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This year sucked. It began with my little sister’s funeral, and ended with a malaise lingering on from my mother’s funeral.

For my sister, Mary, death came quickly, and then it came slowly. She was very busy living a vibrant life, when she was suddenly smitten with a terminal cancer. Then she spent a year and a half dying. She tried to keep up the appearances of optimism, but everyone around her knew how the dance was going to end; we just didn’t know quite when. When it came, death came slowly, bleeding her life away as her ministering aunt and other loved ones waited in vigil for the end, which came in the third watch of the night after Christmas Day. She was 49, and left no children to carry her line forward on the Earth.

For my mother, Edna, death came slowly, and then it came quickly. Dying at 79, she had lived a good and full life, touching the lives of many, and leaving a legacy of kindness that, pray God, will redound to her name for generations, even when she herself is forgotten. Having been born with a collapsed lung, her breathing organ was never quite right, and she’d been living with a progressive case of acute Pulmonary Fibrosis for some time, before she up and died on us. Of course, we knew it was coming sooner or later, and she had gotten “old” recently, but still it seemed to come almost out of the blue. True, she had given us a scare the day before, and the family spent Sunday afternoon in the emergency room, wondering if she’d perhaps had a stroke, but she seemed fine by afternoon, had checked out OK medically, and was sent home in the evening. On Monday morning, she died. Just like that. It was October 3rd, the original feast day of St Therese of Lisieux, the saint credited by the family with saving Mom’s life as a newborn, and whose name she was thus given in tribute.

Whatever else may have happened this year seems almost lost in the shadows of these two bookends of death & grief. I’ve looked upon the sorrowful , resigned faces of yet a couple more friends who have had their verdicts of terminal cancer pronounced to them. I’ve watched dozens of co-workers jettisoned from their source of material well-being, as the business world atrophies under corporate & government mismanagement and corruption. I’ve seen the U.S. government run up a debt of unprecedented magnitude – one poised to crush the commonweal of my children and their peers – for the sake of a filched political placidity, while the ruling party successfully smeared the opposition as extremist and non-cooperative for the sin of (futilely) demanding a roadmap to fiscal sanity as the price for complicity in the mortgaging of the futures of those we have a moral duty to protect & defend. Shameful.

As for myself, I can’t get out of my own way: I had targeted early December for completion of my prerequisite course work at Franciscan University, but have been scuffling badly since mid-October, and don’t even know how to get back on track at this point.

On the bright side, this was the year that Joyce leveraged her imposed unemployment into an opportunity to pursue her long-time desire to get into professional dog grooming. The Boston Bruins are suddenly the best hockey team in the world for the first time since I could sing alto, and last spring they gave us one of the greatest hockey games I’ve ever seen (Game 7 of the Conference Finals against Tampa Bay).

Furthermore, as of yet at least, no crowd of self-entitled, self-righteous, unemployed ne’er-do-wells have converged to “occupy” my backyard, demanding that I succor them by paying off their insane student loans for stupidly bloated college tuitions I could never afford for either myself or my own kids (we found other ways to achieve what we needed to achieve). That’s a plus. And I still have my own job; my kids are all healthy and safe; we’re coming up on a leap-year – which means a “real” anniversary for Joyce and I on Feb 29th; Congress reversed the moronic ban on incandescent light bulbs; and Rick Santorum actually appears to have an outside shot at winning the Iowa caucuses, putting the only candidate I actually like from the Republican field in a position to at least temporarily receive some media attention before the big-money candidates get around to burying him under a torrent of glitzy drivel (OK, I also really like and admire Michelle Bachmann, but I’m afraid she would be almost as out-of-her-league in that job as Obama is, speaking of torrents of glitzy drivel from big-money candidates…).

And, lastly, the garage ceiling light bulb is still burning faithfully, almost 40 years after being installed. Yes, the very same light bulb that greeted my mother and father the first time they illuminated their new garage with electricity in June of 1972 continues to shine its light every time I flip the switch. To me, it’s become a symbol of faithfulness and perseverance, and it reminds me unfailingly of my dad. Would that we all could be relied upon so faithfully, as that bulb, to shine forth the light entrusted to us for the sake of others’ seeing their way in the world! I dread the day that bulb blows; I pray it’s not in 2012.

