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The Weblog at The View from the Core - Thursday, October 28, 2004
   
   

Our Man in New Hampshire

The Inimitable One writes at The Spectator, dated Oct. 30. RTWT.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 10/28/04 07:54:31 PM
Categorized as Political.


   
   

The Horserace Blog

Vide.

(Thanks, Peter.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 10/28/04 07:15:37 PM
Categorized as Blogosphere Stuff.


   
   

Lisa White Could Use Our Prayers

And we, hers.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 10/28/04 07:01:21 PM
Categorized as Religious.


   
   

JunkYardBlog on The New Soldier

Bryan Preston looks at Kerry's 1971 book:

.... And that is why The New Soldier is so fascinating. Through it we see that John Forbes Kerry has changed very little since 1971. His default position then, and through his Senate career and now, has been to mistrust American power and resist its use in the world, no matter the cause. Young John Kerry opposed Vietnam; Senator John Kerry opposed the first Gulf War and the Reagan approach that won the Cold War; Candidate John Kerry first voted for the current Iraq war, then denounced it, then voted for funding it before voting against the same. He has said at various times that it was the right thing to do and that it was the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time, mostly because the United Nations did not sanction it. In that, we can hear the echo of a young John Kerry who wanted to put the US military under permanent UN dictate. That same John Kerry showed up in the presidential debates this year, advocating some kind of “global test” that must be passed before the US should engage in any military action.
The New Soldier shows that, in one sense, the charge that John Kerry is a flip-flopper is somewhat inaccurate. On foreign policy, he has been quite consistent from 1971 through the present day. The problem for him, and for America if it puts him in the White House, is that Kerry has always and in all situations been completely, utterly skeptical of his own country’s intentions, completely and utterly credulous of the intentions of our enemies, and has always come down on the wrong side of every single foreign policy issue. That wrong-headedness is the single thread that runs through the anti-war protestor, the Senator and presidential candidate. The New Soldier, therefore, warns us that John Kerry does not possess the judgment to lead America in peacetime or in war. His true ideals are simply incompatible with America's purpose and place in the world.
Why did John Kerry collaborate with the North Vietnamese and Vietcong during and after he met with them in Paris in 1971? Why did he smear all American soldiers who fought in Vietnam as "war criminals?" Why did he favor nuclear freeze and oppose peace through strength? Why did he oppose the first Gulf War, which of all wars should surely have passed his "global test?" Why does he believe in a global test in the first place? Why is he out there drumming up fears of a draft to undermine support for the war? And why is he now smearing our troops in Iraq based on a bogus story from a highly biased source?
Because that's who he is. That is John Kerry's character, and those are his beliefs. The New Soldier shows us that his character and beliefs have changed little since his radical days of helping our enemies defeat us. It warns us that he is not to be trusted with the power of the presidency....

JYB very kindly gives a nod to your Humble, Faithful Blogster at the end.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 10/28/04 06:27:27 PM
Categorized as John Kerry.


   
   

Why Bush Deserves Re-election

A view from across the pond, by Gerard Baker at the London Times, today:

.... But above all, in this oppositional sort of age, when it is often easier to be defined by what one is against rather than what one is for, I have to say it is his enemies who most justify Mr Bush’s re-election.
The list of those whose world could be truly rocked on Tuesday is just too long and too rich to be ignored. If you think for a moment about those who would really be upset by a second Bush term, it becomes a lot easier to stomach.
The hordes of the bien-pensant Left in the universities and the media, the sort of liberals who tolerate everything except those who disagree with them. Secularist elites who disdain religiosity except when it comes from Muslim fanatics. Europhile Brits who drip contempt for everything their country has ever done and long for its disappearance into a Greater Europe.Absurd, isolationist conservatives in America and Britain who think the struggles for freedom are always someone else’s fight. Hollywood sybarites and narcissists, self-appointed arbiters of a nation’s morals.
Soft-headed Europeans who think engagement and dialogue with mass murderers is the way to achieve lasting peace. French intellectuals for whom nothing has gone right in the world since 1789.
The United Nations, which, if it had its multilateral way, would still be faithfully minding a world in which half the population lived under or in fear of Soviet aggression. Most of Belgium.
Above all, of course, Middle Eastern militants. If your bitterest enemies are the sort of people who hack the heads off unarmed, innocent civilians, then I would say you are probably doing something right.
This may sound petty. It is not. This constellation of individuals, parties and institutions has very little in common other than the fact that it has contrived to be wrong on just about every important issue of my adult lifetime.
And so, perhaps for the wrong reasons, perhaps less because he has been right and more because those who hate him so much have been so wrong, I want this President re-elected.
Go on America. Make Their Day.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 10/28/04 06:17:35 PM
Categorized as International & Political.


