Caution: May Lead To Unpredictable Results

John Hinderaker, whom I normally take as seriously as I take any other Ivy League Republican, actually raised an important point yesterday. First, he cited the Washington Free Beacon:

A Rutgers University town hall descended into anarchy Thursday evening as anti-Israel students chanted demands to "globalize the intifada," hurled anti-Semitic insults at Jewish students, and forced the school's president to end the event early[.]

Hinderaker then observes,

“Globalize the intifada” means that no Jew should ever be able to live in safety, anywhere in the world.

He cites shouts of "Go back home!" elsewhere in the story and asks,

“Go back home”? Where might that be? Not Israel, evidently. Maybe, like the former “dean of the White House press corps,” Helen Thomas, they want Jews to go “back” to Germany and Poland. But they don’t want Jews here in the U.S., or in Israel.

What strikes me in the current outbreak is that since the Holocaust, anti-Semitism has been characterized as something that developed from medieval Christianity, or perhaps from European occultism or neo-paganism, which all led to the Nazis. This is the subtext of Raiders of the Lost Ark, for instance. But the whole idea of the chant "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" derives from a much more basic conflict, the original one between the Jews and the Canaanites or Philistines. This is something Hinderaker senses; these demonstrators aren't brown shirts, they're something much older. (Dershowitz even makes this mistake in calling them brown shirts. Nazis don't explain it.)

This year I've been following Ascension's Bible in a Year podcast -- I tried it when it came out two years ago, but at the time, I faltered as it plodded through Numbers and Leviticus (I discovered in Leviticus that boilerplate is nothing new). After I completed their Catechism in a Year program last year, I decided to give Bible in a Year another try, and this year, it's caught on with me.

At the end of each day's readings, the host, Fr Mike Schmitz, gives remarks that put the readings in context. As they move through Exodus, Numbers, Joshua, Judges, and 1 Samuel, commentators like Jeff Cavins, Fr Schmitz, and Bp Barron make the point that God is gradually making Himself known to the Jews in the specific historical dialectic of the conquest of the Promised Land. Not only are the Jews taking geographical territory, but there are specific requirements that they have nothing to do with the pagan beliefs of the original inhabitants.

A consistent theme is that whenever the Jews wander away from God's clear directive -- for instance, when they vacillate over the whole question of whether to go through with the conquest at all, or decide worshiping the pagan idols is more or less OK -- things work out badly for them. Then one or another figure herds them into line, and things work out a lot better, until they wander away again. But this always takes place in the specific context of the temptation represented by the Philistine inhabitants.

This isn't just an isolated historical artifact. Pope Pius XI made this point on September 6, 1938:

At the most solemn moment of the Mass we recite the prayer which contains the expression "sacrifice of Abel, sacrifice of Abraham, sacrifice of Melchisedek" in three strokes, three times, three steps, the entire religious history of mankind—a magnificent passage. Every time we read it we are seized by an irresistible emotion. The sacrifice of our patriarch Abraham. Note that Abraham is called our patriarch, our ancestor. Antisemitism is incompatible with the thought and the sublime reality expressed in this text. It is alien to us, a movement in which we Christians can have no part. The promise was made to Abraham and to his descendants. It is realized in Christ, and through Christ in us who are members of his mystical body. Through Christ and in Christ we are the spiritual descendants of Abraham. No, it is not possible for Christians to take part in antisemitism. We acknowledge for all the right to defend themselves, to adopt measures of protection against what threatens their legitimate interests. But antisemitism is inadmissible. Spiritually, we are Semites.

I'm profoundly uncomfortable with an agenda that seeks in some way to redo Old Testament history, especially by wiping out the Jews. I used to write software manuals that had the standard phrasing in relation to deviating from prescribed procedure: "Caution: May Lead To Unpredictable Results". It reminds me of Wikipedia's account of the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark:

The vessel travels to an island in the Aegean Sea, where Belloq intends to test the power of the Ark before presenting it to Hitler.

