By DEXTER DUGGAN
The morning after Lyndon Baines Johnson was inaugurated in his own right as president in January 1965, the top of the front page of the major daily New York Herald Tribune was dominated by a two-line banner headline: “Johnson sworn in, predicts victory over poverty and injustice in America within this generation.” The subhead was, “He takes oath on mother’s Bible.”
Strictly, “this generation” ended 20 years later, in January 1985 — nearly 36 and one-half years ago. How have you been enjoying these decades of blissful equality and justice delivered by Johnson’s Democrats?
Johnson and his kind only want the money and power for themselves that come with such big talk, while leaving the public on the hamster wheel of futility.
And what a perfect touch, that a wheeler-dealer who paid as much serious attention to the Bible as a buzzard does would haul out his mother’s for his presidential inauguration.
Politics, thy name is pride. Which goes before a fall.
Johnson had been John F. Kennedy’s sleazy vice president who, some speculation suggested, would be dumped from the Democratic ticket before JFK’s re-election race in 1964. But Kennedy never lived to see November ’64 election results because he was assassinated in Johnson’s home state of Texas a year earlier, on November 22, 1963.
It was debatable if “LBJ” could have been elected president on his own. But as vice president he became the incumbent by jumping into JFK’s vacant saddle while dominant media of that day glued their customary epithets to the back of his Republican presidential foe, Arizona’s Barry Goldwater — warmonger, fascist, Nazi.
Having seen JFK gunned down a year earlier, Goldwater went down in an inglorious electoral blaze of his own. Johnson was elected in a landslide and had comfortable Democrat majorities in both the House and Senate for the four years of his term.
But before that four years finished, in March of 1968 LBJ shocked the nation by announcing he wouldn’t seek a second term of his own. An Asian war, riots, unrest. The dominant LBJ of 1964 was no more.
Such are the uncertain fortunes of politics — and a warning to the physically, mentally, and morally impaired Democrat and bad Catholic Joe Biden, fond of fancying his allegedly undeniable greatness while habitually unable to speak coherent sentences. If the mighty LBJ crumpled before long, what of the mumbling old man who spends many hours in White House seclusion?
Might the archbishop of San Francisco, Salvatore Cordileone, have laid the groundwork for a way to end the charade by Catholic faker politicians like Biden, back when Cordileone was auxiliary bishop of San Diego, before being called north by Pope Benedict XVI to head the Diocese of Oakland in 2009?
Cordileone had made some headlines at a USCCB meeting, a young bishop speaking up about worthiness to receive the Eucharist, so I left a message at his San Diego diocesan office to request an interview for The Wanderer. Would my message go through channels? But I received a voicemail from Cordileone himself inviting me to come by.
So off I went to the pastoral center on Paducah Drive to interview a prelate willing to say what all of the Church’s hierarchy at least supposedly believed. This was back when Biden as a U.S. senator had only failed in his aspirations to become president.
But now pro-abortion fanatic Biden sits, or slumps, in the White House, furthering the scandal long promoted by none other than San Francisco bad Catholic, pro-abortion fanatic, and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Is their time expiring as the royalty of a charnel house?
Without naming any of the vile offenders, Cordileone issued a powerful pastoral letter on May 1, “Before I Formed You in the Womb I Knew You: A Pastoral Letter 0n the Human Dignity of the Unborn, Holy Communion, and Catholics in Public Life.” (See additional coverage elsewhere in this issue of The Wanderer.)
Cordileone is talking about hardened pro-abortionists who have no intention of changing without the prospect of certain punishment.
“In the case of public figures who profess to be Catholic and promote abortion, we are not dealing with a sin committed in human weakness or a moral lapse: this is a matter of persistent, obdurate, and public rejection of Catholic teaching,” the archbishop writes. “This adds an even greater responsibility to the role of the Church’s pastors in caring for the salvation of souls.”
He goes on to remind Catholic public figures: “God has entrusted you with a prestigious position in society. You have the power to affect societal practices and attitudes. Always remember that you will one day have to render an account to God for your stewardship of this trust. You are in a position to do something concrete and decisive to stop the killing….
“And please stop pretending that advocating for or practicing a grave moral evil — one that snuffs out an innocent human life, one that denies a fundamental human right — is somehow compatible with the Catholic faith. It is not,” Cordileone says. “Please return home to the fullness of your Catholic faith. We await you with open arms to welcome you back.”
Necessary strong advice, but Biden will need to drop the loads of nonsense he routinely carries around so he could have his arms free for that welcome. Hardly had the West Coast archbishop delivered his lesson than Biden stuck both feet in his own mouth again.
