Obama: Don’t Buy That Cynical “The Poor You Will Always Have With You” BS!

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Going for walks, discussing policy, or sometimes just values

Going for walks, discussing policy, or sometimes just values

Obama’s grasp of Biblical quotes is about what you might expect from a man who’s spent most Sundays golfing for twenty years.

Obama scorned Christians at the Catholic-Evangelical Leadership Summit on Tuesday, twisting the words of Jesus Christ into an insult against the Savior of the believers he was addressing.

“It’s important for us to guard against cynicism and not buy the idea that the poor will always be with us and there’s nothing we can do,” Obama said. Lest leftists and liberal Christians say his comment was “taken out of context,” but here are his full remarks:

“One of the things I’m always concerned about is cynicism,” Obama said. “My chief of staff, Denis McDonough, we take walks around the South Lawn, usually when the weather is good. And a lot of it is policy talk, sometimes it’s just talk about values. And one of our favorite sayings is our job is to guard against cynicism, particularly in this town. And I think it’s important for us to guard against cynicism and not buy the idea that the poor will always be with us and there’s nothing we can do, because there’s a lot we can do. The question is, do we have the political will, the communal will to do something about it.”

Does Obama take walks around the south lawn with his chief of staff when the weather is bad, in order to discuss policy or sometimes just values?  Can’t they even bother to pay an adult writer for these cheesy lies?  Aren’t the American people even worth a half-hearted appearance of sincerity?

Obama’s quotes Matthew 26:11 in a manner that’s utterly contrary to the verse’s meaning.

6 Now when Jesus was in Bethany, in the house of Simon the leper,

7 There came unto him a woman having an alabaster box of very precious ointment, and poured it on his head, as he sat at meat.

8 But when his disciples saw it, they had indignation, saying, To what purpose is this waste?

9 For this ointment might have been sold for much, and given to the poor.

10 When Jesus understood it, he said unto them, Why trouble ye the woman? for she hath wrought a good work upon me.

11 For ye have the poor always with you; but me ye have not always.

12 For in that she hath poured this ointment on my body, she did it for my burial.

13 Verily I say unto you, Wheresoever this gospel shall be preached in the whole world, there shall also this, that this woman hath done, be told for a memorial of her.

Far from heaving a resigned sigh, Jesus is reminding the disciples that poverty, like death or the pain of childbirth, are constants in this fallen world that can be attended to but never wiped out. The Complete Commentaries of minister Matthew Henry affirms this:

“Observe his reason; You have the poor always with you,” Henry writes. “Note, 1. There are some opportunities of doing and getting good which are constant, and which we must give constant attendance to the improvement of. Bibles we have always with us, sabbaths always with us, and so the poor, we have always with us. Note, Those who have a heart to do good, never need complain for want of opportunity. The poor never ceased even out of the land of Israel, Deu. 15:11.” [For the poor shall never cease out of the land: therefore I command thee, saying, Thou shalt open thine hand wide unto thy brother, to thy poor, and to thy needy, in thy land.]

Twisting the words of the Gospel to push unjust, disastrous government programs robbing Peter to pay Paul? For shame.

Well put.  Someone tell Pope Francis and his Yoda.

 

 

 

 

 

Pope Francis: The Answer to Obama’s Prayers

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Pope Francis: The Answer to Obama's Prayers

Superhuman Political Force for the Poverty Panel

NBC News reports:

It’s being dubbed “the Francis effect” and it’s hitting Washington, DC.

From 4500 miles away Pope Francis is exerting his influence on everything from foreign policy to summits on poverty. Pope Francis got a big shout out on Tuesday from the leader of the free world as a great example of someone who understands what’s important.”Nobody has shown that better than Pope Francis, who I think has been transformative just through the sincerity and insistence that he’s had that this is vital to who we are,” President Barack Obama said during a panel discussion at Georgetown University.

“And that emphasis I think is why he’s had such incredible appeal, including to young people, all around the world.”

Why does the Francis adulation from Obama go on and on and on? Is the Pope more sincere?  Is he ‘transformative,’ whatever that liberalspeak means?  What does it say when something is ‘vital to who we are?’  Does Pope Francis really have an ‘incredible appeal’ especially including young people, or is it just non-stop well-funded hype?

I know one thing: it’s not filling up Churches, but we don’t need those any more anyway.  You can ‘kneel before the poor’ anywhere, can’t you?

Well, not in Georgetown.

