JOE BIDEN - THE PHONY CATHOLIC OR GOOD AGNOSTIC?

 Yes, Joe Biden Is a Catholic in Name Only

By Daniel John Sobieski

Yes, Joe Biden is Catholic in name only.  So are Nancy Pelosi, Dick Durbin, and a bevy of other liberal Democrats who are "personally opposed' to abortion" while paying lip service to a basic tenet of their alleged faith.  To be sure, you cannot judge what's in someone's heart and soul, and you should not judge lest ye be also judged by the same standards.  But it has also been said by someone with authority that by their fruits ye shall know, and the fruits of the efforts of Joe Biden and others to preserve the "right" to an abortion and the funding of Planned Parenthood are tens of millions of little corpses and assorted baby body parts that have torn this nation's moral fiber and humanity.

Democrats would not accept a Republican saying he is merely personally opposed to slavery or racial discrimination.  I, like Joe Biden, am a Catholic, but I, unlike Joe Biden, accept the basic tenet that life begins at conception.  The time and means of our passing are determined by God, not by a surgeon's instruments, and abortion on demand is a moral evil.  You cannot choose otherwise and be a Catholic.

That is what former Notre Dame football coach Lou Holtz said on Wednesday night at the Republican National Convention.  He took a lot of heat for it, but he was absolutely and eloquently right:

Sharing the ideals of the Catholic university he was a legendary football coach of, former Notre Dame football coach Lou Holtz said Joe Biden and the Democrats are "Catholics in name only."

"Nobody has been a stronger advocate for the unborn than President [Donald] Trump," Holtz said in an address to the Republican National Convention on Wednesday night.  "The Biden-Harris ticket is the most radically pro-abortion campaign in history.

"They and other politicians are Catholics in name only, abandoning innocent lives. President Trump protects those lives."

Responding to the inevitable outcry from those who believe that all our rights and moral authority come from government, Holtz defended the truth others can't handle, truth based on exactly what Catholic teaching says:

"People have taught me that to murder an unborn child at nine months is illegal," Holtz told "Bill Hemmer Reports". "That's not part of the Catholic faith. And Joe Biden — he may be a wonderful individual, I hear great things about him — I'm not casting aspersions on his character, his integrity, but I am casting aspersions on his decision." ...

In the Catholic Catechism, abortion itself — described as "gravely contrary to moral law" — is classified as a violation of the Fifth Commandment against killing. Catholic clergy have repeatedly condemned both the act itself and abortion-rights political advocacy.  Vatican officials have reportedly said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., should be denied the sacrament of Holy Communion and the last pope — Pope Benedict XVI — personally reminded her of the Church's stance on the issue during a private meeting.

Joe Biden was once denied Holy Communion for his steadfast advocacy for ending human life in the womb.  Biden, while campaigning in South Carolina, presented himself for Holy Communion and was refused at the 9 A.M. Mass at Saint Anthony Catholic Church, where Father Robert E. Morey serves as pastor.  As the Christian Post reported:

Morey confirmed with SC Now that Biden was denied the sacrament because of his advocacy for abortion rights. ...

"Sadly, this past Sunday, I had to refuse Holy Communion to former Vice President Joe Biden," Morey told the publication Monday.  "Holy Communion signifies we are one with God, each other and the Church. Our actions should reflect that. Any public figure who advocates for abortion places himself or herself outside of Church teaching."

The rebuke from Morey comes after Biden publicly objected last Wednesday to a proposal to outlaw abortions in South Carolina after about six weeks of pregnancy, including in cases of rape or incest[.] ...

He also noted that even though he personally opposes abortion, "I don't think I have the right to impose my view — on something I accept as a matter of faith — on the rest of society."

But Joe,  as a Catholic, you are obligated to practice your faith, and spread your faith, to make apostles of all nations.  Your faith is not just a one hour on a Sunday thing, and you are commanded by your Catholic Church and its founder, Jesus Christ, to place the light you have been blessed with high on the nightstand and not hide it under a bushel.  Can a politician kiss babies if he believes that their birth is a choice like which shoes to wear?

Biden's target in 2020 is President Donald J. Trump, who has publicly professed that he believes that every human life is a gift from God.  Elizabeth Warren, who supports abortion to the moment of birth, denies the humanity of the unborn and their right to life.  Does Biden remember the Bible passage where Mary, pregnant with the fetus Christians call Jesus, greeted Elizabeth, and the baby — yes, baby — who was to become John the Baptist leapt in his mother's womb?  Does he remember the passage where God reminds us that even before he formed us in the womb, He knew us?

