Truth Is

"Truth is a power, however, only when one requires of it no immediate effect, but has patience and figures on a long wait. Still better, when one does not in general think about its effects but wants to present truth for its own sake, for its holy, divine greatness. . . . As already said, one must have patience. Here months may mean nothing and also years. And one must have no specific aims. Somehow, lack of an agenda is the greatest power. Sometimes, especially in recent years, I had the sense that truth was standing as a reality in the room." -- Romano Guardini, Catholic theologian, writing in 1945, in his twelfth year living under Nazi rule.


In an age of rampant agendas and poison ideologies, this seems worth noting.


(Thanks to Rev. Richard John Neuhaus)

A Bad Habit Is Hard To Break

File this under "Has Been A Nun."

Like The Sun From Out The Wave

"God paid a ransom to save us from the impossible road to heaven which our fathers tried to take, and the ransom he paid was not mere gold or silver. He paid for us with the precious lifeblood of Christ, the sinless, spotless Lamb of God." -- Peter 1:18-19

“They took the body down from the cross and one of the few rich men among the first Christians obtained permission to bury it in a rock tomb in his garden; the Romans setting a military guard lest there should be some riot and attempt to recover the body. There was once more a natural symbolism in these natural proceedings; it was well that the tomb should be sealed with all the secrecy of ancient eastern sepulture and guarded by the authority of the Caesars. For in that second cavern the whole of that great and glorious humanity which we call antiquity was gathered up and covered over; and in that place it was buried. It was the end of a very great thing called human history; the history that was merely human. The mythologies and the philosophies were buried there, the gods and the heroes and the sages. In the great Roman phrase, they had lived. But as they could only live, so they could only die; and they were dead.

“On the third day the friends of Christ coming at daybreak to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realised the new wonder; but even they hardly realised that the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of the gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the evening but the dawn.”
-- G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man


In a sense, it is easy to be an "Easter " person. Glory. Joy. Sadness forgotten.

But the joy has no depth, no substance, unless we remember that there is no Easter without Good Friday. Without the misery of Hell, we have no glory of Heaven.

We cannot fool ourselves that life is all Easter Sundays. The Good Fridays will come to us. As a wise priest once said, if you haven't seen Good Friday yet, if you haven't yours yet, don't worry, it will find you. But the glory of Easter, the abiding joy that exists even in the face of suffering and death, is what transcends the Good Fridays of our existence.

Christ's Resurrection is not a metaphor. It is not a myth borne of group hypnosis. And it is not just emotional anaesthetic to help us believe in a loving world of round edges and happy endings. Easter celebrates a historical fact that provides a new and permanent way of seeing the world and making sense of the whole sweep of history and of our own, individual lives.

As Chesterton notes, the Death and Resurrection of Christ ended the old world with brilliant and Satan-crushing finality, and opened the door to a mind-shattering new eternity. Christ, in his Resurrection, brings us to the threshold of hope, to a wondrous new Eden.

Why The Caged Bird Sings

An old priest once told me this story.

One day, a man came across a young boy carrying a banged up birdcage. Inside the cage were two small birds.

“Where’d you get the birds?” the man asked.

“I caught ‘em,” the boy said.

“Really? What are you going to do with them?”

“I don’t know,” said the boy. “Play with 'em, I guess. Shake the cage, dangle a string through the bars, tease ‘em, feed ‘em worms, I don’t know.”

“What are you going to do with them once you get tired of them?” asked the man. “You can’t play with them forever.”

“When I get tired of 'em? I don't know. I guess I’ll feed ‘em to my cat. He likes birds.”

The man asked, “How much do you want for them?”

The boy looked surprised. “What do you want these birds for, Mister? They’re nothing special. They ain’t worth anything.”

“How much do you want?” the man repeated.

The boy was still surprised. “Look, they’re just field birds. They ain't good for nothin'. They can’t sing. You can’t eat ‘em. They ain’t even pretty to look at. You don’t want these birds.”