On the island, Jones ambushes the Nazi group and threatens to destroy the Ark but surrenders after Belloq deduces that Jones would never destroy something so historically significant, also surmising that Jones wants to know if the Ark's power is real. The Nazis restrain Jones and Marion at the testing site as Belloq ceremonially opens the Ark but finds only sand inside. At Jones' instruction, he and Marion close their eyes to avoid looking at the opened Ark, as it releases spirits, flames, and bolts of energy that kill Belloq, Toht, and the assembled Nazis before sealing itself shut. Jones and Marion open their eyes to find the area cleared of bodies and their bindings removed.

You don't mess with the Ark of the Covenant. This isn't myth or fairy tale. Some things can lead to unpredictable results.

More Warnings From Alan Dershowitz

I'm at a point in my life where I'm ready to make a decision I never thought I'd ever have to make. and that is abandoning the Democratic party. Like Ronald Reagan said, I didn't leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me. . . . I think a lot of people in America are going through an assessment. Many Democrats, people who voted for Democrats, are now saying I can't vote for Kamala Harris, I can't vote for Joe Biden, but they're also saying I can't vote for Donald Trump. They're looking for a third alternative, and there may be some third alternatives. Bobby Kennedy has been very strongly supportive of Israel, and we don't know who the candidate for No Labels will be.

He goes on to point out that the current election is likely to hinge on a few critical states, but

. . . it will not be Michigan. It will not be the Muslims and the Arabs of Michigan. They will not determine the outcome of this election. Why? Because we won't let that happen. I think the Biden administration and those who calculate the costs and benefits of alienating particular groups are making a dreadful mistake when they think they can shift over to pro-Hamas, pro-Arab, pro-Muslim, anti-Israel attitudes is cost free, that all it will do is give them more votes among those groups and young radicals. No!

He apparently made this presentation just before No Labels announced it wouldn't field a 2024 candidate at all:

After failing to recruit serious contenders to run on an imagined "unity ticket" in 2024, the "No Labels" organization announced that it would "stand down" from the current presidential cycle and end its efforts to offer an alternative to voters the group said were weary of the presumptive Democrat and Republican candidacies of Biden and Trump, respectively.

. . . Before the group decided to discontinue its search for a unity ticket candidate after spending millions in its recruitment push, individuals such as former New Jersey Republican Governor Chris Christie, U.S. Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), and former Maryland Republican Governor Larry Hogan had been eyed as potential candidates to run under the No Labels banner, but they — along with anyone else the group tried to recruit — declined to mount a bid.

Thus it's likely that the only third alternative for Dershowitz and other centrist Democrats for whom he speaks will be Kennedy Jr, and it's plain from current polling that Kennedy will be an effective spoiler -- but this is still as of April. But remarks from yesterday by former Clinton adviser Dick Morris suggest the trend may be more toward Trump:

He enumerates the astonishing changes in Hispanic, African-American, Asian-American, and Independent groups just in recent weeks away from Biden and toward Trump and concludes,

When you add all those up, you're talking about a gigantic victory and landslide by Trump. And I personally can't believe the Democrats are going to stay with Biden given the situaion. He's just getting wiped out, and frankly, he's dropping every week by a point or two, and the leakage is coming from his base. . . . this is becoming a rout and a landslide.

But whom can the Democrats fall back on? He mentions Michelle Obama, but she's already taken herself out of the running. The only serious alternative for now is Gavin Newsom, with other standbys including JB Pritzker and Gretchen Whitmer -- but for any replacement to succeed, at least with Dershowitz style centrists, they'd have to announce a reversal on Israel in particular, which would cost them the radical left but likely not bring in others disaffected by the range of other policies that likely wouldn't change under a replacement.

The problem is that the Democrats have managed to lose yet another member of the New Deal coalition, the Jews, having already lost labor, Catholics, and legal immigrants -- but as Morris enumerates, they're in the process of losing Hispanics and Asian-Americans as well. And the range of alternatives for the newly disaffected is rapidly shrinking. This is Dershowitz's dilemma.

Back to Götterdämmerung!

Early in the history of this blog, I brought up the end-of-the-world oppurtunity presented by the notion that the Mayan calendar predicted everything would wrap on December 21, 2012. I said that if anyone believed that, their best option would be to run up their credit cards all that month, because they would never have to pay back the balance. As far as I know, whether people believed the world was going to end in 2012 or not, none of them ran up their credit cards thinking it would.

