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.