Ukranian Catholic Church, Chicago, Illinois

Weapons & Liquor Committee Fall Shoot

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The hawk again

Hawk

Gate

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Fall Color at Church

Isn't this nice?

Molly Moonbat

I like reading Molly Ivins. She seems nice. Her heart's in the right place. But the reason I like to read her is that she usually starts out sounding fairly reasonable ... and then suddenly morphs into a moonbat with her sonar turned up to 100 decibels. It's entertaining.

I'm now going to attempt a "Fisk" of her column published in the Chicago Tribune October 20, 2005. I don't know where that term comes from, but I think from reading others' fiskings that the task is to write in her stuff, followed by mine when I feel like observing something. Wish me luck. I apologize in advance for the poor formatting. I'm new at this.

Molly's headline is "A laundry list of ideas on how to undo the damage done by the Bush White House"

Fair enough. Bush isn't perfect, and the people who work with him are human. Okay, let's get to the list, Moll.

"You can only sit around wringing your hands and moaning about what a mess the Bushies have made of America for so long. Sooner or later even the gloomiest doom-meisters are bound to get beaned by an acorn on the noggin, leading to the startling and productive thought, "So what could we do that would make things better?'"

Um, 'what a mess the Bushies have made of America?' Is that all 53 million of us, or just George and Karl? And what mess exactly? Well okay, she's a columnist and if she isn't a little provocative she'd be boring. I'll give her one for style. But I like the second thought. Very pragmatic.

"For those mired in loathing the Bush administration,"

Phew, glad Moll's not one of them!

"the program would start with a long, long list of things that need to be undone: repeal the bankruptcy bill, repeal the tax breaks for the rich, and fix the farm bill, the transportation bill, the energy bill, etc."

Bankruptcy bill, check -- stupid, bank-kissing law. Agreed.

Tax breaks for the rich, check -- I know nothing about what tax breaks she means because I don't follow tax law, but I generally agree that the rich benefit from law and order and all that more than the poor do, and they should pay for it, plus a little something to help those in need. Just because.

Fix the farm bill, check -- I don't know what she's talking about, but I always say, if something's broke, fix it. Agreed.

Fix the transportation bill, check -- is this the one where they're building bridges in Alaska from one moose to the other? Agreed.

Uh oh, am I mired in loathing the Bush administration? Turns out not.

"Or you could start with a list of gentle suggestions, such as:

• Making a rude jerk with a bad temper ambassador to the United Nations, probably not a good idea;
• Putting a veterinarian in charge of women's health policy, maybe not;
• Making someone with a background in Arabian horses the disaster relief czar, possibly needs reconsideration;
• Invading a Middle Eastern country with no provocation, a country that had posed no threat and had no connection to Sept. 11, 2001 ... hmmm, perhaps not a shrewdie."

SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

1) A rude jerk is exactly what the US needs in the UN, and I'd be even happier if he carried a hunting bow, a 12 gauge and a tomahawk. Oh, just kidding. Really we should just turn a blind eye to the oil for food scandal, let France run our foreign policy, give China the keys to the Internet ... let's see, what else. Ah, who cares.

2) Putting a veterinarian in charge of women's health? I heard rumors about that and if true it sure sounds shameful. But I don't know the person, either. Generally I agree with the Mollster here.

3) Ditto.

4) This is typical Moonbat conflation and misdirection about Iraq, but so finely tuned, and so shamefully timed four days after the magnificent approval of the Iraqi (interim) Constitution as to be breathtaking. (a) No provocation? What was September 11th, a dinner invitation? Remember, this enemy doesn't have nice little borders. He operates across borders, and he was in Iraq. So we went and got him -- well, some of them. We're not done yet. (b) Iraq had nothing to do with Sept 11? True, in the dream-worldly sense that the Iraqi parliament did not vote for war on the US and send the planes. Utterly false in the real-worldly sense that Iraq sponsored and sheltered Al Queda agents, and has for years paid for -- paid for right out in the open -- attacks against Israelis. (c) Not a shrewdie? Oh okay, we'll just bring all the troops home right now and let the weakened but newly free Iraqis try to fend of the Islamist wolf at their door all by themselves, because this is all such an inconvenience, and besides that Mom-person, whatever her same is, is really really mad at Bush and it costs a lot. Honestly, f--k you, Moll. These people are fighting, with our help, for their lives and their freedom. They have now courageously, and in greater percentages than we do, turned out for elections under the threat of possible death for doing so. Twice. And that's a bad idea? Sorry. Great idea. Kill off Al Queda and other Islamist terrorists, try to show a large Arab nation what freedom tastes like, and possibly -- well, no, undoubtedly -- lose some brave men and women and lots of money in the process. Great idea. Great in the sense of unbelievably, stupendously selfless and honorable.

