Kathy Shaidle can't say that, can she?

Yawn. The angry white girl schtick is so early 1990s. At least then it had the benefit of being original; now it's just old and boring. This isn't even witty. I've read better screeds by angry 15 year olds.

What's more, I don't see how any Catholic can advocate for such selfish, individualistic and laissez-faire capitalistic principles with a straight face and still consider themselves to be faithful in any meaningful way.

* to make and keep as much of my money as possible and spend it on whatever I want, including my own health care and nobody else's

parasitical fellow citizens

most people are stupid, selfish, lazy leeches

Nice. Someone introduce this grrrrrrrl to Catholic social teaching.

Ah yes. "Studies". "Catholic social teaching." So much more convincing than centuries of capitalist prosperity -- and your own lyin' eyes. Liberals are so cute...

And I don't consider myself a terribly faithful Catholic, which is why I changed the name of my blog a whole year ago. Please improve your reading comprehension.

I don't believe that most people are "rational" as you could have seen from my "most people are stupid" comment. But an irrational market is preferable to central planning, incompetent government interference, and any other socialist whatnot you can come up with. I don't see any of you moving to Cuba, so you must like the American system too. When they tore down the Berlin Wall, folks went in one direction and not the other. Tell you something?

Catholic social teaching is especially suspect since it is cooked up mostly by Eurotrash elites who have never held real jobs in their lives, let alone run a business, met a payroll or bought a stock. Come on, these are men who think bombing Hiroshima was a BAD idea and annul licit marriages if the name "Kennedy" is on the application form.

Pardon me for trusting Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell over some old bishop who takes 4 hours lunches between naps.

Anne, Pyrrho, hush! You guys ought not be saying such things on a conservative blog site. You know if God hadn't run out of stone, the Eleventh Commandment would have been "Thou shalt worship Free Markets with all thy heart and all thy soul and all thy voice".

Tedious is the word that immediately jumps to mind. Hasn't Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter already staked out this schtick.

Seriously, folks, somebody can be a good conservative or a good liberal without believing a lot of economic nonsense. I just favor shifting the contest onto firmer ground. Markets are just as dysfunctional and fallable as the people who constitute them, and all human institutions are "reformata et semper reformanda".

"Pardon me for trusting Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell." If you want to be a propagandist, stick to your men by all means. If you want to actually learn something and be of real use, broaden your reading list.

What is especially sad about the anger-and-venom schtick is a lot of what this young (I assume) lady and her fellow bile-spewers say is true, but kind-hearted folks are driven away from conservative ideas by the sheer meanness of their screeds...I was for years, and I still have to remind myself when I see stuff like this that conservatism isn't *really* all about "I got mine and to hell with everyone else."

I especially like the screed about tort reform. Why is it that conservatives never like a lawyer they haven't hired? And all those frivolous lawsuits that everyone else files, we need to stop those. But don't suggest that the cases they file aren't the most serious, earth-shatteringly important cases to come down the pike. God knows that it's only liberals who file useless lawsuits in court anymore.

And don't get me started on the "press one for English" bit. That's free-market capitalism at work, sweetheart. Clearly there are non-English speakers patronizing those businesses, and in true conservative capitalist fashion they are catering to their clients. I just love how these nationalistic neocons whine about the free market not being allowed to work, and then whine when it does work in a way they don't approve of or in a way that somehow disadvantages them. (And I can see how hard it might be for a conservative to find the number "1" on a phone).

Someone give this brown-eyed woman a Southern Comfort enema and send her back north.

Can anyone name a person who's applied for an annulment -- any name other than Kennedy -- and been denied?

I'll give you a hint.
You can find the answer behind the eight ball.

"* racial/cultural divides and differences, such as taxpayer sponsored serial unwed motherhood that's become an institution among blacks, hispanics and lower class whites"

Oh God yes!! Let's denude the budget of everything that remotely smacks of "the welfare state." Let's just eliminate the departments of Health & Human Services and Housing & Urban Development. You've saved us the staggering amount of $104.5 billion dollars!!!

That's 1.7% of the budget, folks. Two whole departments and we've saved a whopping 1.7% of the $2.9 trillion that the 2008 budget spends. But, by God, we won't be supporting all those serial unwed mothers in those nasty poor and minority communities.

You conservatives are so good as spotting waste in the budget. If we put your procedures in place you would save the taxpayers soooooooo much money, we might be able to fund another war!! Heaven knows we all need another war to fight, seeing as how these two we have are going so darn well.

As for the worship of the words of Milton Friedman, maybe conservatives need to read the whole gospel.

"Every friend of freedom must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence."

TLM:

"160. The permanent principles of the Church's social doctrine constitute the very heart of Catholic social teaching. These are the principles of: the dignity of the human person ... which is the foundation of all the other principles and content of the Church's social doctrine; the common good; subsidiarity; and solidarity."

-- Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, Libreria Editrice Vaticana (2005)

This book is a surprisingly good read (at least to dorks like me).