The man repeated: “How much do you want?”

The boy eyed the man closely, and said, “How much you got, Mister?”

The man looked at the birds for a moment, then took out his wallet and handed the boy all the money in it – he wasn’t sure how much. Then, he bent down to lift the cage as the boy counted his money.

He walked into an alley between two buildings, and set down the cage. He knelt, opened the cage door, and tapped on the bars, hoping the birds would fly away.

And Not A Drop to Drink

Terri Schiavo is a 41-year old woman who is brain damaged and who some doctors say is "in a persistent vegetative state." For this reason, her husband has decided to remove the tube that gives her food and water.

Terri's parents went to court to try to stop her husband. Florida's legislature has passed laws to stop her being starved and dehydrated to death. At each turn, the state courts in Florida ultimately have denied efforts to keep her alive. Today, a judge in Florida again ruled that the tube keeping Terri alive should be removed.

It appears that, unless the U.S. Congress can act in the next three days, before they leave town for Easter recess, Terri will surely die. She is quite unlikely to survive until Congress returns from its break.

Terri's parents do not seek "extraordinary" means to keep her alive. They simply want her to get food and water. They also believe that physical therapy will help her eventually to swallow on her own. Other doctors believe that, with help, Terri might recover.

Terri's husband, who has been living with his girlfriend long enough to have two children by her, claims that he loves Terri and that Terri told him she did not want to be kept alive, even by routine feeding and hydrating methods. He has no evidence of this -- no living will, no documents, no notes, no witnesses, no nothing.

There are other elements of this case that raise questions. According to Wesley J. Smith, a lawyer who has researched this case exhaustively:

* Terri's husband told a jury in Terri's 1992 malpractice trial that Terri would live a normal life span. Get it? The long her life expectancy, the bigger the jury award.

* Once Terri won a $1.3 million verdict, Terri's husband paid off his hired gun and also put 300 grand in his own pocket, but he never began rehabilitation for Terri. In fact, the evidence is that, at first, Terri's husband tried to save the $750,000 initially put aside into Terri's treatment fund. He immediately put a "Do Not Resusitate" card on his wife's chart -- the better to kill her with. He would not even permit Terri to be given antibiotics to fight infections. In fact, in the five years between 1993 and 1998, he spent only $50,000 on her.

* Once Terri's parents began to put up a fight, Terri's husband spent most of the $750,000 allegedly put away for Terri's treatment has been spent on lawyers to lead the charge to expedite Terri's demise. About $450,000 of the "Terri Fund" has been paid to Terri's husband's lawyers. Another $200,000 went to expenses not intended to ensure Terri's continuing survival. But still her parents fight to keep her alive. So much for the argument that Terri's parents sought custody to "get the money" for themselves. There is no money. In fact, her father has depleted his own retirement fund trying to keep her alive.

So it comes down to Congress. Democrats in Congress, with a couple of exceptions, and even many Republicans, will not sound even a dry cough to ensure that Terri gets help. More-sanctimonious-than-thou Robert Byrd, easily one of the crassest politicians in Washington, but someone who, at least, would kick a bottle of Poland Spring with the toe of his shiny Bruno Maglis to a drunken, cotton-mouthed bum sprawled on the sidewalk, cannot raise the energy to support legislation that might keep Terri alive. And so, very soon, without a hoarse whisper from the most powerful legislative bodies in the world, Terri will probably die.

It's enough to drive you to drink.

Putting Words In Your Mouth

Lyrical ideas have dominated my thoughts for a long time.

Or perhaps I should say that ideas about lyrics have dominated my thoughts for a long time.

Popular music is a compelling expression of many things, among them, emotion, culture, and wit. The best music marries the music itself with lyrics of beauty, strength, cleverness, or humor. I hope to look at these types of lyrics in the future.