Okay, we'll skip a few sentences and get to the next laughable screech.

"True, we need to go back to doing a lot of things we used to before George W. Bush 'won' that remarkable 'election' in 2000."

Reality has left the building, ladies and gentlemen! Moving on to the end of the article, though there's some meat in the middle for anyone who wants to take a shot.

Yep, that ol' devil 'socialized medicine' against which the right wing has so long and so relentlessly inveighed is now the darling pet of huge corporations. Not only is it good for General Motors, folks, the rest of us need it desperately, too ...

The reason corporations like socialized medicine is because it doesn't cost them anything, not because it's good for people. Insured health care comes out the corporate bottom line. Socialized medicine does not. I would think an old lefty like the Mollster would at least suspect this. But the question is, is it good for people? The answer, looking at Canadian and British healthcare, is no. People wait in lines and sometimes die with diseases that could have been treated if there were more doctors and facilities. Know why there aren't more? Because the cash incentive to become a doctor or build a hospital is too low. Oh, and guess what, rich Canadians come to America for their heart surgeries. So who gets screwed? The poor. Just like here. Just like everywhere.

While I completely agree with Molly that that situation -- the poor always getting screwed -- is wrong and should be remedied with some sort of "safety net" health care for the poor (which I haven't even begun to think about what it would look like), the answer isn't socialized medicine. Finally,

"This dandy list of Good Ideas on How to Fix things will be continued."

Yay!

Book Review: How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization

This book is both highly important and deeply flawed.
It is important because, while it plows no new ground, it manages to gather together and to explain in easy-to-understand prose numerous sources that demonstrate the role of the Christian Church in building the institutions that today are taken for granted or assumed to have arisen only in the “secularized” post-Enlightenment period. In fact, everything from hospitals to International Law rose from Christianity. As the author puts it, “So ingrained are the concepts that Catholicism introduced into the world that very often movements opposing it are nevertheless imbued with Christian ideas.” This is all very important and cannot be stated enough nowadays.
However, the book is also deeply flawed. First, the author seems to conflate the Church with the radical teachings of Christ and the enormous power that His Spirit and inspiration have had on the individuals who created the hospitals and who created International Law because they took up the cause of indigenous American Indians. Simply stated, given the fact that there was no Church in the West other than the Roman Catholic for roughly 1500 years, anything any Christian did during that period can, and in this book is, credited to that Church. Now this is all okay and fine, were it not for the undisguised disdain the author demonstrates for Protestant Christians. Any time a Protestant appears in this book, it is only to act as a foil for something good that a Roman Catholic did. Protestantism, apparently, has had nothing to do with building Western Civilization. This leads to another flaw I will note below.
The second flaw is the style. Perhaps because he was trying to write an easy-to-understand book – which he successfully has – the author reuses empty phrases to the degree of annoyance. There are more “father of” something in this book than in the lineage of Jesus in chapter One of Matthew. And the word “milieu” gets a workout that would leave Lance Armstrong panting.
The third flaw is that the author, apparently to avoid giving Protestantism any credit, turns a blind eye to other highly important developments in Western Civilization that came from the Protestant side of the catholic Church. For instance, oh, I don’t know – widespread use of the printing press? Prior to the Protestant Reformation, the use of the printing press was very confined, and translation of the Bible was verboten -- some were burned at the stake for it. Once the Protestants got started, however, the political and economic power of the Roman Church crumbled.
Overall, this is a worthwhile book with a few warts that can be ignored if you are cognizant of them going in.