Not A Clean Getaway

"The lecturer is a bore, but he means well. Bores always do." -- Capt. Jack Harding in Until They Sail


I really dislike Joe Biden. My frequent readers -- all three of them -- know I don’t.

I hammer him whenever I can. I spanked him here and here, and whenever I can in conversations or in print.

What I like about hating him is that I really don’t have to make up anything, or twist anything, or take anything out of context to make fun of him. He is pretentious, smarmy, smug, arrogant, officious, and so obviously fake-folksy, with a phony sledgehammer touch of humorous whimsy and so little sense of people and what the public will find charming, that he makes my life better by making it easier to laugh. To paraphrase Voltaire and his comment about God, if Biden did not exist, we’d have to make him up. Biden actually thinks the Voltaire’s quote was about him.

Still, as I read the outrage over his comments about Illinois U.S. Senator Barack Obama, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for Smilin’ Joe.

Here’s what Biden said: Obama is "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy."

Now, first, what did he mean? He says now, that instead of “clean,” he meant “fresh.”

Here in Younstown, clean means “uncorrupted.” We think of “clean” the way people in Kansas think of the ocean. Or the way Rosie O’Donnell thinks of a thong. Oh, and it can also mean "off the bottle or needle," as in having your addiction under control.

But it is not really far fetched that Biden really did mean “fresh” when he said “clean,” since Obama really is fresh, at least in appearance and demeanor, if not in ideas, which he most certainly is not, to the extent he really has any ideas.

And Obama is articulate. He can express himself, not in the ridiculous, rhymy way of Jesse Jackson or the over-the-top silly way of Al Sharpton, but in the measured tone of a statesman. Again, not that I think Obama is really a statesman, but that is his package; that is his appearance. He is respectable in a way that Jackson and Sharpton are not.

I genuinely think that is the way Biden meant it.

You can make a pretty fair argument that words must be viewed, not how they are meant, and not even in their objective, dictionary meaning, but in the way in which they are heard. And for black people, apparently, the word “articulate” has come to be a shorthand for something like “he can speak clearly, like a white man, unlike the rest of those people.”

I think I understand, and even agree with, African-American concerns on this. The word is often used by whites in a way to highlight a given black person’s ability to express themselves well, in a way that it is not often raised with respect to a similarly-well spoken white person.

And a pompous windbag like Biden, who oozes superiority with every smirk of his face, and every drip of his rhetoric, cannot expect that people will kindly overlook such implications.

Still, Biden is also smart enough -- or least he acts like he is smart enough -- to know the way people will see it. He is not a “racist.” (See “Trent Lott.”)

He is not just another white guy who doesn’t “get it.” (See Maryland’s “William Donald Shaeffer.”)

Biden is a liberal Democrat who’s been in politics since the 1970s and who should really understand the ways words are likely to be taken by his audiences.

So maybe Joe is not quite as quick on his patent leather loafers as he acts like he thinks he is.

Maybe he is not actually the smartest guy in any particular room he happens to glide into.

Maybe he is a guy who has generally decent grasp of foreign affairs and not too much else, a good staff, and a way of schmoozing the enough people in Delaware (there are only 715 people in the whole state; we should have real debate in this country as to what it should take to be a real state) that he can get elected, but really nothing too special -- nothing that gives him What It Takes to be president.

I don’t know. But it won’t matter in the long run. Because the media’s focus has already begun to drift from Biden in a way it never did for Trent Lott. Because they like Biden.

As Dan Balz put it in the Washington Post on Thursday:

“A gifted orator, Biden has been plagued by a reputation for being windy and verbose, whether while chairing a Senate hearing or speaking at political gatherings around the country.”

What he should have written is this:

“A boring orator, who could make a deaf man cry with his banal stories and unamusing recollections of his parochial school nuns and faux folk wisdom, Biden has plagued the American political scene with more achingly dull anecdotes than any other U.S. senator. He is a man who can spend ten minutes asking not a single question from his murder hole on the Judiciary Committee, while at the same time making those ten minutes seem like ten years. He is a man who sends nearly every sane person within hearing range in search of the nearest pair of scissors with which to puncture their eardrums. It is not at all surprising that Mr. Biden would embarrass himself as he has done. It just goes to show, if you say enough words, some of them will get you in trouble.”

But Mr. Balz didn’t write that, having already moved on.

