have to concede on the merits he’s right about X.” And he should both cheer and revisit his thesis when serious social conservatives win without compromising their beliefs (as happened in the McDonnell election).

Josh Green:

Watching the David Frum saga unfold, culminating with his being fired from the American Enterprise Institute yesterday and essentially purged from the respectable conservative movement, I'm reminded more and more of my old boss, Charlie Peters. Charlie founded The Washington Monthly magazine in 1969, and undertook to reorient a liberal movement that he felt had become hopelessly lost and inward looking. Charlie believed in a liberal vision for society–just not the means by which the Democrats of the 1970s and '80s were pursuing it. His philosophy became known as neoliberalism. It's a measure of how out of step Democrats at the time were with popular sentiment that a 1976 Washington Monthly cover story titled "Criminals Belong in Jail" was controversial.

The conservative reaction to Frum's suggestion that health-care reform is a Republican Waterloo feels uncannily similar.

A reader writes:

You're starting to get the emotional tunnel-vision people sometimes accuse you of.  (It is sometimes a very good thing – such as the passionate way you went about digging for information on Iran last June – but sometimes you seem to dive headfirst into the pool before checking the water level.)  To wit: the "new" documentary on the BBC that seemingly implicates the current Pope in covering up child abuse scandals aired four years ago. Yes, the article about the documentary (from September 2006) was reposted today, but likely only because it is relevant to current events.

It did not receive much attention then because its claims are dubious.

The incredibly "secret" document "Crimen Sollicitationis" and its subsequent update by Ratzinger are surprisingly public information. Indeed, "Crimen Sollicitationis" – including the updated version – does not call for secrecy of the allegations or prohibit the involvement of the criminal justice system; it calls for the secrecy of the Vatican court's procedure, which is highly common. Also, your favorite Catholic reporter John Allen has a 2003 rebuttal to the charge that "Crimen Sollicitationis" contains instructions on how to commit child rape and get away with it. Finally, criminal charges were brought against the clergyman who raped the maker of the documentary when he was 14 (the priest committed suicide before the trial began), so the claims that the Vatican is set up as a protection for child rapists is somewhat undercut again.

The dubious nature of the article probably explains why it is in the Entertainment section of the London Evening Standard and not the News section. The writer even calls him Thomas Ratzinger!