That would be a very good idea.
I am a regular reader of the New York Times and have been for many years. Our future at Fort Leonard Wood depends on federal government decisions so I have to read the national media to know what they are talking about and to understand how they think.
If we as conservatives are going to effectively participate in national politics we need to understand the way the other side thinks — not only what they do and why what they are doing is wrong, but the rationale and logic behind their thoughts and actions. These people are not stupid, they've largely taken over our universities and education system, and if we're going to take back our country we need to read what they write and understand it.
We already know that writers for the national media read Free Republic. They're doing the right thing to understand the other side. We need to be doing the same.
34 posted on Thursday, February 23, 2012 6:34:46 AM by Elsie: “Your last two paragraphs summed it up quite well. Thank you.”
42 posted on Thursday, February 23, 2012 9:18:32 AM by Lauren BaRecall: “*standing ovation*”
Thank you both, and anyone else I may have missed specifically thanking.
29 posted on Thursday, February 23, 2012 6:19:06 AM by don-o: “Excellent post! May your tribe increase.”
Thanks... though we're too old to have that increase naturally, we expect to bring most of our nieces and nephews from Korea to live in our home in the United States and will likely be adopting at least some of them. I guess that means there may be a “tribe” someday of Koreans with an Italian last name.
TMI, probably, but some on Free Republic know me and have made private jokes about how a short black-haired Italian is getting lots of short black-haired kids with yellow skin and almond eyes. At least we can say both Italians and Koreans love to eat lots of garlic ;-)
http://spectator.org/archives/2012/02/22/satan-and-santorum/
The American Spectator
By Paul Kengor on 2.22.12 @ 6:08AM
Perspective from Reagan's Evil Empire speech.
Here's my take on Kengor’s article:
I remember the uproar against Reagan. I was not an evangelical Christian at the time and moved mostly in secular conservative and “blueblood GOP” circles, so my memories are not as sharp as they would be of a similar event today, but as I recall, the focus among people I knew was more on “good grief, how are we going to defend this new dumb thing Reagan said” than anything else.
Of course, I now realize that what Ronald Reagan said wasn't dumb at all — he was dead right.
If Paul Kengor of the American Spectator is right in his analysis, it looks like Santorum used essentially the same themes used by Reagan. The key difference, of course, is the attack on mainline Protestantism.
That difference is important. However, I think that is going to be understood by evangelicals not as an attack on us but on the old WASP mainstream Protestant consensus culture of pre-1960s America, which truly **WAS** anti-Catholic for a mix of legitimate and illegitimate reasons.
It's hard for us to remember it today considering the attitude of liberals toward multiculturalism, but old-school liberals before the rise of the Kennedy family were deeply concerned that the Roman Catholic Church would create a powerful Catholic threat to American freedoms, and combined with the older Protestant objections to Roman Catholic doctrine, made a powerful anti-Catholic force in America for most of our history. Many of the anti-immigrant complaints of the 1800s were directed specifically toward southern European immigrants (people like Santorum’s Italian ancestors, BTW) who were regarded as culturally inferior and meekly submissive to the authority of a dangerous and increasingly powerful Catholicism. Catholics were, of course, seen as theologically problematic people whose loyalties to America were questionable. More seriously from a practical political perspective, they were viewed as being largely controlled by Irish Catholic bishops who were perceived by WASP Protestants (in those days, largely Republican) as being ecclesiastical ward bosses whose power to control votes was far more dangerous than that of anyone in the local Democratic Party offices.
Today it's not the evangelicals yelling about “American Freedom and Catholic Power” (go google and you'll find what I'm alluding to) but rather secularists who are either liberal Protestants or atheists.
That may say a great deal about how evangelicals have come to understand that we have no choice but to make common cause with Roman Catholics if we're going to win the culture war. To convince an evangelical or fundamentalist Protestant to make common cause with a Roman Catholic is not an easy thing, but it was largely accomplished two generations ago by the theological groundwork of men like Francis Schaeffer and cemented a generation ago by men like D. James Kennedy.
If the liberals want to try to create a division between Santorum’s evangelical and Catholic supporters, I think they're going to have to do it over some issue other than access to birth control.
That dog won't hunt, and I don't think the attacks on this speech to Ave Maria University will hunt any better.