“So you can make a case that, gee, if the level’s about the same, then the insurgency must be down because we’re paying less attention to it….” — Donald Rumsfeld
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frontline: rumsfeld’s war: paths to power: nixon administration | PBS
Rumsfeld might have been a moderate compared to Barry Goldwater, but over the years, his political profile moved to the right….
ABC News: Conservatives See Win in Rise of New Pope By RICHARD N. OSTLING, The Associated Press
“Faithful Christians ought to be thrilled,” declared Charles Colson, the prison evangelist who’s among the best-known members of America’s largest Protestant group, the Southern Baptist Convention.
Colson is especially pleased because, as he sees it, America’s cultural elite is alarmed by the cardinals’ choice. He praised Ratzinger’s recent sermon against moral relativism, which amounted to a papal campaign platform. He also agreed with the pope that Western civilization is doomed if secular trends persist.
It’s significant that Colson is scheduled to appear Sunday night in Louisville, Ky., for a “Justice Sunday” rally where conservative Protestants will denounce what they call “out-of-control courts” and Democratic filibusters to block U.S. Senate votes on nominees to be federal appeals judges. …
[Sidebar on the honorable Charles Colson
Known as President Nixon’s hatchet man, Colson could be counted on to break the china – do whatever was necessary – to achieve the desired political ends of his boss. The saying at the time was that he would be willing to run over his own grandmother if the President ordered it to be done. (Colson never did so.) Such a reputation showed him as an administration loyalist.
Colson was involved in the Watergate Scandal, and in 1974 voluntarily agreed to a plea of nolo contendere (no contest) to obstruction of justice in the Watergate affair. Some months before this plea, Colson became an evangelical Christian.]
While the pope is no Protestant, conservative evangelicals see him as a powerful ally in such matters and Benedict’s track record suggests they’re correct. …
While Catholic liberals believe it would be both wise and just for the church to loosen up on doctrinal demands, Benedict might draw the opposite conclusion from U.S. Protestant trends.
Since the mid-1960s, liberal denominations like Thomas’ United Church of Christ have suffered a steady slide in membership, while conservative groups like the Southern Baptists have continued to expand. And in the past generation, Southern Baptist agencies have actually moved from moderate conservatism to stricter conservatism.
Penn State historian Philip Jenkins noted in his book “The Next Christendom” that the same trend is true globally.
While flexible, modernized churches stagnate, evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity are growing in the developing world as is Islam. These groups have been dogged in preserving doctrinal and moral tradition.
If Benedict plays to conservative Christians in the United States, he’ll be working with the growth sector of the religious world today.
Synchronicity. Follow the first link for a dicussion of a new bill allowing Christians to refuse to serve others, which is sponsored by Dick Santorum (“‘Santorum? Is that Latin for asshole?'”), Clinton and Kerry. Follow the second for a discussion of Napolitano.
Napolitano is originally a New Mexican. I’m sure Richardson would rather people ignore her — there won’t be a Southwestern Ticket. mjh
The Nation | Blog | The Daily Outrage | Ari Berman
Instead of pandering to the get-right-with-God crowd, [Kerry] could instead follow the lead of Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano, who recently vetoed conscience clause legislation….
I can’t imagine that if Napolitano were a man, we wouldn’t be hearing her name as one of the top possible candidates in 2008, and with good reason given her electoral record.
Thin Line By Tim McGivern
Several weeks ago, President George W. Bush, jackass that he is, stood next to a filing cabinet in Parkersburg, W. Va., that was filled with $1.7 trillion in U.S. Treasury bills belonging to the Social Security trust fund. The staged event went off flawlessly with no tough questions asked, and Bush, following the script, described the cabinet’s contents as “a worthless stack of IOUs.”
With our president making these kinds of boneheaded statements, is it any wonder the U.S. dollar continues to collapse overseas? And if that isn’t bad enough, a lawyer friend e-mailed me suggesting Bush’s photo-op might actually be an impeachable offense. According to U.S. Constitution amendment XIV(4): “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.” The amendment intended to punish any elected official who disparaged the credit of the United States. And the president swore an oath to uphold the Constitution, didn’t he?
