WORD COUNT 664                                                                                                                                                                            MAY 27, 2009

UNIFIED REPUBLICANS AND DIVIDED CATHOLICS – by Donald Kaul 

Barack Obama is not perfect; he has his flaws---some people like him, some don’t---but there is one thing even his severest critics would grant him. He has helped resuscitate one of America’s great political parties. 

The Republican Party is so much better off now than in those bad old days when George Bush was president. For example: 

·         It is purer. No more will Republicans have to consider the feelings of weak-kneed moderates in their midst. There are none left (unless you count the ladies from Maine and no one does). Just getting rid of Arlen Specter, who was lured to the Democratic Party by Obama’s siren song, was worth a bunch. (Can you imagine sitting through one of Specter’s long, Talmudic lectures at a party caucus? Now the Democrats have that to look forward to. The beauty of Specter’s defection is that he’ll keep voting Republican at about the same frequency he always did. His first act as a Democratic Senator was to vote against the president’s budget. His second was to announce that justice required that the courts hand the Minnesota Senate election to Republican Norm Coleman, rather than Democrat Al Franken, who got the most votes.) With friends like Specter, you don’t need enemies.

·          

It is more fiscally responsible than it’s been at any time since the heyday of Sen. Robert Taft. When Republicans took full control of the government in 2000, the federal budget was in surplus for the first time in decades. Within months, they had reversed that, cutting taxes and increasing spending. By the time President Obama took office, he had a trillion-dollar annual deficit to deal with, along with a plunging economy. Republicans took the earmarks program, a quiet pork barrel scam run by Congress that amounted to a few hundred favored pork projects, and exploded it into thousands of unreviewed projects costing taxpayers billions of dollars. No more. All you hear from Republicans these days is balance the budget and cut spending. As for earmarks, to hear Republicans tell it, that is something Democrats do. Somewhere, Robert Taft is smiling. 

·         Republicans have even embraced the concept of civil disobedience, gingerly perhaps but you have to start someplace. Hundreds of anti-abortion protesters (most of them Republicans, presumably) stood on the edge of the Notre Dame campus to protest the pro-choice president’s commencement speech there. More than three dozen were arrested for trespassing. 

Republicans trespassing! 

A few sneaked into the speech itself where they attempted to interrupt the president’s speech with shouts of “Baby Killer” and “You have blood on your hands.” They were shouted down by the crowd and removed. 

OK, so it wasn’t much of a protest but still, you didn’t see scads of conservatives at the great protest rallies of the ’60s and ’70s. This is a new gig for Republicans and I’m sure as time goes by they’ll get better at it. 

So far as Catholicism goes, it’s easy to get a distorted opinion of that religion these days, what with “Angels and Demons” in theaters and the child-abuse in scandals in Ireland and the Notre Dame protest. 

In reality, Catholicism is as diverse as any other religion in this country. It has its extremes at either end of the spectrum. 

While Obama was giving his speech at Notre Dame, here is what Patricia McGuire, president of the prestigious Catholic school, Trinity College, was saying to her graduating seniors in Washington: 

After making references to “religious vigilantism” at Notre Dame and “ostensibly Catholic mobs,” she said: “They have established themselves as uber-guardians of a belief system we can hardly recognize. Theirs is a narrow faith devoted almost exclusively to one issue. They defend the rights of the unborn but have no charity toward the living. They mock social justice as a liberal mythology.” 

She called the demonstrations against the president at Notre Dame “an embarrassment to all Catholics.” 

She received an ovation from the crowd of 3,500. 

Isn’t free speech wonderful? 

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Don Kaul is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-losing Washington correspondent who, by his own account, is right more than he's wrong. Email: dkaul2@earthlink.net -- A photo of Donald Kaul is available CLICK HERE

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