SPOOKED BY SPOOKS

The CIA’s “’estimates’ have always been inherently political documents, and its executive summaries are written to be leaked,” says Angelo M. Codevilla in a review of George Tenet’s At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA (HarperCollins) and John Prados’s Safe For Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA (Ivan R. Dee) in Claremont Review of Books, Summer, ‘07.

Prados’s title, says Codevilla, “masks the Left’s perennial agenda of encouraging its own ends by depriving America of coercive means.”

He calls “transparent projection” Prados’s contention that in the Truman years the U.S. “cheapened the coin of its appeal by covert actions that, to foreign populations, did not represent American policies democratically arrived at.”

The reader is supposed to believe that foreigners-none of whom, including the British, have any say in their countries’ foreign policies-look askance at America because not all the details of its foreign policies are decided “democratically.”

This is too much for Codevilla, a Boston U. international relations teacher, who notes that “these very foreigners . . . are supposedly shocked that Americans do not live in perfect equality and sometimes speak unkindly about one another. It is clear enough that Prados is expressing his own judgment on America, not that of any foreigners.”

Having it in for the U.S., he assumes others do too.

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On not leaving Iraq

This from Tony Blankley, editorial page editor for The Washington Times, gets at the main and utterly conclusive reason for not leaving Iraq, namely that if we do, we ain’t seen nothin’ yet: 

[I]f al Qaeda can plausibly claim they drove America out of Iraq (just as they drove the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan) they will gain literally millions of new adherents in their struggle to destroy America and the West. We will then pay in blood, treasure and future wars vastly more than we are paying today to manage and eventually win our struggle in Iraq…. As Osama bin Laden once famously observed, people follow the strong horse. We have two choices: Use our vast resources to prove we are the strong horse; or get ready to be taken to the glue factory.

Opinion Journal’s Political Diary quotes this from today’s Times.

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The transformation of a newspaper

Where have all the hard ledes gone?  Where have they gone?

Chi Trib p-1 today, here are first sentences (ledes).  Not exactly wuxtry-wuxtry stuff, but what are you gonna do in an age of Internet news?  Fire one:

Against the majestic backdrop of the Rocky Mountains, in the far eastern corner of Colorado where the land begins to flatten into a vast golden prairie, two teenagers trudge along the weed-bitten edge of an isolated highway.

Fire two:

The gray-faced young man lying in bed number 15 of the run-down local hospital wasn’t much of a talker.

Three:

WASHINGTON — Several weeks ago, nylon shoulder bags ordered for a student financial-aid conference arrived with the Wachovia Bank name splashed on the outside.

Four:

Like a sweaty stranger who sidles up too close in an airless waiting room, a heat wave settled in over the weekend in the Chicago area, forcing people to escape or confront it.

Five:

LAKELAND, Fla. — In the hallway of a science building at Florida Southern College here, silvery ventilation ducts sprout from the floor, rise some 7 feet, take an abrupt 90-degree turn and disappear into the walls of classrooms.

Don’t mind me, folks.  Can’t help but notice that this paper is trying to compete with Nelson Algren.  The morning reader is expected to settle back and give his full attention.  Will he?  Will she?

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Ouch, that hurt!

Sun-Times head on AP story:

Latin mass a ‘body blow to Catholic-Jewish relations,’ group says

But its suppression in ‘70 was a body blow to a sense of the sacred in Catholic worship, which has become the “Father John Show,” or Father Tom, Dick, and Harry.  Father Johnny maybe, as in the king of the nights long ago, Johnny Carson.

This we may say apart from the rabbis’ complaint, which deserves separate treatment later.

 

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Mass and bulls

* When in doubt, ask a JESUIT about liturgy?  Since when?

It’s Tom Reese this time (as when not in these days of word bites?), saying we need vernacular to get down to the mystery of things: 

“The mystery of the Eucharist is not that it’s in Latin,” Reese said. “The mystery is the death and resurrection of Jesus that’s being celebrated here. To have the mysteriousness of Latin blocking you from seeing the true mystery is one of the reasons we went to English.”

He means for us to plumb depths, thinking it over until we get it or give up because we can’t get it.  Head-trip Tom they call him.

In same story, writers say Rome “strictly limited” the old mass in 1970 so as to “prod reluctant parishes” to adopt the new.  I’d say “force.”  Why the euphemism?  Have they been spending too much time on the phone with Tom Reese?

* Also, Chi Trib is pulling an old chestnut out of the fire, just to show old dogs know old tricks, namely the Pamplona bullshi—–  I mean bulls.

 

 

 

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Excuses, excuses . . .

