George Weigel notes the inadequately observed 20th anniversary of Centesimus Annus, Pope John Paul II’s most important encyclical, which has some important things to say about our political life and the concepts of social and economic justice.  Weigel concludes:

The encyclical’s analysis of the collapse of communism is also relevant to contemporary debates. Denying God, communism had a false view of the human person, and that was ultimately its undoing: it could not build a humane culture, politics or economics. This truth has implications for a world without communism, too. Culture is the key to making free economies and free politics work well, and at the heart of culture was religious conviction, John Paul insisted. Thus religious freedom had to be defended, not only against the hard totalitarianism of communist systems, but against softer, but nonetheless aggressive, forms of political pressure: pressures summed up in Pope Benedict’s biting (and wholly accurate) phrase, the “dictatorship of relativism.” Governments that impose political correctness through coercive state power—as, say, Canadian human rights tribunals do when they fine pastors for preaching biblical morality—are violating both religious freedom and weakening the moral-cultural foundations of democracy.

The article is here.

Irony from John Miller at the Corner:

Obama administration policy:

• Revoke the ban on photos of coffins of America’s dead soldiers.
• Withhold photos of the dead Osama bin Laden.

Evidence that we are moving beyond moral equivalence.

The sanctimonious left apparently has no qualms about labeling Sarah Palin’s views as hate speech while offering up her beheading as suitable fare for children.  The difference when such violence comes from the left is that . . . well, we know it’s just in good fun.  Everyone is supposed to recognize that liberals are nice people who would never resort to violence, while conservatives are disturbed and imbalanced and armed to the teeth.

But why stop with Palin?  Why not invite a whole bunch of conservatives to The Last Supper and kill them all?  The director of this play says it’s just a way for liberals to voice some of their frustrations.  You know, it’s therapeutic, and therefore it’s part of what keeps those liberals such sweet, fun-loving people.

To be fair, The Last Supper apparently suggests that killing conservatives is wrong, although this reviewer says that conclusion is muddled:

“If you had the chance to kill Hitler or Stalin when they were young men, would you have taken it?” That’s the hypothetical at the heart of “The Last Supper,” the latest production from Rising Sun Performance Company. What’s good about Dan Rosen’s play, which is based on his screenplay for the 1995 movie of the same title, is that it provides an answer. What’s bad is that the answer is confused.

Of course, when your premise equates run-of-the-mill conservatives with Hitler, you have a long way to go if your stated goal is to provoke rational political discourse.  If you equate them with Stalin, it’s not surprising that you never get there.

Somebody call the death panel: I’m too stupid to live.

That should be self-evident from my opposition to ObamaCare, that ingenious and benevolent legislation that is set to give everybody affordable health care at cheaper rates.  My skepticism that it will pan out as planned is surely irrational because, you see, the legislation was crafted by people with good intentions.  As any liberal will tell you, good intentions are all that really matters.

And there’s the dilemma.  Because if I’m not too stupid to see that ObamaCare will usher in a health-care paradise, then my opposition must mean that I’m evil.  How crass of me of to deny needy people access to the same level of health care that I enjoy (at least for now).  Maybe I own a lot of insurance stocks and hope to profit from their misery.

Not wanting to be evil, I suppose I’ll have settle for stupid.

I surely wallow in ignorance, not realizing that Congress passed socialized medicine in 1798, thereby proving that it is constitutional.  (Justice Scalia welcomes these new converts to originalism.)  I really should learn to read and study before I speak.  Heck, forget about me.  What about the attorneys general of the 26 states suing over ObamaCare?  Somebody send them a copy of this article in Forbes so they can bone up on the law instead of filing suit based only on regurgitated ramblings of Glenn Beck.

Yes, that would be the Glenn Beck who looks just like Jared Loughner.  Liberals are so clever they actually put Beck’s and Loughner’s photo side by side to show how they are nearly identical.  (Liberals are smart enough to find that viral graphic without a link from me.)  Ignore the fact that Beck’s face was PhotoShopped.  It proves the point, you know, that Loughner acted based on Beck’s super-charged rhetoric, because . . . well, they look alike . . . um, after you PhotoShop them.

Now, if you’re as stupid as I am, you may have trouble following this logic.  But remember, it’s all about good intentions.  And those whose good intentions extend to shutting up Glenn Beck can all agree that he looks just like Jared Loughner (after you PhotoShop Loughner’s face onto Beck’s, that is), and therefore Beck is a crazed mass murderer.  This, in the liberal’s world, is known as “civility.”

(PhotoShop is the propagandist’s dream come true.  Does anyone doubt that Hitler would have used PhotoShop if he had it?  I guess all users of PhotoShop are just like Hitler, and Glenn Beck is just like Hitler, and Jared Loughner is just like Glenn Beck, and PhotoShop is therefore responsible for the shootings in Tucson.  Gosh, this makes my tiny little brain spin.)

I’m due for an intervention.  Soon my family will corner me and start the deprogramming process to cure my conservativism.  I can see it coming, because just yesterday on Facebook, members of my family posted the PhotoShop comparison of Beck and Loughner, cited the Forbes’ article as proof that ObamaCare is constitutional and people should read before they speak, labeled the House vote against ObamaCare as outrageous, wondered if I own a lot of insurance stocks, and opined that we have better things to do than de-fund programs.

And I’m so stupid, I look at $14 trillion in national debt and think defunding some programs is the very best thing we can do.