So at the end of the day, Biden probably meant well. His statements against Obama and the others were probably more attributable to his anger and ego bruise at not being acclaimed as the obvious best presidential candidate, and frustration clouded his judgment. He can see his own glory; why can’t everyone else?

But Biden won’t be president, although it won’t be because of these statements, and it certainly won’t be because the media will continue to torch him. More hypocrisy from the media.

And it couldn’t happen to a more boring guy.


© Lost in Youngstown and Palinurus 2007.

School for Scandal

"It is seldom appropriate for one group within society to seek to insert their moral beliefs, however profoundly held, into a document designed for people of fundamentally differing views." -- Robert Drinan, American Herald, March 25, 1974


The above quotation from Robert Drinan, S.J., who passed away last Sunday, is truly fantastic coming, as it does, from (1) a lawyer and legislator who supported, among other "moral beliefs," (2) impeaching Richard Nixon (3) banning guns (4) the holding of Roe v. Wade and (5) ending the war in Vietnam.

That a lawyer and/or legislator does not recognize that, first, ALL laws reflect moral beliefs, and second, that all the issues he cared the most about while in office imposed or else found in the Constitution a "moral belief" is stunning. His is a profoundly hypocritical, or else stupid, statement. To make sense of this quote requires re-defining words such as "law," "moral beliefs," "imposing," among others, plus a facility for moral compartmentalization that, I think we can show, Fr. Drinan possessed in superhuman quantities.

I am reprinting below Fr. Drinan's New York Times obit. The Times, typically, glosses over certain leftist hypocrisies that are obvious from the record. I have provided my comments, in italics, on those parts of the obituary that require dilation.


Robert Drinan Dies at 86; Pioneer as Lawmaker Priest

By Douglas Martin

The Rev. Robert F. Drinan, the first Roman Catholic priest to become a voting member of Congress, and the first congressman to call for the impeachment of President Richard M. Nixon, died on Sunday in Washington. He was 86.

The cause was pneumonia and congestive heart failure, said a spokesman for Georgetown University, where Father Drinan had taught at the law school for the last 26 years.

"Father Drinan's commitment to human rights and justice will have a lasting legacy here at Georgetown University and across the globe," said Georgetown President John J. Degioia. This is a true statement, only not how Degioia means it. His commitment to human rights did not extend to the unborn, nor to those enslaved under communist regimes from the old USSR to Vietnam to Cambodia to, his favorite communist society, Cuba. His "commitment" to "justice" will, unfortunately, have a lasting legacy. It will take decades for Georgetown and the Church to get over the harm he caused.

A footnote here: I went to hear Fr. Drinan speak when he came to my lawschool in the early 80s. I asked him in Q and A how he could speak on behalf of human rights while ignoring/remaining silent of the fact that Castro in Cuba was one worst suppressors of human liberty in the world. To paraphrase, Fr. Drinan said, “well, we need to be patient with Cuba because Fidel Castro faces many obstacles, many of which brought on by the U.S. embargo.” (!) This says it all: the embargo came about because of Castro’s suppression of human rights and his outright support for a sworn enemy of the U.S. and his willingness to assist that enemy. His human rights violations gave birth to the embargo, not the other way around.

The career of Father Drinan, a Jesuit, included work as a human rights advocate, as dean of Boston College Law School and as an author of 12 books. But it was in electoral politics, and particularly his fiery opposition to the Vietnam War, that he gained his greatest visibility.

He maintained that a priest should be involved in secular pursuits as a way of promoting a more just and compassionate society. He was inspired, he once said, by Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement, which she co-founded. And though he never pledged to ignore church dictates while in office, he did ignore Catholic teaching in his support for federal financing of birth control and abortion.

The CNN website notes: “But he wore his liberal views more prominently. He opposed the draft, worked to abolish mandatory retirement and raised eyebrows with his more moderate views on abortion and birth control.” Well, I suppose you could say his views were “more moderate.” He spoke in defense of Bill Clinton’s veto of the partial birth abortion bill. Even pro-abortion Democrats like Joe Biden (“SMILE!”) and Pat Leahy supported the bill. If his views on abortion are “moderate,” what views of abortion are extreme? Mandatory abortion? Catholic Church-funded abortions performed inside the sanctuary of St. Patrick’s Cathedral?

In 1980, when he was in his fifth two-year term representing his Massachusetts district and planning to run for a sixth, Pope John Paul II ordered him to quit Congress. The Vatican said that it was belatedly enforcing a provision of canon law forbidding priests to hold elective office and that the order applied to all. Father Drinan said he would not even consider resigning from the priesthood to continue a re-election race he was almost certain to win.