Faith and the filibuster fight By Melissa Rogers
The press release for the event states that certain judicial nominees are being opposed “because they are people of faith and moral conviction.” It labels a broad range of court decisions as “liberal, anti-Christian dogma,” claiming that “activist courts … have been quietly working under the veil of the judiciary, like thieves in the night, to rob us of our Christian heritage and our religious freedoms.” In sum, the release says that “we must stop this unprecedented filibuster of people of faith.”
Thus, according to supporters of this agenda, including one of the foremost leaders in Congress, anyone who has a different view of the Constitution is an advocate of “liberal, anti-Christian dogma.” Anyone who takes a contrary position on Senate rules of procedure is hostile to faith. End of story.
It’s time to tell the truth. [keep reading]
Another chance to learn more about Jack Abramoff, a conservative Republican lobbyist-scoundrel and friend of Tom DeLay’s.
Albuquerque Journal readers should note that only the first half of this article appeared in our paper. mjh
Lobbyist Target of Several Investigations By NANCY BENAC, Associated Press Writer
It was the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 that brought Abramoff back to Washington, where lobbying firms were looking to strengthen their GOP connections.
Abramoff’s Republican credentials and long ties to Reed and Norquist, head of the conservative Americans for Tax Reform, made him a natural; now, all three are under the microscope of congressional investigators.
Marshall Wittman, a one-time conservative activist who now works for the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, sees Abramoff’s rise and fall as emblematic of what he believes has happened to the conservative movement overall.
“Many other Reagan conservatives came to Washington with the stars of the revolution in their eyes and they ended up with very fat wallets in their back pockets,” he said. “They came to do good and they ended up doing very, very well.”
mjh’s Dump Bush weBlog: We will continue to fight for the truth.
“Isn’t it true that instead of fixing airline security, port security, mass transportation, local response, and securing loose nukes and biological components, we spent billions on starting a war with Iraq—a nation that had nothing to do with 9/11? And, instead of capturing Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan, we captured Saddam Hussein in Iraq with no weapons of mass destruction? Isn’t it true that because of our invasion of Iraq terrorist recruitment for Al Qaeda has soared, making us even less safe than we were before the Iraq war? Remember that we were supposed to go to war in Iraq to eliminate a real threat. Isn’t it true that now because of our foreign policy in Iraq, we have only created a real threat to the world’s security and ours? Isn’t it true that instead of successfully prosecuting Al Qaeda terrorists and bringing them to justice, all we hear about is torturing ‘enemy combatants’ and detaining them indefinitely–a concept far removed from the American ideal of justice? Isn’t it true that instead of opening up government to restore trust and faith, we created the Patriot Act? And, isn’t it true that instead of pursuing alternative energy resources to decrease our dependency on foreign oil, we invaded oil-rich countries and passed no alternative energy legislation in the meantime?
“Why do we accept these choices? Why do we condone a government that uses over-classification to obfuscate such choices? …
“We–the American public–find ourselves adrift and overwhelmed. Pre-occupied with fear, we fail to unearth the truth or understand what choices we should or can make to effectively make our world safer. We are simply told that this is our ‘new norm.’ …
“Alarmingly, we accept all of this in the name of our ‘ongoing fight against the enemy.’ But, with a timeless, faceless, nameless and stateless enemy, when will our ‘fight’ ever end so we can return to our sensibilities and the truth? How can we ever define what success or victory might ever mean? …
“How can we trust a Congress that holds hearings on steroids in baseball and yet does not want to find out why our FAA received 52 warnings about hijackings in the summer of 2001? … How do we trust a Congress willing to work through a Sunday night on the Shiavo debate yet unwilling to hold public hearings on the ‘dead wrong’ intelligence that brought us to war in Iraq? …
“We will continue to fight for the truth. … And, respectfully, our hope is that in future years this award might be rendered obsolete. Simply because there will be no need to bestow an award or any special status onto a truth-seeker because truth-seekers will have become our new norm.” — Kristin Breitweiser, accepting one of the second-annual Ron Ridenhour Awards [read her whole speech]