But for today, I am interested in bad lyrics. But not just bad lyrics -- rotten lyrics. The worst lyrics you can possibly imagine. Not just nonsense lyrics of the Maresy Doats variety. Like them or not, songs like that are almost tolerable since they do not presume to take themselves seriously. The really horrible songs, however, employ lyrics that combine self-satisfying gravity and importance with ridiculous sentiment and just plain awful word choice.

I hope to roll out a few of the best, by which I mean the worst, songs I have come across in my many decades of musical enjoyment, and I hope you will join in with your own.

My first nominee is “Jesse’s Girl,” written in 1981 by rock “star” and sometime soap opera “actor” Rick Springfield. The lyrics to this song are so bad, they will make you laugh. When you are not laughing, you likely will be retching. Take a look.

Jesse's Girl

Jesse is a friend
Yeah, I know he’s been a good friend of mine
But lately something’s changed that ain’t hard to define
Jesse’s got himself a girl and I wanna make her mine

And she’s watchin’ him with those eyes
And she’s lovin’ him with that body, I just know it
And he’s holding her in his arms late, late at night
You know I wish that I had Jesse’s girl
I wish that I had Jesse’s girl
Where can I find a woman like that

I play along with the charade
That doesn’t seem to be a reason to change
You know I feel so dirty when they start talkin’ cute
I wanna tell her that I love her, but the point is probably moot
Cos she’s watchin’ him with those eyes
And she’s lovin’ him with that body, I just know it
And he’s holding her in his arms late, late at night

You know I wish that I had Jesse’s girl
I wish that I had Jesse’s girl
Where can I find a woman like that
Like Jesse’s girl
I wish that I had Jesse’s girl
Where can I find a woman
Where can I find a woman like that

And I’m lookin’ in the mirror all the time
Wonderin’ what she don’t see in me
And I’ve been funny, I’ve been cool with the lines
Ain’t that the way love supposed to be
Tell me
Where can I find a woman like that

You know I wish that I had Jesse’s girl
I wish that I had Jesse’s girl
I want Jesse’s girl
Where can I find a woman like that
Like Jesse’s girl
I wish that I had Jesse’s girl
I want, I want Jesse’s girl

Copyright © 1981 Rick Springfield, RCA Records


First off, I include the copyright only out of sense of propriety, since it is beyond comprehension that anyone would steal these lyrics or falsely claim their ownership.

I also note that Mr. Springfield’s search for a woman like Jesse’s is very likely to be made more difficult by a past that includes having written lyrics like these. And while he tells us that he’s “been funny” and “cool with the lines” with Jesse’s unnamed girl, I have a feeling that a guy with a gift such as his for turning a phrase is more likely to have been Strange-funny than funny of the “haha,” charm-the-clogs-off-my-best-friend’s-girl sort. I have no difficulty in believing that Mr. Springfield spends lots of time looking in the mirror; unfortunately, whatever else Jesse’s girl does not see in him, she does not see a poet.

Not to put too fine a point on it, these lines -- “You know I feel so dirty when they start talkin’ cute, I wanna tell her that I love her, but the point is probably moot” -- are probably the worst and stupidest couplet in the history of the English language. These lines manage to be simultaneously illogical, silly, offensive, and voyeuristic. I will put those 25 words up against any other 25 words in the history musical lyrics as a measure of sheer idiocy.

As Yeats could have told Mr. Springfield, “Hearts are not had as a gift. But hearts are earned.” Unfortunately, I have a feeling that these two poets run in different circles.

Worth Doing Badly

If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly." -- G.K. Chesterton

I read with great appreciation last Friday's post, written by my good friend and skillful mainstay of this blog. I also noted with interest the perceptive posts of our thoughtful guests. It put me in mind of the following lines, written by Chesterton, almost presciently, in the years before the First World War, as though he could foresee the conflicts and the coming bloodshed of the world's bloodiest century.

The gates of heaven are lightly locked,
We do not guard our gold,
Men may uproot where worlds begin,
Or read the name of the nameless sin;
But if he fail or if he win
To no good man is told.