Happy New Year, planet Earth. Choose carefully; choose well. Peace, from here.

Quote of the Day for Tuesday, September 27th, 2011:

J.E. Dyer, posting over at HotAir’s Green Room, on the implications of the increasing and expanding reliance of the United States’ military efforts in the Middle East on assassination via drone strike:

To use this kind of force, the implication is that you don’t need to have a traditional-warfare justification.  Alternatively, you could say that this kind of force – drone-targeting; anti-personnel tactics untethered to the idea of securing a “better peace” – is now a way war can be defined.

In either case, these suppositions raise questions in terms of the Geneva Conventions and the law of armed conflict.  More fundamentally, they raise questions as to what we are, in effect, doing.  It’s one thing if drones are used as an adjunct to an overarching strategy of closing in on militant jihadism by denying it territory and transforming the political conditions in which it has thrived.  But it’s something else when drones become the go-to tool, for a go-to method of simply killing as many jihadis as possible.

The latter model begins to resemble the methods of guerrilleros and the bloody conflicts of crime syndicates.  What those models presuppose is the absence of a possibility of strategic resolution:  a felt need to keep killing because, when baseline conditions aren’t expected to change, it’s the only option for harassing, culling, and deterring the enemy pack.  Is that the light in which we see this “war on terror” conflict?

…

Accountable nations fighting to win – fighting for what B.H. Liddell-Hart called a “better peace” – fight differently.  Their objective is not to kill as many people as possible but to transform the conditions of people on the territory they inhabit.  Bill Roggio is right:  if you don’t transform what’s going on on territory, the important things – the things that produced the need to fight in the first place – will not change.  That transformation need not involve forcibly changing foreign regimes, but it unquestionably involves changing foreign regimes’ will and intentions.

As usual, Dyer has produced a well-thought-out piece, and she asks some very important questions. It’s worth reading the entire (short) piece. Even the discussion in the combox is worth reading – and I don’t find myself able to say that too often!

Myself, I’ve been troubled for quite some time, from a strictly moral perspective, by this administration’s clear preference for using assassination techniques – whether by unmanned drones or more conventional tactics – to achieve its goals. I’ve been reluctant to say anything publicly because I don’t want to come across as a partisan hypocrite. A partisan, maybe; a hypocrite, sure; but not a partisan hypocrite, please.

It’s true that the Obama administration can pretty much do no good in my eyes, but the simple fact that this drone issue might be just another platform from which to clobber Obama with fault does not change the fact that it is so for morally valid reasons – perhaps especially since it appears to me to be of a piece with his overall approach to moral reasoning. One could reasonably ask why I didn’t similarly criticize George Bush for similar techniques, but the truth is, I can’t remember how drones and such were used during the Bush administration, and I haven’t bothered to find out. I simply don’t remember what I thought – assuming I paid attention. Beyond that, I will only make three brief points: (1) If I had said anything at all, I would have been similarly critical of their use by Bush in similar circumstances, though regarding circumstances, see Dyer’s main point on the strategic imperative, and also my following point. (2) For all his failures and mistakes, I understood Bush to be a fundamentally good, decent, and moral man who grappled deeply with the moral implications of his decisions, whereas I understand Obama to be the most cynical, calculating, and utilitarian politician to occupy the White House since Richard Nixon. I trusted Bush; I don’t trust Obama, and so my antennae are up – what can I say… (3) Neither Bush nor his supporters ever tried to pass him off as a “peace candidate” – talk about partisan hypocrisy!

Anyway, getting back to Dyer, she hits the nail on the head when she reminds her readers that, regardless of what they may think, either strategically or morally, of the use of this tactic in the current crises, it is behavior that is opening up a Pandora’s box of payback and proliferation of pre-moral, savage violence, untethered to anything remotely resembling just war.