However, what I did think was happening in the wake of the 2020 election was that Democrats, having swept into power on the thinnest of margins, began running up whatever political balance they could on the basis that they'd never have to pay anything back down the road. Last August, I reviewed this:

[Speaker Pelosi] expected to enact the Great Reset agenda via a pair of infrastructure bills in 2021, getting it all done before the start of the 2022 election cycle, when by this point conventional wisdom expects Republican control of congress to return. The problem with this strategy is that it simply doesn't think past 2021 -- who cares if everything falls apart after this year? Speasker Pelosi will retire! The Götterdämmerung won't be her problem! The COVID strategy fails? The border collapses? The Taliban humiliates us? Inflation? None of those bills will come due until next year, when the Speaker will retire!

Lower down, I linked to a source that has since disappeared, but the quote from Pelosi is still apposite:

When asked about the possibility of another Trump presidency, Pelosi commanded the reporter “Don’t even think of that.”

“Don’t think of the world being on fire,” she continued, adding “It cannot happen, or we will not be the United States of America.”

As of yesterday, there seems to be an emerging acceptance that the world is, in fact, going to end:

Democrats with deep knowledge of the Biden campaign acknowledged former President Donald Trump’s significant chances of completing the greatest political comeback in American history.

. . . Democrat fundraiser John Morgan said his party is “prepared to lose” the presidential election to Trump. Morgan, a very successful lawyer from Central Florida, added he is nervous about President Joe Biden’s current political position.

“As my great-grandfather used to say, ‘I’m as nervous as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs.’ Yes, hell yes,” Morgan told the Washington Post. “We all know this is a jump ball,” he said. “In 2016, we were reading Nate Silver, and we weren’t worried at all. When we woke up, we realized we’ve never been to Wisconsin and we’ve never been to Michigan and then all the Monday-morning quarterbacks are out.”

. . . The Post’s Jesús Rodríguez questioned if [Biden's campaign manager Julie] Chavez Rodriguez has the tools to prevent Trump’s return to the White House. “What if Biden’s campaign manager can’t manage to keep it at bay?” he asked. “That won’t be the case for Julie,” Morgan defended Biden’s campaign manager. “Because we all are prepared to lose. . . . No matter what, I don’t think people are going to blame Julie like people blame Robby Mook for Hillary. Because Hillary was supposed to win this.”

Joe himself seems to be hedging his bets:

Today, my Administration is announcing protections for 2.2 million career civil servants from political interference, to guarantee that they can carry out their responsibilities in the best interest of the American people. . . . This rule is a step toward combatting corruption and partisan interference to ensure civil servants are able to focus on the most important task at hand: delivering for the American people.

In other words, if Trump gets in, we'll make sure he can't touch the Deep State. Beyond that, he may well be looking toward starting World War III before Trump can do anything about it:

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Thursday that Ukraine will eventually join NATO as support for the country remains "rock solid" among member states.

"Ukraine will become a member of NATO. Our purpose at the summit is to help build a bridge to that membership," Blinken told reporters in Brussels.

Inevitably,

Russia and NATO are now in "direct confrontation", the Kremlin said as the U.S.-led alliance marked its 75th anniversary on Thursday.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters: "In fact, relations have now slipped to the level of direct confrontation." NATO was "already involved in the conflict surrounding Ukraine (and) continues to move towards our borders and expand its military infrastructure towards our borders", he said.

What I don't really understand is that Blinken's remarks are purely aspirational. Russia would need to be driven out of Ukraine's pre-2014 borders and beaten badly enough to create a stable environment that would allow Ukraine to enter NATO with territorial integrity that could then be defended via the alliance -- but given the current battlefield situation, this is highly unlikely, even looking out for years in the future. Blinken's brave words won't help a thing in the medium term, and I suspect Putin is simply going to bide his time until the election.

Meanwhile in a move that's just as inexplicable,

President Joe Biden demanded an “immediate ceasefire” from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a phone call on Thursday between the two leaders, threatening a loss of U.S. support for the war if Israel does not comply.

