Lucifer | The Gospel Truth

A Pauper Nation

September 21, 2015
2 Comments

The Prince and the Pauper is a novel by Mark Twain, which was first published in 1881 in Canada, a year before its American debut. Set in 1547 it tells the story of two English boys, a pauper named Tom who lived with an abusive father and Prince Edward, son of King Henry VIII.

Through a series of plot manipulations the boys switch identities for a temporary period of time. This literary device has serious allegorical overtones and has been a standard in literature ever since.

How surprising it is that the respective historical legacies of such disparate figures, such as Niccolo Machiavelli and Saul Alinsky have come to be intertwined in an intergenerational relationship that has had lasting consequences for American society.

Just look what their acolytes in the Democratic Party have done to the United States in the person of Barack Obama and the still potentially dangerous Hillary Clinton.

Machiavelli was born in 1469. According to historian Jacques Barzun, even his name evokes visions of fiendish conduct. It has evolved to mean a cynical approach to government. This disdain revolves around his seminal work, The Prince, written in 1513.

16th century Florence was the cultural hub of the Italian peninsula. Yet Italy was a miasma of violence-ridden principalities where the people lived in constant fear and trembling. Assassinations, murders, and pillaging were daily occurrences. Machiavelli thought it was time for a new prince, who would establish peace and order.

Machiavelli was disturbed because most people lived according to the immorality of the day, even though they espoused Christian principles. He believed that since the Italians of his day were morally weak, cowards, or poor, traditional rules had to be altered.

According to Arthur Hippler, writing in the Wanderer, Machiavelli was the first Western thinker to promote the idea that moral evil is necessary for political good or as we paraphrase it the ends justify the means!

It has been almost five centuries since Machiavelli’s death in 1527. According to Barzun, Machiavelli’s legacy has lived on in the minds and hearts of scholars and deep thinkers, such as John Adams, philosophers, Charles Montesquieu, and David Hume, as well as Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. They all believed that the state should be neutral on moral issues.

It is obvious that his spirit has deeply influenced the minds of many current American leaders, who employ the same antinomian rationale that has led the Supreme Court to render its historic decisions on abortion and homosexual rights that have rent the fabric of American civilization.

Saul Alinsky main importance was that he adapted Machiavellian tactics to his own brand of social justice. He was a superb social organizer, who believed in the power of numbers. Grass roots organization and community organizers were the open door through which he hoped to accumulate power for his disciples, the legions of poor people he witnessed every day.

Like his Italian forbear, Alinsky was not a utopian visionary. He believed that the organizer should be a neutral agent, a kind of ideological agnostic, seeking no particular outcome and advancing no philosophy, other the gaining of power.

Nor did Alinsky lose any sleep over doing dark deeds for the good of the have-nots. To him ethical standards had to be elastic enough to stretch with the times.

Unlike Machiavelli Alinsky did not want power for the rich and the well-connected. His goal was to turn Machiavelli on his head and usurp power for the poor and the downtrodden, thus upending the historical way that life had worked.

But Alinsky was not a doctrinaire cultural Marxist. He was more concerned with strategy. In his books Reveille for Radicals and Rules for Radicals he created an amalgamation of ideas and plans adapted from the dusty pages of Marxist, Socialist, anarchist even Fascist texts.

In essence his thinking mirrored that of the Philosophes of the French Revolution in their deep abiding contempt for Christianity, the business world, private property, and the traditional American political process.

It is not surprising that Tom Paine, the voice of the revolution, was one of his heroes. He had no tolerance for compromise.

One of his early converts from the middle class was a former Goldwater Republican from Park Ridge Illinois. Alinsky saw great promise in the bespectacled college student from Wellesley College, Hillary Rodham.

The future Mrs. Clinton thought enough of Alinsky to write her senior thesis on his ideas and strategies, after working for him one summer. Unfortunately, the voting public will never know what she wrote.

According to the book, Hell to Pay, by Barbara Olson, a passenger on American Flight #77 that was crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11, as soon as Bill Clinton became president, Hillary’s thesis was put under lock and key at Wellesley.

In her 2003 best seller, Living History, Senator Clinton briefly acknowledges her intellectual debt to Alinsky. She took great pains to point out that she disagreed with his idea that one had to work from outside the establishment. Clinton prides herself on working from within an organization to reform it.