The three day Catholic-Evangelical leadership summit at Georgetown is a direct response to the pope’s call to help the poor.

It’s been answered by an influential lineup of people on vastly different ends of the political spectrum. Speakers include ideological opposites from progressive Senator Cory Booker, a New Jersey Democrat and former conservative presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty to members of Opus Dei, a Roman Catholic lay organization, to Nuns On The Bus, a Catholic groups focused on social justice.

Democrats, dissidents, and a Romney Republican.

“It’s been a long time since we’ve seen a pope have this kind of influence in the United States,” said E.J. Dionne, Washington Post columnist who moderated the poverty panel including President Obama.

…and the whole thing run by a left-wing Wapo pundit.  Does anybody ever help the poor by actually doing something for them?  I’ve never met a poor broke person who would be interested in moderators of ‘poverty panels.’

However, it’s too early to say whether Tuesday’s talk will lead to change.

“If they care about these problems, Americans can change the politics that would, over the next five to 10 years, make a huge difference. And I’m not talking about changing Republican-Democrat. I’m talking about making poverty and the opportunity to escape from poverty a higher issue on both parties’ agendas,” said Robert Putnam, the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard.

I guess if both parties adopted your big government redistribution platforms it wouldn’t matter if they were Republican or Democrat, you’re right.

The report presents some silly charts showing how beloved and respected Pope Francis is.  Then it talks about how important Catholics in Congress supposedly are.  It all boils down to a sort of superhuman papal political force.

The president said he can’t wait to host the pope and if he can spur the least effective congress in history to action, it might just be a certifiable miracle.

Salon Canonizes Oscar Romero, the New Saint of Communists

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Is this a crucifix or what?

Is this a crucifix or what?

When trying to piece together history from very murky and politicized events, always consider the source.  Why is it that we are only able to find blanket conclusions and sparse facts from the ‘c’atholic press on pre-sanctified ‘martyr’ Archbishop Oscar Romero, and if we want a bigger picture we must turn to leftist rags for their screeds?

Pope Francis is soon to beatify the late Monseñor Óscar Romero, the archbishop of El Salvador who was assassinated in 1980 by a right-wing, pro-capitalist death squad. Unlike others whom Francis has already consecrated, the Blessed (and, sooner than later, Saint) Romero will be a holy figure whose killers still walk the earth.

Not only are they ‘right-wing’ they’re also ‘pro-capitalist.’  Does anyone detect a surge in blatant Communist rhetoric in the press, the Leftist leaders, and our FrancisChurch this week?

If a saint is a sanctified man of God, what do we call the killers of a saint? Is theirs an especial evil? I’m no theologian, but it seems that to kill a saint is in excess of mere man’s law. The Catholic Catechism exhaustively extols the sanctity of saints, saying that Christ’s “holiness shines in the saints.” How then do we describe a powerful organization that trains and gives sanction to the killers of saints? Even the Vatican says that Romero “was shot by a right-wing death squad,” which, as  everyone who understands recent Salvadoran history knows, was trained in the United States.

That’s bad yes?  Why would the United States train Romero’s killers?  And, why is Salon suddenly so Holy?  I thought they despised Catholics saints.

During the Cold War, the Georgia-based School of the Americas (now called WHISC) trained tens of thousands of Central American soldiers for right-wing governments and insurgencies in order to neutralize leftist influence in countries like Nicaragua, Honduras, and Romero’s El Salvador, where civil wars in the 1970s and ’80s pitted U.S.-trained rightists against socialists and leftists who opposed their countries being used as a plantation in service of a Washington-backed elite.

They were against, “a plantation in service of a Washington-backed elite?”  Is Oscar Romero some saint of Communism?

A UN truth commission in 1993 would find that two-thirds of the right-wing soldiers in El Salvador’s horrific civil war were U.S.-trained, many of them to operate the “death squads” that became a feature of Central America while Washington played with a heavy hand to direct the region’s politics and economics.

Is it a surprise that a UN truth commission might call government soldiers on the right side of a civil war ‘death squads?’  Do UN truth commissions work?

Bishop Romero was a thorn in the side of Washington, preaching liberation theology in defense of the poor and becoming known as the “Voice of the Voiceless.” Increasingly worried about Washington’s meddling in El Salvador’s burgeoning war between rightists and leftists, Romero wrote a letter to President Jimmy Carter in 1980, calling out the United States’ support for the murderous right-wing forces who “repress the people and favor the interests of the Salvadoran oligarchy.”