Biden's faith is selective.  The faith of our Founding Fathers was absolute when they noted in the Declaration of Independence that our unalienable rights come from our Creator and that foremost among those rights, before liberty and the pursuit of happiness, is life.

Joe Biden has the moral spine and religious convictions of a jellyfish.  How else to explain the "triple-Axelrod" awarded by veteran operative David Axelrod to this serial groper, who would have a grasp on reality only if it were a female, for blindly agreeing to a rope-line question about past support for the Hyde Amendment blocking federal funding of abortion?  Axelrod discussed Biden's remarks with Alisyn Camerota on CNN:

Former Obama campaign manager David Axelrod weighed in on Joe Biden's position reversal on the Hyde Amendment, which bars federal funding for most abortions, saying it is a "flip flop flip" which highlights some of the larger problems with his candidacy:

DAVID AXELROD: I think that this was a parable about Biden that goes to question marks about his candidacy ... the virtue of having a long record and comforting people and being a figure of stability has the flip side that you have to defend positions that you've had over the course of 45 years in politics, some of which may have been acceptable in the day and not acceptable now.  We see that on this issue of the Hyde Amendment[.] ... Joe Biden was out on the campaign, and he's not been out that much and a voter challenged him on the question of Hyde, video was rolling, and he said he would reverse this policy[.] ... Then the next day when it came to light the campaign put out a statement and said, no, he still believes in the Hyde amendment.  Then there was a furor and last night he flipped again.  So that was a flip, flop, flip, which is never a good thing in politics and it raises questions about his own performance and his own steadiness and his campaign's performance.  So this was not a good — you know, beyond the issue itself, this was not a reassuring episode for the Biden campaign.

 ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN: A flip-flop flip, also known as a triple Axelrod.

Biden can no longer fudge the issue.  He is the nominee of a party that embraces abortion without restrictions and on demand from conception to birth and even after birth.  He accepts the endorsement of Planned Parenthood and its thirty pieces of campaign silver.

Thankfully, in an age of "cafeteria Catholics" who pick and choose which Church doctrines they will adhere to and which they will ignore, an age where we have a Pope Francis, who would have us pray for the oceans and invites Amazonian "priests" and their fertility gods into the Vatican, it was refreshing to see a Catholic priest speak truth to power and tell a craven Catholic politician that abortion on demand is a moral evil opposed by the Catholic Church — and that to approve of it means you are unworthy of receiving the Sacrament of Holy Communion.

It was refreshing to see faithful Catholic Lou Holtz remind Joe Biden and the rest of us what Catholic teaching and Catholic truth are.  It is the truth that will keep us free.

Daniel John Sobieski is a former editorial writer for Investor's Business Daily and free lance writer whose pieces have appeared in Human Events, Reason Magazine, and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.

Is Feudalism Our Future?

By Clarice Feldman

It’s increasingly clear that one-party polities are corrupt, badly managed and serve the interests only of those at the top and their courtiers. I think that if Biden and Harris win, the entire country will devolve to a kingdom of  state and regional duchies composed of  often semi-hereditary rulers in the pay of the rich, donor class, the clerisy (media scribblers, complaisant judicial appointees and academic rent seekers who promote favored policies and shut out the dissenters), an impoverished, smaller, and powerless middle class and a vast layer of muzzled, docile poor serfs. They will rule by fiat (often inconsistently and illogically) as they have been in dealing with COVID-19. Because they can, the Constitution to the contrary notwithstanding.

In a lengthy essay, Michael Anton details why he thinks the leftist dream (which, in essence is a feudal form of tyranny) is within reach if Trump loses.  I urge you all to read in its entirety this thoughtful article at your leisure. At best, I can only highlight some of the many salient points he makes.

1. Since the 1960s policies and practices have enriched the ruling class and “erode our natural and constitutionally guaranteed rights and liberties” as they degraded our culture and dishonored our heritage.

2. At present the office of the presidency is seriously weaker than the unitary executive described in the Constitution intended as an entrenched bureaucracy undermines, flouts and disobeys the president at every turn if he dares to advance policies “unpopular with the deep state.”

3.  The benign phrase “public-private partnership” is no less than “the use of state power to serve private interests” and the relationship is one in which the senior partner is always big business.

4.  Congress, he argues “is a joke.” Our government is run by “The cogs and lickspittles in the bureaucracy, led by a small elite in corporations, above all in Big Tech and finance, will determine all important policies, foreign and domestic.”