Alinsky has had no better acolyte than Barack Obama, who from his perch in the White House has put himself above all rules of law, moral and judicial. His tenure has worked to instill Alinsky’s Rules and Principles in health care, gun control, education and religion.

A former Alinsky community organizer, Obama has instituted a Marxist plan, the work of two Columbia University professors from the 1960s, the infamous Cloward-Piven Strategy whose intent is to purposely collapse the U.S. economy with huge deficits, an uncontrollable nation debt and a welfare system bursting with millions of new recipients, immigrants and mentally ill homeless people, essentially turning the United States into a Pauper Nation, at the mercy of its creditors and foreign enemies.

According to philosopher, Leo Strauss’ classic, Thoughts on Machiavelli, the Florentine was essentially a teacher of evil. This epithet should also apply to Alinsky. All Americans should be aware of what these teachers of evil taught and to whom they taught it.

This should surprise no one since Machiavelli was and atheist and Alinsky praised the first known radical, who rebelled against the establishment and did so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom. Who was the first radical? Why Lucifer himself!

Uncertain Truths

November 5, 2014
3 Comments

According to a recent issue of the NY Times CLIVE JAMES is dying, but he’s pretty good-natured about it. Once a three-fisted drinker and smoker, Mr. James, 75, was found to have leukemia in 2010, with the added complications of emphysema and kidney failure. His condition is irrevocable.

James is a polymath, who found his way from a poor, sewer-free suburb of Sydney, Australia, to become a beloved writer, entertainer and figure in British life

What interested me was his relaxed and almost casual way of looking back at his life while at the same time contemplating what the future might have in store from him.

As the Times so lyrically put it, he can look back with astonishment and amusement, and look forward with a trenchant eye.

I am amazed at how much at peace and detached he is from the reality that his life is nearing its completion.

My entire life I was taught either overtly or subtly to fear my death because of the serious Judgments that followed each human being’s death.

Of course this was during the old days that the proponents of Vatican II have deliberately sought to stricken from the Church’s history. Their laudable goal was to replace it with a kinder, gentler Church that appealed to more people and did not tax them with too many rules and strictures.

Ever since the 1960’s I have found my soul torn in two between these two sales pitches.

While the one uses Hell and Damnation to terrify and frighten us, the other uses a Big Easy way of getting saved without a great deal of effort on our part.

While the 10 Commandments reigned in one, the corporal works of mercy seem to have the big edge in the other.

The first seemed to imply that only a small percentage of God’s creation actually get into Heaven. Their Sears Catalogue of serious sins seemed to second that opinion.

When you are sixteen years old and have a body flowing with relentless hormones a pretty girl can easily morph into a vehicle headed down the road to hell and damnation

The new church has almost eliminated the word “sin” from our vocabulary.

This explains why so few people feel the need to go to Confession or what we now call reconciliation. I go twice a year just to play it safe.

While the first attitude has given us generations of stiff, sour and basically neurotic Catholics, the other has opened the gates for an exodus of faithful who seek an even easier fulfillment in another religion.

It has also given the breakdown of marriage and the family, sexual promiscuity and a confusion of what even constitutes a marriage. That pretty girl who used to turn my head is now seen as a more aggressive object of pleasure and delight. And she knows it!

This conflict still tears at my innards sometimes. The first left me with a terrible unease that I do not miss at all while the second one gives me not much more than uncertain truths, supported by a world of doubts.

James Clive does not seem bothered by any of that. He simply says: I should have been a more honorable man, but the regrets don’t overwhelm me, he said. They’re such a good subject for writing.

My bifurcated situation is akin to the Broadway musical A Year With Frog and Toad, written by brothers Robert (music) and Willie Reale (book and lyrics), based on the Frog and Toad children’s stories written and illustrated by Arnold Lobel. The musical follows the woodland adventures of two amphibious friends, a worrywart toad and a perky frog, with their assorted colorful hopping, crawling and flying companions, over the course of a year.

At times my old faith makes me fearful like Mr. Toad and my new faith brings out more the joy and wonder of being alive. Both seem valid to me. I am fearful of letting go of the former while frustrated for not being able to fully enjoy the latter.

On a personal note my 12-year old granddaughter will play the frog in an upcoming St. Louis presentation of this musical.

To alleviate my stress I have taken it upon myself to study for the most important final exams of my life. I am not kidding when I say I still study for everything, including my thrice-annual blood test.