A White House statement quoted in the link said in part,

He underscored that an immediate ceasefire is essential to stabilize and improve the humanitarian situation and protect innocent civilians, and he urged the Prime Minister to empower his negotiators to conclude a deal without delay to bring the hostages home.

The link continues,

Biden’s statement confirms that the U.S. has effectively adopted Hamas’s demand that a ceasefire precede a deal to release the remaining 130 or so Israeli hostages. The U.S. previously agreed with Israel that a ceasefire depended on a deal.

This comes in the face of threats by Alan Dershowitz and others that Jews will withdraw their support for Democrats in the fall if the administration doesn't continue to support Israel. Dershowitz has insisted several times that a cease fire benefits Hamas by allowing them to rearm and regroup, and his own publc support for Biden is definitely not a sure thing.

Meanwhile, Joe has revealed that his wife has been pushing for precisely that outcome, acccording to Muslim leaders who met with him this week:

“It’s got to stop,” he recounted the first lady had said to him recently, according to the recollection of Dr. Nahreen Ahmed, who was in the room.

Another participant, who declined to be named, told CNN they remembered the president saying that the first lady had used these words: “Stop it. Stop it now.”

Dershowitz has been puzzled for weeks that Biden appears to be letting a small group of Michigan voters drive Israel policy, when caving to their pressure is likely to lose him a far larger segment of the Jewish vote. But naturally, if Dr Jill is telling him what to do, that's what's going to happen. The White House has been struggling to keep up; farther down in the link:

Ahmed said it was unclear to her whether the first lady’s comment was directed at the Israel-Hamas war at large, or the mounting civilian death toll in Gaza.

Asked about the president’s remarks, a White House official said there is “no daylight” between the couple on the issue,with both sharing in outrage over civilian deaths. The official added that Dr. Biden was not calling for Israel to end its efforts against Hamas.

Ah, so Dr Jill's policy views are fully nuanced. I'm with her stepson Hunter's previously expressed view that she's an entitled something or other. There seems, though, to be a slowly emerging consensus that the election can't come soon enough.

Joe Regresses To The Mean

This morning, I saw this:

On Tuesday, he had nothing at all on his public schedule. But, as I noted, he looked horrible at his healthcare remarks that he had to deliver on Wednesday and lost badly in a fight with the teleprompter.

. . . Biden was late to the event which was supposed to be at 11 a.m. He kept Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and the health care advocates who attended the even [sic] waiting for an hour before he bothered to appear. He didn't show up until around 12 p.m. And when he showed up finally, people noticed that he had CPAP strap marks still very evident on his face.

He supposedly sleeps with a CPAP machine helping him because he has sleep apnea.

But if he's showing up at that time with the straps still evident on his face, then one has to concluded it's very likely he overslept. Fox's Jesse Watters made this point.

"If he has a creasy face at noon, he just got out of bed," Watters surmised. He wasn't up late or doing anything the day before, yet he's still so late this morning?

Last month, he was spending two or three days a week on the road at campaign appearances, but according to his daily schedule, he's back in the White House this week with limited daily activities. But as it turns out, stories about Joe with CPAP creases on his face are nothing new. The photo at the top of this post is from last summer, when this story appeared:

President Biden used a CPAP machine Tuesday night while sleeping, explaining visible marks on his face when he was talking to reporters on Wednesday.

White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates told Fox News that Biden has sleep apnea, as previously disclosed.

"Since 2008, the President has disclosed his history with sleep apnea in thorough medical reports. He used a CPAP machine last night, which is common for people with that history," Bates said.

According to Forbes in another story that came out at the same time,

An official told Forbes Biden started using the machine to optimize sleep quality in recent weeks.

Biden’s last health summary from the White House, issued in February [2023], made no mention of a CPAP machine and concluded that Biden, 80, “remains a healthy, vigorous” person “who is fit to successfully execute the duties of the Presidency.”

. . . Though CPAPs aren’t the only treatment, if sleep apnea goes untreated it can lead to a lack of quality sleep, resulting in “trouble concentrating, making decisions, remembering things or controlling your behavior.”

