Tone it down, says Oak Park Dem

Oak Park’s Dem committeeman and one of its state senators, the astute and up-and-coming Don Harmon, warns against harsh words and the like among Dems in this primary:

The nominating process has almost run its course. While I believe and hope that Sen. Obama will be our party’s nominee, I would certainly support Sen. Clinton, were she nominated. More so than ever before, we Democrats need to rally ’round our nominee, and do so in a manner that engages independent voters and Republicans troubled by the course of current events. Fights within families often include the most hurtful words, but just as often lead to healing. In a campaign where words matter, let us all begin the healing by choosing our words more carefully.

He speaks for a lot of Dem professionals, who are worried about divisions in the party that will give the lie to their candidate’s bringing an end to divisions in the country.

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First, no metal, then not enough mettle

The good news was, the metal detectors worked at Proviso East last night.  The man behind it, among many milling about on both sides of it, kept calling out to us on the other side, “Single file, folks.  Single file.”  And hats off, not to anyone in particular but to the goal of civility in closed places.

The bad news was, the Huskies lost decisively to the Dolphins of Whitney Young.  . . . .

More more more at my Wednesday Journal blog . . .

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Wuxtry. J-dean beats rap. He got the gist of it.

The Medill-Northwestern journalism dean is off the hook because he can’t be proven wrong.  He

did not violate any policies in using unattributed quotes in alumni magazine columns last year.

Provost Dan Linzer said that he concurred . . . that Dean John Lavine had accurately captured the essence of student sentiments about courses in his column, “Letter from the Dean.” [Italics added]

He used quotation marks, right?  To capture the essence?  Winking as he did so?  The quoted statements

cannot be [verified, but] sufficient material does exist . . . to demonstrate that sentiments similar to the quotes had been expressed by students,” . . . .  [Italics added again]


This was pretty truthy stuff?

“The author of a [column] like the “Letter from the Dean” could not reasonably be expected [to] have retained for a year the notes or e-mails documenting the sources of quotations used in the letter.”


But The Daily Northwestern asked every student, none of whom vouched for the blind-quote affirmations of the dean’s class:

[Columnist] Spett sought out the 29 students in the class Lavine had described and, he said, asked all of them if they had made the statements in Lavine’s story. All said no.


But the dean is not guilty, as it were of a criminal charge, when the matter was much more a civil complaint, of which he’s supposed to be innocent — a regular Caesar’s wife, being a teacher of mass communicators in a prestige-heavy institution.


Are we henceforward to look on Medill grads’ work as crafted so that we can’t pin a thing on the writer?  He’s in the clear, is he?  No matter the “caveat lector” that has to accompany his writing?

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Barack O. sox it to blax — would hit home in Oak Park

B.O. made like Bill C.:

On the campaign trail, Democratic front-runner Sen. Barack Obama . . . drew wild cheers as he told a mostly African-American crowd that parents need to shape up, turn off the TV, help their kids with their homework and stop letting them grow fat eating Popeyes chicken for breakfast.

“It’s not good enough for you to say to your child, ‘Do good in school,’ and then when that child comes home, you got the TV set on, you got the radio on, you don’t check their homework, there is not a book in the house, you’ve got the video game playing,” said Obama while in Beaumont, in southeast Texas.

“So turn off the TV set, put the video game away. Buy a little desk or put that child by the kitchen table. Watch them do their homework. If they don’t know how to do it, give them help. If you don’t know how to do it, call the teacher. Make them go to bed at a reasonable time. Keep them off the streets. Give ‘ em some breakfast.  . . .


His Sister Souljah moment?


He’d go big in Oak Park (IL), where getting black kids to score as high as whites is a big issue.  Nothing in this Lynn Sweet column about catching up to whites, however.  Good.  It can’t be the issue, though it’s ballyhooed as such in OP, where “the gap” has magic.


OK.  Say you want blacks not just to score better but (explicitly) as well as whites.  OK.  Get them to act white.  Let every black parent post on the bathroom mirror the new slogan for black betterment, “ACT WHITE.”  That should do it.


If the black p. says f—– it, as many will, then so be it.  We whites can’t say we didn’t try.  Black is beautiful anyway, so what’s the problem?

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That antic-ridden marriage

You can’t beat letters to the editor for revealing the pulse of the nation.  As noted here yesterday, in epistola veritas (see below).  At issue is a column in Wednesday Journal of Oak Park & River Forest which referred to Hillary Clinton as a cuckquean, which is female for cuckold.

So came this protest arguing that it was “misogynistic” to define Clinton’s political success “by the unfortunate and inappropriate sexual antics of her husband.”

Here’s where the national pulse is revealed (in part), in saying that tomcatting around is “unfortunate and inappropriate” and falls not under adultery — which by definition doth cuckold or cuckquean make — but under “antics.”

The writer adds, “Had Sen. Clinton been a man, this would never have been written.”  Of course not.  He would have been not a cuckquean but a cuckold.

Meanwhile, she’s a heroine to women?  Putting up with that schmuck all those years?  How so?

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Scratch a liberal and . . . what?

In vino veritas, said the old Romans, accepting strong drink as truth serum.  Now it’s In epistola veritas, as in letter to editor during a political campaign.  No?  What if you’re an Oak Parker (IL) indignant at what a columnist said about her favorite female candidate?  I discuss it in my Wednesday Journal blog:

The fire-Hubbuch movement is under way. Good. Throw him and his out on the street. It’s in this letter from an Oak Park woman whose attention he caught with a column in which he mentions Hillary as “the most famous cuckquean in American history,” explaining . . . that this is “a woman whose husband strays” from connubial obligations.

