Day: August 28, 2009

Zorn on Roeser after Roeser on The Dick

Eric Zorn takes issue with Tom Roeser, who called U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin “the Dick” (citing as precedent “the Donald” for D. Trump) and complained that Durbin has no townhall meetings about health care/insurance/whatever-the-latest-name and that reporters don’t press him on sensitive issues.

Because, you know, how else could one possibly gauge public sentiment or consider the various sides of the debate other than to participate in a spectacle?

And [Roeser] wants an immediate disquisition from Durbin about the latest developments in the CIA/torture issue.

Oh? It’s not good for D. to meet people in unscripted venues and reporters’ looking for comment from a senator is seeking a disquisition?

Not so, Eric Z.  However unbridled the adjectives, adverbs, metaphors, and flourishes Roeser employs, it’s not that easy to deal with the substance therein contained. 

When does “the Dick” — upper case and definite article take it out of the realm of the out-and-out contumelious — meet with citizens and take their questions?

And why wouldn’t the mediums ask him about the CIA and torture?  Look, he might come up with something good, as when he went off in 2005 about Nazis, Soviets in Gulags, Pol Pot and our Guantanamo guards. 

He did apologize for it, yes, and would rather not have to do that again.  So maybe that’s why he won’t do the free-flowing-exchange thing this time around: he’s afraid he’ll say something off the wall.  But his reason for not doing it is nasty and dismissive of the people who show up:

These folks are there about YouTube. That’s why they’re showing up. They want to get a little clip on YouTube in an effort to disrupt a town meeting and to send the congressman running for his car.

How does The Dick know this, who is on YouTube with that 2005 Senate speech, by the way?  He just knows, that’s all.

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Oh, those Kennedy Catholics

Here’s an item of Kennedy Catholic history I’d forgotten about, when one of the wives refused to be cast aside:
Some say the final sunset on the Kennedy name within Catholic halls of power was the Vatican’s decision [revealed] in 2007 to overturn the annulment of the first marriage of former U.S. Rep. Joe Kennedy, the eldest son of Robert Kennedy. The successful appeal by Joe Kennedy’s ex-wife Sheila Rauch, an Episcopalian, was another blow for the Kennedy image in Catholic circles.
Sheila Rauch Kennedy wrote a book about Joe’s “aggressive pursuit of the annulment” that “helped to end his political career.” 
“When you try to defend your marriage, the army that comes after you is pretty brutal,” Rauch Kennedy said [in June of 2007]. “You’re accused of being a vindictive ex-wife, an alcoholic bigot, an idiot.”
The decision was two years old at the time, but she was just hearing of it, as she heard five years after the fact that her marriage had been annulled. 
The annulment had been granted in secrecy . . . after the couple’s 1991 no-fault civil divorce. Rauch found out about the de-sanctification of their marriage only in 1996, after Kennedy had been wedded to his former Congressional aide, Beth Kelly, for three years.
She and Joe K. had twin sons, ipso facto bastardized in the eyes of the church by the secret annullment.  Joe later went into business with Hugo Chavez, marketing heating oil to poor people at cut rates. 
 
This fit in with the Kennedy schtick as exemplified by the career of the late Ted, who is praised by the immensely ready-for-quotation James Martin:
“He is a complicated figure,” says Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest and the culture editor of the Catholic magazine America. “Catholics on the right are critical because of his stance on abortion. Catholics on the left celebrate his achievements on immigration, fighting poverty and other legislation that is a virtual mirror of the Church’s social teaching.”
The virtual-mirror part is highly debatable, of course.  For one thing, Ted the lionized was a firm believer in Dorothy’s Day (ironic) “holy mother the state” and promoted statism strenuously.  Holy Mother the Church was something else, but it seems you have to be “on the right” to make that an issue.  “Complicated figure,” right.  If that’s not priestly b.s., I never heard it.
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