Thank God, once more, for JP II.

“As a person of faith,” he said, “I must believe there is work for me to do which somehow will be more important than the work I am required to leave.”

Yes, there was more important to work to do. It was being a priest, taking his vocation seriously and not using it as a shield for those who supported positions that the Church specifically taught against and understanding that saying the Catholic Mass had a greater importance, metaphysically, than all his votes supporting Communist governments put together.

He began teaching constitutional law and other subjects at Georgetown University Law Center.

Ah, Georgetown. That used to be Catholic college. His hiring was one more nail in the coffin of Georgetown University’s identity as a Catholic university. He was hardly the first heretic to find refuge there and by no means the last, but it is shameful nonetheless.

There was only partial precedent to Father Drinan’s election to the House in 1970. Another Catholic priest, the Rev. Gabriel Richard, had served in Congress in 1823-25, but only as a nonvoting delegate from the Michigan Territory. (A third priest, the Rev. Robert John Cornell of Wisconsin, was elected to the House four years after Father Drinan, and served two terms, until an unsuccessful run for re-election in 1978.)

Father Drinan, a Democrat, won over the voters of his district in his very first race despite indications in the polls that a third were uneasy about his mix of religion and politics, and that Catholics were most concerned. But he hardly evaded the issue, even after election: he said Mass each day and wore his clerical garb at the Capitol, jovially claiming that he had no other suits.

Think of the compartmentalization that had to take place in this man’s soul to be able to raise the Body and Blood of Christ at 7 a.m. and go to the floor of Congress and vote in support of abortion at 9:30.

He won office on his passionate opposition to the war; worked successfully to help eliminate the House Internal Security Committee, previously long known as the Committee on Un-American Activities; fought against the arms race; and crossed himself before denouncing President Nixon on the House floor as “a fascist war criminal.” The president returned the favor by placing him on the administration’s enemies list.

All consistent with his pro-communist sympathies. All the good little Bolsheviks in the Democrat party supported him.

On July 31, 1973, Father Drinan introduced the first measure to impeach the president, not charging any crimes related to the Watergate scandal, but because of the secret bombing of Cambodia without Congressional approval.

The record is silent as to whether he said so much as a single Hail Mary for the millions killed by Pol Pot in Cambodia following the U.S. pull out from Southeast Asia. As far as I can see, I can find not a single reference to this man criticizing a communist government anywhere, no matter how repressive, how violent or how evil. So much for the human rights of those mired in gulag or re-education camps.

Some House Democrats had by then begun laying the groundwork for an impeachment case based on Watergate, and did not welcome Father Drinan’s initiative. They believed that if a vote to impeach was defeated, members might not back another one.

Representative Thomas P. O’Neill Jr., a Massachusetts Democrat who was then House majority leader, later wrote in his memoirs that while Father Drinan’s case had seemed good, “he damn near blew it.” In any event, Representative Peter W. Rodino Jr. of New Jersey, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, did not act on the Drinan resolution.

Then, as now, it was really all about “getting” the president.

Robert Frederick Drinan was born on Nov. 15, 1920, in Boston, graduated from Boston College, entered the Society of Jesus and studied at Weston College in Massachusetts, where one of his classmates was Daniel Berrigan, who would gain fame as a radical Jesuit peace activist.

You would be hard put to find a single genuine difference between the radical Berrigan and Fr. Drinan.

Father Drinan earned a master’s degree from Boston College, two law degrees from Georgetown and a doctorate in theology from Gregorian University in Rome. He returned to Boston College, where he was dean of the law school for 13 years, then briefly served as vice president and provost before his election to Congress in 1970.

In that race, Father Drinan defeated Representative Philip J. Philbin, who had held his seat since 1942, in the Democratic primary and again in the general election, when Mr. Philbin ran as an independent. Father Drinan’s campaign manager was John Kerry, still 14 years away from winning election to the first of what have become four terms in the Senate.

Fr. Drinan ran for office with the explicit permission of Cardinal Cushing. This is only one small instance of the near-complete failure and collapse of moral authority within the U.S. Catholic Church in the 1960s and 1970s (and which continues to today, I hate to say). It was nearly impossible for the stalwart bishops in the U.S. (few as there may have been then or are now) to get much traction among Catholic politicians or the Catholics in the pews in the 70s or since on issues like abortion once you had an esteemed religious Order and a preeminent Cardinal granting tacit or vocal support to a Catholic priest who openly supported abortion rights and birth control. This is only part of the record of scandal for which a large segment of the American Catholic hierarchy will need to be accountable.