James did address his own eschatology saying:

An afterlife? Both Virgil and Dante set some of their greatest work in another world, he replied. But Shakespeare didn’t, and his is the attitude I prefer. There is enough of heaven in a hedgerow, and enough of hell in the perfidy of man.

I believe in Heaven and Hell but with a bit of a twist. I have written several times in this space about Heaven and my high hopes to be able to walk one of its beaches someday and embrace all the people who have meant sometime special to me in my life, including even those who may have shared nothing more than a long conversation.

My view on Hell is optimistically cautious. An old Jesuit friend once told me–it was two weeks after his ordination in 1969 that as Catholics we had to believe in a Hell but we did not have to believe that anyone, other than Lucifer and his minions ever went there.

I like the sound of that because it makes a certain kind of sense. Other than Mary and Jesus, the Angels are the only ones who had a perfect choice between good and evil. I do not believe human beings always fully understand the gravity of their decisions.

Oh we may feel that something may not be right about an action but under the pressure of any moment, most people can think of a plausible rationalization that would provide a reasonable doubt in God’s moral court.

And even if I am wrong, the eternal part of Hell is the game breaker. Lucifer was so proud that literature has quoted him as wont to say that he would rather reign forever in hell than serves for one day in heaven.

This tells me that he knew the score on his level. How many human beings ever get that clear a choice! Again this is one of my uncertain truths.

Purgatory makes the most sense to me. We are all imperfect beings. The Book of Genesis and any daily newspapers attest to that fact.

We must be perfect to see God and unless we have suffered the most excruciating pain imaginable that is not going to happen.

To explore what my vision of Purgatory is, I wrote Gaby’s People for the local stage…I hope… *Instead of the tradition habitat of punishment and suffering for sin, my Purgatory is more to enlighten the person of his or her weaknesses and negative behaviors that separate him from their final destination. Using a massage spa as my venue for healing, understanding and reconciliation with the absolute truth of one’s life I found it more consistent with my understanding of God as all-merciful and all-loving God.

I saw it as a place of forgiveness, self-awareness and redemption, rather than a place of pain and temporal torment. It is probably the place most people will wind up after this life is done.

Most people I know never think of any of the above. When their time comes they seem to easily adapt an attitude like Clive James…confidant…self-satisfied and ignorant of what may follow. I don’t know if that’s the kind of bliss I long for…but that’s just another one of my uncertain truths.

*Gaby’s People is under competitive consideration by a local theater group. If anyone would like to read the play just contact me and I will send you an e-copy.

Posted in Uncategorized
Tags: free will, Frogs and Toads, Gaby's People, Lucifer, Purgatory

The First Atheist

June 21, 2012
4 Comments

I have often paraphrase Robert Fulghum’s book, All I Needed to Know I Learned In Kindergarten.

Since my Catholic school did not have a kindergarten, I learned everything I need by the end of the first month of first grade.

Knew it all at five

It was all contained in a single question in thew Baltimore Catechism–the third one I believe.

Why did God make me?

The answer is of course: To know, love and serve Him in this world and be happy with him in the next.

As basic as that pity answer is it is loaded with high-minded theology and pregnant with all the philosophy and wisdom that any person, no matter how old or young needs to know.

Everything I have learned since then have ben postscript.

The word serve reminds me of the quote attributed to Lucifer right after the world’s first great rebellion of the defiant angels.

In his epic poem, Paradise Lost, John Milton quoted Lucifer’s after his fall that it was better to reign in Hell forever than serve in heaven for one day.

That statement goes a long way in explaining the behavior of atheists.

I guess that makes Lucifer the first atheist.

the first of his kind

As we go more deeply into the 21st century, atheism is generating a lot more currency.

Prominent atheists are spreading their anti-gospel message in increasing numbers and generating many public debate on the place of religion in governments and societies in the modern world.

Thanks to the Internet they have been able to network together around the world.

Today about 2.3 percent of the world’s population identifies themselves as atheist with another 12 percent more describe themselves as agnostic or non-believers in any deity.

The ranks of scientists boast probably the largest concentration of atheists.

This is true because the very power and majesty of science instills a false sense of their own elevated intellectual abilities that adorns itself in godlike attire.

Supreme egotists, such as that fear the competition from a Being more divine than they are.

I was shocked to learn that many famous and highly regarded men and women are numbered in their ranks.

Raises some eyebrows

Their recorded ranks include Epicurus, Mick Jagger of the Rollin Stones, Andrew Carnegie, Freud, Clarence Darrow, Ayn Rand, and radical college professor, Noam Chomsky, Facebook’s Steve Zuckerberg, comedian George Carlin, and George Soros, one of the most ardent supporters of Barack Obama.

Objected to religion

If I am not mistaken, Obama’s mother declared her atheism at one time.

While most of the above list will not surprise, the declarations of actresses Jodie Foster and the late Katherine Hepburn should raise a few eyebrows.

Warren Buffet the richest man in America might also be surprise.

He describes himself as religiously agnostic.

According to a 1995 biography, he adopted his father’s ethical underpinnings, but not his belief in an unseen divinity.

In case no one has noticed there is a new brand of militant atheists on the march.

They are angrily led by such non-believing luminaries, such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens.

Dawkins, the author of the 2006 best-seller, The God Delusion is their presumptive leader.

Leader of the godless pack

In his 2004 book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Religion, Harris takes more of an apocalyptic approach.

He believes that people must renounce religious faith or it will mark the end of civilization, conveniently ignoring the destruction of more than 175 million people at the bloody hands of atheistic governments during the 20th century.

Taken as a group these few angry men believe they have Christianity on the ropes because of it sexual scandals, loss of universal membership and the general demise of a religious and moral society.

Like their forebears from the French Revolution, they see the Church as an institution founded on unreason and superstition.

It is their sacred mission to chase such foolish ideas from the public marketplace.

Atheism has fascinated me for a long time.

For some reason I seem drawn to them.

While at WGNU radio I developed a long personal relationship with a fellow who sometimes used the handles of Gunboy Jim or Jim from Ferguson.

He was very bright, more of a library-educated philosopher who loudly proclaimed his atheism.

He was also ardently pro-abortion.

He would come up with the most creative arguments that he believed justified abortion.

One time in the 1980s in an off-air phone conversation he said that abortion was a noble act.

So great was my visceral reaction that I could not restrain my contempt for him and his ideas.

Despite my rage, Jim continued to call and challenge me.

These calls made me a much better talk show host.

Wonder if Jack and Jim will find that inner peace

I eventually put away my anger and tried to understand him and his atheism.

I realized that he was my neighbor and he needed something more than my righteous indignation.

I never did fathom why he wanted to protect a woman’s right to choose…death for her child.

He lived with his mom, rode a bike, seemed to have no job, never talked about dating or having a lady friend.

One time in an e-mail he casually mentioned how he had been doing the dishes and the housework for his mother who had been seriously ill.

I told him in a near apologetic tone that what he was doing was the work of sainthood.

In the spirit of his namesake, the work of sainthood

I was taken aback when he thanked me for seeing some good in him.

That nearly reduced me to tears.

I told Jim I would pray for him.

Jim was a seeker who wanted to know and understand the reality of life but had been looking in all the wrong places.

I haven’t heard from him in a long time. I often wonder if he ever filled the void, that spiritual vacuum in his life that the absence of God leaves.

I really miss the exchanges.

Last July we were on a plane, flying to the West Coast when I started talking with a pretty blonde lady from Tennessee.

We talked for three and a half hours.

She told me about a physical malady she had–Titanium poisoning from the fillings in her teeth–that caused her to lose her job as a nurse and had virtually incapacitated her.

Vanity prevented her from removing the teeth.

She also mentioned a wayward husband whose philandering made her blame God for her misfortune.

I suggested she read Bishop Fulton’ J. Sheen’s book Life is Worth Living to raise her spirits and enhance her life.ecause she was done on life in general…at least her life.

Part of the deal

We made a deal.

I had told her I told her my long interest in becoming a lector at our Church during Mass.

It as something I had on my mind for five years.

She would read the book and I would sign up in church.

Last January, I finally expressed my interest and told our pastor the whg\ole story, which is a lot longer than recounted here.

He asked if she had kept her part of the bargain.

I told him, I had no idea.

I didn’t even remember her name.

But I had given my word and it was between her and….God to keep her end.

My last example involves a morning at the abortion center in St. Louis.

I go there a few times every year to witness with my fellow pro-lifers.