The men of the East may spell the stars,
And times and triumphs mark,
But the men signed of the cross of Christ
Go gaily in the dark. . .

The wise men know what wicked things
Are written on the sky,
They trim sad lamps,
they touch sad strings,
Hearing the heavy purple wings,
Where the forgotten seraph kings
Still plot how God shall die. . .

But you and all the kind of Christ
Are ignorant and brave,
And you have wars you hardly win
And souls you hardly save.

I tell you naught for your comfort,
Yea, naught for your desire,
Save that the sky grows darker yet
And the sea rises higher.

Night shall be thrice night over you,
And heaven an iron cope.
Do you have joy without a cause,
Yea, faith without a hope?


So the decision before us is to choose for which side to fight. We have no guarantee of success. There is no value in smug, phony rectitude. The promise, I suppose, is not in the winning, but in the fighting. As Mother Teresa said, "God does not ask us to be successful; God asks us to be faithful."

A Chesterton scholar spoke of the outline of a white horse, exposed long ago by the local folk, by plucking the turf from the white stone on an English hill. For many years, the people kept the White Horse visible by constant clearing, keeping the encroaching weeds and soil from covering the mythic figure.

"The Ballad of the White Horse" reminds us, she wrote:

"It is not the moral tradition that keeps us, it is we who keep (or do not keep) it.”

The End of Satire

“You can’t make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you’re doing is recording it.” -- Art Buchwald


Tomorrow is the birthday of hotel heiress Paris Hilton.

Recently, Miss Hilton was arrested for suspicion of petty theft in West Hollywood, California. “There was an incident, and she is alleged to have taken something,” sheriff's Deputy Steve Suzuki said immediately following the arrest.

A video posted on website of the television show “Celebrity Justice” shows Miss Hilton buying several magazines at a newsstand. After she received her change, she grabbed a video from the counter and walked off with it -- without paying. The video was the tape of Miss Hilton's famous sex tape, "One Night in Paris", the one showing her and paramour Rick Saloman, well, in flagrante delicto, so to speak.

Miss Hilton, who in 1999 received her GED, the high school equivalence diploma usually earned by adults who, through diligence and persistence, finally receive in middle age the diploma denied them in their youth by circumstances and misfortune, identifies herself as model, jewelry designer, recording artist, and actress, apparently based on her role in the reality TV show, The Simple Life. At the ripe age of 23, she has released an autobiography. She even has her own calendar. Paris and her family are reportedly worth $3.8 billion.

Besides the aforementioned Mr. Saloman, Hilton has dated, been engaged to, or otherwise spent extensive amounts of time with, actors Jason Shaw, Leonardo DiCaprio, Edward Furlong, Jared Leto, Simon Rex, Brandon Davis, Jamie Kennedy, musicians Rob Mills, Deryck Whibley, Nick Carter, and tennis player Mark Philippoussis and boxer Oscar De La Hoya. Miss Hilton turns 24 tomorrow.

Following her recent arrest, the newsstand employee, Gerry Castro, said that Hilton became enraged after spotting the sex video on sale at the newsstand. “She threw her 80 cents change at me and took the video and said, ‘I'm taking this and I'm not buying it,’” Castro told reporters. Castro then called police. “Nobody steals on my shift,” Castro said.

According to Paris' sister, Nicky, Castro overreacted. “She did something anyone would have done in this situation,” Nicky Hilton said. “It's not a big deal. Whatever - she doesn't care. I think this guy is trying to make it into a big deal, to get some publicity for his newsstand.”

Charges against Hilton were recently dropped for lack of evidence.

Not Too Soon To Tell

“I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, we must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.” -- Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail

“It is imperative to abandon the unconditional non-violent concept expounded by Dr. King and adopt the position that for every Martin Luther King who falls, 10 white racists will go down with him. There is no other way -- America understands no other language,” United Black Front chairman Lincoln Lynch --1968.

“Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. These are nice. Little Roquefort cheese morsels rolled in crushed nuts. Very tasty. Very subtle. It's the way the dry sackiness of the nuts tiptoes up against the dour savor of the cheese that is so nice, so subtle. Wonder what the Black Panthers eat here on the hors d'oeuvre trail? Do the Panthers like little Roquefort cheese morsels rolled in crushed nuts this way, and asparagus tips in mayonnaise dabs, and meatballs petites au Coq Hardi, all of which are at this very moment being offered to them on gadrooned silver platters by maids in black uniforms with hand-ironed white aprons . . . The butler will bring them their drinks . . . Deny it if you wish to, but such are the pensées métaphysiques that rush through one's head on these Radical Chic evenings just now in New York. For example, does that huge Black Panther there in the hallway, the one shaking hands with Felicia Bernstein herself, the one with the black leather coat and the dark glasses and the absolutely unbelievable Afro, Fuzzy-Wuzzy-scale, in fact—is he, a Black Panther, going on to pick up a Roquefort cheese morsel rolled in crushed nuts from off the tray, from a maid in uniform, and just pop it down the gullet without so much as missing a beat of Felicia's perfect Mary Astor voice . . .” -- Tom Wolfe, Radical Chic


Following Martin Luther King’s murder in Memphis in April 1968, and fueled by the riots that followed across the nation -- in Detroit, Chicago, Washington, D.C. -- many gave up on King’s “constructive non-violence” in favor of a different tack. For example, in 1970, composer, maestro, and painfully-relevant leftist Leonard Bernstein and his wife, Felicia, threw a fundraising party, what we would now call a “meet-and-greet,” at their Park Avenue duplex apartment for the radical Black Panthers. Attendees were reminded that donations to the Panthers were non-deductible; generous donations with no tax advantage were a measure of the donor’s sincerity and dedication to the cause. It was a sign of those raucous times.

This division within a division highlighted a key crossroads in American civil rights history. The rednecks had to retreat or entrench. Those within the civil rights movement had to determine whether they would stay King’s course, or choose the violent route. Those who had previously remained aloof from the civil rights conflicts, or had considered it an intramural conflict between leftist rabble-rousers and southern rednecks, saw in the widening, violent conflict a need to enter the debate, at least in political terms.

When asked by Richard Nixon in the 1970’s to describe the impact of the French Revolution, Red Chinese Premier Chou En Lai replied, “It is too soon to tell.” But perhaps it is not too soon to tell the effect of Martin Luther King on the American civil rights landscape.

As it turned out, the racist rednecks turned tail, like the cowards they always were, and today are viewed as almost quaint and pathetic caricatured cranks, relegated to afternoon appearances on Jerry Springer, where they react with shocked, semi-toothless silence when confronted with a daughter who is dating a young black man -- an unsanitized, dirty-fingernailed version of “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.”

The Panthers chose fear and the threat of violence, and tried to settle scores and give vent to their hatred and anger. Some died trying, for a while, blowing up mailboxes or robbing banks or staging courthouse hostage scenes with sawed-off shotguns duct-taped to judges' necks. Others wrote Soul on Ice screeds or rotten poetry. Some now give speeches for $15,000 a crack or are in political office or may even be settling into tenured positions, or have turned to running corporate shakedowns, to the extent they can get the time of day from Sixties-stunned reporters.

The Radical Chic, of course, we always have with us.

Those who picked up the flag from King -- the Ralph David Abernathys, the Hosea Williamses -- are mostly gone now, or old and enfeebled. To their eternal credit, they set aside disappointment and anger, and chose a principled continuation of King’s most basic philosophy, even in the face of slurs from former allies and proteges.