Quote of the Day for Wednesday, September 14th, 2011:

Mary Rose Somarriba, writing yesterday at Public Discourse, on the recent anti-bullying legislation recently enacted in New Jersey (hewing closely to Obama administration policies), in an article called “A Bully-Free World?”:

Why, one might ask, would the president lead a conference on preventing something like bullying, which is ultimately impossible to prevent? It could be, perhaps, because bullying is something that everyone agrees is wrong, and it is something that everyone can relate to, because everyone has been bullied at some point.

But sadly, bullying is like any unfortunate human conflict and will exist as long as humans do. This does not mean it is okay to bully; it means it is problematic to imagine that we can create a world in which conflict doesn’t exist. It is hard to imagine zero-tolerance bullying prevention without schools becoming mini-bureaucratic-police states—the likes of which only belong in films like Minority Report or Adjustment Bureau—where kids could be criminally charged for hurting each other’s feelings, “different” kids could be targeted as “likely to be bullied,” and so on. But that is exactly what this boils down to: a child’s version of hate crimes.

In reality, laws like New Jersey’s risk worsening the problems of bullying. There is reason to believe that hotlines where kids can anonymously text-message tips to incriminate bullies are yet another technology that kids will abuse for the purposes of bullying. Further, bullying prevention is arguably the wrong goal altogether. It would be better to focus on conflict resolution than on conflict prevention. Devoting all effort to preventing the inevitable is not only wasteful policy; it is a failure to do what actually might lessen the damage of real-life conflicts.

One of my kids – probably the youngest one – mentioned something during dinner the other night about the latest anti-bullying campaign at her school, and I was too tired and cranky to resist letting out a snort. The kids were a little flabbergasted when I said I thought the current anti-bullying hysteria is moronic. Of course, they assumed that anyone who didn’t “like” anti-bullying must therefore “like” bullying – that’s the way these things are framed society-wide, the way immature minds tend to work naturally, and certainly fits the Facebook zeitgeist we and they inhabit. I pointed out the hypocrisy of adults shoving anti-bullying propaganda down the throats of helpless populations of schoolchildren, and made some references to the long stream of social do-goodism in the schools, of which anti-bullying is not merely the latest fashion, but an almost inevitable consequence of previous efforts by the same kinds of “progressive” people to coddle school children, eliminate discipline, abandon authority, and eradicate the stain of “judgmentalism”.

I don’t think I did a very good job of explaining myself, and fortunately, Somarriba does a pretty good job in this article of explaining at least why the anti-bullying agenda is impractical. But I really dislike it for reasons she comes close to, but doesn’t address. She suggests that perhaps President Obama wants to get out in front of this because everybody agrees that bullying is wrong, and she’s dead right about that. It’s a convenient platform for cheesy moralism. You won’t lose any votes by thundering denunciations against bullies, after all. And that’s the real problem here: it’s symptomatic of a culture that feels the need to find something phony to fill a glaring void, where genuine morality deserves to be found, but cannot be allowed expression lest it upset the libertarian apple cart of mutually assured disregard of vice.

Quote of the Day for Tuesday, February 1st, 2011:

I’m not sure quite how to attribute this… I’m quoting Joe Carter over at the First Thoughts blog today, who is quoting Judge Roger Vinson’s ruling published Monday striking down the ObamaCare law on account of the individual mandate, which is quoting then-candidate Barack Obama from 2008, essentially mocking the notion of a mandate… You can figure it out:

On this point, it should be emphasized that while the individual mandate was clearly “necessary and essential” to the Act as drafted, it is not “necessary and essential” to health care reform in general. It is undisputed that there are various other (Constitutional) ways to accomplish what Congress wanted to do. Indeed, I note that in 2008, then-Senator Obama supported a health care reform proposal that did not include an individual mandate because he was at that time strongly opposed to the idea, stating that “if a mandate was the solution, we can try that to solve homelessness by mandating everybody to buy a house.”

Politicians really hate when you remind them what they said on the campaign trail. I imagine they despise it even more when the reminder is included in a federal ruling overturning their prized legislation.

Priceless. But if there remained any doubts, we surely know now why Senator Obama was so well-known for voting “present” during his legislative stints – he’s not stupid. As to whether he’s principled, well, that’s another question altogether, as we wouldn’t want to conflate being principled with having an agenda. There’s a world of difference between being willing to pay any price to stand your ground, and being willing to pay any price to get what you want.