5. The COVID lockdowns and mandates engineered by governors and mayors without laws to permit them based on “expert” lies continue even as we know the virus is definitely not the plague we were told it would be.

He argues that should Trump lose we can expect increasingly anti-democratic governance “committed to social engineering and grievance politics” and a continued undermining of virtue and promotion of vice.

Anton talks about the undermining of the right to self-defense and the outrageous prosecution of Kyle Rittenhouse, who in Kenosha did just that against three attackers whose marauding had been encouraged by the Wisconsin governor’s and local mayor’s refusal to enforce the laws to maintain order. 

Attorney Lin Wood, who successfully sued on behalf of Robert Jewell and Nick Sandmann and who this week volunteered to represent  Kyle  Rittenhouse (the hero of Kenosha) for defamation says we are facing a revolution and need to prepare ourselves for the fight. 

Lin Wood @LLinWood
(1) Republicans are talking “policy differences” while focusing on upcoming election. They are not taking the current situation serious or they are just plain stupid. They need to face truth that our country is under attack.
(2) The former President, Barack Obama, is calling for sustained protests. The leader of the resistance movement, Hillary Clinton, is saying that we should not accept the results of the next election.
(3) The Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, is describing our President, @realDonaldTrump, as an enemy of the state. Many radical members of Congress are openly calling for the overthrow of our government.
(4) 1 + 1 + 1 = Revolution.
#FightBack
5:55 AM · Aug 29, 2020

The Duchy of Newsom as the Template of the New Order

No better example of what Anton describes as our future can I find than the sad state of California under the governorship of Gavin Newsom. I’ve written elsewhere of the Green New Deal disaster he helped birth and which now plunges much of his state into darkness and misery. 

Victor David Hanson has written extensively on what has brought his home state so rich in natural resources to its knees. Here’s but one of his latest reports. It begins (and then extensively documents):  “Power outages, fires, water shortages, rising taxes, crumbling and congested highways, dismal schools, lawlessness…”

At the Wall Street Journal, Holman Jenkins, Jr. notes that California politicians obsess about things like “climate change” they are powerless to do anything about while ignoring serious problems they could do something about if only they had the skills and will to govern. In that one-party state there is simply no accountability for failure of vision and execution:

Unfortunately, the people running the state, including Joe Biden’s prospective veep, have been mostly meme-chasing, pose-striking calculators. Their only career plan: nurse their standing with Hollywood green activists, trial lawyers and public-sector unions. In a one-party state, there is no serious clash of policy prescriptions. That’s how Kamala Harris could reach middle age with a giant vacancy in her résumé where one would normally find some connection to policy ideas.

If the state is to dig out of its deepening hole, it will need something else. It will need, you know, ideas. In fact, only a revolution of ideas can save it from the path it’s on. And the first idea is easy to see. The state will have to wake up from the sheer ludicrousness of devoting so much of its politics to a problem its politics can’t fix at the expense to those it can.

So why do the citizens of blue hells not rebel? That is the question -- Anton and Hanson and Jenkins, like so many of us, know they must.

My online friend “The Infamous Ignatz” sees it in psychological terms:

I don't think the people living in urban blue hells want to live in hell, but irrationality on a mass scale is made up of millions of little individual irrationalities collectivized.

An irrational person has a very, very difficult time choosing the rational option because it involves so many self-negating decisions, not least of which is stopping the magical thinking and the blaming of others for the problem.

That's why I equate irrational society with personality disorders. It's not that people in urban hellscapes aren't miserable, they just don't see any way out. For those outside looking in, American cities' electoral habits fit Einstein's apocryphal definition of insanity better than anything I can think of.

What makes it even more incurable and persistent is the very people the voters think they are hiring as their therapists not only come themselves from the ranks of the disordered but they have very powerful incentives making sure the patient never gets well. 

Maybe that’s part of it. I do think that the movement in the direction of feudal, tyrannical governance is being aided by the influx of millions of illegal immigrants from places where this kind of government is the norm. It gained force when civics education was dropped in schools in favor of less significant subjects, and the hollowing out of our higher education institutions, including law schools, which since the 1960s have increasingly become there-oughta-be-a-law schools which encourage future judges and law clerks to imagine themselves as legislators and executives. Nor can we forget the role being played by the tech giants, who are using IT as a weapon for social control and the destruction of privacy. In any event, November will have us in the fight of our lives. Be prepared.