One time there was this solitary figure who was witnessing against us!!

I engaged him a conversation that lasted over an hour.

My fellow picketers later thanked me for keeping him occupied as he does this on a regular basis.

His atheism was founded on an anger director toward the creator and by proxy His innocent human creations.

God’s crime was sending him a son who was a violent schizophrenic he tried to stab his wife in the neck.

Protesting life

He also floored me with his statement that he wished his mother had aborted him, so that he would be in Heaven with God.

I don’t know what his standing would have been.

He might know more than I do because I think Limbo is literally history.

I guess Paco, 12-year-old, I encountered on his video game connection,the other while my grandson and I were parallel playing, was right when he said that he didn’t believe in God because religion was too confusing.

So is the meaning of life and that’s really what it’s all about as Alfie once said.

Posted in Uncategorized
Tags: Baltimore Catechism, John Milton, Limbo, Lucifer, militant atheists, Rolling Stones

Welcome to Barry’s World

October 3, 2011
5 Comments

It’s funny the more I write about President Obama the less I feel I understand him.

He is as elusive as a slippery eel.

Hard to fathom

The harder one tries to get a grip on his essence, the more he seems to slip out of your understanding.

And we thought Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon were difficult to fathom!

Part of the problem is that in Barry’s World, things that are real have become twisted, and unreal.

While today it might be difficult to define just what a normal childhood is, by any standard, even the most loyal Obama supporter must admit that the president has endured an unorthodox childhood and early adulthood.

We can see him but for us to get close and personal with his mind and his psyche is nearly impossible.

The mainstream press had little or no curiosity about his former life and merely accepted his media releases as the gospel truth.

Only Hillary Clinton took any interest in his background and was the first camp to raise the issue of his national origins and eligibility to become president.

Obama’s life is like a multi-colored mosaic made up of thousands of pieces that have been collected from around the world–Kenya, Indonesia, Hawaii, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and Washington,D. C.

I often wonder what must go on in his mind?

Why is there so much doubt about his native and biological origins?

Has the public’s lack of understanding been a plot derived by him or his parents to confuse us or just make him seem so mysterious?

As a racially mixed child, what kind of internal doubts and confusions must have raged within his slight body?

His alleged father, Barack Senior abandoned his family right after Barack was born.

Fled to Seattle right after Barack's birth

Or was it the other way around? His mother literally fled Hawaii to pursue her education in Seattle two weeks after Barack was born.

When they returned, Barack Senior could have matriculated with a full ride at the University of Hawaii but instead decided the allure of a Harvard Ph.D. was more important than heart or hearth.

Or maybe he didn’t have any real connection to Ann Dunham and her baby.

No one has ever seen any wedding pictures, nor a marriage license.

What must it been like growing up as a racially mixed child in Hawaii?

Of course most people in Hawaii are of mixed parentage but usually between the many ethnic groups in Asia, not Africa.

Throughout his formative years he was just Barry–his Caucasian name. Many thought of him as a white teenage with a white mother and white grandparents.

Barry, aka "Barack"

His grades were not outstanding and neither was his jump shot.

The most potent influence in his life quite possibly could have been, the man he identifies, simply as Frank in his memoirs.

I wonder how few people realize that this Frank was none other than Frank Marshall Davis who mentored him for 11 years.

Many people think that Frank was much more than a mentor.

Perhaps he was Barry’s biological father. The resemblance between the two is uncanny.

Barry was chubby as a prepubescent child and makes the resemblance even more dramatic.

Only his nasty smoking habit helped him take the weight off later.

Barack Sr. on the other hand looks nothing like Barry.

Perhaps that’s the real reason Barry’s birth certificate confusion has existed. On the 1961 form I believe the blood type would be mentioned. A simple test might have determined that Barack Sr. could not have been his father and Frank was.

A family tree?

I guess we will never know. Frank is long dead and Barry isn’t talking.

Davis, for those who have been sleeping off the 1960s, was a self-admitted communist, whose disdain and overt hatred of America was notorious.

Like his protegé, he didn’t like American exceptionalism and thought this country had done nothing but oppress his people.

Besides being a communist polemicist, he dabbled in pornography. His most memorable book was the Sex Rebel: The Memoirs of a Gash Gourmet, written under the pseudnym, Bob Greene.