Quote of the Day for Thursday, January 13th, 2011:

President Barack Obama, from his address yesterday at the memorial service for those killed in the Tucson shooting:

In George and Dot, in Dorwan and Mavy, we sense the abiding love we have for our own husbands, our own wives, our own life partners. Phyllis – she’s our mom or grandma; Gabe our brother or son. In Judge Roll, we recognize not only a man who prized his family and doing his job well, but also a man who embodied America’s fidelity to the law. In Gabby, we see a reflection of our public spiritedness, that desire to participate in that sometimes frustrating, sometimes contentious, but always necessary and never-ending process to form a more perfect union.

And in Christina…in Christina we see all of our children. So curious, so trusting, so energetic and full of magic.

So deserving of our love.

And so deserving of our good example. If this tragedy prompts reflection and debate, as it should, let’s make sure it’s worthy of those we have lost. Let’s make sure it’s not on the usual plane of politics and point scoring and pettiness that drifts away with the next news cycle.

In the spirit of giving credit where credit is due, a tip of the hat this morning to President Obama for his deft handing of the Tucson Media Meltdown. It was gratifying and heartening to see that he saw fit to quell the circus unobtrusively, while honoring the dead, the wounded, and the heroes involved in the tragedy.

I’m only half surprised by his approach, as his tenure seems to be building his character. If this had happened two years ago, I honestly don’t think he would have risen above the fray like this, as he persistently displayed a penchant for perpetual campaigning and partisanship. In this address, he sounds presidential to me for the first time.

Like so many Catholics, I pray for the president at Mass every day, and while I still despise his political agenda, it almost feels rewarding to see him able to discern that there is more to leadership than power. I’m proud of him for the first time since he took office.

Marveling after the recent election at how, as usual, every single candidate or question I supported on my election day ballot went down to defeat, I was doing a little post-election pundit reading, and was struck by another glaring contrast – one that got me thinking about the competing political visions that dominate our public conversation. This time, it was the tone of a pair of where do we go from here ruminations.

The first was from Michelle Malkin: the mischievously entitled “Take Your Olive Branch and Shove It, Democrats”. I find Malkin to be clever, shrewd, and insightful, but I cringed when I saw this article title. However, not having the fortitude at the moment to resist gawking at the car crash I expected to find, I read the article.

It was a bitter lashing-out, primarily directed toward President Obama, whom she observed had presided over “an Us vs. Them freefall” ever since conning his way into the Oval Office two years ago by passing himself off to a weary American people as The Great Uniter, uniquely qualified to lead the country into a post-partisan and post-racial promised land.

How anyone ever fell for that shtick, I’ll never understand to my dying day – every time I’ve ever heard him open his mouth, he has tried to carve out political camaraderie by marginalizing or demonizing some scapegoat or dissident group. During my adult life, I’ve never witnessed a more divisive character in that noble office – though I suppose he’d find a kindred soul in Richard Nixon, whom I remember as little more than a cartoon character from my youth.

But Malkin found worse than hypocritical the late-breaking calls from the Democrat party leadership for compromise, after their repudiation by “voters who have been maligned by the ruling majority as stupid, unwashed, racist, selfish and violent” for the past two years. She wasn’t buying it, and wasn’t hiding her disdain. I was sympathetic, but disturbed by her bitterness.

At that point, I was ready for the next article I found, posted by Joe Scarborough over at Politico, entitled: “Give Hyperbole, Partisanship a Rest”. He began with a customary conceit, wagging the finger at “extremists of all stripes,” and expressing his hope that a certain liberal political comedian can help the country bridge the breech that has opened up more and more in recent years between Washington’s political camps. It was a self-serving feel-good piece certainly, but I was worn out from the partisanship of the election push, and pretty sympathetic to the message as I read.

But then Scarborough started telling a story about how he, referring to himself as a “young, conservative Republican,” made a trip across the proverbial aisle in his freshman year to strike up a friendship with “60’s radical” Rep. Ron Dellums. Dellums asked him: “Why is it that all you guys with energy are conservative? Back in my day, you would have been on my side!” The answer Scarborough gave him floored me:

“When you think of Republicans, you associate us with Vietnam, Watergate and segregation. When I think about Democrats, I associate you with Iranian hostages, 20 percent interest rates and malaise.”