   
   

Catholic Carnival I

Something new in the neighborhood:

We have an excellent set of posts for our First Catholic Carnival. Buckle your seatbelts, enjoy the ride — Oh, and take a minute to read the entire posts, you’ll be glad you did....

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 10/28/04 05:38:47 PM
Categorized as Catholic Carnival & Religious.


   
   

"Contraception: Why Not?"

A talk given by Janet Smith at a Catholic Physicians Guild meeting at the Pontifical College Josephinum, Columbus, Ohio in May, 1994.

Lege.

(Thanks, Oswald.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 10/28/04 05:23:43 PM
Categorized as Social/Cultural & Speeches and Suchlike.


   
   

Autumnal Miniatures

Morning, Tuesday, October 26, 2004.

Autumnal Miniature

Autumnal Miniature

Autumnal Miniature

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 10/28/04 08:15:50 AM
Categorized as Photos.


   
   

Hand in Glove

North Vietnamese communists and Lt. John Kerry, early 1970s.

Thomas Lipscomb writes at the New York Sun, Oct. 26:

.... The two documents provide a glimpse of the favorable way the Viet Cong viewed the activities in which Mr. Kerry was involved. They are from many documents of a kind that were ordinarily sent to a unit called the Captured Document Exploitation Center at the United States Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, which was headquartered in Saigon. Documents like these that were sent to the center were immediately translated into English and processed for battlefield intelligence for targeting or operations as required, or filed.
The CDEC cover sheet of the "Directive" indicates it was "acquired" on May 12, 1971. The cover sheet itself is dated June 30, 1971, and is entitled "VC Efforts to Back Antiwar Demonstrations in the United States." It shows a detailed knowledge of such VVAW activities as the Dewey Canyon demonstration on the Mall in Washington in April 1971, mentioning the "return of their medals." And the Saigon American military intelligence cover sheet dates the information in that document as being assembled in Vietnam only a week after the Washington VVAW demonstration had taken place.
The CDEC Viet Cong document titled "Circular on Antiwar Movements in the US" notes, "The spontaneous antiwar movements in the US have received assistance and guidance from the friendly (VC/NVN) delegations at the Paris Peace Talks." It also notes that "The seven-point peace proposal (of the SVN Provisional Revolutionary Government) [the Viet Cong proposal advanced by one of its envoys, Madame Binh, operating out of Paris] not only solved problems concerning the release of US prisoners but also motivated the people of all walks of life and even relatives of US pilots detained in NVN to participate in the antiwar movement."
The significance of the documents lies in the way they dovetail with activities of the young Mr. Kerry as he led the VVAW anti-war movement in the spring of 1971....

Both documents are at Winter Soldier:

Two recently discovered documents captured from the Vietnamese communists during the Vietnam War strongly support the contention that a close link existed between the Hanoi regime and the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) while John Kerry served as the group's leading national spokesman....

Chad Evans is digging into this. See Bryan Preston, too.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 10/28/04 07:47:13 AM
Categorized as John Kerry.


   
   

Golden Contra Kerry

Boston's congressman, a Catholic Democrat, supports Bush for president.

Plus, some other stuff.

