Archive for December 27th, 2010
Class vs. Crass: Abigail Adams vs. Michelle Obama
Click above to embiggen
During the Revolutionary War, future First Lady Abigail Adams melted down her own silver to make bullets so the Continental Army could fight the British, their Hessians, and (presumably), their reinforcement werewolves.
With two wars raging during her husband’s presidency in 2009, Michelle Antoinette Obama wore fleur-de-lis capped regal Bochic diamond and amber baubles…a year after complaining the Bush tax rebate of $600 couldn’t “even buy earrings”.
More Class vs. Class here.
Massive scandal breaking involving Cocktail Party-backed Chicago Young Republicans political social club: organization looks likely to fold in 2011
The Elizabeth K. Christie Foundation for Wayward Boys is seemingly no longer funding CYR operations
This weekend, I learned from sources in local politics that the Chicago Young Republicans political social club is now between $60,000-80,000 in debt, on top of $20,000 they owe to the state GOP in Illinois (a loan that Illinois GOP Chair Pat Brady made to the CYRs in 2009, at the urging of multimillionaire cougar Beth Christie, who forced Brady’s hand in the matter). Representatives of the group have been pleading with large donors in Chicagoland (including Democrats, who told me what’s going on) because the debt the CYRs owe is to vendors who have threatened legal action in 2011 unless these debts are paid. The CYRs are in a full-court press to cover these debts before the end of the year, or they’ll have to fold the organization to stave off the lawsuits.
All of the CYRs problems stem from the leadership of a charismatic high school graduate known in Chicago political ranks as “The Prophet”, who took over the CYR organization in 2009 with the promise that he had all sorts of high profile politicians and large GOP donors eating out of his hands. The Prophet worked for the Romney 2008 campaign and plans to work on Romney 2012 as well (one of the ways he convinces people to trust him politically is by showing them photos of him with Mittens Romney, and bragging about the “friendship” he has with the Romney camp).
The Prophet was especially close to Beth Christie, a newly-made multimillionairess whose fortune came with her departure from a baby-goods company she formerly led as CEO. With that golden parachute came the ability for Christie, a political neophyte, to make a big splash on the Chicago political scene, where her checkbook bought her immense influence with the Cocktail Party crowd. Brash, blonde, and uninhibited, Christie strives to be the life of the party wherever she goes, seeking as much attention as possible, wanting desperately to be admired and loved.
The Prophet took advantage of both Christie’s naiveté and her desire to forgo the usual ladder-climbing, years-in-the-making, political ascent most people (even wealthy ones) need to go through to gain credibility and influence in a state. The Prophet used the CYRs to surround Christie with handsome young men, so her every appearance at political events was like a scene out of Myra Breckinridge…with Christie taking Mae West’s part, popping off zingers and flashing a big smile, as she’d step off an elevator or walk down a grand staircase with sharp, attractive, boys in crisp blazers and pleated khakis as her escorts. In exchange for this youthful entourage, Christie used her Elizabeth K. Christie Foundation (for wayward boys…as the joke in Chicago goes) to write enormous checks to Pat Brady and the Illinois GOP, with the proviso that The Prophet and the CYRs got anything they wanted from the Republican Party in Illinois.
The Prophet knew how badly the Illinois GOP needed money, and how much Christie wanted to become a sort of Pamela Harriman-meets-Jennifer Coolidge here in Chicago, so he used Christie’s influence to land himself and his friends extremely lucrative positions within the Cook County GOP (under Chair Lee Roupas), despite the Prophet having only a high school diploma.
All of this came crashing down last summer, when Pat Brady and Lee Roupas attacked Eloise Gerson (Chair of the Chicago GOP), because Gerson raised questions in Republican ranks about the influence of Beth Christie and the recent hiring practices of Brady and Roupas. The Prophet, in particular, was hired by Roupas to an incredibly well-paid position of high influence in the Cook County GOP, despite having no qualifying experience for the job, or a college degree, in anything, to his name. Gerson found evidence the Prophet’s hiring was okayed by Brady, even though a sexual assault complaint was filed with the Republican Party about behavior of the Prophet in 2009…which neither Brady nor Roupas ever investigated. They just hired him anyway, seemingly because Beth Christie said so.