And the bulk of the American public -- black and white -- put aside personal disputes over their own hardships and affronts, and paused in their debates over King’s personal flaws -- his plagiarism, his marital infidelities, his association with radicals and communists -- long enough to debate in the mainstream of the political process. They made common cause, in a broad sense, in order to have an equitable peace. They have pursued, over the intervening 35 years, a generally peaceful course. It has been, and is today, by no means perfect, but we, as a society, have broadly common goals, and have a degree of racial harmony that would have seemed very unlikely in 1968. By any reasonable, objective standard, it is admirable progress less than four decades after colored-only water fountains.

In the end, these last two groups -- not the bigots, or the radicals, or the radical chic -- most clearly and intuitively understood King’s importance and greatness, and the monumental message behind his faith in the American system. What they accepted, and based their consensus on, was what King was saying all along: that the ideals and the inherent, transcendent moral strength and goodness of the American system is powerful enough to join disparate political elements of goodwill in order to acknowlege the essential value of each human life and to dwarf and render impotent powerful forces of self-interest, raw ideology, and hate.

That, in black and white, is why King really matters.

A Broken Record

Honor isn't about making the right choices.
It's about dealing with the consequences.
-- Midori Koto

Well, here I go again.

It was recently revealed that conservative columnist and television show host Armstrong Williams took a $240,000 fee from the Department of Education to run an ad on his program supporting President Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” program and to write a syndicated column supporting the initiative.

In an open letter published Monday, Williams apologized for his conduct and promised it would never happen again. He pointed out, however, that he had long supported such school choice initiatives and that his support for this program was co-incidental with the fee paid to him by the Education Department.

He also indicated that he accepts “full responsibility” for his lack of good judgment, and that he is “paying the price” for his actions. “Tribune Media,” he writes, “has cancelled my column.”

Of course, having a well-deserved beating forced upon you is not the same as taking “full responsibility.” But Williams at least is honest enough to recognize that his actions breached whatever shards are still standing in the increasingly oxymoronic “wall of journalistic ethics.” Williams sees that his behavior compromises his credibility as a journalist.

The Wall Street Journal pointed out again recently that, on the other side of the political street, two prominent liberal bloggers, Daily Kos and MyDD, took monthly payments from Howard Dean’s campaign in the months prior to Dean’s embarrassingly puerile self-immolation in the Democratic primaries. This fact -- the payoffs, not the self-immolation -- has been substantially overlooked in the media.

In any event, these incidents again prove two things: (1) the improper behavior exists on both sides of the spectrum; and (2) neither side is willing to be truly accountable.

Williams will apologize and he won’t cry "unfair treatment," but apparently will not do much else. He certainly won’t return a quarter of a million dollars. He may be sorry about all this, but he’s not that sorry.

The two Dean bloggers are even worse than Williams. They, like many liberals today, believe they are beyond good and evil -- their cause is just -- and they need not even acknowledge that they did anything that might have compromised journalistic standards.

They argue, instead, that their hands are clean because they disclosed their financial ties to the Dean campaign to their readers. In other words, everybody knew they were bought and paid for. You know, a sort of red light in the cyber-window.

They also try to distinguish their own hired gun status from Williams’ by arguing that the money they took was not taxpayer money, as was the money paid to Williams. That, of course, is a stinking red herring, a distinction without a difference, inasmuch as the key issue here is journalistic integrity and not the appropriate use of tax dollars.

No one -- in this case, neither Armstrong nor the Dean blog mouthpieces -- is willing to do much to illustrate that they are serious about taking responsibility for improper behavior. Williams will only apologize; the Dean folks won’t even do that. This unwillingness to take the consequences is probably predictable in an age much more familiar with Hari Krishen than hari-kari.

The Eye Winks

After reading this space last Friday, CBS Chief Leslie Moonves today broke silence and “took responsibility” for CBS’ discredited story on President Bush’s national guard service by firing three CBS news executives and the story’s producer. Those directly responsible for the airing of the piece -- CBS anchorman Dan Rather, CBS News President Andrew Heyward, and Moonves himself -- all remain in their respective positions without official censure or consequence.