She is left holding the shame bag, as it were. 

But fire Hubbuch?  What’s that about? 

You should have pulled this [column] or excised part of it. Remarks regarding Hillary Clinton’s qualifications for president were derogatory to all women.

So.  Douse the column, says the writer, warming to the task of advising the editor.  She closes:

Hubbuch lacks intelligence and sensitivity. You have control over his employment.

There it is.  Did you get that?  She wants him not only edited but dismissed.  In epistola veritas.  She’s a Hillary supporter, a Democrat, indeed a former Cook County judge, slated by Chi Ald. Ed Burke’s committee some time back.  She’s a liberal.

BUT WHEN THE COLUMNIST WRITES WHAT SHE DOESN’T LIKE, SHE WANTS HIM OUT OF THERE!

Puts me in mind of that new book, Liberal Fascism.

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Hands off!

Hot item here about saying mass, about Vatican ruling that would be widely violated, sez I:

Stricter rules for Mass including disallowing taking Communion in the hand and time limits on homilies may soon be initiated by the Vatican.

Aimed at “extravagancies.” says Divine Worship honcho in La Stampa. 

In sermons too:

Provisions include restricting to 10 minutes homilies and ensuring they be exclusively based on the Gospel readings.

This will call for urgent dispatching of grief counselors to rectories worldwide.  No more beginnings followed by a succession of middles-without-end, no more rhetorical flights about the world scene.

Who do they think these preachers are, “blocks, stones, worse than senseless things”?  O tempora, O mores!

As for communion:

“The Vatican wants the host placed directly into the mouths of the faithful so they don’t touch it (with their hands) because many don’t even realize they are receiving Christ and do this with scant concentration and respect,” Archbishop Ranjith said.

The anti-in-hands rationale, soon to be repeated in further rollbacks of post-Vatican II innovations:

Ranjith said the practice was “illegally and hastily introduced by certain elements of the Church immediately after the Council”.

. . . .

“Ranjith said the measures to bring back “dignity and decorum” to Mass celebrations were in line with Pope Benedict’s wishes.


But the archbishop backed off:



“The article published on Monday by Turin daily La Stampa contained a collage of phrases citing him (Ranjith) that led to conclusions which were out of place,” a Vatican Radio broadcaster said.

Archbishop Ranjith has now denied any plans are afoot, saying instead on Vatican Radio “the hope is that the existing norms will be regularly applied and that the Eucharist be celebrated with devotion, seriousness and nobility.”


A collage of phrases, eh?  Out of place, eh?  Will have to remember that one.

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Modesty cops routed in Tehran

Sit as I just did, and watch the cell-phone video via YouTube of spontaneous resistance to modesty police in Tehran.

This cell phone video is of poor quality, and half the time it’s sideways, but it conveys the aftermath of the incident. At least hundreds of Iranians, if not thousands, have gathered and are chanting anti-Mullah slogans, including the one that I think must be most chilling to tyrants the world over: “How many people do you think you can kill?”

The modesty cops had tried to arrest a young woman for dressing Western, and I don’t mean sombrero and chaps.  When a young man tried to stop them, they beat him up and threw him into a garbage can.  But by then hundreds had gathered who stopped the arrest and chased the cops.

The mullahs don’t have full control.

Many experts on Iran, including Michael Ledeen, are of the view that encouraging internal resistance may be our most effective way of dealing with the current government. This video offers a window into what is happening in Tehran; for the whole story, go to Pajamas Media.

Citizen journalism of a high order.

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He can run things?

We have already heard of Hillary’s incompetence as manager.  Here’s the ultimate anti-Hillary Dick Morris and wife Eileen McGann on B.O. as manager:

The best evidence of Obama’s readiness to lead the nation is the ability with which he has run for president. After all, what is more difficult, complicated, or challenging than getting elected president? What other life experience better illustrates one’s qualification to hold the office than a manifest skill in seeking it. For anyone who has ever been elected president, the race that sent them to the White House was the single most important event in their lives and dwarfs any other experience they might have had before running.

As we have watched Obama surmount the hurdles that lay in his path, we cannot help but be impressed with his judgment. Adam Wallinsky, who served on Bobby Kennedy’s staff, once singled out good judgment as JFK’s most salient characteristic. Obama has faced so many delicate questions and issues and seems always to have the right feel for how to handle them.

We will be hearing more about this about O., I think.  Already there’s a lot.

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No longer a priest?

Convicted pedophile Donald McGuire has been expelled from the Jesuits.  “Defrocked” is the going term, which he is for all practical purposes.  No more ministry, no more membership in worldwide organization.

Defrocking has been advocated by bishops in recent years as a means of punishing clergy found to have abused children, but it’s not a simple procedure. Priests who do not voluntarily leave the cloth — as McGuire did not — must be forced out by official order from the Vatican.

However, expulsion automatically means suspension from priestly functions.  He lost his “faculties” worldwide, as the term used to be.  But in the Catholic scheme of things, was he laicized?  That is, reduced to the lay state, again as matters used to be stated?

Probably, almost certainly, in fact.  But the term “laicized” deserves to be part of any official statement.  If it were, the papers would use it.  Why isn’t it?

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