By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — Nineteen years ago, during his first spring as the new bishop of the Diocese of Phoenix in 2004, Thomas J. Olmsted led a pro-life Lenten rosary outside the local Planned Parenthood headquarters and abortuary. More than 1,000 people showed up to join in the prayers, jamming neighborhood sidewalks around the North Seventh Street location.
Part of the reason for the surprising turnout, some said, was that people’s hearts had been stirred worldwide by the coincidental release as Lent began that year of the powerful movie The Passion of the Christ, directed, produced, and co-written by Mel Gibson.
The previous December one of Olmsted’s first public acts as the newly installed bishop in 2003 was to join the traditional Christmas Eve rosary outside an abortuary. He previously was bishop of Wichita, Kans., after serving nine years in Rome with the Vatican Secretariat of State.
Pro-lifers here were encouraged that Olmsted quickly allied himself with them in a high-profile way.
Was the nation’s moral tone about to change for the better after decades of increasing immorality, epitomized by the permissive abortion imposed by elite forces on the U.S. in January 1973?
It didn’t reform but only grew worse after 2004. Moral abominations that were inconceivable then became the core platform of the Democratic Party by the time the notorious bad Catholics Nancy Pelosi and Job Biden represented the national face of Catholic Democrats in 2022.
Transgenderism, mutilating children sexually, aggressive official racism and “gay marriage” were presented as entirely acceptable elements of Democrat Party politics.
Democrats must think they’ve already won all of the real political battles if these unbelievables are what they believe they have to champion in order to keep their fighting spirit intact and aggrieved.
A wide-open border with drug dealers, sex traffickers, and terrorists running back and forth as they pleased, supported and funded by Biden, was normalcy. Republicans were denounced as fossils for opposing the degeneracy.
Meanwhile, Olmsted had reached retirement age in 2022 and was succeeded in Phoenix upon the decision of Pope Francis by John P. Dolan, previously auxiliary bishop of San Diego under Robert Cardinal McElroy.
Globalists had a big agenda but they had seen incumbent U.S. President Donald Trump as a serious obstacle. Election procedures had to be shaken up from head to foot to disrupt results in 2020.
Communist China intentionally launched biological warfare on the world, developed in one of its labs, but a fact like this was treated by dominant media as an unmentionable lie during the 2020 campaign, while the actual lies these media spread and promoted, such as Trump allegedly being a Russian agent, were treated as doubtlessly true.
Time passes. Careers rise and fall. Many people would have had no idea who Patricia Schroeder was when the former congresswoman died in Florida on March 13 at age 82. However, three decades ago she was big stuff as a fanatically pro-abortion Democrat representing Colorado. She retired from that seat a quarter-century ago.
When it looked like Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas would be confirmed as an associate justice back in 1991, Schroeder was in news photos as one of a small group of kindred feminist politicians marching in a line in outrage against him.
Former government worker Anita Hill had charged that Thomas, while her supervisor at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in the previous decade, had sexually harassed her.
However, the pro-abortionists failed and Thomas narrowly was confirmed despite what Thomas denounced as his foes’ “high-tech lynching for uppity blacks” against him.
Napolitano And Hobbs
As it happened, a Phoenix lawyer, liberal Democrat Janet Napolitano, had been sent to Washington by her boss, powerful local liberal Democrat attorney John Frank, to advise Hill. Frank liked what he saw about Napolitano’s work and decided that she deserved to start ascending in the Arizona political power structure.
Just over a decade later, Napolitano had been maneuvered into the statehouse as governor of Arizona, despite being a strong advocate of open borders and permissive abortion. However, suiting voters’ preferences often didn’t seem to matter much when the Arizona establishment made decisions.
Napolitano squeaked into the governorship by a small margin and a long vote count in 2002, allegedly beating her conservative Republican foe. Sound familiar these days?
Lauded by dominant media, Napolitano served as governor from 2003 until 2009, when newly elected President Barack Obama chose her to head his Department of Homeland Security.
Twenty years after that 2002 vote, the Arizona establishment liked the idea of having reclusive, unpopular left-wing Democrat and Secretary of State Katie Hobbs as governor, and proceeded to throw November 8 voting procedures into chaos to attain that result against Republican Kari Lake. Much the way that Joe Biden, on a larger scale, was elected president in 2020.
Because the Democratic Party continued its extremist march through the years, by now Hobbs was affirming her support of permissive abortion by saying she didn’t want her daughter to be denied reproductive freedom.
