Month: January 2008

Hillary, self-unmasked

This from the subscription-only Wall St. Journal “Political Diary” gives me a chill:

What a treat for viewers who tuned into the South Carolina debate on Monday night and caught a glimpse of the real Hillary Clinton. Whether it was calculated or not, the senator cleared up any doubts that, for her, winning the presidency is about revenge. Forget about veiled threats. She’s already taking names.

It’s not always clear who Hillary thinks she owes a kick in the pants to. But it’s very clear that, should she get into the White House, baby, it’s payback time. “They’ve been after me for 16 years, and much to their dismay, I am still here. And I intend to be still here when that election comes around and we win in November 2008,” she declaimed.

Whoever “they” are, you certainly don’t want to be one of “them” come January 20, 2009. For instance, apparently men and/or employers can expect the boom to be lowered for numerous injustices they have wrought. “We obviously still have problems of gender equality. You know, equal pay is not yet equal,” she warned her audience.

Also in line for punishment are those who humiliated Mrs. Clinton during her first attempt to administer a heavy dose of government-run health care whether Americans wanted it or not. “I think that the whole idea of universal health care is such a core Democratic principle that I am willing to go to the mat for it. I’ve been there before. I will be there again. I am not giving in; I am not giving up…. I am not running for president to put Band- Aids on our problems. I want to get to universal health care for every single American.” Get in her way and you’re toast.

At least she made no effort to hide her hostility, which apparently emerges from being a victim for so long. “I’m used to taking the incoming fire. I’ve taken it for 16 years.” And now, she let us know on Monday, the tables are about to turn. Be afraid.
— Mary Anastasia O’Grady

This fits with my contention that Hillary is the devil we know, Barack O. the one we don’t know, except that in this case the one we know is so bad I’d be willing to risk the other if I had to choose — which, God willing, I won’t.

 

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Lying down on back and kicking feet in air

The LA Times editor who got the ax the other day became an editor gone wild about it:

“The current system relies too heavily on voodoo economics and not enough on the creativity and resourcefulness of journalists,” O’Shea said in a farewell note to his staff that said flatly he had been fired. Too often, he said, “we’ve been dismissed as budgetary adolescents who can’t be trusted to conserve our resources.”

When quite the opposite is true?  Or are they guilty of wanting to make money without consideration of the market?

It is “simply stupid,” [Jim] O’Shea [the editor] wrote, to consider closing foreign bureaus so the Times can afford to cover the presidential campaign and the Beijing Olympics. As for Tribune Co.’s new owner, real estate financier Sam Zell, O’Shea said, “When Sam Zell understands how asinine the current budgetary system is, he will change it for the better, because he is a smart businessman.”

Zell will take business advice from O’Shea?  Please.  Instead, elementary economics from the publisher who fired him:

In an interview yesterday, [David] Hiller said the rupture came over O’Shea’s demand for a modest increase in newsroom spending, but that this was just one among many disagreements.

“It was a regrettable and unnecessary line drawn in the sand,” Hiller said. “In the environment all newspapers are facing, it is wildly unrealistic to consider a budget increase at a time when revenue is falling.”

What?  You don’t spend more when taking in less?  What sort of mentality is that?

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Newspapers just fade away

Reader Margaret in response to my saying I go to Instapundit, Drudge, and one or two other ‘net sources “rather than my old reliable morning Trib or Sun-Times” — it’s how her household dropped Chi Trib:

Ditto — the Internet is always timely, self-correcting and if one is choosy about which blogs to visit, not Left-leaning or outright lying by shading the wording, delivery, or amount of news provided. 
 
During the 2000 election, when Drudge was providing links to the AP and Reuters, my husband and I would notice that the exculpatory last paragraph that both had to add to their sensational and twisted main stories (in order to maintain their claim to full coverage of events) would be copied at the Tribune with the last paragraph missing.  Regular readers did not get the part that unraveled the whole piece of slanted journalism. 
 
It happened over and over until we decided that we couldn’t support the paper any more.  The faster they die, the happier I’ll be.  Of course, then we will be a society depending on two entirely different sources of information, conservative vs progressive blogs.  If we are divided now, think of what that will mean?
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Freedom to be nice?