Now that Congress has repealed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” a few questions arise:

Will universities that opposed the law begin reinstating ROTC programs and allowing military recruiters on campus? I predict they will not. DADT was a convenient rationale for being anti-military, but they will quickly find others. Their means of opposing DADT was fundamentally dishonest. It was, after all, not the “military’s policy” (as it was universally labeled) but the result of legislation enacted by a Democratic Congress and signed by Bill Clinton. They should have banned members of Congress from campus rather than the military. But the point was always about opposing the military rather than DADT. The military will continue doing things our academic class opposes (i.e. doing what militaries do), and the military will remain unwelcome on campus.

Will recruitment and retention become more difficult? I’m sure a number of heterosexual men will opt out of military service, although I expect that number will be small. I also doubt there will be a sudden influx of homosexual recruits. The impetus of repealing DADT, however, is again more about dismantling the military culture than it is about individual rights, and open homosexuality in the ranks will change that culture. The ultimate question concerns what happens if recruitment goals can’t be met. Will the liberals support a restoration of the draft? We all know the answer to that question.

Will the privacy of military personnel be compromised? Under DADT, homosexual personnel were allowed to serve and given a measure of privacy. (Sex, as you may recall, used to be a private matter.) Men could serve faithfully and still have a private life. That was the “Don’t Ask” component of the prior law. What will replace “Don’t Ask”?

Finally, will this be good for the military and for our national defense? Of course not, but the people pushing this social experiment don’t care.

“The last thing we wanted to do was infringe upon personal liberties.”  So says Fred Upton (R-MI) who wants to be chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Upton co-sponsored the legislation to ban incandescent bulbs, so I guess this is supposed to be an apology.  But really, was there any doubt in Upton’s mind that the legislation would eliminate the option of buying incandescent bulbs?  Isn’t that the first thing Congress wanted to do, arguably the only thing, and not the last?

If Upton is really surprised and sorry that legislation has its intended effect, I fail to see how that should make us more comfortable giving him the chairmanship.

From Victor Davis Hanson:

Behind the recent news of massive debt, looming defaults, WikiLeaks, the administration’s about-face in the war on terror, and the implosion of the European Union is a reminder that progressivism, at least as it operates today, is a sort of high-minded adolescence, as sophisticated in faculty-lounge repartee as it is near-suicidal in its actual implementation.

Columnist Richard Cohen richly deserved the series of rebukes that came his way after writing this.  His thesis was simple: Michele Obama was right to have no pride in her country, and Sarah Palin was ignorant for suggesting otherwise.  Cohen caricature’s Palin’s statement as asking blacks to “go blank” on their history.

Cohen, of course, goes blank on the history of women.  If we really want to wallow in our grudges, there is no end to it.  This is one of the better takedowns of Cohen.

Today Ed Kaitz looks at the larger syndrome behind Cohen’s post – not the Palin Derangement Syndrome but the tendency of “intellectuals” to “go blank” on American history.  Kaitz refers to Eric Hoffer’s essay on “Black Studies.”

While the “depredations of the Arabs were gathering momentum” in 1860s Africa, over in America, says Hoffer, “hundreds of thousands of American soldiers died or were maimed to abolish Negro slavery.” For Hoffer, the paradox is that “many black Americans feel a greater affinity with the descendents of Arab slavers than with Americans whose forefathers fought one of the bloodiest civil wars in history to set the Negro free.”

We are not permitted to take pride in abolishing slavery at great cost.  We can only recount the fact that slavery was once a blight on our democracy.  Our past imperfections are held up as proof that we are uniquely flawed and irredeemable.  Cohen wants us to forget that America is unique precisely for addressing and correcting those flaws.  Hoffer says,

Nowhere in the world at present and at no time in the past has an underprivileged minority experienced such spectacular changes in its fortunes as did some twenty million Negroes in America during the 1960s.  Yet we are not allowed to take pride in this unprecedented achievement.  Negro spokesmen seem to believe that the Negro’s cause will be advanced not by praising but by shaming America; that a proud, confident America would resist racial integration.

It is not an issue of race, but one of pessimism and self-loathing that infects the left.  Kaitz turns to Eldridge Cleaver for an explanation.

Cleaver understood, like most of us, that no one should be “sugar-coating anything that’s wrong over here,” but one should also be eternally grateful for the promise America holds for freedom and individual opportunity. On the other hand, says Cleaver, “The left [has become] so ideologically attached to anti-Americanism and pro-communism and Third Worldism that I believe we have a problem on our hands.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Put up a Nativity scene on public property, and the courts will likely make you take it down.  Display the Ten Commandments in a courtroom, and expect to be labeled as a bigot.  But do a little anti-Christian kitsch and the Sacramento County Law Library might just welcome it to their collection.

Jeri Wyrick created a work called “Moral Values” that shows a Bible with a prominent label: “Warning! May Impair Judgment.”  The Sacramento Bee says:

In an “artist statement” posted next to her work, Jeri Wyrick said she created the piece after the 2004 presidential election: “I came to the conclusion that there must be something about religious faith which renders people stupid.”

Wyrick obviously feels compelled to explain away any ambiguity in her work lest we mistake what judgment is likely impaired and who is rendered stupid.  The “artist statement” however says everything Wyrick wants us to know, and makes the artwork itself superfluous.

In her statement, Wyrick described her work. She said that she decided to create her controversial piece after exit polls showed most people cited moral values as their reason for voting for President George W. Bush in 2004.

“I hope that these pieces are not presumed as a group to be pro-Muslim/anti Christian – which they are not – as opposed to just anti-religious – which they admittedly are.”

That last admission might pose problems though.  The Supreme Court has allowed Christmas displays that are not purely religious in nature.  Toss in some reindeer and snowmen and you can get by.  Might a purely anti-religious message violate the First Amendment?

But not to worry.  Despite Wyrick’s admission, her work is not just anti-religious.  It contains a sophomoric political message as well.

Now about that county name: Sacramento . . .