Mark Shea on the GOP

Somehow, the GOP morphed into the Great Society with Guns, bribing people with entitlements at home and imagining that dreams of human perfectibility which gave us the The Projects 40 years ago would kindle the fires of the Goddess of Democracy through Michael Ledeen's Creative Destruction abroad. This is why I laugh at End to Evil types. It's the same messianic secularism. And it's working as well in Iraq as it worked for LBJ in Detroit and Watts.

SOURCE: Catholic & Enjoying It November 16, 2006.

Mark Shea on Tom McKenna

Tom McKenna is Predictably Angry with Me

Reason: I demonstrate an insufficiently insatiable hunger and thirst for death, death, death, and more death, so that means I regard Saddam as a victim, you see.

McKenna, whose blog is more or less devoted to obsessing over how to execute as many people as humanly possible, is naturally orgasmic at the idea of hanging Saddam. Failure to be thrilled at the death of a human being and a general agreement with Pope John Paul that it's better to forego executing people unless you really need to is, for McKenna the ultimate crime and the source of numberless entries on his vengeful blog.

(Tom McKenna responds).

Mark Shea on the Apostles of Strength Through Torture

It's not just a matter of time, I reckon, before a happy concord is reached between cynical devotees of abortion on the Left, and equally cynical devotees of torture on the right (yes, *devotees*: just as the Left *needs* abortion to fuel its raison d'etre, so the cynical manipulators on the Right are already coming to *need* to justify themselves as the Apostles of Strength Through Torture). When that day is reached, the big losers will the Christian dupes who mouthed the agitprop fed them by the Administration that just a *little* mortal sin was the grease that keeps a modern nation state in fine tune! If they repent of being shills for Leviathan, they will be called goddam torture pharisees and prolifers whose sanctimony has gummed up the smooth running of the party long enough. If they persist in being nuisances, they may well find themselves vehemently suspect of aiding and abetting the enemy.

SOURCE: Catholic & Enjoying It Sept. 25, 2006.

Mark Shea on Hope and Despair

As the media begins to dally with apocalyptic despair, it becomes more urgent than ever to point out that despair (like the presumption that is its twin) is the enemy of hope. Secular presumption consists of the project of turning heaven into earth. It matters little who is making the promise. Whether it's the Lefty who is promising eternal health and youth via embryonic stem cell research or the Creative Destructionist Righty who promises an End to Evil and the triumph of the New American Century via murder of wounded combatants and torture, both are basically making secular messianic promises: heaven on earth and ultimate happiness achievable here, if only you will fudge some of that pesky crap about doing evil that good may come. We get drunk (for a time) on the hope that this time it will work.

The problem is that drunkeness leads to hangovers. So when the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agly because God is not mocked, the one who dreamt of heaven on earth yesterday can fall into despair and the false certitude of hell on earth today. This is why the prophets so often seem to be out of step with the times.

SOURCE Catholic & Enjoying It August 17, 2006.

Mark Shea on War Zealots, Master Planners and Machiavellian Schemers

For me, it's 2006 and I'm highly suspicious of all moral calculations that appeal to a clock for legitimacy. I plod along, looking at just war teaching, and find myself increasing puzzled as to how to unscramble the various eggs our Best and Brightest have scrambled for us in recent years. On the whole, though I disagree with the Pope's remarks as they stand (since I believe in Just War teaching), I find myself thinking that I'd rather live in a world of people who err as the Pope does than in a world of War Zealots and Master Planners with big ideas for a New American Century based on "creative destruction" and other Machiavellian schemes. In short, I don't have much in the way of solutions, but I have a clearer and clearer idea of who I trust as I try to think things through.

Mark Shea on Neoconservatives

the point is that the Weekly Standard and suchlike neocon enthusiasts for war are not talking about Lieberman v. Lamont. They are talking about Lieberman for Veep. And it's quite clear that, for the neocons, the only thing that matters is war and the entire prolife movement and social conservative types can drop dead. The Neocons are All About Power and Realpolitik. Conservatives are morphing into the mirror of their postmodern nihilistic Leftist opponents.