Brian P. Golden writes a guest column at the Union-Leader, Oct. 26:

.... When considering core values issues, the choice for Catholics has not always been clear. But this year is a dramatic exception.
The Democrats offer Sen. John Kerry, a professed Catholic. You may have heard that Kerry’s own Democratic colleagues, by some creative measure, call him the “most Catholic” senator. That’s like calling Tony Soprano a devout Catholic because he shows up at Mass most Sundays and throws some bills in the collection plate. Catholics know better.
For 20 years, on matters most fundamental to Catholics, Kerry has been consistently wrong. Kerry was one of only 14 senators to vote against the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act. This year, he opposed the federal marriage amendment, which would give the American people a voice in the definition of marriage, rather than leave it to the whims of activist judges like those in Massachusetts. Kerry has even castigated church leaders for weighing-in on the marriage issue, calling it “inappropriate” and a breach of the “separation of church and state.” ....
In 1960, a Democratic senator from Massachusetts inspired many first, second, and third generation Catholic immigrants. John Kennedy’s election was a final blow to the Know Nothings and their descendants. But, in those days, while Democrats and Republicans were debating the general direction of the nation, there was broad consensus on the central cultural issues. Now that the consensus has vanished, we must choose carefully. And while our faith should not direct our choice, it should certainly inform our choice.
This year, with another Democratic senator from Massachusetts running for President, many more Catholics will be avoiding the Democratic lever because the Democratic nominee shows little regard for what matters most to Catholics. This year, the more Catholics know, the clearer the choice becomes....

Golden is interviewed at National Review Online, Oct. 27 (quoted ellipsis in original):

.... NRO: There's a distinct difference between John F. Kerry's approach on faith and public life and John F. Kennedy's, isn't there? Do people see that?
Rep. Golden: If you look at it objectively you can see a profound difference. When John Kennedy spoke to people about his religion, he was essentially saying, "I'm a Catholic, but don't hold it against me." John Kerry essentially says, "I'm a Catholic, but don't hold me to it."
It's one thing if you don't believe that human life begins at conception. However, John Kerry admits he believes that life begins at conception but won't do anything to protect it in law. How does he square his conscience with his official antipathy to all legislation protecting human life? John Kennedy said that "if the time should ever come... when my office would require me to either violate my conscience or violate the national interest, then I would resign the office; and I hope any conscientious public servant would do likewise." Can you imagine that coming from John Kerry? Senator Kerry's willingness to place political expedience before conscience is disturbing no matter what your faith....

Also, NRO has a review of The American Catholic Voter, dated Nov. 1:

.... To read much in Catholic political commentary is to be told that there really are distinctive Catholic voters out there in America. These voters are strong on social justice and squishy on the war in Iraq. They are unambiguously opposed to abortion, but they recognize that a reverence for life requires contemplation of other issues, particularly the death penalty. They can always come up with a fitting quotation from St. Francis de Sales's Introduction to the Devout Life when they have to, and they've read most of Graham Greene's novels. They're Irish, they went to Jesuit schools, and every one of them has a sister or a cousin who was a Maryknoll nun until she resigned from the convent in 1979 and began to teach women's studies at a college in upstate New York.
These Catholic voters have been uneasily registered Democrats since they were in their cradles, and they remember with wryly embarrassed nostalgia the enormous success of the corrupt Catholic Democratic machine politics of James Michael Curley in Boston and Tammany Hall's Boss Murphy in New York.
When Ted Kennedy said in 1996 that he remembered "'Help Wanted' signs in stores when I was growing up saying 'No Irish Need Apply'" — despite the fact that he was born to wealth in 1932 — it mostly proved just how long an urban legend can last. But all these Catholic voters do genuinely have a sense of themselves as something of the underdog in American public life. They remember why Catholics had to build their own social institutions — schools, colleges, hospitals, orphanages, and all the rest — and they remember that these institutions were constucted not with dollars from millionaires but with pennies and nickels from women who spent their days on their knees scrubbing floors for the Protestant upper classes.
American Catholic voters are liberal about government in a way no economic or evangelical conservative can understand, and conservative about morals in a way no socialist or New Age liberal can grasp. They were pro-labor and anti-Communist when both those things really counted, and they remain committed to the possibility of applying the intellectual and ethical fruits of their faith to the messy life of politics.
One further thing needs to be said about these Catholic voters: They don't actually exist. Maybe they never did, at least in the ideal type sketched by Catholic political writers, but certainly we haven't seen many of them since the 1950s. Indeed, by every statistical measure, Catholics are indistinguishable from other voters in the American political scene....

