By DEXTER DUGGAN
What signals were sent when new U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson appointed Catholic Jacob Rees-Mogg as leader of Parliament’s House of Commons and also lord president of the council, to attend cabinet meetings? Or is this a question that shouldn’t even be asked?
Might it be said that Britain had started a bit of atonement for the fate of perhaps the most prominent Catholic in its history of government, Lord High Chancellor Thomas More, beheaded in the sixteenth century as a traitor?
Although the Rees-Mogg symbolism may seem powerful, it’s best to look forward instead of reheating the grievances of one victim group after another. After the English apologize to their fellow Catholics whom they long persecuted, then they could apologize to Irish Catholics whose religion they also tried to stamp out.
And surely the Irish need to apologize to someone. And Russians need to apologize. And the Germans were awful neighbors. If you continue reopening the wounds, the world suffers with constantly re-infected resentments, the sorry condition that seems so appetizing to the U.S. Democratic Party.
After necessary redress has been made, forgive and forget. Figure that Boris Johnson wanted a capable top aide, not a conscience-soothing emblem.
Rees-Mogg not only is an experienced parliamentarian in the Conservative Party but also an orthodox, practicing Catholic — definitely not the phony brand of “Catholic” well known in the U.S. Democratic Party, like pro-abortion Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden.
An article posted July 29 at Catholic World Report, based in the U.S., called Rees-Mogg “as much a political sensation in his country as Donald Trump is in ours.”
In these days of aggressive political secularism on both sides of the Atlantic, Rees-Mogg probably faces some difficult steps as a government leader, but Johnson presumably knew that when choosing him as a kindred political spirit to disrupt the established order.
Speaking of the established order, Rees-Mogg’s father, William Rees-Mogg, who died in 2012, had been editor of the powerful daily Times of London, about as much a symbol of the establishment in William’s day as could be imagined. Will wonders never cease?
However, there’s also a side of Johnson that worries LifeSiteNews.com columnist Jonathon Van Maren.
Van Maren posted on July 29 that the new prime minister’s fans “should temper their enthusiasm: while Johnson may deliver on Brexit (and who knows?), it appears that he is another one of those Tories who likes to utilize red-meat rhetoric that sounds traditionalist but has worked as hard as any progressive to dismantle the socially conservative institutions and consensus that once made Great Britain great.”
Like Trump before he began to campaign for president in 2015, Johnson hadn’t earned the desirable reputation of a moral beacon, but they both seemed to recognize a need to turn to traditionalists in pursuit of their goals. Whether this remains true for Johnson, Trump has had two-and-a-half years in the White House without turning his back on them.
In a remarkable visual parallel, both Johnson and Trump are big-haired, beefy blonds on the right side of the political divide and despised by dominant media.
Asked by The Wanderer about this resemblance, northern California conservative commentator and Catholic Barbara Simpson said that “maybe it’s just a sign that both men have a core of morality and goodness that current politics tend to diminish and hide. Good for them — we need more of that. Let’s see what happens!”
Conservative GOP political consultant Constantin Querard told The Wanderer that the two men know what they’re doing.
“I’ve always taught that politics is about addition, not subtraction, and in this case both Johnson and Trump are practicing that by growing their base and including more people and groups in their coalition instead of less,” Querard said. “That is both the right thing to do and the smart thing to do.
“People wonder why these groups join such coalitions even when the leaders may not be what observers would expect them to be, but in most cases you can advocate for your position and make gains when you are on the inside easier than when you are on the outside,” Querard said. “And these leaders will make very consequential decisions, like Supreme Court justices for the president, so it is important to have a seat at the table.”
Back in 1535, Thomas More reportedly approached his execution with a cheerful spirit — all the more impressive because he knew not only that the blade soon would take his life but also, as was the custom for traitors, that his severed head would be placed on a pike on London Bridge for 30 days to be mocked by the public.
More than a decade before his death, a contemporary is said to have commented that “as time requireth, (More is) a man of marvelous mirth and pastimes, and sometime of as sad gravity. A man for all seasons.”
Equanimity before execution surely demanded a composure of spirit, but to think that in effect the public then would be invited to spit on his remains for weeks must have required a truly saintly detachment from earthly rewards.
While multibillionaire Donald Trump wouldn’t be described as having saintly detachment from earthly comforts, he had a hard-driving work ethic and continued to show remarkable endurance against unending baseless, vile attacks from powerful, raging foes. Whatever he did, in their churning minds, was only for the worst of motives and due to his depraved character.
In late July the president replied to Maryland liberal Democrat Cong. Elijah Cummings’ harsh criticism of U.S. Border Patrol agents by drawing attention to the miserable conditions in Cummings’ own Baltimore territory.
The revealing reason Trump said this, according to the media and Dem wind-tunnel phonies, was his racism against the black Cummings — even though Trump blasts anyone, of any background, that he cares to.
It didn’t take long for Trump supporters to unearth examples of harsh attacks against Cummings’ district even from liberals including The New York Times and Cummings himself. But the facts never would get in the way of the narrative of Trump’s unparalleled awfulness.
Now, some people may think of voting against Trump’s re-election in hopes that the strife attached to his White House rhetoric would disappear with his departure. Although it’s true that Trump’s tweeting is unparalleled, any GOP president in contemporary memory has been derided by dominant media as pitifully unfit, from Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan through George W. Bush and Trump.
Simpson, the California commentator, told The Wanderer that destroying Trump is simply Democrats’ game plan.
“The Dems will continue to accuse him of every awfulness they can think of in their goal to destroy him as the worst of the worst,” Simpson said. “He is not a ‘racist’ for calling attention to the filth in Baltimore — and I speak as someone who has relatives living there.
“The city IS a mess politically and physically, and that Elijah Cummings is black has nothing to do with it,” she said. “Inept governing allowed the city to devolve into a Third World slum. Shocking and sad.”
Asked about the Baltimore words war, national conservative columnist Quin Hillyer told The Wanderer:
“Both sides need to cool down their rhetoric substantially. Both sides also are hypocritical in attacking each other’s rhetoric without reining in their own.”
If anyone needed some tough criticism, it probably was Congress, which prepared to take a six-week summer vacation after having done little about the remarkable border-invasion crisis this year — or any year. Consider these words:
“The resurgence of the immigration debate ought to be good news for Republicans. The party’s conservative base overwhelmingly favors stronger border enforcement, a concerted effort to curtail illegal immigration, and reduction of illegal entries to a more manageable level. Polls repeatedly demonstrate that each of these positions also commands majority support from the broader electorate.”
But those words were published 15 years ago, back in the October 11, 2004, issue of The American Conservative magazine. Capitol Hill runs a never-ending ruse. Who except maybe Trump and his supporters expect to find the border scandal any better 15 years from now, in 2034?
The corrupt Latino jefes will have stayed in power, and their peons will continue to find it easier to sneak north than effect reform back home.
Democratic presidential hopeful and space girl Marianne Williamson has been running a politically correct racket by asking white people to apologize to blacks for wrongs against them.
Williamson better watch out. Blacks may start demanding that left-wing white elitists apologize for flooding the labor market with low-wage illegal aliens. Or Planned Parenthood’s white elitists be made to beg mercy for slaughtering millions of black babies. Or Hollywood’s big donors to Dem causes be upbraided for toxifying our culture.
Or maybe Brazil’s conservative president, Jair Bolsonaro, will stomp northward and demand that U.S. white elitists stop treating Latinos like their ineducable pets. This apology business, you never know how far and unfashionably it may go.
With two beefy big blonds improbably running the U.S. and U.K. and finding room to seek counsel with conservative Catholics, what else may go off-script?
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