Now, it’s one question whether anybody old enough to remember which of the two major political parties was primarily responsible for U.S. involvement in Vietnam, or for that matter which was the party of the KKK, would actually associate Republicans with those things (my own experience with partisanship suggests: yes, alas; facts are of little consequence in these matters). But a better question is, how can any “young, conservative Republican” freshman congressman associate the Democrats with something as frivolous and irrelevant as the political failures of the Carter administration? Mind you, this conversation occurred in 1995! 

It may be another 15 years later now, and I may not be a Republican, but when I think about Democrats, I think about leftist policies; I think about liberalism leaning harder and harder toward socialism. And the first real problem I think about is legalized abortion, not political dilemmas. Politics have real consequences; it is not just a game to determine who gets to hand out the goodies, and who gets their pockets stuffed.

There are real serious reasons to oppose the Democrats, and I’ll happily put a separate post together to identify some of them. But I’ll say this much about Joe Scarborough’s crusade to span the great partisan divide: it’s a sham. He might be all smiles and handshakes, but he’s a completely empty suit with nothing but trivial platitudes to offer in exchange for his healthy paycheck. If you can’t come up with a serious reason to oppose your opponent, then what are you doing in the game – other than looking for an angle to cash in on?

In the end, even though Malkin’s snarl was off-putting, at least you know where she stands, and why she thinks its important to stand there. That is, at least you can trust her. Not so Joe.

I saw something on TV last night that was just too funny to pass up. When I got home from teaching CCD, my wife had the TV on, watching a nice 60 Minutes character piece on an Afghan vet who is being awarded the Medal of Honor, and I milled around to watch it. Then Andy Rooney came on.

Rooney started complaining about a recent Gallup poll showing pretty broad dissatisfaction with President Obama and his performance. Rooney contrarily said he had gone and asked nine of his friends what they thought, and they all thought Obama was doing a terrific job. Well, duh! I have no doubt that if Rooney had spent an entire afternoon polling his friends and co-workers, he would have had a hard time coming up with anyone dissatisfied with Obama – except for those perhaps who think Obama has been too much of a middling moderate! “They polled 90, 000 people!”, he crowed: “Where do they find these people?”

I was just a little bit too stung by this man’s naivety to laugh out loud. If someone had hired an actor to portray the stereotype of mainstream media figures as a collection of smug, condescending liberals, living a secluded existence completely out of touch with the American people, he couldn’t have done better than Rooney did.

The point is not whether Rooney and his nine friends, or the 90,000 Americans, are better judges of Obama’s presidency. The point is how funny it is that a guy like Rooney apparently genuinely has no idea how much farther to the left the insular world of liberal “opinion” institutions is from mainstream America.

How is this ignorance cultivated? How about, for an example, we take Ted Koppel’s musings the same day on the sad demise of the nobly objective media institution his rose-colored way-back glasses remember from back in the day – like, you know, the days when Koppel held court and people listened. The three-step formula? Find someone else even more egregiously leftist to serve as one punching bag (MSNBC fits the bill nicely here). Then, to serve as the main punching bag, find someone who seems quite out of place in the whole media mix because they’re not particularly leftist at all (this is the FOX News role, since they’re not leftist – though they are pretty libertarian, which is something of a cross between being a liberal and being a tightwad, but that’s what passes for “conservatism” in a lot of circles today). Finally, declare yourself a centrist, or “normal,” or the only ones without an accent, etc.

But back to philosopher number one: the final punch line has to be Rooney insisting that there just must be something wrong with polls that reflect views so contrary to the prevailing view within the hallways of places like CBS. “They never ask me what I think,” he huffs.

So then, why do you keep telling us, Andy?

So, the Conniver-in-Chief speaks tonight about the environmental mayhem in the Gulf of Mexico. Let’s see…

The first thing he will say is that he is in charge and in command, yet simultaneously responsible for nothing.

