Operation HOT MIC!

23 Comments

1. wolskerj says:

   14 April 2012 at 12:14 PM

   Unfortunately, I think this incident was seen as a positive sign by the President’s supporters. There are a frightening number of people who hope that after this election the President will finally be able to get down to business, without having to pander to all the “bitter clingers.”

   (OT: could you perhaps include the original url somewhere in this type of post – the embedded video doesn’t show up in any browser I can run on my less-than-cutting-edge machine. I dug through the source code and searched youtube to find the matching video.)
2. frjim4321 says:

   14 April 2012 at 3:02 PM

   What’s the big deal; he was stating the obvious. He’s running for an election. Every president in history had to be careful toward the end of the first term, including the sainted (by some) Ronald Reagan. Right now the election is Obama’s to loose, so no wonder he’s being cautious – he would be a fool not to be. Basically all he has to do is not make any mistakes between now and 11/6.
3. momoften says:

   14 April 2012 at 3:33 PM

   my favorite Obama stupid comment on ABC News in an interview with Diane Sawyer on Jan 27, 2012 was:
   President Obama admitted he makes “a mistake, you know, every hour, every day” in an interview with ABC’s Diane Sawyer Thursday night. Obama, who said he will “second-guess myself constantly,” admitted that he’s still learning with each day of his presidency.

   this after 3 years of presidency, still making mistakes every hour? Scary.
4. Theodore says:

   14 April 2012 at 4:55 PM

   @Frjm. If you can’t see the “big deal” then I fear for a country that would have an electorate with a substantial number of people who are similarly blinded.
5. frjim4321 says:

   14 April 2012 at 5:22 PM

   Please, after eight years of W we’re surprised when a president says an occasional dumb thing? I would think we’d been anesthetized by now.
6. Theodore says:

   14 April 2012 at 7:58 PM

   Dumb is nukular for nuclear. Telling the head of a foreign country that you need some breathing space to align the US policy on missile defense with that of Russia is quite another thing. I’m disappointed but not surprised about the position you have taken about this most grave matter.
7. trad catholic mom says:

   14 April 2012 at 7:59 PM

   Oh my, I was laughing so hard. That was great!
8. Neal says:

   14 April 2012 at 8:01 PM

   Come on, Father Jim. You’re smarter than that.
9. lydia says:

   14 April 2012 at 8:32 PM

   Fr Jim 4321 Having been married to a neurosurgeon for 30 yrs. I suggest you have that tingly leg syndrome you share with Chris Matthews checked out.
10. frjim4321 says:

    14 April 2012 at 8:41 PM

    lydia, omg, how did you know about my leg problem? are you psychic? i think i do have some early signs of stenosis in the left leg which is pretty bad in the mid-50s. left arm goes a little bit numb also, so yes, you are right on target. pretty sure about this b/c my Dad had it…so i’m getting as much out of life as I can before becoming totally lame…….

    (this is not a joke – this is all ture)
11. frjim4321 says:

    14 April 2012 at 9:06 PM

    lydia, does your hub do decompressions? Pretty sure I am heading that way within the next ten years.
12. lydia says:

    14 April 2012 at 9:19 PM

    Fr Jim4321 I extend my sympathies to you. I have spinal stenosis and take medication and have had cortisone injections surgery will be my last choice at this time. While we obviously disagree politically I wish you successful treatment and relief from your discomfort. My husband passed away 8 1/2 yrs. ago.
13. monmir says:

    14 April 2012 at 9:43 PM

    President Bush was very creative with vocabulary and grammar, he also read in Putin’s eyes and he told us so, he read the wrong thing, but what President Obama did was making a deal behind our backs with the President of a foreign country which is not friendly to us, which is also impairing our progress about Iran or Syria. There seem to be a word in the dictionary for it hmm.. Treason? Yes it is a big deal particularly after the unfavorable agreement the administration made with Russia about nuclear weapons. A big deal.
14. SKAY says:

    14 April 2012 at 9:56 PM

    Great video.

    After almost four years – five trillion dollars borrowed and his track record of ignoring the Constitution when it gets in his way(especially that pesky first ammendment thing about freedom of speech and religion)–I think we have a pretty good idea what he ment about “flexability” in his message to Putin.
    Obama’s past and the people he surrounded himself with told you exactly who and what he is.
    The content of one’s character is not the important thing-loyality to the idiology is.
    With few exceptions, his various judicial appointments, Cabinet Secretary and numerous Czar choices have reinforced that observation. His meeting with the Democrat Governors to find a way to go around Congress in order to push his agenda tells us a lot also about his domestic “flexability”.

    I am still looking for those other 7 states he thought he campaigned in during the 2008 election.
    A (far left) Harvard graduate just could not be wrong. In fact-the Democrats may find them before the November election to prove to the uneducated voters that he was exactly right and I am sure they will all be blue states.
15. robtbrown says:

    14 April 2012 at 10:10 PM

    I’m not so sure the election is Obama’s to lose. So far, Romney’s attacks have been confined to the Repub primaries. Unlike McCain Romney runs a very aggressive campaign that has not yet been directed at Obama.