FEC records show large donations from the Elizabeth K. Christie Foundation coincided perfectly with terrible decisions made by Brady and Roupas, in terms of hiring, loans to the CYRs, and whatever else Beth Christie interested herself in at the time. Brady and Roupas attempted to remove Gerson from her elected position within the GOP because of the questions she asked about the propriety of all this, but the coup failed when Michael Steele and others at the RNC were informed of what was going on. Steele’s office chastised Brady and Roupas, whose political futures were ruined by the scandal.
Sometime this fall, before the November elections, former Illinois state Chair Andy McKenna had a sit-down with Beth Christie during which she was told, point-blank, what an embarrassment she’d become and how she’d made a complete laughingstock of herself and the Republican Party in Illinois. The Huffington Post and other outlets had picked up the tale of the Prophet, and GOP donors coast to coast complained about the influence Beth Christie had on the Illinois state party…and how it looked for her to be carrying on with the CYRs, at her age, making people uncomfortable with her displays and unabashed demands on the party for favors to her “dollies”, as the young men in her constant company became known.
So, Beth Christie, grudgingly, closed her checkbook and presumably looked for dollies elsewhere, leaving the CYRs to fend for themselves.
That’s when things started to get very interesting here in Chicago, with mysterious attacks beginning on anyone who spoke out against the CYRs and the Prophet. One group, calling itself “Rose’s Thorns”, launched a series of personal attacks straight out of the Alinsky playbook, meant to silence CYR critics. Rose’s Thorns targeted one vocal Prophet detractor, who is a first year law student, by writing to every professor at her law school and libeling/slandering her. They did this the night before this person’s first final exam, in hopes of throwing her off her game and upsetting her enough to throw her concentration. That’s a classic Alinsky method, normally seen only on the Left.
Rose’s Thorns is comprised of a half dozen or so (mostly) young men who all have direct ties to the Romney 2012 campaign.
These are “Romney Guys” here in Chicago who were part of Romney 2008 efforts. When McCain became the 2008 nominee instead of Romney, these guys ostensibly worked on the McCain campaign, but only in areas of ground game building, laying their own foundations for Romney 2012 in Illinois. They did not want McCain to win, because their lots are hitched to Romney’s star, and making sure Romney becomes the 2012 presidential nominee is their sole collective purpose (because they assume Romney will give them all high-paying jobs, and after Romney loses the presidency to Obama, which everyone believes will happen, these guys will work for the Pawlenty 2016 campaign or the Tune 2016 effort…whichever the next “it’s his turn” candidate will be).
Rose’s Thorns have attempted to take hits at me, personally, and at HillBuzz as well, but with no success. Because I oppose the Romney nomination and speak out against the Cocktail Party in general, Rose’s Thorns started a hate site to target me and have been frequenting sites favored by the Daily Kos crowd to attack me. Which, frankly, is just another day in my life because I’ve been experiencing this since HillBuzz began back during the 2008 primary campaign when Obama supporters started using these Alinsky efforts to shut me up. For a while, Rose’s Thorns tried disrupting comment threads here on HB with trolling efforts, but that had zero effect once we upgraded our spam and troll filter and started requiring the WP registrations to comment.
Rose’s Thorns seems wary of having to register, because someone in their midst must realize their IP addresses are being tracked and that the people being targeted by them are sharing information. Computer techs have traced the IP addresses used to send the emails to those law school professors, and the IPs match computers used in attacks on HB, as well as emails sent to others in the Chicago political world attempting Alinsky efforts in service of the exiled Prophet.
It’s all cloak and dagger and ridiculous…and only a matter of time before the court orders are issued to the internet service providers to determine who owns the computers in question and where, exactly, all of this activity has been taking place from.
Once that’s done, we’ll have the direct connections to the Romney 2012 campaign proven, dead-to-rights, and Mittens Romney himself will have a great deal of explaining to do, since these are his operatives up to these activities here in Chicago.
Any politician, in any state, who employs or supports any of Rose’s Thorns will have a lot of explaining to do…to GOP donors…to the RNC…and to voters, considering the attacks made against women, especially. First the woman who brought the complaint against the Prophet (where Pat Brady and Lee Roupas deliberately refused to investigate before hiring the Prophet at Beth Christie’s insistence), then Eloise Gerson (attacked by Brady and Roupas for asking questions about the Prophet and Beth Christie’s unusual influence on the party), and then a young woman who was attacked by Rose’s Thorns with a flurry of libelous/slanderous emails to her professors, meant clearly to jeopardize her studies and emotionally damage her before her exams.
The activity of Rose’s Thorns has not gone unnoticed, in both Republican and Democrat circles in Chicago.
Since October, the young men affiliated (if not directly behind) Rose’s Thorns have attempted to save the CYRs from their own hubris and mismanagement by starting a new organization, called something like Reform Illinois…which they hope will be their Carpathia once the CYRs go under in 2011, unable to pay their $100,000 debt (including the massive loan Pat Brady gave them). Beth Christie has stopped writing the CYRs checks, either because she’s listening to Andy McKenna or she’s joined the 21st Century and has discovered Craigslist for her staffing needs.
Reform Illinois has tried to secure funding from Adam Andrejewski (NGF-ski) and other wealthy fringe figures, doing their level best to repackage themselves as an alternative to the Illinois GOP…but that’s because they have burned every bridge imaginable in the actual GOP organization and now delusionally believe they can usurp and supplant it. A mighty smackdown is coming, from all sides in this.
Normally, Democrat donors would line up to fund the mischief inherent in all of this, but that’s impossible because of the Prophet’s involvement.
Back when the initial CYR sex scandal broke over the summer, female Democrats in Illinois held a big, showy press conference demanding to know why Pat Brady, as Illinois GOP Chair, did not investigate the sexual assault complaint made against the Prophet before Lee Roupas hired him to work in a high-level position at the Cook County GOP (despite this 20-something young man having only a high school diploma). Democrats did this as shot to Bill Brady’s gubernatorial campaign, hoping to alienate female suburban voters Brady was counting on to beat sitting Governor Pat Quinn.
This worked, as Brady received a lower percentage of both the female and suburban vote than Mark Kirk did…make that Senator-elect Mark Kirk.
So, Democrats can’t support anything Prophet-related, no matter how much mischief they would like to cause for the GOP by funding Rose’s Thorns, under whatever front organization they’ve created, or will create next.
All of this is very reminiscent of “The Billionaire Boys Club” (BBC) in the 1980s, in California, where a group of blue-blazered young guys thought they were masters of the universe and far more brilliant than anyone older than them. Rose’s Thorns are the BBC of Chicago, though they haven’t committed any murders. They have womanized, been named in sexual assault complaints, taken advantage of (albeit willing) multimillionaire cougars with more money than sense, and engaged in Alinsky-grade personal assaults on private citizens using libel, slander, and all means available to them in hopes of shutting down their critics.
But, there are too many critics to shut down now.
On both sides of the aisle.
And the bills are all coming due, with no hope of boy-crazy older women with deep pocketbooks to save them.
For those of you not in Chicago, this story is worth paying attention to because it’s more likely than not happening to some degree where you live as well. This is how the Cocktail Party operates, and it’s on a generational cycle. I’ve been told Rose’s Thorns is similar to a group of young guys maybe 15 years or so ago who did almost the same thing, using a predecessor of the CYRs to do it. Whatever that group was called had another charismatic young man in a blue blazer at the helm who thought he could take on the GOP in Illinois…for his own personal gain, and not some sense of trying to reform the Cocktail Party corruption. The “reform” angle is a convenient one, because clearly the GOP Cocktail Party NEEDS to be reformed…but the scam of Rose’s Thorns and their predecessors is that they aren’t intending to reform a damn thing…just usurp the current Cocktail Party, boot them out, and install themselves in its place.
The new boss is the same as the old boss, just a generation younger.
The GOP in Illinois created the CYRs to steal the thunder of the last group of usurpers, and now the CYRs will go under…to be replaced shortly by something else, since there’s a new crop of GOP star-wannabes who wanna be in place for future “it’s his turn” campaigns led by people like John Thune or Tim Pawlenty (or, much more likely, Mike Pence) in the years ahead.
THIS is how the Republican Party operates and why it can so accurately be called the “Party of Stupid”.
It’s clear the party has a major liability in guys like the Prophet and Rose’s Thorns, but the party doesn’t take steps to address the problem, because it is afraid of alienating big donors like Beth Christie who enjoy the company of these boys. The boys then entrench themselves, and find someone like Mittens Romney to be their political patron. They then do whatever they can to advance and enrich themselves on the GOP dime, never wanting to have anything to do with actually winning elections and advancing conservatism. They don’t care about the country, or the Republican Party, or what happens in Washington.