It's hard to avoid thinking that Joe is having trouble keeping up with the campaign schedule he'd been on last month, and he's having to adjust things and use the CPAP machine to recover. After the delayed Wednesday meeting, his former chief of staff, Ron Klain, tried to put the best face on things:

“[T]he President’s done a good job, he’s running on his record, and he also has an agenda to make the country a better place. . . . So, I think the President thinks he’s going to confront Donald Trump on his disgraceful conduct, on his record, and also talk about what he’s done and what he wants to do. And the event today with Sen. Sanders (I-VT) was a good example. It also — it acknowledged the progress they’ve made on bringing down the cost of prescription drugs. Yet, there’s still a big agenda left to be done. . . . Prices are too high. People need more money in their pockets. And so, I think both confronting President Trump on his outrageous conduct and chaos and having an agenda for what he wants to do in another four years, I think that is the key thing for getting President Biden re-elected.”

But the fact remains that Joe had suggested he'd turn things around with the State of the Union, but nearly a month later, the polls haven't moved, while he's allowed himself to be caught up in more gaffes and bad visuals. Ron Klain wants him to take on Trump, put forward an agenda, brng down prices, and fix the border. Big order.

Except they've got him back on his CPAP machine and heaven knows what else.

Is Trump Reading A Trend?

In this morning's Breitbart lead story:

Former President Donald Trump declared that the November election will be “Christian Visibility Day” in opposition to President Joe Biden’s declaration of “Transgender Day of Visibility” on March 31, which coincided with Easter Sunday this year.

“Election Day, November 5th, will be the most important day in the History of our Country. It will also be Christian Visibility Day, the biggest turnout of Christians in the history of our Country!” the former president declared on his Truth Social account.

Axios provides some context:

The presumptive GOP nominee is encouraging supporters to buy the "God Bless the USA Bible," which draws inspiration from country singer Lee Greenwood's patriotic anthem, "God Bless the USA."

"We must make America pray again," Trump said in a video posted to his Truth Social account Tuesday encouraging supporters to make the purchase.

The former president said "religion and Christianity are the biggest things missing from this country."

But isn't this not so far from remarks the liberal Cardinal Gregory made on Face the Nation Sunday evening?

Whereas faith used to be the- the- the voice, the moral voice that political people, whether they adhere to everything, they would turn to find that the moral compass with faith. I think, in some cases, it's the political world that's beginning to set or claiming to set the moral voice. We've switched position. There is a- there is a great need, I believe, to place faith in its proper position, which is not necessarily antagonistic to the political arena but to seize the- the responsibility of being that guiding principle, that moral light for our people to turn to. And that has- that's been turned upside down in so many cases, too many cases.

But then I found a remarkably opaque think piece from William A Galston in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, The Danger of Making a Religion of Politics. Galston is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Wall Street Journal columnist, and a regular talking head in the usual places, making him a conventional neoliberal. And he's worried:

The effort to explain rising internal opposition to liberal democracy has become a cottage industry in the past decade. In an op-ed for the Washington Post last month, journalist Fareed Zakaria argued that since the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union, rapid economic and social changes have corroded communal life and empowered minority groups in ways that have “unnerved” longstanding majorities. “Freedom and autonomy often come at the expense of authority and tradition,” Mr. Zakaria wrote. “As the binding forces of religion and custom fade, the individual gains, but communities often lose.” The result, he said: We are freer but lonelier, and we struggle to fill our sense of emptiness.

It gives me a headache just to try to diagram these sentences, much less figure out what they mean. TS Eliot could have written this a century ago, which is part of the problem with TS Eliot. Galston goes on,

New York Times columnist David Brooks agreed, contending last month that dissatisfied Americans are feeling an absence of “meaning, belonging, and recognition.” Like Mr. Zakaria, he suggests that infusing liberal politics with moral meaning is the remedy for the declining power of religion.

If you think about it, the views of Zakaria and Brooks are precisely the sort of thing to which Cardinal Gregory objects, "it's the political world that's beginning to set or claiming to set the moral voice." Galston is also against it, but for much more obscure reasons:

I have two qualms with this argument. First, it minimizes simpler explanations for the declining confidence in liberal democracy. One is that the U.S. has been ill-governed for the past two decades. Consider the record: two costly, mostly failed wars; a financial crisis from which it took years to recover; a pandemic during which Americans experienced more restrictions and more deaths per capita than many other advanced societies; a postpandemic inflationary surge; cultural conflict that has polarized politics. Against this backdrop, we need not invoke religion to explain declining confidence in liberal institutions, which are, like all forms of government, judged mostly by their fruits.