What misplaced joy Biden gave to workers when he goofily announced in early May that under his tax plans, no one earning less than $400,000 — hey, nearly a half-million dollars — “will pay a single penny in taxes.” Of course, he didn’t mean to say that.
On the other hand, the president whom Biden had served as veep, Barack Obama, had assured voters that they could keep their doctors, keep their medical plans, and save lots of money, too, with his Obamacare. Just lie after lie, but if Obama got away with that long enough for Congress to pass it, who knows what whoppers Biden has yet to trot out for his socialist schemes.
On a related front, on May 1 the Washington Examiner posted an article expressing what probably had been on many Americans’ minds. What’s Biden doing with his frequent trips home to Delaware? No visitors’ logs to show who sees him? Including doctors with injections of super-vitamins or something else for the 78-year-old man who more than shows his age?
The Examiner headlined, “Again at home in Delaware, Biden’s weekends are mostly a mystery.” The story said, “The White House has so far released very little information about what he does on Saturdays and Sundays, providing the public with scant details about whom he spends time or speaks to,” and the descriptions are “becoming increasingly vague.”
The story quoted Eric Schultz, a former press spokesman for Obama, about the need for Biden to “recharge” — “None of us want the president running on empty — so the trick for every president is to find ways to clear their minds, release some tension, and stay well.”
A Nauseating Double Standard
The Wanderer asked three of its sources to comment on the Examiner story. One declined to speculate but the other two agreed that Biden frequently ducking out to Delaware raised questions.
Conservative GOP political consultant Constantin Querard said sarcastically on May 3: “It is odd, and to the degree that there is a real mystery about how the president of the United States spends his weekends, the media is likely to get very busy trying to solve the mystery and race to be the first to dig and dig and dig until they find out the answer.
“Unless the president is Joe Biden,” Querard added, “in which case they’ll mostly just ignore the story because they don’t want to do him even accidental harm by covering his health and ability to do the job.”
Mary Ann Kreitzer, a Catholic commentator who runs the Virginia-based Les Femmes — The Truth, blog, told The Wanderer on May 4: “Well, it is certainly strange. We have a serious humanitarian crisis at the border. The virus is still an issue. And Biden is going off many weekends back to his Delaware basement.
“It reminds me of Obama going to bed so he could be fresh as a daisy for a fundraiser during the Benghazi crisis,” Kreitzer said. “The ambassador and some of our courageous soldiers were killed while Obama slept and Hillary twiddled her fingers and refused to send air support.
“Think of all the criticism of Trump if he dared to play a round of golf (Obama was frequently on the golf course, but he got a pass). Think of the criticism of Ted Cruz for leaving Texas during the winter storm,” she said.
“The double standard is nauseating,” Kreitzer said. “Biden’s weekends could lead to some interesting speculations about what’s going on. But he really isn’t in charge anyway, so it doesn’t matter where he is. Meanwhile, they tell us not to travel or associate with our families. Head-shaking hypocrisy!”
The Times of London posted its own suggestion on May 2 of who’s in charge: Biden’s wily chief of staff, Ron Klain.
Would this mean that Biden just nods along while it’s really Klain who’s responsible for massive tax-funded abortion, tax-paid grotesque experimentation on aborted babies, enforcement of sexual disorientation, just for starters? But who gave Klain his job? Biden. Or did Klain just hire himself and inform Biden when the prez awoke from another nap?
Unhinged
Meanwhile, national radio talk host and commentator Dennis Prager offered a theory to his audience about the outbursts of today’s left-wing political extremists and their delusions that go under the names of “global warming,” “anti-racism,” and “police brutality,” unhinged from the facts.
Prager said that when there’s affluence and secularism, boredom results that leaves “gigantic holes” in people who lack belief that they seek to fill with this activism.
He said nothing else elicits anger in the comments section of his Prager U. website like religion.
One might size these protesters up as religious fanatics without religion. As the aphorism says (whose originator is disputed): When men do not believe in God, they don’t believe in nothing. They become capable of believing anything.
A final political thought for this week: Even if Democrats were to expand the Supreme Court to 13 members to give themselves an unfair advantage, what’s to prevent a future Republican Congress and White House from expanding it to, say, 17 members, to regain their edge?
The answer is that no matter how many Republican-appointed members the High Court gets, if they’re led by someone like Chief Justice John Roberts — who lives in the same “My Big Legacy” fantasy world of Biden — they often won’t have the gumption.
If, on the other hand, Clarence Thomas laid down the law as chief justice, there’d probably be little problem for conservatives, no matter how few or many the court’s members.
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