In other words, Hobbs wants to make sure her own grandchildren can be aborted. Hobbs tweeted explicitly, “For my daughter and for yours, I’ll never stop fighting for reproductive freedom.”
Oh, thanks, Katie, you’ll fight to abort our grandchildren, too? How monstrously ghastly of you. Hobbs may wish to ask herself how she ever arrived at embracing such slack-jawed evil.
Few Democrats dared say that a few decades ago, when it was supposed to be “rare.” However, a traditional damaging weakness among leftists is the fear that they’ll displease someone further to the left than they are. Oh, the shame to be thought insufficiently left-wing.
Also like many other leftists who promote highly permissive abortion, Hobbs is an opponent of capital punishment, no matter how seriously limited. She fits the profile of a leftist as being someone who loves killing the innocent but hates killing the guilty.
Why is this? Is it something about viewing the guilty as their misunderstood, disadvantaged soulmates — while a defenseless preborn baby is someone they’re never at risk of being again?
Upon becoming governor, Hobbs ordered a review of state death-penalty procedures and said no convict would be executed in the meantime. This was merely her stratagem to impose her personal views as the law, not unusual for her brand of politics.
As it happened, the Arizona Supreme Court issued an execution warrant for April 6 for a man who pled guilty in 2004 to first-degree murder and kidnapping. Hobbs wasn’t commuting this execution but saying on her own that she wouldn’t let it proceed now.
Maricopa County’s chief prosecutor, Rachel Mitchell, told the Arizona Supreme Court that Hobbs had no such authority. The Associated Press reported on March 15: “Nicholas Klingerman, an attorney representing Mitchell, said no constitutional violations have been found with the state’s execution protocols and that carrying out execution warrants isn’t optional for the governor.”
Mitchell also said that the relatives of crime victims deserve justice.
The State Supreme Court set a deadline of March 16 for all briefs in the case, the day that this hardcopy edition of The Wanderer went to press.
Fans Of Open Borders
Another way that Hobbs resembles Janet Napolitano is her frequent vetoes against conservative GOP legislators.
Ballotpedia says Napolitano issued a record number of 180 vetoes while governor: “She vetoed every piece of abortion legislation passed by the state legislature. She also consistently vetoed bills aimed at loosening gun-control laws as well as measures aimed at criminalizing illegal immigrants, because she believed it to be a federal issue.”
Actually, Napolitano, like Hobbs after her, simply favored open borders, whether it’s a federal issue or a Martian issue or a bingo-player’s issue.
On March 10 Republican State Sen. J.D. Mesnard said on KFYI Radio news (550 AM) that it’s hard to figure out what new governor Hobbs wants. Mesnard said she already had issued 16 vetoes although she said she wants to cooperate.
Hobbs may think she’s hot stuff now, spurting out her veto ink, but time passes and one day she’ll be half-forgotten, like Napolitano now, then completely forgotten, like the abortion-loving Pat Schroeder. One place where her record won’t be forgotten, though, is the admittance desk at the Pearly Gates.
Wonder what the aborted baby angels at the desk will say to Hobbs if she tries to saunter through with bloody hands instead of repentance? Shaking bloody newspaper articles at them that praise her won’t do the trick.
Speaking of news clippings, The Wall Street Journal recently assigned reporter Eliza Collins to cover politics from a base in Phoenix, according to talkingbiznews.com on January 9.
Newsroom spending is tighter than it used to be. If the Journal wants to get value from investing in having Collins in Phoenix, it would be well-advised to request that she not produce narratives that echo what’s already published in the left-wing New York Times and Washington Post.
For instance, the March 13 hardcopy Journal had an article by Collins advancing the line that Republicans need to move away from 2022 GOP gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake because she’s too conservative.
News flash to Collins. That’s been the dominant-media line against conservatives for, oh, half a century? Longer? Including against Ronald Reagan, whose two overwhelming presidential wins simply couldn’t happen, according to the narrative.
“We are a taken town,” proclaimed one Washington-based columnist after Election Day 1980, meaning the experts were flummoxed by Reagan’s smashing victory that none of them saw coming. It wasn’t, you know, the conventional and prevailing thought.
But if the conventional and prevailing thought must reign, why bother with following the media at all — because everyone already knows everything to come.
I floated the idea past a former Journal employee that Executive Chairman Rupert Murdoch could save some money rather than fund a liberal echo chamber in Arizona. The former employee replied: “Certainly the expense accounts at home and abroad are not what they were. But this is true at most places. Offices were consolidated in midtown with Fox in less expansive quarters.”
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