In other words, there's no need to invoke the loss of religion to explain the current mess, it's just that the politicians have screwed things up by themselves. But that just begs another question: why did the politicians screw things up? Aren't we allowed to seek out causes? He then makes something of a leap:

But for most people, a sense of true purpose and belonging won’t come through politics. This is especially true in liberal societies without enforced religious orthodoxies, whose denizens pursue their own conceptions of meaning and worth mostly in families, voluntary associations, religious institutions and work.

What he envisions here is one view of the constitutional principle that there must be no established religion, which earlier he equates with the whole idea of liberal democracy. Let the people work things out, by implication outside the political realm. You have bowling league Tuesday nights, church on Sunday, work all week; these have nothing to do with politics in a liberal democracy. He concludes,

When we ask politics to fill the role vacated by religion, the consequences are dangerous. The natural longing for perfection shifts from heaven to a realm that resists it. Doctrinal commitment to a set of secular ideas is pitted against the diversity of belief inherent in free societies. A religious-like fervor for a particular set of political values undermines the spirit of conciliation that makes peaceful common life possible.

To cure our current ills, better governance is a safer bet than a politics of meaning, even one designed to bolster liberal principles and hopes.

As best I can tell, he's saying we should forget religion, it goes against liberal principles. What, then, do we do with religion? I think the only answer is a secularist one, that religion is an evolutionary vestige based on primeval myths that are little better than dinosaur skeletons in the local museum. We must concentrate on good governance independent of religion, because, apparently, values, at least those based on religion, are misleading and deleterious to social order. But what do we do with common-sense observations from even secularists like Richard Dawkins?

"If I had to choose between Christianity and Islam, I choose Christianity every single time," he said. "I mean, it seems to me to be a fundamentally decent religion in a way that, I think, Islam is not."

Dawkins argued that Islam is less compatible with British values than Christianity, particularly regarding the treatment of women and homosexuals.

"I'm not talking about individual Muslims, who, of course, are quite different," Dawkins said. "But the doctrines of Islam — the Hadith and the Quran — is fundamentally hostile to women, hostile to gays. And I find that I like to live in a culturally Christian country, although I do not believe a single word of the Christian faith."

Isn't this the essence of what Trump is saying?

Last-Minute Rescue Attempt Falls Prematurely Flat

There's been a new effort with Obama, the Clintons, and Pelosi to get behind Joe's campaign. Apparently the photo above was taken just this past March 22, a little over a week ago. There was briefly a fundraising ad on YouTube, which disappeared almost immediately, that looks like it was taken in the same session, in which Joe and Barack stand together to make their pitch -- except that it emphasizes all the more that Obama is quite a bit taller than Joe, and he seems robust, while Joe looks frail in contrast. Joe's YouTube ads have almost immediately reverted to Joe talking alone.

(In fact, searching the web for recent photos of Joe with Obama, I noticed that in the past, photographers and editors had been careful to frame and angle photos of the two so that the height difference wouldn't be as clear. Now, it doesn't seem like they care.)

Last night, Hillary told voters to "get over yourselves" on the Tonight show:

Get over yourselves, those are the two choices … And, you know, it’s one of, like, one is old & effective & compassionate, has a heart & really cares about people, & one is old & has been charged with 91 felonies.

I don’t understand why this is a hard choice, really.

This is an all-out press that you might expect in a fall campaign, but here we are in late March and early April.

The Democrats are in a full-blown panic over President Biden's re-election campaign. He's floundering. Former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton are coming to the rescue.

At least that is the plan. Whether or not the star power of the two former Democrat presidents will turn the tide for Biden remains to be seen. It is an indication of just how alarmed Democrat officials are, though, if they are calling on Obama and Clinton to boost Biden's campaign this far out from November.