Here’s the crux of the matter, in a Dutch official’s warning about anti-Muslim film whose showing is expected to cause rioting:

‘It is difficult to anticipate the content of the film, but freedom of expression doesn’t mean the right to offend,’ said Maxime Verhagen, the Foreign Minister, who was in Madrid to attend the Alliance of Civilisations, an international forum aimed at reducing tensions between the Islamic world and the West.

How so?  Because freedom to offend is at the heart of free speech.  Rubber does not meet the road when no one’s offended, no one objects, only when someone objects.  Else it’s meaningless.

If he had talked up “fire” in a crowded theater, there would at least have been arguments to make.

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There’s hope for us all

A fellow in England got put in jail for saying this at a pro-hunting rally and spent five years getting the charge thrown out, in the end receiving 2G lbs (money) for his trouble:

“If you are a black, vegetarian, Muslim, asylum-seeking, one-legged lesbian lorry driver, I want the same rights as you.”

So.  It pays to be persistent, even with fanatical hate-crime believers.

What else did that day see?

Given Adolfo Nicolás’ almost five decades of ministry in Japan — and their effect on his outlook — the day since his election has seen the 30th “Black Pope” being repeatedly compared to the 28th.

Yes.  That would be the newly elected “general” of the Jesuits.  Like the 28th, Pedro Arrupe, he spent much time in Japan.  Much more is noted by blogger Rocco Palmo, a much published Philadelphian who writes from America for The Tablet, the international Catholic weekly published in London.

Fine.  But I expect there’s another likeness, that as a Jesuit novice blogged a year or so ago, in his first half year as a Jesuit, a Jesuit general “literally has his finger on the pulse of the planet.”

He doesn’t, of course, and I entered into dialog with the young man in order to remind him gently that he may literally has his finger on the pulse of a novice but not of the planet.  Alas, by the time he cut me off from comment on his blog, he had made it brutally clear that he had no idea of the meaning of “literal,” nor any sense of its being the opposite of “figurative.”

He’d come to the Society fresh off a respectable state university campus and had apparently met usual Jesuit requirements as to gray matter and literacy but nonetheless thought the Jesuit general took global pulses.

  This I found more disheartening than if he’d denied the Trinity, which he may yet do, who knows?

 

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He will help us find ourselves?

New head man for Jesuits has non-Western tilt?

It’s been 46 years since Father Adolfo Nicolás first traveled to Japan as a missionary from Spain. His has been a long conversation, first in Japan, but also in Korea and more recently in the Philippines. It’s left him convinced that the West does not have a monopoly on meaning and spirituality, and can learn a lot from the experience of Asian cultures.

He’s Spanish-born Adolfo Nicolas,

ordained in Tokyo in 1967 and spent most of his career in the Far East – directing a pastoral institute in Manila, in the Philippines, and holding leadership positions in Japan.

Let us not rush to judgment, but let us confess our bias toward Western values and suspicion of those who lean East.

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Martha, Martha . . .

This book-writing lady did a bad thing, per U. of N. Carolina-Greensboro prof David A. Cook, in a letter to Times [of London] Literary Supplement 1/4/08:

In 1972, I was preparing to write an essay on [John Cowper] Powys’s Owen Glendower (1940), a two-volume, massively researched novel of the Welsh prince’s revolt against Henry IV, and I learned that a historical novel on the same subject had been published that year [1972] by G. P. Putnams.

This was Martha Rofheart’s Fortune Made His Sword (published in 1973 in the UK as Cry God for Harry). I quickly got my hands on a copy to see if Powys and Rofheart had used the same sources, but what I discovered was page after page of verbatim plagiarism. This was no accident: I counted more than a hundred such instances, extending over about 150 pages in the middle of the novel.

Martha gets a respectful hearing elsewhere however, especially at Randolph-Macon College, where an Honors 141 student observed that her 1976 novel The Alexandrian was “fun to read,” being “told from Cleopatra’s voice” and thus “interesting.”  This novel also “allowed the readers to feel like they were Cleopatra.”

That’s nothing.  Writing Fortune Made His Sword made her feel like John Cowper Powys.  It must have been a wonderful experience.

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