Bombing Hiroshima was a bad idea - and it was carried out by the left*, and most of the early opposition to it was on the right. Examples include Fulton Sheen, Richard Weaver, Russell Kirk, Robinson Jeffers, Robert McCormick, George Schuyler, Herbert Hoover, Robert Taft, and even Dwight Eisenhower. National Review editorialized against the action as late as 1958. Were they all honorary Eurotrash? On the other hand, The Nation and The New Republic praised the bombing to the skies in 1945, even if the former backtracked decades later.

* In fact, who was the first U.S. president to (unsucessfully) support universal government-run health care? Harry Truman! He was certainly on the moderate, anti-Communist left, but he was on the left.

Matt is right that Rod and Kathy agree on almost nothing and that Rod seems oblivious to this fact. (Personally, I disagree with both of them quite a bit, but they are good representatives of their points of view and I'd love to see them debate each other)

It's not the money spent on welfare programs that's the problem; it's what those welfare programs do to the social fabric. If the goal of the "War on Poverty" was to create more poverty and destroy the family, then WELL DONE! We've produced several generations of bastards on the government dole. This helps who exactly? WHY are those communities poor? (HINT: The answer ain't TOO MUCH capitalism, it's TOO LITTLE.) WHY are those mothers unwed. (HINT: Some feminists told them that unless their groins were OPEN FO' BIDNESS, they were being repressed.) Remind me again: which was the liberal idea that actually worked, like, EVER?

The War on Poverty was never allowed to work, because it was quickly starved of funding and support. What we have is evidence that conservative approaches to poverty have utterly failed since successive Republican presidents and Congresses failed to make any improvements. Poverty rates go up during Republican presidencies and down during Democratic presidencies. That can't be a coincidence.

I said it before (but not very well): I think conservatism would do better if its practitioners abandoned the overheated verbal and writing styles that many have noted above. Otherwise at some point, the 'issue' stops being the main issue, and the commentator's style does. Making true points, in an off-putting way, doesn't help the cause or expand the base. I thought that men in the past like Buckley did a good job at making their point but in a more winsome way. I am conservative, and actually enjoy some of the slash'n'burn as entertainment, but I question the strategic value of that.

Bombing Hiroshima was a good idea. Just ask any surviving WW2 veteran who did not expect to survive an invasion of Japan.

Bombing Canada would probably be a good thing, teach them to behave and keep their damn winters up there where they belong. But no one is likely to do it.

The Shorter Shaidle, or Kathy's Modesty Blaze:

"Bitch bitch bitch bitch bitch

Kathy Shaidle: prophet or heretic?

Either way, I'm annoying -- so it's all good."

# Kathy : 2008-05-23 15:07:37 EDT

"But an irrational market is preferable to central planning, incompetent government interference, and any other socialist whatnot you can come up with."

Typical cult capitalism speaks again! An irrational market is preferred to "socialist" interference.

Yep...let Exxon ship oil everywhere in single-hull ships with drunken captains. Let the oil flow...all over the oceans.

Let companies go ahead an put PCBs in asphalt and spread it in your neighborhood.

Let companies bring in laborers from some third world nation to work here at slave wages.

Let the market prevail! Such is the mantra of capitalism, and by God we must worship at its altar.

After all, as Donny keeps telling us, Jesus was a conservative. And we know that all conservatives are capitalists.

Kathy, Kathy, Kathy..

So, this is what "conservatism" has come to? Undead armies of Anne Coulter doppleganger grotesques, all spewing misanthropic nonsense? Defenses of Hiroshima and spasmodic kneejerk attacks on the Great Society?

I'm so glad I've never registered Republican. Look at what it's all come to. Rabid screeds defending rapacity. They'll not even overturn Roe, which was all I really ever supported them for.

Nietzchean will to power. That's all it finally boils down to? Flaccid bloviations and toothless ranting over "eurotrash" four hour lunches? Pathetic stuff. Truly sad.

Look, if civilization means anything at all, it's found in leisure. In things like four hour long lunches & liturgies.

And yet somehow, I doubt that Leo XIII of blessed memory, memory eternal (Pray for us, Holy Father!) ever took a four hour lunch in his life. Read Rerum Novarum. If only we had the wisdom to attempt to form a society along the lines articulated by that great pastor.

I'm sure that Chesterton and Belloc lunched long, and quite frequently, however. And you can read "The Servile State" and "The Party System" and you will find prophecy now fulfilled in the obsolescence of the Republican Party- it's moral and intellectual bankruptcy and coming utter irrelevance. None too soon, and very very good riddance.

Anyhow, I'd bet our esteemed host here, Rod Dreher, has enjoyed a couple of those repasts, himself. And wishes he could enjoy more.

It always disappoints and dismays me to read someone like Rod - whom I respect for many reasons, not least his conversion to Orthodoxy, and continuing respect and concern for the Western Church (which I see as a prophetic stance, one that presages what I hope to be an inevitable annihilation of the Schism, and a restoration of the Faith and all it's traditions) - admires this sort of hideous inhuman and cowardly poison. These people who glorify violence and rapacity.

Opposing them and their sickening ideology has nothing to do with liberalism and socialism. Even the leftists and irresponsible are iconic images of the Living God. Even cretins like Kathy Sheidale and Hillary Clinton.

No, it has to do with the Beatitudes. Would that Kathy re-read that passage (Matthew 5:3-12), and rethink her words.