Invading a kid’s privates is not as bad as raping him, says Colleen Dolan for Cardinal George and the rest of the chancery gang.  It’s a conclusion she reached after giving it a lot of thought?

It’s here in the Sun-Times today in story starting:

As a priest, the Rev. Daniel McCormack heard people confess their sins. On Monday, he stood before a Cook County judge and admitted his own — while the Archdiocese of Chicago said those sins could have been much worse.

Read all about it.  As the widely travelled Mayordaley II says about kids being murdered on his watch as chief enforcement officer, where’s the outrage?  C. George got feisty and excited about reporters with pencils, but stays very controlled here.

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Quis custodiet custodes?

Very big issue here in this HOGAN/ALBACH story in Sun-Times:

Top leaders in the Archdiocese of Chicago responsible for complaints about predatory priests kept their positions or rose in the church in the aftermath of the Rev. Daniel McCormack’s 2006 arrest, according to archdiocesan reports and interviews.

Vicar General George Rassas was elevated to auxiliary bishop. Chancellor Jimmy Lago was named the primary point person on child abuse cases. Leaders from the offices of Vicar for Priests to Protection of Children and Youth stayed in key posts.

And Cardinal Francis George — whose handling of the McCormack matter led to calls for his resignation — appears poised to be elected president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

What’s with the Latin?  It’s a Roman issue, isn’t it?  Who indeed will keep track of these guys who are supposed to keep track?

It’s the Fr. McCormack story, of course.  He’s apparently about to cop a plea.  Will he be kept on the rolls of God’s chosen ambassadors?

 

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Poets speak truth to reader . . .

* Sir John Suckling had a way with words. In “Loving and Beloved,” in the 1646 collection of his poems, Fragmenta Aurea – “incomparable peeces [sic],” reads the title page – he has this about romantic love:

Love is the fart/ Of every heart;/ It pains a man when ‘tis kept close/ And others doth offend when ‘tis let loose.

* Robert Herrick, “On a Perfum’d Lady”:

You say y’are sweet: how sho’d we know/ Whether you be sweet or no/  From Powders and Perfumes keep free;/ Then we shall smell how sweet you be.

Say that to a woman (or man) trailing clouds, not of glory like Wordsworth, but of perfume or cologne.

* Herrick again, in “Upon Himselfe”:  He is not sure if getting married would reverse his “mop-ey’d” ( as in “mope”) condition,” says it might “put out the light,” presumably in his eye (and spirit).


This I read as one whom getting married helped immeasurably but who allows the other possibility and holds in due respect the other choice. The poem in question:



Mop-ey’d I am, as some have said,/ Because I’ve liv’d so long a maid [unmarried]:/ But grant that I sho’d [should] wedded be,/ Sho’d I a jot the better see?/ No, I sho’d think, that Marriage might,/ Rather [than] mend, put out the light.

Great thoughts from far and near

* Christopher Smart, in his 1751 poem, “An epigram of Sir Thomas More, imitated,” has a man kissing Dorinda, whom he playfully tells her nose is too big.

At which Dorinda, “equally to fun inclined,” placed “her lovely Lily hand behind./ ‘Here, Swain,’ she cried; ‘Mayst thou securely kiss,/ Where there’s no nose to interrupt thy bliss.’”


Right here, Bud.


* The academic (not athletic) racial achievement gap at one Oak Park K-6 school was said to be “more unique” than at other schools — by its principal.


Is she more unique than other principals?


* A book I am working through is The Roots of National Socialism, by Rohan D’O. Butler (Dutton, 1942). It would be good reading for others, I think, especially by young folks who do not know Naziism was socialism — national socialism, as opposed to the international version run out of a building in Moscow.


The roots in question are heavily philosophical. The book is a tour de force showing the consequences had by ideas.


* We routinely object to senseless violence (it’s a consecrated phrase), but when do we hear praise for sensible violence?


On the football field is one place, but no guns allowed.  The Bears’ Tank Johnson has done his time for gun violations and is suspended for several games at considerable monetary loss. I am assuming he had to promise not to go armed onto the field.

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Fr. Pfleger again in Riverdale

Oops, Fr. M. Pfleger joins Rev. Jesse J. et al. in another foray to Chuck’s Gun Shop Saturday, his people tell Friends of Saint Sabina in an email message. 

Normally any friend of St. Sabina is a friend of mine, but is another call to snuff the gun salesman on tap? 

Maybe just a joke or two making fun of right-wingers, with maybe a mild shot (pardon the expression) at Cardinal George The Ineffectual?  Only the Shadow knows.

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