CNN reported that Obama visited Joe Biden at the White House on Friday [March 22]. This was the latest of Obama's visits with Biden over the last few months. The bat signal has been in view by concerned (desperate) Democrats that Sleepy Joe isn't up to the challenges of a presidential campaign. No one, other than Jill Biden, is more worried than Barack Obama.

. . . Obama has made it clear to associates that he thinks the November election will be very close and it's an all-hands-on-deck moment. This meeting was a working visit.

The fundraiser at Radio City Music hall with both Obama and Clinton last Thursday was apparently another part of the new plan, but it blew up in the visual of Trump attending Officer Diller's wake, his spokesman calling the presidential gathering The Three Stooges, and Gov Hochhul, a surrogate for the presidents, being asked to leave the wake the following day. But this was only compounded by the disastrous blunder of announcing the Transgender Day of Visibility to coincide with Easter. Clinton adviser Dick Morris said on YouTube,

For political consultants on the other side -- you pray for things like this, and for him to give this as a gift and unforced error is beyond belief, and then on top of that to do that at the day of the funeral of a hero cop who was shot . . . absolutely was gifts beyond imagination. And it really makes me wonder how the Democratic party does this. How the hell do they expect to win elections with this?

Joe's defenders have fallen back on the "how could anyone be expected to know this?" argument:

On Monday’s broadcast of NewsNation’s “Cuomo,” Democratic strategist James Carville reacted to criticism of the Biden White House for its proclamation of Transgender Day of Visibility falling on Easter by stating, “as if Biden even knew it was” Transgender Day of Visibility and saying that he doesn’t think that “anybody in the White House was aware of” the overlap between Transgender Day of Visibility and Easter.

But this isn't an excuse, even if it's true. Gov DeSantis made the obvious point:

He said that didn't happen. He said he didn't do it. Which raises the question: Either he's not being honest with the public, or he really didn't know what was going on. So my question would be: "Who's running the presidency?"

Is it a bunch of woke, 20-something White House staffers that just put out this drivel whenever they want? So I don't know who's in charge, the fact that he's not owning up to it, either way it's bad. Either he's not being honest or he really didn't have anything to do with it.

But even if Biden has deniability, the White House announcement was actually a step beyond the routine designations of earlier years:

Biden and his White House not only issued the proclamation on Friday, but also issued numerous posts on social media on Easter Sunday to celebrate trans-identifying Americans. Notably, President Biden is the only president to ever recognize “Transgender Day of Visibility” with a presidential proclamation.

I think the problem is that Joe isn't the sort of instinctive politician that Clinton and Obama are -- we're back to Obama's admonition never to underestimate Joe's ability to mess things up, or something like that. My estimate would be that, even if both Clinton and Obama would have the instinct not to issue a presidential proclamation like that ever, much less on Easter Sunday, they would still have staff smart enough to kill the idea before it reached either one.

So here we are in early spring, bringing out the heavy artillery in support of Biden that would normally be called up in the fall, and if anything, it's fallen short and landed on friendly troops. I'm wondering how long the Clintons and Obamas are going to cooperate with this.

It's Hard Not To Think The Calculation Is Changing

Cardinal Wilton Gregory has been widely characterized as a liberal at least since he was named Archbishop of Washington, DC.

The good news is the next archbishop of Washington, D.C., is not Cardinal Cupich, Cardinal Tobin or Bishop McElroy. The bad news is, according to Catholic News Agency, the new archbishop will be Wilton Gregory.

A disciple of Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, Gregory is not just liberal on some things; rather, he is liberal on everything.

On abortion.

On natural law and the traditional family.

On dissident priests.

On the translations of the novus ordo.

Even on dressing for the beach at Mass.

I'm not sure if this impression was ever completely accurate; as far as I can see, he's never been on board with the idea that Joe Biden is a "devout Catholic", for instance. As of 2021,

The spiritual leader of Washington, DC’s archdiocese says President Biden is “not demonstrating Catholic teaching” when it comes to abortion rights.

. . . Biden, who has been vocal about his Catholic faith throughout his political career, flopped Friday on his belief on when life begins. In 2015, the then-vice president said, “I’m prepared to accept that the moment of conception is a human life and being.”

Six years later, the president revealed that he respects but disagrees with those “who believe life begins at the moment of conception.” Biden added that he would never impose his beliefs on others.

