The Center has Collapsed

If there are two things that I don’t like, they are these: 

Hypocrisy and mendacity – two nefariously complementary characteristics which have been on full display in the Senate hearings of Brett Cavanaugh for appointment to the Supreme Court of the United States.


I’m not going into preferences here, but I will go into the behavior of the Senate Judiciary Committee and its overly sycophantic supporters of whatever persuasion.

McCarrick: Zenith of Perfidy and Hypocrisy

So much has been written in recent days about Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick, Archbishop of Washington, D.C.,  a man who once held one of the most powerful and influential positions in the American Catholic Church, that it is almost redundant to revisit the ugly details.

What seems more pertinent to me at this moment is to share a few words which symptomatically describe the behavior of this man. 

Several days ago, I came across an ancient, highly appropriate source that fits this man’s conduct, and have adapted it to the current situation while preserving its intent:

There was no fear of God in his twinkling eyes . . .

Because, in the morning, in the mirror, he flattered himself too much to detect his own sin . . .

During the day, cunning words of deceit spilled from his mouth as he rejected goodness and wisdom . . .

Even when he lay in his bed at night, he plotted the next day’s evil . . .

. . . To which he committed himself while rejecting what is wrong.

Simple, isn’t it?

The preceding excerpt reflects my situational adaptation of the first few verses of Psalm 36, which I came upon in one of my early morning readings. 

The sages who penned the original sentiments nearly three millennia ago were right on point in properly describing the never-ending human perfidy and hypocrisy housed in the mind of some humans.

Preserving National Memory

On a late morning, on July 25, 2012, while visiting family, we found ourselves in Arlington National Cemetery, paying respect to the brave souls who gave their lives for our American republic.

As we walked these sacred grounds among seemingly endless grave markers, we came across the ceremony of a solder being laid to rest with full honors.

Memorial Day is about remembrance -- the price of freedom. We may not be a perfect country, but it beats the alternatives.

If Only He Could, What Would He Say?

Remember the journalist Jay Jefferson Cooke?

I miss this guy.  Very much.

I wonder how he would opine about all the politically-related shenanigans and the mendacity swirling about us in the Public Square today?

What I liked best about Jay was the unvarnished personal authenticity that characterized his writing style.

From Blue Jeans & T-Shirt at Facebook, to Business-Blue Before Congress!

What’s so uncanny about Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook scandal is not simply how all-pervasive is the extent to which his firm  developed  a wide array of drill-down tools to data-mine virtually all of over two billion users’ personally identifiable information, but that Zuckerberg has also permitted third-party businesses to construct apps to access that information and to employ it for their own commercial purposes without user consent.

The tsunami behind this scandal has been building up in the depths of the Silicon Valley information ocean for years, but it finally hit the shores of the Washington D.C. Beltway with the revelation that Russian interests had wormed their way into Zuckerberg’s empire of data and used that source to meddle in the 2016 American elections.

Best of the Bunch

Jerry Izenberg, sports writer emeritus for The Star-Ledger, sits at the top of his craft for that publication.  Too bad that he is no longer permanently active but, whenever he comes out of his well-earned retirement, he sure sets the ink on fire – a master at using words to get his point across.

On Saturday, February 3, 2018, he penned a justifiably scathing front-page column about the hypocrisy of the National Football League; namely, the NFL’s “hypocrisy” in its defensive legal battle to keep the Garden State from becoming what could be the Las Vegas of the East Coast for sports gambling.

No Place to Hide

Wednesday’s edition (Jan. 17, 2018) of the Courier News featured a guest article on its opinion page on how American civilians should prepare for a potential nuclear strike.

Yikes!  Are you kidding me?

There is no way for civilians to logically prepare for survival following a massive nuclear strike.  Photos depicting the WWII obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki from two atomic bombs should have made that abundantly clear.

Yet Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor and author proposes exactly that.

 

He quotes a government agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as his authority, “While a nuclear detonation is unlikely, it would have devastating results and there would be limited time to take critical protection steps. . ..” and so on, and so on.

I lived through the Cold War between Russia and the U.S., and I vividly recall the concept of deterrent dubbed MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction).