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Reece Terry, publisher
Opinion
Mark Boehler, editor
4A • Friday, October 2, 2015
Corinth, Miss.
Feminists should be terrified of Fiorina Carly Fiorina is a no-nonsense former business executive who is showing she can play – and throw elbows – with the big boys in the Republican presidential nomination battle. Rich Feminists have noticed, Lowry but their admiration is tinged with dread – and it should be. National An eloquent, fearless critic of Review abortion, the latest outsider to climb into the Republican race is a clear and present danger to what feminists hold most dear. Even if she had said nothing else at the CNN debate, Fiorina would have stood out for her gut-punch of a statement about the horror of the guerrilla Planned Parenthood videos capturing the ghoulish organ harvesting that is an important side business of the organization (the main business, of course, is aborting babies). The novelist Jennifer Weiner told The New York Times for a story about the conflicted feelings of feminists, “It’s so weird – she looks like one of us, but she’s not.” Another feminist writer said that “there’s an excitement and a horror.” The managing editor of the feminist website Jezebel tweeted the night of the debate, “I’m in love with and terrified of her.” Yes, be afraid, very afraid. Fiorina already may be the most effective, high-profile woman that the pro-life movement has. At the debate, she captured the enormity of the Planned Parenthood scandal, for which there are almost no words, speaking of it in the harshly indignant terms that it deserves. No sooner had she made her statement than the media fact-checkers got to work. Fiorina had described a video of a living fetus and a technician working to harvest its brain. This was wrong. The video was stock footage of a briefly living victim of an abortion that played while a former technician described – in a different case – her horrifying experience cutting an aborted baby’s face open to preserve its brain for sale. Fiorina should have been more precise, but what she had misdescribed was a detail in the broader Planned Parenthood abattoir. It has been established that the organization kills babies and cuts out their organs to sell them off. How much of a defense is it that the brain harvesting is not itself on video? Fiorina’s electric condemnation of Planned Parenthood has inevitably gotten the attention of the pro-abortion sisterhood. This past weekend in Iowa, protesters chanted and threw condoms at her – condoms evidently being the go-to projectile to demonstrate outrage, even though Fiorina had said nothing about birth control. At the same event, a woman accosted Fiorina to ask, “How can you as a woman not support our health care?” In a firm and frank exchange, Fiorina probably left the woman determined never to try that again. “Oh, I support your health care,” the candidate shot back. “I don’t support butchering babies.” Fiorina is so formidable because she has a tough-as-nails public persona, together with an ear for the music of public speech. As Noah Rothman of Commentary magazine put it, she campaigns in poetry, not in prose. There is a reason that she completed an improbable escape from the undercard debate in August to the main stage in September. At their best, her riffs are pungent, memorable – and persuasive. “Liberals and progressives will spend inordinate amounts of time and money protecting fish, frogs and flies,” she said last week after a visit to a prolife pregnancy center. “They do not think a 17-week-old, a 20-week-old, a 24-week-old is worth saving.” Hillary Clinton’s fans can be forgiven for wishing their candidate had some of Fiorina’s flare as a communicator. A writer at Cosmopolitan lamented, “Carly Fiorina Is the Candidate I Wanted Hillary Clinton to Be.” She and others ought to get used to feeling envious and chagrined. Even if she flames out as a candidate, in Carly Fiorina conservatives and prolifers have discovered a formidable champion. (Daily Corinthian columnist Rich Lowry can be reached via e-mail: comments.lowry@nationalreview.com.)
Prayer for today My Father, I pray that when the “sun sets to-day my hope may not set with it.” Be with me earlier than the dawn, that I may plan with thee a new day. I pray that thou wilt release me from anything that keeps me from reaching the highest. Amen.
