Tag Archives: American

The Obama Touch – Disrespecting Foreign Allies

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Charles Krauthammer telling it like it is:

RealClearPolitics – Disrespecting Foreign Allies.

What is it like to be a foreign ally of Barack Obama’s America?

If you’re a Brit, your head is spinning. It’s not just the personal slights to Prime Minister Gordon Brown — the ridiculous 25-DVD gift, the five refusals before Brown was granted a one-on-one with The One.

Nor is it just the symbolism of Obama returning the Churchill bust that was in the Oval Office. Query: If it absolutely had to be out of Obama’s sight, could it not have been housed somewhere else on U.S. soil rather than ostentatiously repatriated?

Perhaps it was the State Department official who last year denied there even was a special relationship between the U.S. and Britain, a relationship cultivated by every U.S. president since Franklin Roosevelt.  Continue reading →

NY Times’ Ratzinger Story Wrong by Its Own Documentation

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A Response to the New York Times – Fr. Raymond J. de Souza – The Corner on National Review Online.

Excerpts from the response by Fr. Raymond J. de Souza :

The New York Times on March 25 accused Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, of intervening to prevent a priest, Fr. Lawrence Murphy, from facing penalties for cases of sexual abuse of minors.

The story is false. It is unsupported by its own documentation. Indeed, it gives every indication of being part of a coordinated campaign against Pope Benedict, rather than responsible journalism.

The documents show that the canonical trial or penal process against Father Murphy was never stopped by anyone. In fact, it was only abandoned days before Father Murphy died. Cardinal Ratzinger never took a decision in the case, according to the documents. His deputy, Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone, suggested, given that Father Murphy was in failing health and a canonical trial is a complicated matter, that more expeditious means be used to remove him from all ministry.

To repeat: The charge that Cardinal Ratzinger did anything wrong is unsupported by the documentation on which the story was based. He does not appear in the record as taking any decision. His office, in the person of his deputy, Archbishop Bertone, agreed that there should be full canonical trial. When it became apparent that Father Murphy was in failing health, Archbishop Bertone suggested more expeditious means of removing him from any ministry.

Furthermore, under canon law at the time, the principal responsibility for sexual-abuse cases lay with the local bishop. Archbishop Weakland had from 1977 onwards the responsibility of administering penalties to Father Murphy. He did nothing until 1996. It was at that point that Cardinal Ratzinger’s office became involved, and it subsequently did nothing to impede the local process.

The New York Times flatly got the story wrong, according to its own evidence. Readers may want to speculate on why.

Read here– the documentation

Read more from Archbishop Dolan here

and more from the Anchoress here

Taking the Church Down – A Story of Disception

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The secular agenda has at its core a hatred for the Catholic Church.  The Church speaks with the authority of its God-given mandate and the Enemy uses his peons in the world to strike at its heel in anticipation of the moment that its Founder will crush his head.  Until then, no holds are barred in this open aggression. A world under the influence of sin and license falls easy prey to the secular media, a favorite arm for deception and bias.

George Weigel writing for First Things: Scoundrel Time(s)

The sexual and physical abuse of children and young people is a global plague; its manifestations run the gamut from fondling by teachers to rape by uncles to kidnapping-and-sex-trafficking. In the United States alone, there are reportedly some 39 million victims of childhood sexual abuse. Forty to sixty percent were abused by family members, including stepfathers and live-in boyfriends of a child’s mother—thus suggesting that abused children are the principal victims of the sexual revolution, the breakdown of marriage, and the hook-up culture. Hofstra University professor Charol Shakeshaft reports that 6-10 percent of public school students have been molested in recent years—some 290,000 between 1991 and 2000. According to other recent studies, 2 percent of sex abuse offenders were Catholic priests—a phenomenon that spiked between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s but seems to have virtually disappeared (six credible cases of clerical sexual abuse in 2009 were reported in the U.S. bishops’ annual audit, in a Church of some 65,000,000 members).