Some questioned Moonves’ failure to hold Rather, Heyward or himself accountable for the false national guard story and particuarly for his unwillingness to acknowledge the longstanding anti-Republican political motivations of CBS, Rather and others in breaking the unsubstantiated story. But Moonves denied such bias and sloughed off the criticism, saying, “What kind of boss would I be if I started to blame other people for every tiny little thing that goes wrong? Who do I look like, Joe McCarthy? Warren G. Harding? Herbert Hoover? William Casey? Lee Atwater? Newt Gingrich? Richard Nixon?”

But Moonves did acknowledge that the entire controversy “raises questions about accountability at CBS News - questions that will have to be addressed both by Andrew Heyward and me. We intend to do so.”

Related to this, sources inside CBS indicate that Heyward and Moonves plan to terminate at least two cafeteria workers and a night watchman in a second phase of firings to follow the independent investigation. “Almost no one is completely innocent,” Moonves said, as he left CBS offices today on his way to his bi-monthly retreat at his Bahamian winter home. “If people think that they’ll be able to hide behind their aprons or brooms, for example, to avoid responsibility for this, they’ve got another think coming.”

News of the firings came as reports surfaced that Rather had been held off Monday’s CBS Evening News broadcast as punishment for his role in the Bush attack piece. CBS denied the story, saying that Rather's absence was attributable to the fact that Rather was too exhausted from his trip to Indonesia to handle the broadcast. Rather had been in Asia reporting on the recent deadly tsunami, during which time, internal CBS news leaks reveal, he received documents from refugees indicating that President Bush, while AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard in 1972, took part in underwater nuclear tests in the Pacific basin region that caused microscopic cracks in the earth's geological plates and led to the recent tsunami.

Meanwhile, following the release of the independent commission's report and the harsh criticism focused on his news division’s ties to the Kerry campaign , Moonves appears aware of the treacherous line he must walk to prove the extent of his dissatisfaction: he must fire as many underlings as possible, without actually ridding the company of those most responsible for creating and perpetuating the culture that engendered the irresponsible, politically-motivated attacks that led to the crisis in the first place.

“Let me repeat,” said Moonves, as he climbed into the back seat of his company limousine: “Nobody is safe here.”

I Feel So Responsible

The Senate Judiciary Committee took up yesterday the nomination of White House Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales as U.S. Attorney General. With this action, the Judiciary Committee again gives the American public an opportunity to see craven grandstanding and hypocrisy at its worst.

In one such example, Committee Democrats apparently even considered resurrecting at the committee hearing the photos and other images related to the torture of Abu Ghraib.

Aside from the genuine issues raised by these claims of torture (i.e., e.g., whether the torture was as widespread as claimed, whether certain actions are really even torture, whether Gonzales really tried to shield such actions from being disclosed) and the Democrats' willingness to make political gains based on empty but inflammatory posturing, the issue of the torture of terrorists and terrorist suspects brings before us again the concept of “responsibility,” more specifically, what it means to “take responsibility” for something, whether in the personal or political context.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfield indicated last spring that he took responsibility for the torture. Does he really? Sure, his blame taking might have resulted in a loss of personal stature and perhaps some political fallout for the president, but what did it cost him? What actions accompanied his “taking responsibility”?

The Democrats, of course, jumped all over Rumsfield's essentially painless mea culpa as a hollow gesture. But it in no way absolves them and their consort of leftwing phonies (the ACLU, Move-On.org, e.g.) for their own actions or inactions when their side has been faced with similar allegations.

For example, those screaming about the hollowness of Rumsfield’s actions in “accepting blame” related to Abu Ghraib were completely silent when Janet Reno made the decision to incinerate the Cranks of Waco. Certainly she bore much more direct responsibility for the deaths of the Texas holdouts than Rumsfield does for the torture of POWs in Iraq. And while she shed tears, allegedly, over the literal immolation of the Branch Davidians, she certainly took no action that imposed any cost on herself or her Department, leading to the following clerihew:

Waco Janet Reno
Began the Great Inferno
Took responsibility
But stayed with us eternally

Perhaps there is no real solution to this tendency to such empty and painfree sorrow. But it is not surprising that most sensible people smell hypocrisy when politicians and officials claim to “take responsibility” without paying any real price. I, for one, would take such blame-grasping more seriously if it were accompanied by some of the political hari-kari we see on occasion in Japan’s political arena.