A verse to share “To declare, I say, at this time his righteousness: that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus.” Romans 3:26
John Boehner: Then and now The announcement by House Speaker John Boehner that he is retiring at the end of October stunned Washington where life is all about grabbing power and holding on to it, often until death they do part. At a meeting with reporters, Boehner said, “My first job as speaker is to protect the institution.” Really? Is that why Ohio voters sent him to Washington in 16 elections and his Republican colleagues elected and re-elected him speaker? Did he take an oath to preserve, protect and defend the institution of the House or the Constitution, which, if followed, offers protection enough? In 2010, I interviewed Boehner when he was minority leader and I asked him to cite the most important lesson he learned when Republicans lost their hard-won House majority in 2006. He replied, “Our team failed to live up to our own principles.” Failing to live up to GOP principles, indeed, failing to articulate what those principles are, was largely the reason for the increase in conservative members who then demanded either action or the speaker’s head. They got his head. Whether
that means his successor will do a better job is open to question. On July Cal 28, Rep. Thomas Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) Columnist expressed the frustration of many conservatives by filing a “motion to vacate the chair,” for the purpose of ousting Boehner from the speakership. Meadows’ resolution charged Boehner with using “the power of the office to punish Members who vote according to their conscience instead of the will of the speaker,” providing for “voice votes on consequential and controversial legislation to be taken without notice and with few Members present,” using “the legislative calendar to create crises for the American People, in order to compel Members to vote for legislation” and failing to comply with “the spirit of the rules of the House of Representatives, which provide that Members shall have three days to review legislation before voting.” That last one had been a promise made by Republicans, should voters return them to
a congressional majority. Most conservatives understand that with a Democrat in the White House and an insufficient GOP congressional majority to override presidential vetoes they can’t always, or maybe even mostly, have their way. But they would like to see Republicans at least employ some of the tactics Democrats shamelessly use when they hold the majority, such as the “nuclear option” employed in the Senate in 2013, which allowed a majority vote instead of a “supermajority” to advance confirmation votes on judicial nominees and executive branch appointments. At a minimum, conservative members want to see their convictions articulated by the leadership and to fight the left with conviction in hopes that getting their positions heard will influence voters. Instead, in too many instances, conservatives have seen their views ignored and the Republican leadership in both houses knuckle under out of fear. Former Speaker Newt Gingrich notes that previous government shutdowns over matters of principle worked in Republicans’ favor, notwithstanding how they were portrayed by the media. In
an email to me, he writes: “We closed the government twice in 1995 and ‘96 and became the first re-elected House Republican majority since 1928. Our supporters realized we were serious and rewarded us for the effort. The Republicans closed the government in 2013 and won a big election in 2014.” In my 2010 interview, Boehner bemoaned the size and cost of big government, saying, “I came here for a smaller, less costly and more accountable government and that has not been what’s happening. We don’t need any more programs; we need to undo a lot of programs.” On Boehner’s watch, the debt has increased nearly $4 trillion, according to figures published by the U.S. Treasury. It is one of many reasons conservative voters are increasingly fed-up with Congress and for the rise of “outside” presidential candidates. The frustration cuts both ways and it is also a major reason Boehner has decided now is the time to hang it up before Meadows’ resolution can be put to a vote. (Readers may email Cal Thomas at tcaeditors@tribpub.com.)
U.S. and Catholicism in crisis During the 1950s, the twin pillars of worldwide anticommunism were Dwight Eisenhower’s America and the Roman Catholic Church of Pope Pius XII. During the 1980s, the last decade of the Cold War, Ronald Reagan and the Polish pope, John Paul II, were the pillars of resistance. When Pope Francis arrived in Washington on Tuesday, the country he entered was very different from Eisenhower’s America or Reagan’s America. In America 2015, homosexuality, abortion on demand and same-sex marriage – shameful crimes in Ike’s America, mortal sins in the catechism of Pius XII – have become constitutional rights. What Ike’s America saw as decadence, Obama’s America calls progress. And among its noisiest celebrants are our Catholic vice president, Joe Biden, and the Catholic leader of the Democratic Party in the House, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Since Eisenhower’s time, Christianity, the faith that created the West, has been purged from American public life. The Bible, prayer, and all Christian art, books and symbols have been expunged from the public schools as they were in Cuba when Fidel Castro took pow-
Reece Terry
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er. Our cradle faith cannot be taught in our public schools. America Pat is a different Buchanan country today, a secuColumnist lar and postChristian nation on its way to becoming anti-Christian. Some feel like strangers in their own land. And from the standpoint of traditional Catholicism, American culture is an open sewer. Ironically, as all this unfolds in what was once “God’s country,” Vladimir Putin seeks to re-establish Eastern Orthodox Christianity as the basis of morality and law in Russia. And one reads in The Wall Street Journal that Xi Jinping is trying to reintroduce his comrades to the teachings of Confucianism. The world is turned upside down. Every civilization seems to recognize the necessity of faith except for the West, which has lost its faith and is dying for lack of it. In a New York Times article this month – “Are Western Values Losing Their Sway?” – Steven Erlanger writes: “In its rejection of Western liberal values of sexual
equality and choice, conservative Russia finds common cause with many in Africa and with the religious teachings of Islam, the Vatican, fundamentalist Protestants and Orthodox Jews.” Yet what Erlanger describes as “conservative Russia” does seem to share values with America, only it is the America of 1955, another country from the America of 2015. Which raises a question: Does moral truth change? Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, “The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.” But is this true? A decade after his beer hall putsch failed in Munich, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party won the largest number of Germans ever to vote in a democratic election. He had succeeded in the marketplace of ideas. Did that democratic ratification make Hitler’s ideas true? Or does truth exist independent of the marketplace? Secular America, which has purged Christianity, preaches a new gospel to the world: liberal democracy as the salvation of mankind. The Catholic Church, too, faces a growing crisis of moral consistency and credibility.
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The church of Pius XII and John Paul II taught that the truths of the Ten Commandments brought down from Sinai and the truths of the Sermon on the Mount are eternal. Those popes also taught that a valid marriage is indissoluble, that homosexuality is unnatural and immoral, that abortion is the killing of the innocent unborn, an abomination. Yet one reads regularly of discussions inside the Vatican to alter what is infallible church teaching on these doctrines to make the church more appealing to those who have rejected them. What has come out of the Vatican in the past two years is moral confusion. Yet as Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput reminds us, “confusion is of the devil.” It is also trifling with schism. Having emerged victorious in the 70-year ideological struggle against one of the greatest enemies that mankind has ever known, Marxism-Leninism, are the United States and the Catholic Church heading for the same desuetude and disintegration? (Daily Corinthian columnist Pat Buchanan is an American conservative political commentator, author, syndicated columnist, politician and broadcaster.)
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