One of the Drinan campaign posters in that race proclaimed, “Father Knows Best.” (“Vote for Drinan, or Go to Hell” was reluctantly dropped.) After his election, supporters rather liked the slogan “Our father who art in Congress.”

The latter is a natural progression from raising the government to the status of God.



© Lost in Youngstown and Palinurus 2007.

Doing what I do

"I don't pretend to be Captain Weird. I just do what I do." -- Johnny Depp


This got me thinking......

Six Weird Things About Me:

1. Audrey Hepburn gives me the creeps.

2. I think most well-known 1900-1930 American writers -- Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, e.g. -- are banal and greatly overrated.

3. I fell asleep in Das Boot three times and Out of Africa six times.

4. I think Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are the most boring, Stepfordish couple since -- well, Brad Pitt and Jennifer Anniston.

5. I would rather eat haggis than watch a Katie Couric interview.

6. I would rather watch a Katie Couric interview Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie about how they believe Sherwood Anderson would have critiqued Das Boot than listen to Joe Biden for more than four seconds.

Reading Obituaries With Pleasure

"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure."
- Clarence Darrow

It is a sign of moral weakness to take pleasure in the misery of others. It is even worse when the pleasure comes from a down payment on a grudge you hold.

I have grudges and I hold them. I don't just nurse them: I feed them. I clothe them. I educate them. I brought my grudges with me from melancholy childhood into bitter manhood. I will drag them, limping, to my grave.

I know it is probably wrong, but when it comes to Ohio State football, that's what I do, and I like it.

I have an old grudge that has caused me to root against Ohio State every single time they play. I would root for the Red Army team against Ohio State, if they ever played each other, if there were still a Red Army team, if there were still a Red Army.

So this morning, I am giddy with joy, since the Buckeyes lost the National Championship game last night, though saying they "lost" is an understatement along the lines of Noah saying, "Gee, it looks like rain!" Ohio State lost to the University of Florida, 41-14, in a game that was not as close as that. Florida spotted OSU seven points on the opening kickoff, and then proceeded to pound them 41-7 over the remainder of the evening, alternatively passing them, running them, beating them, and kicking them silly.

OSU coach Jim Tressell, who some think has the ethics of an abortionist, was humiliated, and their overrated Heismann Trophy winning quarterback Troy Smith (who is as likely to make it in pro football as Rosie O'Donnell is to sing Panis Angelicum for Pope Benedict) was throttled all night by a marauding Florida defense that sacked him repeatedly and shut down all aspects of his game.

The real story behind the game is one that was missed all season by the national and local media: the Big 10 really was a pathetic conference this season (2-5 in the bowls and lucky to do that), and their top teams were thoroughly untested in their non conference schedules. No one in the media ever picked this up, preferring instead to go on about how great OSU and Michigan were, how unstoppable Smith was, OSU and Michigan are the two best teams in the country, blah, blah, without ever noting that they really played weak competition -- OSU played okay Texas and Michigan teams and no one else; Michigan lost to the only good teams they played and whooped an okay Notre Dame team. A steady diet of mediocre Mid-American Conference teams and a conference schedule of sorry Indianas does not temper champion steel.

It's hard to give the experts much credence when they can go four months without ever even alluding to such facts. They all read each other columns and heard each other's TV spots and bought the same, rotten bill of goods. With that level of analysis, they might as well play the game with no sound. These guys just sit around in a group grope agreeing with each other, telling each other how smart they are, like Hollywood self-congratulation awards dinner where they take turns giving phony awards to each other so it is almost always their own turn to be told how they great they are.

So the loss gives me double pleasure, since it both exposes media prima donnas and vindicates what I have argued all season long: that OSU was drastically overrated and that the Big 10 was a sadly weak conference.

The bottom line is this: OSU is a good team who last night looked really rusty and out of sync. But they were not that good to start with and were, in any event, outcoached, outprepared, and outplayed. FLA was clearly better, and there should be no Buckeye griping or moaning about long layovers or hurt players. They got whooped by a much better team.

And beyond that, at least in this corner of Youngstown -- where the green spring of recrimination flows eternally and the seething never ends -- there is unalloyed joy, as the Buckeyes bite the dust.