The Vatican -- Its moral authority already strained by its unwillingness to effectively deal with the priesthood\'s pedophilia crisis, the Catholic church has condemned American "aggression" against Iraq, while remaining conspicuously tepid in its disapproval of Saddam Hussein\'s actions. The pope tells the Iraqi government to cooperate with U.N. resolutions, but then takes the position that there should be no consequences when it does not. What message did he expect Saddam to take from that?
Pope John Paul called for a "fast for peace" on Ash Wednesday, but Catholics fast on Ash Wednesday already. Was this intended to make American Catholics appear to share his opinion? The concept sounds similar to student activists declaring a "blue jean day," and then counting everybody wearing blue jeans on campus as a supporter of their cause.
After President Bush gave Saddam his 48-hour warning, Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls warned, "Those who decide that all peaceful means that international law makes available are exhausted assume a grave responsibility before God, their conscience and history." Exactly. But the church is taking the position that nobody should ever assume that responsibility. When all peaceful means really have been exhausted, the Vatican\'s terminal pacifism has no answer.
Nobody expects the pope to endorse a war, but the least he could have done was put the onus for maintaining the peace on Saddam, where it belonged.
The Dixie Chicks -- The country music trio had apparently thought they\'d crossed over into the pop genre when lead singer Natalie Maines (better known as the little ornery-looking one in the middle) told a London audience, "Just so you know, we\'re ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas." Saying such a thing overseas during a time of war, it was quite obvious that they weren\'t critiquing the president\'s economic plan. The remark was clearly intended as a condemnation of U.S. military action.
It must have come as a shock to them that this incident made them the subject of a boycott, not just by fans, but by country music radio stations. This sort of thing doesn\'t generally happen to pop musicians, whose listeners either agree with them, or are so numb from such offenses that they stopped caring long ago. When Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders said that she hopes the United States loses the war, the public response consisted of little more than a few rolling eyes.
The Dixie Chicks are not so lucky. Their offense may not have been nearly as bad, but they\'ve forgotten who their constituents are. You can\'t get away with behaving like Bill Clinton when so much of your support comes from Bush country.
Pat Buchanan -- Once a mainstream conservative Republican, the former Crossfire co-host has gone adrift. In 2000, his pitchfork populism led him to join the Reform Party, the political equivalent of a Roswell convention.
Nevertheless, Buchanan persists in his fervent belief that he is the center of the conservative movement, while all those conservatives who disagree with him have been duped by an devious clique of foreign infiltrators. In his new magazine, The American Conservative, he warns against a takeover of the Republican Party by the "neoconservatives."
He explains the threat in contradictory terms that can only be reconciled in the minds of the terminally paranoid. On one hand, the neoconservatives are a small "cabal" of activists who don\'t represent the majority of conservative though. On the other, the political landscape is lousy with neoconservatives, who have overtaken the Bush administration, the Republican Party, and leading conservative publications like The Weekly Standard and National Review.
True neoconservatives are actually former Communists from the Beat Generation, who reacted against their contemporaries\' violent anti-Americanism, and thus themselves became patriotic anti-Communists. The movement was founded by Jewish intellectuals in New York, who by now are mostly in their seventies. When the group was formed, its members had newly become conservative, hence the "neo-" prefix on their title. That\'s not nearly as scary as those who are just now being introduced to the term might have assumed.
Buchanan charges that the neoconservatives have pushed the United States into a war with Iraq in order to further Israeli interests, to which they subordinate the interests of the U.S. Why an overwhelming majority of Republicans, including President Bush, would care to do such a thing is difficult to explain, but Buchanan tries by picking out members of the administration he can call neoconservatives, like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, and suggesting that they exert some hypnotic power over the president.
In his magazine, Buchanan hallucinates that the United States has absolutely no allies in the war against Iraq, and that ninety percent of public opinion in Europe is against us. Is this what Mr. "America First" has come to? Determining the legitimacy of American policy by consulting man-on-the-street interviews from Antwerp? Perhaps he\'d change his mind about the war if someone conducted a poll showing that ninety percent of Israelis opposed it.
CNN -- The original 24-hour news network, now struggling against Fox News and MSNBC, was expected by many to overwhelm its competitors in a flashback to its glory days of the Gulf War. It\'s not happening, and no wonder. In the weeks leading up to the invasion of Iraq, CNN broadcasts were dominated by coverage of "peace protests," which had ceased to be newsworthy long before.
On the network\'s Headline News channel, the demonstrators\' inane slogans like "No Blood For Oil" often popped up as stealth editorials on the bottom of the screen, where scrolling news updates appear. Contrast this with Fox, which leftists have criticized as "jingoistic" for its graphic of an American flag offensively waving in one corner of the screen.
Unlike rival Fox, which is beating it in the ratings, CNN was not ejected by the Iraqi government. Apparently, Saddam\'s people thought Fox was too biased toward the United States. They had no similar fear of CNN, which employed Peter Arnett during the Gulf War, when he relayed pronouncements from the Iraqi dictatorship without cynicism.
Spokespeople for CNN are quick to point out that their network gets more "unique viewers" than Fox, meaning that a greater overall number of people tune in to CNN, but that Fox gets better ratings only because people don\'t turn it off as quickly. If that\'s what the folks in Atlanta have to cling to, they\'re in even bigger trouble than we know.
