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It seems Pope Francis needs to brush up on his Tertullian!

It has been reported (in The ChristLast Media, I must note) that the current Pope does not like the phrase "lead us not into temptation...

"Let no freedom be allowed to novelty, because it is not fitting that any addition should be made to antiquity. Let not the clear faith and belief of our forefathers be fouled by any muddy admixture." -- Pope Sixtus III

Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Joe Sobran on the epidemic of Kennedyism we face and the primary disease vector, Senator Murder.

(Note: The link above will take you to Joe's current on-line column. The archive is here. Not all of his past columns are available in the archive.)

I’m not sure if I ever actually met Sam Alito at Princeton. It’s hard to recognize a guy when the last time you saw him he was wearing a sheet.

Just kidding! Strike that remark from the record!

I wasn’t an alumnus, but I used to live near Princeton and I hung out with several friends in the offices of the Concerned Alumni of Princeton, a rather ineffectual conservative outfit now exposed by Ted Kennedy as a “reprehensible group.” Well, Ted himself was born into a reprehensible group, which he has never repudiated, namely, the Kennedy family. The real scandal is that they have never repudiated him, either. In that flock, the black sheep is the bellwether.

Heehee!

Joe Stalin and Mao Zedong used to hold the record for unconscious irony, but by now I think Ted has broken it. A full generation after Chappaquiddick, he’s still expressing shock over other people’s pasts. Dwelling in a glass house, he has made a career of throwing bricks, which his colleagues are too polite to toss back at him. Unlike Joe McCarthy, he has always made wild charges with complete impunity. Can’t someone at least give him a breathalyzer test?

The “heyday of McCarthyism” lasted only five years. The heyday of Kennedyism, still active, is nearly two decades old, if you date it from his 1987 smear of Robert Bork. But it’s really much older, because Kennedyism didn’t start with Ted. Freestyle accusations of bigotry against political opponents have been a hallowed liberal tradition since the era of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman.

Judge Alito, it must be said, failed to prove he wasn’t a bigot; but then, nobody can prove he isn’t a bigot to liberals’ satisfaction. That’s the whole idea of bigotry charges: they are meant to be unfalsifiable, like Soviet charges of “anti-Soviet activities.” Once you are accused, you’ve already been convicted. There are few acquittals.

Since the charges can’t be disproved, there is no penalty for making false accusations. The burden of proof is on the accused, not the accuser, and besides, the charges are never really defined, so how could they be refuted anyway? If somebody accuses you of murder, he has to produce a corpse, for openers. But if he accuses you of “sexism” or “homophobia,” nobody is even quite sure what he means, except maybe that he doesn’t like your political opinions and wants to stigmatize you.

Ahhh...Can't you smell the essence of politics, kiddies?

Such charges — sexism, homophobia, racism, anti-Semitism, and the generic all-purpose hate and bigotry — are what the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle called “bogus predicates.” They sound as if they mean something, but they have no specifiable content. The listener is invited to fill them out with his own emotional associations. Murder implies that someone has killed someone else. What does bigotry imply?

If liberals were honest, they’d define their words precisely enough that we could meaningfully distinguish between true and false charges, and they’d censure those who made false charges. When McCarthy spoke of “card-carrying Communists,” he made the ultimately fatal mistake of making meaningful charges; and when he couldn’t back them up, he was ruined.

But now that we have the proof, where's the rehabilitation effort for Tailgunner Joe?

That’s the difference between the brief McCarthy era and the too-long Kennedy era. Can you even imagine liberal opinion demanding that Ted Kennedy put up or shut up? The U.S. Senate virtually censured McCarthy. Kennedy can rail on with the full assurance that his colleagues will never do that to him, even with a Republican majority.

Kennedy’s abysmal personal character inspired one wag to quip that “his religion is so private he won’t even impose it on himself.” (Heehee! - F.G.) He has every reason to invent synthetic ideological sins to divert attention from his own concrete moral deficiencies, which might be gently described as contemptible. No wonder he makes it his pastime to savage other men’s reputations, as if making them look bad could make him look good.

Even now Ted is allowed by his party to wear the ill-fitting courtesy halo he supposedly inherited from his murdered brothers. He is still allowed to pose as a spokesman for women, minorities, the poor, civil liberties, and all the other sacred progressive causes.

There’s not much point in dwelling on the irony of all this; it ceased being funny a long time ago. He’s the aging superstar in a sport whose only object is to commit fouls against the other side.

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First of all, the word is SEX, not GENDER. If you are ever tempted to use the word GENDER, don't. The word is SEX! SEX! SEX! SEX! For example: "My sex is male." is correct. "My gender is male." means nothing. Look it up. What kind of sick neo-Puritan nonsense is this? Idiot left-fascists, get your blood-soaked paws off the English language. Hence I am choosing "male" under protest.

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