Wow: opposing Mitt Romney and supporting John Stewart. Who\u2019s your patron St Thomas Amarxist? BTW I appreciated your stand-alone comment, but to try ti use the hypocritical self-contradictory Stewart for support is sublime.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I couldn\u2019t agree more with your sentiment, Mark. John Stewart, however, is a partisan hack who would gladly say the exact opposite of this if it meant supporting his own party.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
And so on for 150-200 comments. Almost instantly the actual point\u2013that would be the injustice done our troops\u2013was totally forgotten and the subject became\u2013overwhelmingly\u2013the grave danger that the graphic was somehow \u201cgiving credibility\u201d to Jon Stewart and failing to maintain tribal purity.<\/p>\n
About 99% of everything that is wrong with the Thing that Used to Be Conservatism is found right in that thread, beginning with its total obsession with Identity Politics (aka the Genetic Fallacy). The very suggestion that somebody who is Not of the Tribe could have something to say that is worth hearing was rejected without trial and the only thing under discussion was not the point being made but the person making it.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not terribly mysterious how, in such a climate of petty power struggles, people like our troops get utterly forgotten. Indeed, as the thread progressed, one badly wounded vet with chronic health struggles attempted to actually bring the conversation back from the lunacy of \u201cYou quoted Jon Stewart! This information is ritually impure!\u201d to describing his struggles with a state system rigged to screw vets. It was very painful reading. But some readers would not be deterred. They resolutely returned to the burning issue of quoting Jon Stewart as a tribal marker of my *real* agenda, as well as explaining that it\u2019s all so complicated and there\u2019s just no money for vets, etc. blah blah. But the main thing was Stewart. What mattered was not whether the central point was true. All that *really* mattered was that I had happened to use a graphic of Jon Stewart making the point.<\/p>\n
How can a conservatism, more importantly how can a Catholic faith, that does this *possibly* hope to engage a world in which, incredibly, not everybody agrees with it about everything? In a healthy civil culture, you work together for the common good with people who are very different from you, affirming in common what can be affirmed. If a garden variety New York Jewish liberal says, \u201cWe should treat our troops justly and not screw them\u201d a healthy conservative\u2013and a healthy Catholic\u2013recognizes that the New York Jewish liberal may not be too keen on the Catholic Church a lot of times (Stewart has made the Church the butt of his jokes many times, no denying that), but at least he\u2019s right about this so God bless him for that. If Catholic conservatives cannot make common cause with a generally reasonable Lefty on something as bloody obviously true as \u201cDon\u2019t screw our troops over\u201d, (because that might somehow mean the Lefty does not receive the maximum amount of tribal hatred that must be maintained at all times in order to retain ones\u2019s bona fides as a True Catholic conservative), then how can we possibly hope to evangelize a world that is not confined to Fortress Catholicus? I don\u2019t have any big answers. But it seems like a good start is \u201cReject Identity Politics and the Genetic Fallacy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Somebody in the thread claimed that Stewart was a Marxist (I don\u2019t believe that for a second) and that this somehow put him beyond the pale of engagement. Pope Benedict is able to engage with all sorts of people of good will who hold ideas that are often quite antithetical to the Faith. These include Marxists, who are often far *more* hostile to the Church than Stewart is.<\/a> I attempted, in vain, to point out that the Church has historically tried to engage with whatever is true from anything in human culture and pointed out that Thomas used the work of pagans and Muslims. The response, of course, was to completely miss the point and say, \u201cSo you are comparing Jon Stewart to Aristotle and Averroes?\u201d<\/p>\nUm, no. I am saying that the Church does not practice the Genetic Fallacy. More importantly, the Church thinks that soldiers and their families should not be screwed out of a just wage or subjected to intolerable strains while monies are spent on enriching our Ruling Class\u2013and is willing to work with anybody who thinks likewise to achieve a more just end for poor people being screwed by corrupt pols and corrupt cronies. Catholics should be able to affirm this elementary truth without the distraction of Identity Politics, which is undiluted folly-making poison.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
but suddenly is gimlet-eyed when it comes to a just wage for troops who are on food stamps and welfare, or unemployed to the tune of a million returning vets: Escalating Military Pay Under Scrutiny of Budget Hawks The other day, on my FB page, I happened to be scrolling down and ran across this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[275],"class_list":["post-40443","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-support-our-troops"],"yoast_head":"\n
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