While at the National Press Club on Wednesday, Gregory was pressed on the president’s change in beliefs.

“The Catholic Church teaches and has taught that life, human life, begins at conception,” Gregory said, according to the Washington Times. “So the president is not demonstrating Catholic teaching.”

“Our Church has not changed its position on the morality of abortion. And I don’t see how we could, because we believe that every human life is sacred,” he later added.

However, he distanced himself from Abp Gomez's statements following Biden's inauguration:

"Cardinal Gregory told me he felt the statement was quote 'ill-timed,' and reiterated that the Church and the President agree on many other things," [NBC Today co-host Al] Roker said, emphasizing Gregory's message of "dialogue" with the new administration.

. . . In the USCCB statement, conference president Archbishop Jose Gomez of Los Angeles offered prayers for Biden and said the bishops spoke not as partisans but with the aim of guiding consciences.

. . . On the "preeminent" issue of abortion and on other matters such as marriage and gender ideology, Biden has proposed policies "that would advance moral evils," Gomez' statement read.

It looks as though there's been a change, not necessarily slight, in Gregory's stance:

Gregory, the archbishop of Washington, D.C., was asked on CBS' "Face the Nation" whether he believes Biden's long-touted Catholic roots will resonate with American Catholics in the upcoming 2024 election.

"I would say that he's very sincere about his faith. But like a number of Catholics, he picks and chooses dimensions of the faith to highlight while ignoring or even contradicting other parts," Gregory replied. "There is a phrase that we have used in the past, a 'cafeteria Catholic,' you choose that which is attractive, and dismiss that which is challenging."

I've frequently heard the term. and I've always thought it was derogatory. So I did a quick search of the web, and the general opinion is that it's derogatory, with a strong thread of dissent suggesting that while it is, it shouldn't be -- but of course, that's just an acknowledgement that it's derogatory. Gregory went on to explain,

"I would say there are things, especially in terms of life issues, there are things that he chooses to ignore, or he uses the current situation as a political pawn rather than saying, 'Look, my church believes this, I'm a good Catholic, I would like to believe this.' Rather than to twist and turn some dimensions of the faith as a political advantage," Gregory said.

Up to now, Gregory seems to have tempered his differences with Biden by stressing the areas where they could work together, referring as well to dialogue. But it's also worth looking at the context of his appearance on last night's Face the Nation: he was also on the show with TEC Bishop of Washingtgon Mariann Budde, who expressed opposing views on the specific question of whether it's a bad thing to be a cafeteria Christian -- Anglicanism has always been on the side of the cafeteria, after all. Elsewhere in the transcript of the show, Cardinal Gregory took a surprisingly hard line:

I think one of the things that we're experiencing is that faith and politics have always had a strange affiliation. But it's switc hed now. Whereas faith used to be the- the- the voice, the moral voice that political people, whether they adhere to everything, they would turn to find that the moral compass with faith. I think, in some cases, it's the political world that's beginning to set or claiming to set the moral voice. We've switched position. There is a- there is a great need, I believe, to place faith in its proper position, which is not necessarily antagonistic to the political arena but to seize the- the responsibility of being that guiding principle, that moral light for our people to turn to. And that has- that's been turned upside down in so many cases, too many cases.

Which is another way of saying that in the Civil Rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr, a Baptist pastor, was joined by a wide spectrum of other religious leaders, certainly including figures like Cardinals Law and Bernardin, in speaking to the issue from a religious perspective. But almost immediately, feminist and gay rights organizations seized the prestige of the Civil Rights movement, which stemmed in some measure from its religious underpinnings, and hijacked it to promote and normalize issues like abortion and same-sex conduct, which have much less religious sanction.

Cardinal Gregory is clearly uncomfortable with this, and he seems to be sharpening his focus on Biden's willingness, not just to side personally with the secularist position, but to try to hitchhike on his Catholicism for his political benefit. Gregory isn't having this.

Whether Cardinal Gregory would go as far as San Francisco Abp Cordileone, who denied then-House Speaker Pelosi communion in her home diocese in 2022 for her support for abortion, and make the same move with Biden, is an open question. But at least from appearances, it's less unlikely than some would have thought.