Until politicians get the stomach for such meaningful political shiv diving, maybe the process as a whole, and the American public’s cynicism quotient in particular, would benefit from a little less empty rhetoric. Officials would earn more respect if they would stop using phrases like "taking responsibility" unless they actually mean it -- and are prepared to act as if they do.

The Fullness of Time and Other Strangers

Every miracle can be explained -- after the event. Not because the miracle is no miracle, but because explanation is explanation. -- Franz Rosenzweig

A man who has faith must be prepared not only to be a martyr, but to be a fool. -- G.K. Chesterton


Some years ago, not long after I returned to the Catholic Church, a random thought struck me about the notion of the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. If Christ is truly present in every tabernacle of every Catholic church (perhaps some churches in the Los Angeles, Richmond, Albany, and St. Paul dioceses excluded) in the world, as the Catholic Church maintains, then that fact has some fascinating implications.

For example, if true, and if believed by Catholics, why would such Catholics ever want to be anywhere else? Why not simply hang around church all the time? Shouldn’t you try to be with that Presence around the clock? Why drop in for just an hour or so once a week?

I never really came up with a very good answer, other than that such spiritual stalking -- I won’t call it worship -- doesn’t seem very practical, whatever its transcendent mercies. We get hungry and sleepy. We have things to do. We have to work and live and die. We cannot just hang around church all day.

These things that we all have to do -- these things that keep us out of church, that keep us from doing, if what the Church teaches is true, what everyone should really want to do -- are necessities. They come with the turf of human existence.

The God that gave us the Real Presence -- an amazing thought in itself -- also created us. He knew we needed to do the very things that keep us away from the eternal Presence. He must have intended us to do these other things, then, even if they keep us away from the Real Presence for a week at a time, because we are living in the real world, and God put us here. And yet, the Real Presence is still there, in every Catholic church in the world.

I would not have created things this way. I would not have created a sacrament that way. God’s way is too internally inconsistent. And yet somehow, his way is better and seems more real, more improbable but still completely true, even if it does not appear to make sense.

This idea of a Genuine Plan, of a Design, that seems internally inconsistent, but is true, came back to me as I considered Christmas.

Christmas is hard for our age to grasp. Increasingly, it has become simply a commercial buildup to one bacchanalian day that fits into a smear of celebrations -- stretching from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day -- that most people call “The Holidays,” presumably to blunt its Eurocentric poison and give them an excuse to eat Kwanza chicken.

However, because most of ostensibly Christian society has become completely divorced from the idea of a Church year, with its seasons and feasts, Christmas is just one day in the string. It is like a rose garden in the middle of the desert -- we come across it, maybe enjoy the looks of it, smell the roses a little, and slip back into the desert, taking with us a few good memories, but likely as alienated as ever.

Christ’s birth was a long time ago. It came at a rough time in human history. It came to a scratched out part of the world, and happened to those who, looked upon objectively, were not the consequential people of their day. It was an improbable start for what became a very big idea. Like the demand for constant worship implied by the Real Presence, the Christmas story seems unlikely, even crazy.

As we face Christmas morning, we are left considering something that -- like Christ in the tabernacle -- makes little sense and seems to imply impossible devotion. And like the notion of the power of the Real Presence, believers are left with many questions.

But at bottom, rests a rock-hard, stark proposition: that at one particular moment in time, and no other, at a time chosen for reasons that make no sense to me nor, as near as I can tell, to anyone else, God chose to enter human history to embark on a mission to save every soul, from the beginning of the world to the end of time.

Like so much else about God, it is just crazy enough to be true.