The book’s protagonist lustfully pursued women of all ages, including a 13 year-old girl, named Ann.

Sex rebel: black;: Memoirs of a gash gourmet

Based on his life?

Rumors have since appeared that Marshall and his wife engaged in a menage a’ trois with the adolescent.

Marshall later admitted or boasted that the events in the book were based on his real experiences.

It was Frank who suggested that Barry attend Occidental College in Los Angeles because it boasted one of the most radical faculties in the country.

Those years Obama still remain a clouded with the vapor of smoke and who knows what else.

As Stanley Kurtz has thoroughly documented in his book, The Radical-in-chief, it was at Columbia where Barry made his ideological bones.

After Columbia it was on to Harvard and an undistinguished tenure as the editor of the prestigious Law Review.

With his law degree in hand, Barry, who was using the name Barack by then, moved on to Chicago where he was literally embraced by the country’s foremost radical, Bill Ayers and his Weatherwoman-wife, Bernadette Dohrn.

Author Jack Cashiel makes a convincing case that it was Ayers who ghosted Obama’s first book, Dreams from my Father.

A ghost-writer in the Chicago sky?

Chicago is also the location where he feasted on the radical wisdom of atheist Saul Alinsky, and his book Rules for Radicals, with regard to marshalling the powers of the mob into political action.

Alinsky dedicated his bestseller to Lucifer, the world’s first great radical.

First great radical!

Alinsky’s thinking is the compendium to Machiavelli whose historic Prince taught rich and powerful people how to maintain their power.

Alinsky’s philosophy was the flip side.

It instructed the poor on how to take their power away and give it to a new elite.

Is this just another way of saying redistribute income by taxing the rich?

All these ideas and life experience inhabited the world of Barry’s mind.

They have had 50 years to germinate, multiply and produce a worldview that is counter to anything that has inhabited our seat of power.

Not since Henry Wallace who was only a few months away from being the president of the United States has anyone been so out of touch with America’s reality.

What do I mean by that?

Many of you will find the following bullet points instructive in how to succinctly debate, argue and expose the mysteries of what our president has been trying to do these past three years.

Kurtz’s Radical-in-chief concludes with the line: Barack Obama is a socialist.

By its very nature, socialism is a fantasy, founded on the Utopian lie that equality of result can ever be established in the world.

There will always be wealthy people, poor people and people who work hard and those who take the easy way out.

The only way to do this is to penalize the producers and elevate the non-producers, who then become dependents of the government.

As a result socialism kills a person’s incentive to better himself and his condition and those of his family.

This has a leveling effect that leads invariably to slavery or serfdom.

In a nutshell socialism is the system where an elite in the name of total equality, dictates how the many may live.

The road we are taking?

Welcome to Barry’s world!

Posted in Uncategorized
Tags: Ann Dunham, Barry Obama, Bob Greene, Henry Wallace, Lucifer, Road to serfdom, Sex Rebel, slipery eels, taxing the rich

Fair and Balanced?

March 6, 2010
3 Comments

I know it is just a promotional statement, but there is something about Fox News’ slogan Fair and Balanced that frosts my pancakes. Maybe it is the fact that it implies that equal time will be given to both sides–both sides of what?

Bill O’Reilly is probably the most blatant illustrator of their “F&B” rule. Consequently, I can agree with him about half the time. He reminds me why I have always had a problem with referees in the 100s of games I have watched.

O’Reilly’s approach to seeking the truth guarantees that he will be wrong 50% of the time.

O’Reilly prides himself on being fair and open-minded. Well I think his mind is so open that the truth flies right through it most of the time. G. K. Chesterton says that the mind must clamp down on somethings or it becomes nothing more than an empty vessel.

I think if O’Reilly had gone to a Jesuit school, like his father, (Holy Cross) instead of Marist College, where he admitted that education was not his main interest, his thinking would have a more definitive substance to it and would not be distracted by form and style. This way he could seriously focus on his content.

His “no spin zone” to me is nothing more than a “dead zone” where ideas go to die because of his conformity to the liberal conventions that permeate his medium.

And to think I just missed having him as a student at Chaminade High School, another Marianist school, which is in Mineola, NY. I had one inglorious year there from 1967-1968. O’Reilly had graduated that previous June.

I figured that out from the yearbook picture that appeared in his recent best-seller, A Bold Piece of Meat, or whatever it is called.

