Here's a provocative comparison from Dan Gerstein, a Forbes columnist:
Prediction No. 1: Wall Street is about to become the new Catholic Church--the most distrusted and vilified institution in America. It's hard to top priestly pedophilia (and bishops covering up for them) for sheer despicability, but Bernie Madoff and his fellow hucksters are giving the men of clod a close run for their--and our--money.Prediction No. 2: This wave of well-deserved populist bloodlust will become the most potent political force in America. In fact, I sense that the recent takedown of the auto industry rescue bill was just an opening act, and that the anti-Wall Street anger will be felt in multiple and even more muscular ways next year.
Prediction No. 3: The first political party to see that second prediction coming, and to adjust its leverage accordingly, will have a distinct and likely decisive upper hand in the next two-year cycle. Forget about the office-park dads and the security moms--the voter du jour in the 2010 mid-terms will be the bailout buster.
You really should read the whole column. In it, the writer argues that the revelations of gross immorality, irresponsibility and even criminality among the institutional Catholic Church are about to be repeated among those who ran US financial institutions. People have no idea how deep the corruption went, he writes -- but we'll learn in 2009. Some will no doubt resent the comparison, but I think it's a legitimate one: we'll learn what happens to the moral authority and legal status of a trusted bedrock social institution whose leaders behaved with shocking recklessness. What protected the Catholic bishops from the deserved wrath of Catholics was the deep reserve of unwillingness of ordinary Catholics to believe the worst of them. I don't see that Wall Street bigs can count on piety as a hedge against reality.
The other day, I was researching my Sunday column about the late Samuel Huntington, and ran across an intriguing passage from Robert D. Kaplan's 2001 essay about Huntington:
The aftermath of creedal passion is cynical indifference followed by the return of conservatism; creedal passion holds government and society to standards that they simply cannot meet. Nevertheless, Huntington believes, creedal passion is at the core of America's greatness. By holding officials and institutions to impossible standards in a way no other country does, the United States has periodically reinvented itself through evolution rather than revolution. What will the next creedal-passion period be about? "Power is now seen as corporate. So the next outburst of creedal passion may be against hegemonic corporate capitalism."
Can the Republican Party credibly extricate itself from its love affair with Wall Street? It'll be hard, but Huckabee-style conservatism (with or without Huck) is the way to do it. Democrats, obviously, should have a much easier time of it, but it behooves Republicans to point out that at least since Clinton, the Dems have been whoring around with Wall Street too. Indeed, Dan Gerstein says the Dems face a particular challenge on this front after Bush gets out of town:
But there is an even greater long-term danger here, particularly for the Democrats, who will soon control both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. Without Bush to kick around, they will soon own not just the economy and whatever stimulus bill is passed but also the management of the bailouts. Once the criminal investigations and indictments pop next year, what kind of exposure will the TARP-covered Obama administration have? Will they be seen as soft on Wall Street crime?That depends in large part on how the Republicans re-position themselves for the post-Madoff era, which I think will be the most fascinating political subplot to watch in 2009.
The Democrats like to think of themselves as the party of the little guy. But their recent reticence on the sub-prime crime wave, along with their aggressive push for the bad bailout deals, has given the down-and-out GOP a huge opening to begin reclaiming the middle class that Bush drove away in droves.
One of the best barometers of that will be how the Republicans take on New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, who is up for re-election in two years and is widely seen as one of Wall Street's most aggressive advocates.
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If they are going to slam the RCC, at least get the criticism correct: The issue is not "peodophile priests" but dissenting, homosexual priests and the cowardly hierarchy, often also homosexual, who looked the other way and allowed the most innocent (almost overwhelmingly teenage boys) be raped.
I'll second Franklin's kudos to Erin and ditto Karth, who is spot-on as usual.
Forget "conservatism," please. It has been Godless and therefore irrelevant. Secular conservatism will not defeat secular liberalism because to God both are two atheistic peas-in-a-pod and thus predestined to failure. As Stonewall Jackson's Chief of Staff R.L. Dabney said of such a humanistic belief more than 100 years ago:
"[Secular conservatism] is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today .one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution; to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt bath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it be salted? Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It .is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth."
Our country is collapsing because we have turned our back on God (Psalm 9:17) and refused to kiss His Son (Psalm 2).
John Lofton, Editor, TheAmericanView.com
Recovering Republican
JLof@aol.com
Wall St. OWNS both parties. Obama got 22 million from Wall St.
Basically, we're screwed, and I don't see any way that it will ever change.
The truth is that the system is broken, and has been broken for a very long time. It makes me sick.
The WSJ has sunk to a new low to reprint the anti-Catholic perjorative "pedophile priest." As was already pointed out here, the abuse was in 80-90% of the cases, pederasty committed by priests who suffer from a homosexual disposition. Pedophilia is the sexual abuse of very young children, while pederasty is the sexual molestation of minors who have already reached puberty. As the columnists Ann Coulter wrote during the media feeding frenzy:
"Despite the growing media consensus that Catholicism causes sodomy, an alternative view -- adopted by the Boy Scouts -- is that sodomites cause sodomy. (Assume all the usual disclaimers here about most gay men not molesting boys,...)
It is a fact that the vast majority of the abuser priests -- more than 90 percent -- are accused of molesting teen-age boys. Indeed, the overwhelmingly homosexual nature of the abuse prompted The New York Times to engage in its classic "Where's Waldo" reporting style, in which the sex of the victims is studiedly hidden amid a torrent of genderless words, such as the "teen-ager," the "former student," the "victim" and the "accuser."
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