Catholic Joe Is On A Roll
By CHRISTOPHER MANION
On the morning after Super Tuesday, Joe Biden beamed. He had beaten Bernie ten states to four. Amy Klobuchar and Mayor Pete had dropped out as dramatically as possible, with a pointed message: on election eve they appeared to endorse Joe on stage in Texas, and he took Texas the next day.
Will Joe be the nominee? On election night he sounded confident, ignoring Sanders and targeting Donald Trump. He told the crowd, “This all starts with a revival of decency and honor and character. Trump has fanned the flames of hate and sought to divide us….We are literally in a battle for the soul of America…winning means uniting America, not sowing seeds of division and anger and hate.”
“We are decent, brave, and resilient people. We are better than you,” he told Donald Trump on Twitter.
There you go again, Joe, mocking us miserable deplorables. Oh, and, speaking of uniting, he didn’t mention Sanders at all. But Bernie wasn’t taking it lying down. Winning big in delegate-rich California, he aimed not at Trump but at Joe. “You cannot beat Trump with the same old, same old kind of politics,” he said. “What we need is a new politics that brings working class people and young people into our political movement.”
Without whom Joe doesn’t have a chance, of course.
On election night, Joe pretended he was already the nominee. But he can’t ignore Bernie’s Brigades for long. He’s going to need them, big time, if he expects to win in November. And to please them, he’ll have to move even further left than he already has. After all, some Sanders supporters are radical, grim, and organized. On a secretly filmed video, Sanders field organizer Kyle Jurek threatened violence against police at Milwaukee’s Democrat Convention. He then advocated reeducation camps and gulags for Trump supporters. If Trump wins, “cities burn,” Jurek added.
Far out? Maybe. But there’s a broader swath of Sanders supporters who are simply greedy. They want taxpayer money — a lot of it. Take Lindsay Zissis. On the day she volunteered for Sanders, she told an interviewer that, “my debt is $226,000, and I wanna help people communicate effectively.”
No, Zissis did not major in logic, she majored in speech pathology, earning a master’s degree in the subject. But while on an academic scholarship at Adelphi University, she traveled the world, enjoying various trips to “Canada, Denmark, England, Germany, Ireland, Portugal, Scotland, Spain, and Sweden.” Under “One Amazing Thing I’ve Done,” she writes that “I once got boozy with the Serbian football team in Copenhagen.”
Well, Lindsay definitely had a good time — and now she wants you to pay for it.
Talk about a “failure to communicate!”
Joe’s Hard Road Ahead
“Nothing on earth consumes a man more quickly than the passion of resentment” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo.
Bernie Sanders is a passionate kind of guy, and Donald Trump has been bugging him endlessly. “The Democrat establishment came together and CRUSHED Bernie Sanders,” Trump tweeted on Wednesday, March 4. While Amy Klobuchar and Mayor Pete both quit the race to support Biden, Liz Warren, our “modern day Pocahontas,” stayed in the race to deny Bernie easy wins in Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Texas, he wrote.
Since then, Warren has also quit the race.
Resentment. Since Robespierre and Danton went to the guillotine, the Left has shown repeatedly that “the Revolution eats its own.” Marx hated his fellow Left-Hegelians. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Hoxha, Kim — all of them routinely killed off their competitors. And now that Bernie has drawn millions of disgruntled millennials and radical lefties into the campaign, the usual suspects are about to tell him to get lost again — “but thanks for the new voters.”
Not so fast. There’s a revolution percolating. Does Joe have the finesse to handle it? Not likely. He’s got problems of his own, and his wayward son Hunter isn’t helping. Thanks to Joe, Biden Junior had made millions from deals in Ukraine and Communist China. Was Dad his fixer? Joe doesn’t want to talk about it, and neither does Hunter. But everyone else does, and they won’t stop.
And say, speaking of China, Catholic Joe isn’t saying very much about the ChiComs’ horrendous forced abortions, vivisection of captives for organ harvesting, and the concentration camps for millions of Uighur Muslims in China’s west.
Alas, on that score, our Catholic bishops aren’t doing any better. For all their talk about Global Warming, they won’t blame China. Maybe they’re mired in silence because of the Vatican’s deal with the Communist government there. Why offend the regime that’s persecuting Catholics and bulldozing their churches? The sellout has been condemned by Cardinal Zen of Hong Kong in strident terms that are as refreshing as they are rare in the banal fog of deflection that rules in Rome.
On Catholic Joe, our bishops have been anything but strident. Ditto on the “Gang of 95” Catholic pro-abortion senators and representatives on Capitol Hill.
Cardinal Dolan was almost embarrassed when Fr. Robert Morey, pastor of St. Anthony Catholic Church in Florence, S.C., denied Joe Communion at Mass there last October. Hadn’t Joe promised that he would make sure that eleven million illegal aliens would become U.S. citizens if he were elected?
Yes, our bishops voted last November to affirm that abortion was their “preeminent” issue in the coming election, but it is amnesty and sanctuary that constitute their Prime Mandate.
Bishop Business
It’s Diocesan Lenten Appeal season again, and times are tough. Where is the McCarrick Report? Oh dear, the Vatican’s in lockdown. If that isn’t bad enough, just as the USCCB takes up its annual “Rice Bowl” collection for Catholic Relief Services, the Lepanto Institute drops a massive report detailing that NGO’s support of contraception in various parts of the world. (See a related item in this week’s News Notes column, p. 2A.)
Michael Hichborn, Lepanto’s president, tells The Wanderer the report reveals “how CRS became a willing participant in programs designed to spread contraception to young people, while even producing its own documents that promote condom use.”
When will they ever learn?
And there’s more on the scandal of the Faithful Citizenship videos — the ones that ignore abortion’s place as the bishops’ “preeminent” political issue facing Catholics this fall. The USCCB’s Communications Department funded the videos, so we asked Bishop Michael Burbidge of Arlington, Va., the department’s chairman, to see if they could be corrected to reflect the vote of the bishops last November.
In response, the department’s spokesman, James Rogers, tells The Wanderer that “The videos…were produced under the auspices of the Bishops Working Group on Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship. The scripts for those videos were approved by the full body of bishops during their plenary assembly in November of 2019. As such, any editing of the scripts would likewise need the consultation of the full body.”
So the bishops voted to affirm abortion as the “preeminent” issue, but on the same day approved scripts that ignored that fact. Classic.
Rogers continues: “The right to life is the most fundamental right we enjoy as humans and there is no more vulnerable a sister or brother than one waiting to be born,” he writes.
Now, that is precisely the fact that the videos ignore. Nor does he deny it, as he continues, “The videos present the full range of Catholic social teaching as our faith calls us to concern on a range of issues. It would be a misreading of the videos to suggest they infer anything less than a total commitment to defend our most vulnerable brothers and sisters.”
So the message is clear: The “preeminence” of abortion is missing and will stay missing. Case closed.