I read the book when it first came out and his Catholic background was a lot different then mine. Well, I guess the background was essentially the same with the habited nuns and their strict discipline–rulers and thin spelling books as weapons but his reaction to their stern demeanor was far more rebellious than mine.

He seemed to always be in trouble and if wasn’t for one of his classmates, he confessed in the book he would have been the worst student in his class.

The one thing that distinguished him in his school years I guess was his height.

I stood next to him at a fund-raiser a few years ago while he was waiting to address the crowd and he just towered over me. He must be about 10 feet tall! I will say that he is an intimidating figure…when he is standing.

His thinking is just dripping with what Pope Benedict XVI has called the dictatorship of relativity. O’Reilly is admitting that there is basically no right and wrong…just opinions, preferences and different observations.

I interviewed him for 15 minutes on my version of The Right Stuff on WGNU and made sure that did most of the talking. That part wasn’t really too hard.

The only issue I challenged him on was abortion. I would not go so far as to say that O’Reilly is pro-choice but the issue does not burn in the recesses of his soul as it does with many of my fellow Catholics.

I don’t think he really cares anything about it nor does he understand what it is all about and why so many of his fellow Catholics are patently distressed by it.

And for Bill to call himself a Cultural Warrior as another of his book titles suggests is absurd. To him the culture war consists naming movie and music trivia from the 1950s.

Catholics like O’Reilly are why we are losing the battle for the culture. He just doesn’t get it.

In fact I think he is wishy-washy on it or what Margaret Thacher used to say about George H. W. Bush, “gone wobbly” on the issue.

I think his analysis of the issue in his book could have been written by Harry Blackmun who wrote the majority decision in Roe v. Wade in 1973.

When I was on WGNU radio a number of callers that disagreed with me said that they had their opinions and I had mine. Well I hated to tell them but in most cases their opinions were not based on any fact, real thinking or had any resemblance to reality.

Quite simply, their opinions were WRONG. Not all opinions are equal.

Everyone has the right to hold opinions but no one has to give them an equal place ast the banquet of ideas.

One of our other hosts had about 10 minutes to kill before it was my turn. When he saw me waiting in the “Chipped Green Room” he motioned for me to join him for the remainder of his time.

Well Steve was one of our many resident liberals. A congenial guy with a strong liberal background–an MS in social work.

He made the same mistake that many of my listeners by saying how we had our different biases. I had to stop him and say that my only “bias” was for the truth.

It goes without saying that he never invited me to join his program again.

Most partisan debates today are unlike the ones that dominated my father’s generation when there could be an “honest” difference of opinion.

Today’s battles are more ideological than mere disagreement on zoning laws, drilling rights and bond issues for real estate development.

Virtually all of these had little or nothing to do with morality, right and wrong or the culture war.

These struggles today don’t allow for the “other side.” There are no two sides to abortion, euthanasia, or a blatant take-over of the health care system. I don’t care what the self-appointed custodians of our popular culture like Bill O’Reilly think or say.

Some issues only have a right side and a wrong side. Take slavery and the Holocaust for example. Both were a violation of every civilized code of honor, ethics and morality.

I don’t see or hear anyone arguing about being “fair and balanced” on these subjects.

Basically all of the issues I have cited emanate from a perverse world view that has been developed and promulgated by the likes of Machiavelli, Marx, Gramsci, Lenin, Castro and more recently Saul Alinsky.

The latter dedicated his book, Rules for Radicals to Lucifer, the world’s first revolutionary.

I don’t think we should consider Lucifer’s arguments or those of his acolytes as part of our national debates.

All of these ideologues have perpetuated a way of thinking that is the antithesis of 1000 years of western civilization. Their target institutions include capitalism or private property, the traditional family and the Christian religion.

It is time people realized that our whole way of life is under attack and that being “fair and balanced” is just a formulae for appeasement, capitalization and pure surrender.

So while I can’t seem to get enough of Fox, not everything they say or believe resonates with my way of thinking. My only passion is for the Logos, the truth of our short sojourn on this vale of tears. Everything else is just window-dressing.

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Tags: abortion, Alinsky, Bill O'Reilly, Chesterton, culture war, fair and balanced, Gramsci, Harry Blackmun, Lenin, Logo, Lucifer, Marx, no spin zone, Pope Benedict XVI, Stalin, WGNU