Hennessy's View

IG Report: Obama Out-Dicked Nixon Nixon resigned. He resigned after a half-dozen Republican Senators told him, in the Oval Office, that a majority of Senators would vote to remove him from office if the House impeached him. So Nixon resigned. Nixon’s crimes were limited to covering up a break-in and wiretapping by employees of his re-election committee. Baraka Obama did worse. And he got by. Obama out-dicked Nixon. The IG Report Department of Justice Inspector-General Michael Horowitz released his report on Monday.

Boris Johnson’s Tories will win their biggest victory since Margaret Thatcher. Maybe bigger than Thatcher’s. Praise God! (This will be very short.) The conservative tide continues. People around the world are fed up with the failed ideas of the 1960s and 1970s. Maybe it was nostalgia that drove world leaders to dig up all the political crap I remember from my childhood. It failed then, and it’s failing us now.

If Democrats cross the Rubicon by impeaching President Trump, they will be sending a strong signal: no Republican president will ever survive his first term. How do you expect people to respond? I’m talking about the people President Obama derisively labeled “bitter clingers.” The people RealPolitics data analyst Sean Trende identified as “downscale, Northern, rural … H. Ross Perot voters.” Or, to put it another way, Tea Partiers.

You can deplatform Twitter and damage their business model. You don’t need money or special skills or lawyers. But deplatforming Twitter requires two things: Commitment. Friends. Friends can be strangers, as long as they use Twitter. Twitter followers are perfect friends for this action. What Is “Deplatforming” and Why Should We Do It? Deplatforming is one of these new words that irritate me. But new words have the virtue of universality.

Jesus said to him: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. (Matthew 22:37-38) My Protestant friends were angry at the goings on at the Amazon Synod. It’s not unusual for some Protestants to disagree with the Catholic Church. After all, that’s what makes them “protestants.” What is unusual is why the Protestants are upset at the Church.

Call me “rigid.” Last night, I saw a tweet that broke my heart. A woman wrote that her husband told her he was going to Mass after work. But he went to a bar, instead. She went to the bar. He was there. He was drunk. She asked for our prayers. I said one for her, and two for her husband. The woman is a traditional Catholic, like me. Or what the Holy Father calls “rigid.

Rosary Coast-to-Coast at the Arch in St. Louis We are in a spiritual battle for America’s soul, and we’ve been fighting it all wrong. Politics is important. Christians should engage. But politics isn’t enough. And politics isn’t first. “For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood; but against principalities and power, against the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in the high places” Ephesians 6:12

The opposites of “rigid” are more unflattering than rigidity: lenient indulgent broken compromising easy imprecise indefinite inexact irresolute unfixed unreliable accommodating liberal permissive resigned soft-hearted And that’s the problem with name-calling. When we impose a derogatory label on someone, we invite scrutiny upon ourselves. We label ourselves as the opposite of the names we impose on others. Some of us are better at name-calling, or “labelling,” than others. Donald Trump does a lot of labeling.

A friend commented on a recent blog of mine that he misses my political analysis. So I need to make this clear: my political analysis is that all problems in the world are demonic in nature. I’ll write that again so no one’s confused: all problems, including all political problems, are demonic. Stop inviting Satan and the demons out of the abyss God made for them, and problems go away.

I’ve always wanted to write a book called How to Lose Friends and Alienate People. But nobody reads autobiographies anymore. So I’ll tell you how to be unpopular, instead. Being unpopular is pretty easy. And it’s hard, too. It’s easy because there’s only one rule, which we’ll get to in a moment. It’s hard for two reasons: beforehand, it’s scary to think about following the rule. Afterwards, it’s lonely and painful to have followed the rule.