They just want to drink, smoke cigars, bed women (no matter how old they are, as long as they are rich), and do all the things the Billionaire Boys Club little hucksters tried to do back in California in the 1980s…only without everything collapsing down upon themselves, because they believe they are so much smarter than their predecessors who tried to do all of this before.
Just as THAT group of Cocktail Party GOP ladder-climbers thought they were smarter than the crash-and-burned climbers who came before them.
Who knows, this generational cycle might go all the way back to the very founding of the Republican Party.
QUESTION: In only his second non-funeral appearance inside a church since becoming president, why did Obama take the sacrament of Communion, when he is not Catholic?
The Seven Blessed Sacraments. How many can you name and identify, just looking at this stained glass window?
Yesterday, according to the AP, the Obamas stepped inside a church for only the second non-funeral time of the Obama presidency. During the service, on a Hawaiian military base, presided over by the base Chaplain, Obama took communion…stepping forward, straight to the front of the line, to do so, dipping the wafer in wine, the whole shebang.
I went to Catholic school for 13 years in Cleveland, and I clearly remember Sister Francis Borgia teaching us in second grade that only Catholics are allowed to take communion, and even then, someone would have had to go through the sacrament of confession to a priest before being able to take communion at mass. Sister Francis taught this with the visual aide of a coloring book depicting all of the blessed sacraments that comprised Catholicism, including four that were unique for Catholics that the protestant denominations did NOT have.
The seven sacraments I remember coloring about (always within the lines, making the pictures pretty like stained glass, just like Sister Francis taught us) were:
(1) Baptism
(2) Confession*
(3) Communion*
(4) Confirmation*
(5) Marriage
(6) Holy Orders (this is ordination of a priest and vow-taking for nuns)*
(7) Anointing of the Sick/Last Rites
I know that Baptism and Marriage are part of many Christian denominations. Baptists, who are not Catholics, have baptisms. They must, or their name would be ridiculous, like firemen who don’t fight fires or someone cruelly named Oprah who can’t clear a side of beef to the bone in under five minutes, using only tooth, talons, and jaws. Marriage is obviously part of just about every Christian faith there could be, since I have seen this on TV, where people are getting married all the time, whether by the state, in a church, or by forest animals, whether they are sober or not, just as long as they are a man and a woman.
I made it as far as Confirmation, in terms of Catholic sacraments…and Confirmation is one of the things I know is unique to Catholics because when I talk about it, few of my friends who aren’t Catholic have any idea what it is. In eighth grade, I took a special religion class after school for my “Confirmation”. Not everyone in my grade school class decided to go through this process and be Confirmed, because it meant extra work that was largely boring and required us to stay after school with our teacher for long sessions. It was a lot of Bible study, learning about the Church, and doing something like 120 hours of community service to earn the right to have a Confirmation ceremony. Sister Jean Marie, my eighth grade teacher, oversaw this study and supervised the community service, which included cleaning the apartments of elderly people at a nearby nursing home (many of whom were hoarders, who created warrens of little tunnels and dens inside rooms full of newspapers and magazines, with the occasional large cat or other smaller mammals entombed here and there), visiting sick people who didn’t have anyone who cared about them, planting gardens near the church, picking up litter, and making various arts and crafts we sold to raise money for Catholic charities abroad. Once all this was completed, we were able to be Confirmed. The Confirmation ceremony was held downtown at the Cathedral in Cleveland, officiated by the Bishop. Afterwards, there was a big party…which makes this sort of the Catholic equivalent of a Bar/Bat Mitzvah, only there was no alcohol and no bats there.
Confirmation is related to Baptism and First Communion as a milestone for a Catholic…see how these three sacraments are connected, just like there’s the Holy Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost (which they started calling Holy Spirit around third grade for me, but it’s been Holy Ghost in my memory anyway, because that’s what was in our coloring books, and I remember that because the Holy Ghost looked kind of like Casper). You are Baptized as a baby and had no say in that, but are given this sacrament for your own good. Then, you have to take classes and be prepared for First Communion, though you more likely than not still don’t really know what’s going on and are doing it just because your parents tell you to (this sacrament is given in second grade, and there is a big party after that First Communion). But, when you are 13 or so, you do have a choice on whether or not you are going to be Confirmed, so this capstone is a sacrament of maturation and the beginning of manhood/womanhood in Catholicism.
I’m not aware of anything like that in other Christian denominations, but maybe it exists.
Because I’m gay, I’m never going to be married. Marriage is a sacrament. The word marriage should not be co-opted by the state, and currently we have a very messy linguistic situation where what Britney Spears and any random person she meets on the street can do in Las Vegas at three in the morning is called by the same word Catholics use for a blessed sacrament. What any two heterosexual drunks can do in the middle of the night, with no forethought, so long as they have $100 and retain the ability to say “I do” at some point while a Justice of the Peace dressed as Elvis stands before them, is not “marriage”. That’s a civil union, because the state has empowered that Elvis impersonator to civilly unite two drunks in a legal contract, whether they should be so united or not. It’s also a travesty, but that’s just my personal opinion. No one dressed up as a dead celebrity should be able to “marry” anyone, under any circumstances, period. Unless it’s Halloween, and they really, really look like that person. Enough to fool old people at least.
“Marriage”, as a Catholic sacrament, requires more of the classes I have been talking about, where a priest makes a man and woman seriously consider what they are doing and treat what’s happening as a lifelong, lasting commitment…made by sober, serious people who are really sure about this, and not of the mindset that “Oh, well, we can always just get divorced later!”. Not that a Kennedy ever had to go to any of these classes, but this is how things were in Cleveland, not Hyannis Port apparently.
Here’s where I get into all sorts of trouble in Boystown, where I live, but it makes my skin crawl every time I hear anyone screech about “gay marriage”…which is an oxymoron. “Who you calling an ox-moron? You’re a self-hating gay!,” is some of the nonsense I get on a regular basis, because it’s impossible for two guys or two women to have a “gay marriage” or be “gay married”, the way I view the word “marriage”. That’s because “marriage” to me is as Catholic and religious as Baptism, Communion, Confirmation, and the rest of those sacraments up there. It’s a religious word, and is out of context outside of religious talk. There is no gay version of the other sacraments, and there should be no state version either.
Some random person walking down the street pouring chocolate sauce on people’s heads is not “Baptism”. Giving someone cheese and crackers at a party is not “Communion”. Standing up and declaring you have a new name and then having a party afterwards is not “Confirmation”. You can’t just take religious words and apply them to some secular event that is related only in a minor cosmetic way and claim they’re the same. It’s insulting. And makes you look crazy. Especially if you are standing there, insisting your name is Moonchild now, eating crackers, with chocolate on your forehead.
Civil Unions are what the state performs, even if they are being called “marriages” because of our messed-up modern vocabulary. What Britney Spears does in Vegas chapels is not “marriage”, but a civil union, and if the state joins two guys or two women in legal contracts then those are civil unions as well. I happen to be dating a really awesome guy named Justin at the moment who is someone I definitely want in my life on a permanent basis. We’ve only been together two months, and while that is an eternity for male couples, it’s not long enough to even remotely think about a civil union with him. But, scrying into the future, he’s definitely someone I could see wanting to live with and make a lasting commitment to. He is an awesome, awesome, guy and I can easily see myself loving him and wanting him as a partner on all of my adventures. If that happens, I would definitely want to make sure all our legal “Ts” were crossed and “Is” dotted, as far as the state goes, for things like taxes, insurance, property holdings, and all the other contracts and obligations a couple would have, together, legally under the state, should Justin and I get that far and be so intertwined in each other’s lives. I would want to make sure he was well taken care of if anything happened to me, should we get to a point where he’s dependent on me for anything and my absence would be detrimental to him regarding any of those contracts we were involved in together. So, yes, Justin and I would need a legal civil union, under the state, to protect our civil and property rights, under the law, as a partnership between two guys who formed this little team.
We would not, however, be “married”, ever, because the person I’m dating is Justin, not Justine. Bateman or otherwise, I will never be married because I don’t want to enter into any partnership domestically with a woman, and never will. Being mad at me or calling me names or not letting me come to Christmas or whatever is never going to change that…just as Justin’s parents perpetual efforts to set him up with the daughters of people they know back in Eureka Springs are futile as well. Christmas is indeed the time to believe in miracles, but you need to draw the line somewhere.
