Category: Blithe Spirit
Teddy Kennedy sincerely missed
Two mistakes by an Alinskyite
Bill Droel’s Chi Cath News column “The Working Catholic: Church once heavily interested in labor relations” has an egregious error, explainable perhaps by his working at a far south suburban community college:
Sunday, Sept. 5, 2010 at 10:30 a.m. . . . the National Center for the Laity sponsors a Labor Weekend Mass. The place is St. Catherine/St. Lucy (38 N. Austin, Oak Park; just north of Madison Ave.)
Avenue? The street of advertising dreams in New Yawk? Madison Street, Droel, before you have your columnist’s license revoked.
Only slightly more egregious is his talking up an organizing effort in his immediately previous [headline-free] column, in which he has this remarkable item:
The Industrial Areas Foundation (637 S. Dearborn St. #100, Chicago, IL 60605; http://www.10percentisenough.org), a 70-year-old national network of community organizations, has launched a “Ten Percent Is Enough” anti-usury campaign. IAF’s material, which refers to religious tradition, suggests that they understand legal victories and legislative changes are insufficient. A solution must include moral change.
Why remarkable? Because it identifies the IAF sans reference to its founder and inspiration and guiding light for its first 32 years, the one and only radical organizer Saul Alinsky! Now why would Droel omit such an important piece of information?
I think he’s trying to fool us, which is naughty indeed.
Advice for Blago prosecutors
Next time no black female jurors.
Maybe no seasoned citizens who ride CTA or RTA either. Leave my wife and me off it!
Thou shalt not jar
Today’s liberty quote on politically correct speech:
“No one understood better than Stalin that the true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade, but to produce a uniform pattern of public utterance in which the first trace of unorthodox thought immediately reveals itself as a jarring dissonance.”
Get enough of those “thou shall not say” words and phrases into the Lexicon of Forbidden Words, and it’s off to the races for fascists and other so-called liberals, who are dying to catch you in the act and/or take you to court.
As in (expletive) you, the man wrote, you gosh-darn (expletive).
Or: It’s wrong to call an African-American a (expletive) or a homosexual person a (expletive).
You may think this, but you can’t write it. You can’t even deprecate the use of such words without tiptoeing through the minefields of liberal, now mainstream, orthodoxy.
Get enough of those “thou shall not say” words and phrases into the reigning orthodoxy, and it’s off to the races for fascists and other so-called liberals.
(expletive) you, the man wrote, you gosh-darn (expletive).
or: It’s wrong to call an African-American a (expletive) or a homosexual person a (expletive).
That’s something I believe but can’t write. I can’t even deprecate the use of such words without tiptoeing through the minefields of liberal, now mainstream, orthodoxy.
These two French guys
Plucky Pierre, after Sox lost in 11th, won in 10th, same night:
A split is not what we wanted, but we battled back, [left-fielder Juan] Pierre said. You dont have time for doubts after Kansas City tied it. Youve just got to play. Thats the kind of mentality we have.
The two teams played 21 innings, lasting 6 hours, 31 minutes, plus a five-minute delay in the second game when a bank of lights went out.
Some guy named Betancourt was bad news for Sox. Pierre, Betancourt — I didn’t know they played baseball in France.
Congressman seeks help
[News Alert had this]
Shorebank helped by friends
The bailout has been controversial. Senior Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett served on a Chicago civic organization with a director of the bank, and President Obama himself has singled out the bank for praise in lending to low-income communities.
But the bank has made its share of bad bets, and some of the Wall Street firms that have given money have said they’ve received political pressure to contribute to the bailout of a business that under normal circumstances would have been left to fail
Can this be crony capitalism?
We had our principles
Tom Roeser on conventional liberal advice to candidates, according to which :
the way to go is pro-abort, pro-gay rights (preferably gay marriage), hold on to the size of state government that exists now, agree to the “inevitability of income tax increases” and bow obsequies to the gifted leadership of the Madigans.
I will say this: it is definitely the authentic voice of 98% of those reporters in the mass media. You have a couple of beers with most newspaper and TV reporters and you’ll hear the same opinions . . . . Frankly, they’re the same observations reporters expressed to me years ago when I was a press secretary. No change since then.
Yes, yes, and double yes. We Chi Daily News reporters and editors trooped into the Corona basement for ham off the bone the day after McGovern won the Dem nomination in ’72, grinning to beat all.
“You’re all happy your man won,” the grizzled Italiano basement cafeteria manager said, and he was right, of course.
And that left-liberal tilting — let no man call it bias — endures to this day, among the very same people, except for the occasional maverick who whispers support for a fallen-away liberal like myself or the veteran police reporter regaling a reunion with tales of murder on the South Side (chuckles and smiles) but (uh-oh) quoting a psychologist he knew who theorized that black people just have shorter fuses. (Groans and disapproving looks.)
Plus ça change, as Roeser says, though not in so many words.
Superior folks talk down
James Taranto at Wall St. Jnl Best of the Web notes that “the liberal elite” puts itrs “ugly attitudes . . . on display” at moments like this, when erstwhile White Houser James Carville says publicly that “there are a lot of stupid people out there” who think Obama is a muslim. It’s a pattern, says T., noting that the Pew Center considered the matter worth polling.
Thus, at a time when the vast majority of voters oppose the president’s policies for any number of legitimate reasons, the media’s self-superior dwelling on “stupid” or “kooky” Obama critics tends to marginalize Obama, not his opponents. Obama’s presidency is being consumed in a bonfire of liberal vanities.
That’s very good, that bonfire stuff. Will have to read Tom Wolfe’s book.