So he lobbied the anti-American Jimmy Carter to throw U.S. support to the Communists, I mean the poor, and cut off backing for the more conservative military regime, I mean the murderous right-wing oligarchy.  That’s staying out of radical politics and preaching and Gospel, yes?

Do you imagine using one’s pulpit and international prestige to decisively change the course of a radical Communist takeover of your country might draw a few enemies?  The question is: how does that have anything to do with the Catholic faith?  How is it even decent to fight for such causes?

Five weeks later, Romero was assassinated by a U.S.-trained death squad while delivering mass at a small hospital chapel. No smoking-gun evidence exists pinning the hit on Washington, but the assassination was the hallmark of U.S. strategy during that time. In a 1984 report for The Progressive magazine, journalist Allan Nairn interviewed “dozens of current and former Salvadoran officers, civilians, and official American sources” and found “a pattern of sustained US participation in building and managing the Salvadoran security apparatus that relies on Death Squad assassinations as its principle means of enforcement.”

Did the U.S. train them to assassinate people or did they train them to shoot in a Cold War battle against totalitarians?  Was the United States on the wrong side of the Cold War?

Ten years later, late Catholic priest William Callahan spoke to the National Catholic Reporter after the UN Truth Commission report brought much more to light, concurring that “[i]t is clear that from the earliest days the U.S. government knew exactly what was going on, especially through the Reagan era, and didn’t care what it was as long as their policy objectives were being achieved.”

Did the Carter White House order the hit? There’s no way to know. But everyone knows where the killers’ training came from. Everyone knows that they were U.S. military proxies. Even the Vatican’s own news agency, in its announcement of Romero’s upcoming canonization, named his killers as “a right-wing death squad,” (read: U.S.-trained death squad) and the National Catholic Reporter points out that the alleged triggerman was a known graduate of the School of the Americas. The United Nations, meanwhile, names two of the alleged assassin squad members as graduates.

The UN and the National Catholic Reporter now: that’s double the Catholic credibility!  The School of the Americas graduates shot a martyr!  They hate Catholicism!  They’re Evil!!

Washington’s culpability in the assassination of Saint Romero doesn’t necessarily depend on an explicit order to carry out the hit. The general directive is enough: These were Washington’s guys doing what Washington needed in the region to maintain capitalist control. Romero is only one of the more than 75,000 who died in El Salvador during the period when the “fragmentation of any opposition or dissident movement by means of arbitrary arrests, murders and selective and indiscriminate disappearances of leaders became common practice” of Washington-backed soldiers, according to the UN Truth Commission’s report. The report continues: “Organized terrorism, in the form of the so-called “death squads”, became the most aberrant manifestation of the escalation of violence…The murder of Monsignor Romero exemplified the limitless, devastating power of these groups.”

There’s that new ‘capitalist’ slur again.  Doesn’t that just mean freedom to have a business, use your own money, and not come to the rotten government to beg for a living?  So the murder of ‘Saint Romero’ is a sign of the ‘limitless devastation’ of ‘capitalist’ groups, yes?

It’s doubtful that El Salvador would be “one of the largest suppliers of clothing to the United States,” with untold thousands of wage slaves sewing our underwear for a dollar an hour if the socialists and Saint Romero had been allowed to design their country how they saw fit. People don’t tend to vote for wage slavery. As in places like Haiti, El Salvador and elsewhere in Central America and the Caribbean, corporate free trade zones tend to be imposed by Washington and compliant domestic governments at the behest of their corporate friends. The 41 percent of Salvadorans living in poverty can be seen as victims, too, of the death squads’ quashing of socialist resistance to Washington’s wishes.

El Salvador is not poor because the allies of Romero lost.  Underwear is sewn for a dollar an hour because they won.  His party rules the country today.  A ‘socialist designed’ country, if you have any sense or recent historical memory, doesn’t improve things.  First they sow murders and rebellions with the help of ‘Saint’ Romeros, then they install a permanent underclass like in Cuba for example.

This piece of Socialist propaganda which attacks freedom, democracy, security, and prosperity, and the country that until recently was the United States; demonstrates the whole purpose behind making Romero so honored by the Church.  It’s the same reason we seem to have Pope Francis now:

To make Communism seem Catholic and to make its obstacles look wrong.

Note to Salon’s Matthew Pulver:

As far as I can tell Romero is only scheduled to be beatified, not canonized.  Not that it matters much these days, but you guys need to brush up on your new Catholicism.