Just as a line needs to be drawn between what the state does, and is empowered to do, and what the Church has been doing long before there was a state in terms of the Seven Blessed Sacraments.
Which mean something, and have to be earned. You have to follow the progression, starting with Baptism, then moving on to Confession, then taking Communion, then being Confirmed, etc. Though there is wiggle room with Marriage (in that you don’t have to be Confirmed to be married in the Catholic Church), you can’t take Holy Orders unless you have done everything through Confirmation, and you most definitely cannot take Communion without first sitting for Confession with a priest and making amends for your sins. If you have not been to church in years, and have not sat for Confession lately, then you can’t take Communion as a Catholic. In grade school, we were taught that if you had not been to Confession in a month, you could not go for communion, no matter how much you wanted to…or how much your handlers wanted you to do so for a photo op.
And that brings me to what Obama did in Hawaii…in what I believe is only his second non-funeral appearance inside a church since becoming president in January of 2009.
Obama claims he is a Christian, and appeared in church in September 2010 to prove it (remember, it’s when Michelle Obama wore that cat pee sofa dress of hers again, after having it shortened to a miniskirt and removing the batwing bow that’s usually on that thing…which I personally believe she wore so the trip to church would be as memorable as possible for everyone. She wore the ugliest dress she owns so that people would remember that trip to church, which worked).
Where will this dress turn up next?
Outside of services like Ted Kennedy’s funeral, or other high profile funerals, the Obamas do not go to church…but claim they “worship in private” in the White House. Maybe they do. Why would they lie about that? I can’t even write that with a straight face, since they lie about so many things, but since we don’t really know what the two of them do all day in the White House, there’s no way to prove they don’t spend it singing psalms and reading the Bible cover to cover, even though it has few pictures in it.
Here’s an article about the Obamas making a “rare trip to church in Hawaii”, which is remarkable because it’s the AP that’s reporting, and usually they are on the Obama praise bandwagon and payroll.
I’ve highlighted in magenta (Obama’s favorite color) the most bizarre part of this AP story: where “Obama was the first worshipper to take communion, dipping the wafer in wine before placing it into his mouth”. We do know how much he loves being “first” at anything, but how can a non-Catholic like Obama take communion?
Only the second non-funeral appearance Obama has made in a church since becoming president.
Obama does like taking things from other people, and neither of the Obamas have ever been anywhere where people were enjoying things that they didn’t stand up and cut to the front of the line to take their unequal share as well. So, if these were Christmas cookies we were talking about, and not communion wafers, the only thing bizarre about that AP article would be that it wasn’t Michelle Antoinette who was first in line to put something in her mouth, dipping it in chocolate not wine, and then demanding more.
But, Obama’s not Catholic. Or, maybe he is this week. Was there a poll done that suggested he’d benefit if he was? Then maybe he converted on the flight to Hawaii, so he can compare himself to JFK some more.
It’s always been my understanding that only Catholics have communion as part of their church service. This is what the nuns in Cleveland taught, at least.
Through the years, I’ve had so many non-Catholics ask me what communion was that I’ve assumed Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists, etc. don’t have this part of Christianity in their own churches. They have the Baptism. They have some version of the Last Rites. They have Marriage.
But, I’ve never heard a non-Catholic talking about Confession, Confirmation, or Holy Orders…and I have never heard a non-Catholic talk about Communion. They don’t do this on TV either.
The Clintons are Methodists, and I don’t recall either of them ever appearing in an article taking communion. The Bushes are Methodists, too, I believe, both father and son and their wives, and I don’t recall any of them taking communion, either. I’m old enough to remember the complete Reagan presidency, and I don’t remember the Reagans taking communion either.