    I will say this: If Obamacare is overturned or significantly disabled by SCOTUS, it will mark the second time in so many Presidencies that the primary effort of an administration has gone belly up (cf. Bush and the Iraq War).
16. robtbrown says:

    14 April 2012 at 10:17 PM

    FrJim4321,

    Are you referring to vascular stenosis of your leg?

    Re tingling: Have you tried physical therapy to correct the arms problems?
17. EXCHIEF says:

    14 April 2012 at 11:46 PM

    Obama is in the same camp “philosophically” as the Russians….but he like most of his cohorts has swallowed the kool aid. Obama may think that concessions to the Russians will make them like us and prevent the sort of potential conflict that existed under the Soviet Union. Obama and those who think like him are fools. The Russians want to dominate us militarily just as much as they ever did. The Soviet Union collapsed for a variety of reasons–but the underlaying problems that existed in the USSR are still there. Putin is 100 times smarter than the allegedly Harvard educated Sotero—and Putin, unlike the little would be dictator wimp Obama DOES know how to fight.
18. amfortas says:

    15 April 2012 at 2:27 AM

    I guess as a Brit I just don’t understand American politics or the politicisation of Catholic clergy. I’m not talking here about the splendid witness of the Catholic Bishops for religious freedom. I’m talking about the strident pro-Republican tone of many posts by Catholic priests. The dividing line between legitimate witness and explicit party politics is now so blurred on this blog as to be non-existent. But, then again, I am a Brit with limited understanding of American politics.
19. Jim of Bowie says:

    15 April 2012 at 6:53 AM

    Although I don’t accept your premise, it’s quite simple amfortas; besides it’s attack on religious freedom, there is only one party destroying two of the things that made this country great, namely the Constitution and capitalism. I don’t think it’s strident pro-Republican, it’s just that we must defeat this man in November to save our country and the practice of our faith.
20. EXCHIEF says:

    15 April 2012 at 8:33 AM

    Jim of Bowie has it exactly right. I could care less about one’s political party. I care only that our elected officials have a reverence for life, support for our Constitution, and a commitment to keeping the USA strong in every sense of that word. I have no use at all for the current President who is clearly on a mission to re-make this country into his image rather than the well thought out image which motivated our founding fathers.
21. Dennis Martin says:

    15 April 2012 at 9:29 AM

    For Amfortas:

    And British and Continental Catholicism has never been politicised? Recent British history may seem different, but then British political systems differ from ours as well. I’d say the Pilgrimage of Grace was a politicisation of Catholicism. But then so too was Henry VIII’s policy.

    To understand the US situation you have to go back to 1950 and to 1973. From the Progressive Era onward (early 20thc), both major parties favored a strong federal role, which was accelerated by the Roosevelt era. Subsidiarity was ignored; Catholics favored the Democrat party because of the Roosevelt coalition and the assumption (now challenged by Shlaes and other revisionist historians) that the only way out of the Depression was Keynesian technocracy.

    Republicans were WASP elitists, anti-Catholic to the core. Republicans were big-governement statists too, by the 1950s.

    Then came the intellectual conservative movement (Kirk, who converted to Catholicism, Weaver, Buckley etc.). It had heavy Catholic influence but also drew on Southern animosity toward Yankee technocracy. (Southern Agrarian movement at Vanderbilt and elsewhere). The Southerners were not Catholic (though some were Anglo-Catholic, like Tate and some converted), but they shared opposition to WASP-Yankees.

    But the intellectual conservative movement might have gone nowhere had it not been for Roe v. Wade in 1973. After the WASP/Blue Blood Republicans failed under Ford in 1976, galvanized by RvW, the Reagan coalition realigned things, wooing blue-collar Catholic Democrats as well as Evangelical Protestants (latecomers to the opposition to abortion). In contrast, the Democrat Party leadership made a deliberate decision to stake their future on 1968-inspired radical/socialist/feminist policies (McGovern, the revolution in the party rules that shunted aside the old mainstream Liberals like Humphrey). That meant they were committed to the death to being pro-abortion. Anyone who wanted a future in the national Democrat Party became pro-abortion (Al Gore etc.). Local Democrats in conservative regions were permitted to be pro-life as long as they stayed local.

    The bishops and the Catholic intelligentsia stayed with their pre-judiced pro-Democrat Party position, thinking that all those Catholic pro-abort Democrats would some day “come around.”

    What characterized the Reagan coalition was a powerful grassroots involvement by people heretofore not involved in politics, Catholics and Evangelicals. They (barely) took over the apparatus of the Republican Party. The WASP Blue-Blood Republicans resented that and still resent that, to this day. Catholic prolife activists in the trenches, battling day-in and day-out against Death, understood very clearly that the Democrat Party had totally abandoned them.