Then he will blame everyone within reach: BP, George W. Bush (!), and Congress (yes, even Congress will get at least a token whipping for this – not because they bear any real responsibility, but because almost everyone hates Congress, so they’re an easy mark).

Conservative talk radio personalities may also get some blame, but I’m not going out on a limb on that one (no pun intended).

In keeping with his political strategy of dividing to conquer, The One will not only blame BP, he will demonize them. It is crucial to his strategy to make the American public hate BP enough to divert most if not all of its anger onto BP.

I don’t think I can watch…

As the leftists in Washington basked in the faux glory of their successful healthcare reform con job last week, it was hard not to be struck by their lack of gravity. You would have thought they had just won an arm wrestling competition, or perhaps a neighborhood gang fight. Despite all the high-fiving, and the preposterous assertions that the vote portended the doom of the Republican Party, it is awfully hard not to see this as a hollow victory for Obama: a political manipulation of the worst kind, for all the world to see; watching him strong-arming his own party over against the evident will of the majority of the governed. What a spectacle.

Listening to the bi-linguae explanans emanating from the victorious discussants, either before or after the vote, it would be hard to judge whether the measure was an historic watershed in the progression of human culture on these shores between two seas, or a simple means of securing just liberties for the disadvantaged that was being blown all out of proportion by the wild-eyed obstructionists in the Republican caucus, and their unkempt tea-bagger enablers. But they’re racists, all, by golly. Yes, we’re all racists now…

I went out to gas up my car on Friday night, as the arms were being twisted, and the “reconciliation” option was still on the table, and I subjected myself to government funded radio on the way – even though it was obvious by then that the fix was in. I heard Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift discussing reconciliation, saying that even though critics claimed it was politically devious and maybe even unconstitutional, it was actually a common device used by both parties to pass laws, and could even be considered “almost routine.” I nearly drove off the road, my head was spinning so violently. This gaggle of savants went on to talk about how reports out of Washington were accusing TEA Party protesters of yelling things at black congressmen, which surely demonstrated the elements of racism to be found in opposition to President Obama’s social agenda.

One of the few sane voices I heard on the left last week came from, of all places, the Washington Post, in an opinion column by Ruth Marcus in which she suggests that a little humility might be in order, given that nobody actually has any idea what just got passed, or what it will actually mean for the future of the country. “Gee, I hope this works” is how she characterizes her hangover perspective. My biggest beef all along with this boondoggle is that it was never thought through. Marcus seems to grasp that, now that the horse is out of the barn.

It’s quite a night for politics in the Bay State tonight. The polls closed about half an hour ago on the first competitive race for a national office that I can remember in my lifetime. My sense is that, before this night is over,  Republican State Senator Scott Brown will have knocked off once heavily favored Mass Attorney General Democrat Martha Coakley for the open U.S. Senate seat that had been held by Ted Kennedy since I was a two-year old. It has been a lot of fun over the past few weeks to feel the momentum building for Brown’s candidacy in this deep blue state, as it has provided some hope that the leftwing lunacy prevailing in Washington D.C. might be brought at least somewhat under control. Not that I think Scott Brown is going to exert some magical power – he’s a deeply flawed politician who just happens to have enough common sense to seem like a bright bulb in a dull array – but he will bring a sorely needed fiscal seriousness to the table, and the loss of the seat will at least force the Democrats to play ball in the Senate.

More importantly, the establishment elite have been served unambiguous notice that the American people are not buying the lies that have been served up as “healthcare reform,” nor do they approve of the bald shenanigans that have accompanied it. If Brown wins tonight, of course the rules in Washington change. It’s simply incredible to think that the Democrats needed a super-majority to get that pig passed, yet thought it was perfectly OK to proceed with it anyway. What arrogance to think they could makeover a major part of our culture through brute force, without having to convince others through reason! But even if Brown fails tonight, it has become abundantly clear for all to see that the current direction of the Obama administration is a political dead-end – even if they can’t see that it is also a moral dead-end. If even Massachusetts Democrats could so much as come close to losing “the Kennedy seat” to an anti-Obamacare movement, that is one dead movement. Stick a fork in it.