Mark Shea | Homepage | 08.14.06 - 3:49 pm | #

I think a war is coming between the God first conservatives and the Money and Power First Conservatives. And I think the MP Cons are going to win. God Firsters have been useful fools. But their utility is almost played out.

Mark Shea | Homepage | 08.14.06 - 6:10 pm | #

Mark Shea on Michael Ledeen

Michael Ledeen Reliably Suggests that our Troops Should Murder Surrendering Enemy Combatants

That, in the final analysis, can only be what is meant by saying, "terrorists should be killed on the battlefield, not captured".

Despicable. Imagine Ledeen writing a piece that said, "Your daughter should sell her virginity to a pimp in order to ensure American security. She'll make an excellent whore and do her nation proud". Would anybody be offended if I suggested that Ledeen's estimation of your daughter is worthy of pistols at dawn?

Yet when Ledeen says, "Your son should commit cold blooded murder of surrendering prisoners in order to keep the quota of captured prisoners down. He'll make an excellent murderer and war criminal and do his nation proud" some of my readers, by some mysterious mental process, somehow decide that my bleat of protest against this insulting estimation of our troops is a sign *I* despise the troops, not Ledeen.

SOURCE: Catholic & Enjoying It July 12, 2006.

Mark Shea on Michael Novak

I don't think Michael Novak is a bad guy. I do think that the attempts by the Money and Power guys who are writing policy to hold up Novak as a sort of Voice of Catholic Teaching Blessing our Policies vs. the Euroweenie opinions of our Peacenik Pope and his Clueless Bishops was highly cynical. I wish Novak had been more vociferous in saying that it is precisely at the moment when the whole world is shouting for one thing and an almost unanimous chorus of bishops is saying "Whoa!" that the duty of the Catholic is to inform his conscience with the teaching of the Church, not join the shouting throng. But I also think Novak is not a materialist so much as a guy who has been beating the drum of democratic capitalism for a long time and who naturally gravitated toward people who found him...useful.

SOURCE: Catholic & Enjoying It March 23, 2006.

This is why I'd like to see a healthy Dem party re-emerge. Opposite evils, so far from balancing, aggravate one another. A Wilsonian Drunken Sailor Safety Through Torture Right inflames an hysterical angry vengeful Left. Meanwhile, when Elephants and Donkeys fight, it is the grass that suffers. The Left fanatically aims for the maximum number of babies to die, while the Right continues pissing away our grandchildrens savings and trying to make the world into the image and likeness of Michael Novak through the exportation of our democratic capitalist system at the point of a gun (only to wind up with Muslims who tend to see the image and likeness of Madonna instead--and to to hate us all the more).

SOURCE: Catholic & Enjoying It March 22, 2006.

I don't say Novak is a materialist. I do say he's a cheerleader for claims about democratic capitalism that seem to me to be in excess of the facts (recall that he was the Neocon Advocate of Choice to go to Rome and try to explain to the Holy Father and bishops of the world why their almost completely unanimous judgment against the justice of the Iraq War was wrong). Novak is the court theologian for this particular experiment. The people who looked to him for theological rationales for the war and the experiment in nation-building to follow have to face the fact that we ain't exporting what we used to export. The manufacturers of our culture are apostate Puritans who could not care less about a civilization of virture or a culture of life. It's Madonna, M-16s and money for them. Novak, probably with good intentions, allowed himself to be used to push this war to plant the American Way in the Islamosphere. The trouble is, the American Way is not the gospel and is becoming increasingly hostile to the gospel.

Mark Shea | Homepage | 03.22.06 - 8:18 pm | #

Mark Shea on Mammon-Worship

. . . I'm afraid I have no idea what you are talking about. I don't believe I've ever claimed that proponents of the War on Terror are Mammon-First Conservatives. That would be rather self-defeating since I am a proponent of the War on Terror, just not of the War in Iraq. I can't for the life of me see that supporting the war on Terror necessarily has anything to do with Mammon-First conservatism. Similarly, I don't think somebody who supports the War necessarily worships Caesar (though I suppose there are people out there who are willing to give the State the power to do anything if it will promise to keep them safe, which is a form of Caesar-worship). . . .

SOURCE: Catholic & Enjoying It February 27, 2006.