Yet in a pattern exemplifying the dog’s behavior in Proverbs 26:11, the sexual abuse story in the global media is almost entirely a Catholic story, in which the Catholic Church is portrayed as the epicenter of the sexual abuse of the young, with hints of an ecclesiastical criminal conspiracy involving sexual predators whose predations continue today. That the vast majority of the abuse cases in the United States took place decades ago is of no consequence to this story line. For the narrative that has been constructed is often less about the protection of the young (for whom the Catholic Church is, by empirical measure, the safest environment for young people in America today) than it is about taking the Church down—and, eventually, out, both financially and as a credible voice in the public debate over public policy. For if the Church is a global criminal conspiracy of sexual abusers and their protectors, then the Catholic Church has no claim to a place at the table of public moral argument.

Read the rest here.

Obama’s Adolescent Fantasy

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H/T Breitbart.tv: Former Attorney General, Michael B.  Mukasey, author of  How Obama Has Mishandled the War on Terror

In his book the former AG points out the danger of Obama’s castles in the air, his letting down America’s guard to accommodate his adolesent fantasy of utopian higher ideals vs. defender of the Nation and national security.

Palm Sunday and Political Correctness Run Amuck

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The young maker of this video has been taught well.  He bends over backwards not to offend anyone of any other religion who might happen upon this video instruction.  He says at the beginning (profusely), “It’s pure entertainment; nothing else!”   After transforming the palm frond into a cross, he ends with, ” Don’t take this as anything against your religion; just pure entertainment;  no stuff like that.”

Not that it is this young man’s intention, but now that this symbol of the Faith and the palm (distributed to the faithful as a reminder of  our fickleness and unfaithfulness) have been devalued to the level of a pass-time,  society must be all the better for it;  right?  The “entertainment” value of the Cross having been established, actually,  does emphasize how quickly nice people forget and dissimilate.  Little chance here that this young man will die a martyr.   Little does he know what he’s missing.  Jesus and the message the Cross, does offend and divide.

Barak Obama – The Man Inside the Image

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H/T Anchoress for directing us to this thought provoking article by Spengler writing about Obama with a view to his late mother,Ann Dunham, and his “rancorous wife, Michelle.”  David P. Goldman exams “Who Is Barack Obama?”

America has the great misfortune to have encountered Obama at the peak of his powers at its worst moment of vulnerability in a generation. With malice aforethought, he has sought out their sore point.

Be afraid – be very afraid. America is at a low point in its fortunes, and feeling sorry for itself. When Barack utters the word “hope”, they instead hear, “handout”. A cynic might translate the national motto, E pluribus unum, as “something for nothing”. Now that the stock market and the housing market have failed to give Americans something for nothing, they want something for nothing from the government. The trouble is that he who gets something for nothing will earn every penny of it, twice over.

“Evil will oft evil mars”, J R R Tolkien wrote. It is conceivable that Barack Obama, if elected, will destroy himself before he destroys the country. Hatred is a toxic diet even for someone with as strong a stomach as Obama. As he recalled in his 1995 autobiography, Dreams From My Father, Obama idealized the Kenyan economist who had married and dumped his mother, and was saddened to learn that Barack Hussein Obama, Sr, was a sullen, drunken polygamist. The elder Obama became a senior official of the government of Kenya after earning a PhD at Harvard. He was an abusive drunk and philanderer whose temper soured his career.

The senior Obama died in a 1982 car crash. Kenyan government officials in those days normally spent their nights drinking themselves stupid at the Pan-Afrique Hotel. Two or three of them would be found with their Mercedes wrapped around a palm tree every morning. During the 1970s I came to know a number of them, mostly British-educated hollow men dying inside of their own hypocrisy and corruption.

Both Obama and the American public should be very careful of what they wish for. As the horrible example of Obama’s father shows, there is nothing worse for an embittered outsider manipulating the system from within than to achieve his goals – and nothing can be more terrible for the system. Even those who despise America for its blunders of the past few years should ask themselves whether the world will be a safer place if America retreats into a self-pitying shell.