    The Republicans today are split, badly split. We have a two-party system. Our coalitions are within parties. Your coalitions and esp. coalitions on the Continent are between parties.

    But they are the only game in town for Catholics. Sorry, but them’s the facts. In 2008 a number of pro-life Catholics insisted that there was still hope for pro-lifers within the Democrat Party.

    Obamacare blew that out of the water. Bart Stupak stupidly trusted an executive order against government-funded abortions (which would have been thrown out in court, given the jurisprudence since R v W, which is why the only way to prevent government-abortions has to be legislative) to sign on. Then Obama not only stabbeed Stupak and the other purported pro-life Democrats in the back but he stomped on them and ground them into the mud with the heel of his boot.

    Even most of the bishops finally are beginning to realize that, politically speaking, the Democrat Party hates everything we stand for. Obviously it’s the responsibility of lay Catholics do engage in the political arena. I make no brief for priests running for or occupying office (Drinan, the Sandinista priests), but surely they are citizens too and are permitted (at least up to now) to voice their opinions???

    Politicisation? Well, yes. We live in a polis. Here we still have elections, though riddled with fraud (a deliberate Democrat strategy). Some Democrat legislators have even begun to suggest that, given our great crisis, perhaps we ought to just skip having elections, just this one time . . . . Unimaginable even 10 years ago. But fact today.

    It didn’t have to develop this way. But it did. Real events brought this about, over a period of 50 or 100 years.

    Many of us saw this coming. We knew who Obama was. He had not hidden who he was. When Douglas Kmiec gave us his rose-tinted version, we denounced it. Now we face the criminalization of our beliefs, all because, contrary to subsidiarity, Obamacare legislation, passed against the will of the people because of trahison des Stupaks, placed incredible power to rule by decree into the hands of bureaucrats. You are already used to that in Great Britain, I suppose. We are trying to stop it before it goes past the point of no return.

    Politics and parties matter. If the opposition to Hitler in 1933 had not been so fragmented, including the various Catholic parties who didn’t agree with each other, would history perhaps have been different?

    Subsidiarity. Subsidiarity. Subsidiarity. Subsidiarity. Subsidiarity. Republicans (one wing only) believe in it. Democrats, no wing of them, believe in it. That’s why the Democrats (and half the Republicans) are no longer an option for Catholics in the US. That’s why retaking the Republican Party along the lines of the Reagan coalition is the only reasonable path forward. It’s a long shot. I am very pessimistic about it’s success. But it’s all that’s left. Otherwise we end up with rule by judges and bureaucrats.

    Back in the day, kings and their courtiers (bureaucrats) ruled by decree. I can live with that. I specialize in medieval church history. But one will have a ghost of a chance at a just society ruled by decree by kings and courtiers or judges and bureaucrats only if the rulers are virtuous and just people. Catholic kings and nobles and courtiers were always a minority compared to pseudo-Catholic kings and nobles and courtiers.

    But the pool from which our bureaucrats and judges are drawn today are Death-cultists who hate the Catholic faith and natural law.

    America was established with no ruling class, no division into subjects and rulers, ruled and rulers. Both statist Democrats and Blue Blood Statist Republicans today see themselves as our rulers. Europe was accustomed to being ruled. We set out to create something different. It lasted for about 100 years, maybe 150. The conservative movement of the 1950s and the post-RvW Reagan coalition was an effort to go back to the citizen represntatives and overturn the ruled/rulers paradigm. It only succeeded part-way (because the Reaganites needed coalition partners from the Blue Blooders). It may be hopeless now. But that’s what the subsidiarity small-government wing of the Republican party, which includes most of the strong Catholic pro-lifers, is aiming at. The Tea Party is a secular version of the same thing. (Parallel to RvW, Obamacare and other measures frightened the small-business owners, the Kulaks of America, to realize what Obama’s “transformation” entailed–the destruction of self-reliant entrepreneurship. The Tea Party movement was made up of a high percentage of heretofore politically uninvolved people. )

    The anti-Catholic Libertarian wing of the Republican Party is the new development and the spoiler here. They are the main reason why Santorum fell short. There’s now a tripartite split among Republicans. The secular Libertarians embrace, in many cases, the Sexual Revolution, or at least aspects of it, and for that reason have it in for religious “Social Conservatives.”

    This shaky coaltion, right now, is the only game in town for Catholics, despite it’s faults. It may well fall apart, as the Zentrum and other oppositions parties’ coalition fell apart in the 1930s. But Catholics cannot avoid getting their hands dirty in politics. It goes along with being a People of the Incarnation.
22. frjim4321 says:

    15 April 2012 at 10:02 AM

    rb/l . . . thanks . . . lydia sorry did not know you husband passed away . . . my sympathies.

    not a vascular issue here, just probably some back issue in the early stages
23. amfortas says:

    15 April 2012 at 1:53 PM

    Thank you for the responses to my comments. They have given me a helpful way in to understanding American politics and the position of Catholics in America.

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