But, I do remember asking Sister Francis Borgia, back in 1983 whether or not President and First Lady Reagan went to communion. This was when I was studying about my First Communion, and the Reagans were in the White House. I can actually remember what I was wearing to school that day, which is admittedly not too hard because we wore the same uniform every day in Catholic school…but it was a sunny day, in the spring, leading up to First Communion in May, and Sister Francis sat at her desk in the front of the room and told the class that President and Mrs. Reagan weren’t Catholic, so no, they never went to communion. That opened the class up to ask if other famous people back then went to communion too, and Sister Francis had to tell many disappointed students that no, Michael Jackson didn’t go to communion either, because he was a Jehovah’s Witness…Lionel Richie didn’t go to communion either, because he was not Catholic…neither Hall nor Oates went to communion, because they weren’t Catholics. Sister Francis interrupted a “We Are the World” of celebrity questions about communion to note, definitively, that the only people who went to communion were Catholics…because, like Confession, Confirmation, and Holy Orders, these sacraments were part of the Catholic faith and not the Protestant denominations.
Because Protestants, in protest against the Catholic Church during the Reformation Movement, broke away from the Holy See and decided four of the Seven Blessed Sacraments were too mystical and magical for their belief system.
This is what I have always been taught, at least.
Maybe I am wrong.
But, if I am wrong, then why haven’t the protestant presidents that came before Obama taken communion while in their (more than two) appearances in church?
If they did take communion, why didn’t the press report on it, like they did when Obama did it?
Each article written has a word count limit. Each word is precious. Each writer is vain and wants to be noticed, so there’s many little details a reporter wants to slip into a piece to give it her personal flavor. That line about Obama taking communion, and being first in line to do so, meant something to the reporter. She found it odd he did this, noticed what was going on, and remarked on it. That sentence could have been used, with it’s 19 precious words, to describe the interior of the church, the other people there, or to give readers more of the sermon delivered (other than the joke the reporter slipped in, about the Chaplain having a heart attack).
It was a Chaplain, not a Reverend, or a Minister, which is very interesting to me as well. I know that Chaplains can be Catholic, but they can be other denominations as well.
What I think happened here in Hawaii is that someone at the White House picked up on a poll showing public discomfort with the Obamas not going to church on Christmas…and so someone rushed to find the Obamas some sort of Christian religious service to attend…but that person didn’t realize the Chaplain at this military base was conducting a Catholic service.
Since “church” to the Obamas means Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ, where people are screaming and yelling “G** damn America!” and hollering about “chickens coming home to roost”, just about any Christian service where people aren’t behaving this way and cursing the country is strange and alien to the two of them.
I really bet Obama has never been exposed to communion before, but saw an invitation to be given something for free, and saw that a line was forming to get something, so he, out of sheer habit, just got up to take it…not knowing what it was. Having wine available was just a bonus.
I can also readily imagine both of the Obamas making it back to the pews and saying something like this to each other:
“What was that cracker they gave us? Sure was dry and dusty, and there was only a wine for dunking”.
“Tell me about it. Where was the caviar? You’re the president for only two more years, and I want to eat all the caviar I can before the gravy train ends”.
“This is so boring in here. I hate that we have to do this twice a year”.
“In my head, I’m thinking about ugly things I can wear when we get back to Washington to embarrass the nation. That will show them. It makes this pantomime garbage we have to do more bearable”.
Can anyone shed any light on these lingering questions:
(1) Do other denominations, besides Catholicism, have communion?
(2) Can someone just walk up and take communion in other denominations, without having to go through any sort of sacrament first?
(3) Have other presidents besides Obama — and Catholic John Kennedy — been seen taking communion?
If any of you post on Catholic sites and other forums, I’d appreciate hearing from you and your forum mates on what happened here.
Am I wrong and am misremembering what I learned in school, or was this a big religious faux-pah Obama committed that no one has noticed yet?
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For those curious about the stained glass above, here’s the order of the Sacraments as depicted: Baptism, Confirmation, Communion, Confession, Anointing the Sick/Last Rites, Holy Orders, Matrimony. Do not feel bad if you could not identify which picture was which. The only ones that were obvious to me were Baptism, Communion, and Marriage. The other four are tougher to depict in a simple stained glass window.
Monday Open Thread: December 27th, 2010
What’s on your minds this Monday?
What are people talking about in your part of the country?
Have you seen any stats on Christmas sales figures for retailers yet? It seems online sales jumped 15% this year, but I have not seen mention of regular brick and mortar stores.
With online commerce so robust, it seems even more foolish for Democrats to ram through Internet-killing regulations via the FCC, in direct opposition to the will of Congress…but those are Obama Democrats for you. Whatever they can do to kill jobs, impede commerce, and break something that doesn’t need fixing.
Hope!
Change!
Needless regulation!