Finally, Jeff Jacoby looks at the "religification of John Kerry", at the Boston Globe, Oct. 26:

.... Voters will have to judge for themselves whether Kerry's newly prominent religiosity is genuine or merely a facade adopted for political purposes. Those political purposes are certainly compelling — according to an August poll by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, 85 percent of Americans say religion is important in their lives and 72 percent say it is important to them that a president have strong religious beliefs.
But there is something wrong, it seems to me, with Kerry's glib equation of higher public spending and more lavish government programs with fulfilling one's religious obligations. He cited Matthew 25:40 — ''Whatever you do to the least of these, you do unto me'' — and interpreted it to mean that ''the ethical test of a good society is how it treats its most vulnerable members.'' That would be a reasonable understanding if Kerry had meant that each of us individually is called upon to reach out to those in need.
But Kerry immediately turned Jesus' admonition into little more than a call for expanding the welfare state and increasing government regulation. ''That's why we have to raise the minimum wage, ensure equal pay, and finish the job of welfare reform,'' he said. He quoted an earlier verse in Matthew (''I was hungry and you fed me; thirsty and you gave me a drink'') and read it to mean that America must ''take action now to cut the cost of energy so that already overburdened seniors in the colder parts of our country can afford heat in the winter.''
I'm not an expert on Christian thought, but it seems unlikely to me that Jesus was taking a position on minimum wage laws or energy conservation when he called on his followers to do more for "the least of these." ....

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 10/28/04 07:31:41 AM
Categorized as Political & Religious.


   
   

Election Day Novena V

Almighty God, all things are in your hands: our nation, our communities, our families, our lives.

In this time of great decision, bless our country and its people. Prosper the efforts of the just and true, and thwart the purposes of the unjust and dishonest. Preserve our land from violence and turmoil, and keep our relationships decent and respectful.

Inspire voters, legislators, executives, and judges so our country may be a land where morality is furthered by law and authority; where life is protected, marriage is respected, and family is supported; where the innocent are spared, and the guilty are punished; where justice is tempered by mercy, and mercy fortified by justice.

Help us to keep the United States of America a land where the rule of law and respect for individual dignity are the legal foundation of a just order.

Amen.

The ubiquitous Earl Appleby has added his own petition:

And, dear Lord, we pray that in the next presidential election we might have a candidate whom we could support wholeheartedly, without moral or mental reservation, rather than one whom we feel duty bound to vote against in defence of every scrap of moral deceny that yet remains in our once Christian nation.

Quenta Nârwenion is also blogging the novena.

The Curt Jester has been blogging additional prayers for the novena.

Another novena continued yesterday at Knitting a Conundrum.

.... St. Thomas More,
adorer of Christ's Passion,
who put prayer before all else,
devoted husband and father,
defender of the Church,
perfect model of friendship,
impervious to all bribery,
committed to the common good,
who reverenced civil and Divine law,
civil judge of unimpeachable integrity,
patron of those who hold public office,
pray for us now
at this critical time of election,
where so much is at stake,
where the lives of the unborn
and those most vunerable
hang in the balance,
where the lives of the downtrodden
and defenseless against the terrorist
are most at risk.
Pray for us, St. Thomas More,
martyr for the truth,
that with this election,
we may draw ever closer
to the way God would have our country governed....

And Veritas has also blogged the novena.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 10/28/04 07:06:59 AM
Categorized as Religious.


   

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