This celebration dates to November 11, 2004.

Well, the old, sorry codger is dead. No, I don't mean Bob Byrd, Fritz Hollings, or Hillary Clinton's right ankle. I mean Yasser Arafat.

Blessed with Yakov Smirnov's good looks, Mike Dukakis's charm, Pee Wee Herman's physical stature, and Adolf Hitler's easygoing love of peace (and Jews), Arafat had the good fortune of being an unrepentant racist with a penchant for incredible violence and a willingness to engage in unremitting slaughter at a time when news organizations could write things like this with a straight face (from the link above):

Yasser Arafat, who triumphantly forced his people's plight into the world spotlight but failed to achieve his lifelong quest for Palestinian statehood, died Thursday at age 75.

Instead of, you know:

Yasser "Push Them Into the Sea" Arafat, an Egyptian engineer who rode varying waves of Arab Nationalism, Islamist terror, and the latter-day development of Palestinian national identity to absurd heights of international acclaim, including numerous visits to the Clinton White House, finally went to Hell Thursday, forty-odd years too late.

But he doesn't matter anymore.

Others will say more, and better, about how this might change the dynamics of the Arab-Israeli conflict; doubtless, others will eulogize the vicious little lunatic in all sorts of ways (I prefer "Nothing so became him in life as his leaving it," but that's me).

But what I find truly remarkable is that this is the first time in two years that the little snot has mattered, and he had to die to do it. (This is called a "mixed blessing.") Wanna know why? Well, having Ariel Sharon hole him up like the rat he is in a single building certainly helped. But I, personally, credit President Bush with this master stroke:

It is untenable for Israeli citizens to live in terror. It is untenable for Palestinians to live in squalor and occupation. And the current situation offers no prospect that life will improve. Israeli citizens will continue to be victimized by terrorists, and so Israel will continue to defend herself.

In the situation the Palestinian people will grow more and more miserable. My vision is two states, living side by side in peace and security. There is simply no way to achieve that peace until all parties fight terror. Yet, at this critical moment, if all parties will break with the past and set out on a new path, we can overcome the darkness with the light of hope. Peace requires a new and different Palestinian leadership, so that a Palestinian state can be born.

I call on the Palestinian people to elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror. I call upon them to build a practicing democracy, based on tolerance and liberty. If the Palestinian people actively pursue these goals, America and the world will actively support their efforts. If the Palestinian people meet these goals, they will be able to reach agreement with Israel and Egypt and Jordan on security and other arrangements for independence. ...

Today, Palestinian authorities are encouraging, not opposing, terrorism. This is unacceptable. And the United States will not support the establishment of a Palestinian state until its leaders engage in a sustained fight against the terrorists and dismantle their infrastructure. This will require an externally supervised effort to rebuild and reform the Palestinian security services. The security system must have clear lines of authority and accountability and a unified chain of command.

And just like that, no American legitimacy, no excuses for blowing up Jewish kids in pizza parlors, and no need for Yasser Arafat any more.

It took Bush all of a week after winning re-election to sell out conservatives again. But let us remember why we supported him so: He has moral clarity. And that clarity can yield impressive results.

So, we bid a fond adieu to the murdering little psychopath with the carefully arranged keffiyeh; wish him well in Asmodeus's torture chamber; wonder if the rumors were true; and have a slightly brighter hope for tomorrow, because we finally have a President who knows that inviting terrorists over for dinner at the White House does not discourage their basest tendencies.

This dates to February 11, 2005.

Arthur Miller is no longer wasting precious oxygen.

Rest in Stalinist peace, fellow-traveler. May the cries of the innocents whose death you helped excuse and make possible waft their way into your holding cell in Hell.

Update [2005-2-11 20:22:2 by Thomas]: For those who think this is a bit much, ask yourself this:

Would it be a bit much if he were a Nazi, instead of an ardent communist?

Oh, wait, I forgot. It's ok to be a member of a totalitarian movement that slaughters by economic group, instead of (merely) by racial group. Silly me.

This dates to January 31, 2007.

In Catholic theology, the term scandal has a very specific meaning, that's usually lost on the outside population and the overwhelming majority of Catholics. The Catechism -- or, as liberal Catholics would have it, "that silly rule-summary-thing" -- identifies scandal thus:

2284 Scandal is an attitude or behavior which leads another to do evil. The person who gives scandal becomes his neighbor's tempter. He damages virtue and integrity; he may even draw his brother into spiritual death. Scandal is a grave offense if by deed or omission another is deliberately led into a grave offense.

2285 Scandal takes on a particular gravity by reason of the authority of those who cause it or the weakness of those who are scandalized. It prompted our Lord to utter this curse: "Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened round his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea."[85] Scandal is grave when given by those who by nature or office are obliged to teach and educate others. Jesus reproaches the scribes and Pharisees on this account: he likens them to wolves in sheep's clothing.[86]

2286 Scandal can be provoked by laws or institutions, by fashion or opinion.

Therefore, they are guilty of scandal who establish laws or social structures leading to the decline of morals and the corruption of religious practice, or to "social conditions that, intentionally or not, make Christian conduct and obedience to the Commandments difficult and practically impossible."[87] This is also true of business leaders who make rules encouraging fraud, teachers who provoke their children to anger,[88] or manipulators of public opinion who turn it away from moral values.

2287 Anyone who uses the power at his disposal in such a way that it leads others to do wrong becomes guilty of scandal and responsible for the evil that he has directly or indirectly encouraged. "Temptations to sin are sure to come; but woe to him by whom they come!"[89]

(Emphasis added.) And that brings us to Hell's newest permanent resident: Robert Drinan.

A more vicious, nastier human being has rarely lived -- not because he was a lawyer (although that's a good first step); not because he voted for, and avidly supported, the Evil Party (also a good step); and not because he was John Kerry's nominally Catholic shield during the 2004 campaign (y'know, these parentheticals are beginning to add up...).

Robert Drinan is as surely in Hell right now as I will be someday, for the evil he effected, directly through his own acts, and indirectly through the scandal he flouted with his every public act.

Let's begin with the obvious. The Silly-Rule-Summary-Thing has a great deal to say about deliberately induced abortion, and none of it is nice. You'll note something about excommunication by nature of the act itself. You may, if you read very carefully, even note some stuff taken from or inspired by that John Paul II-created, fascist document, the Didache, stuff like "The moment a positive law deprives a category of human beings of the protection which civil legislation ought to accord them, the state is denying the equality of all before the law. When the state does not place its power at the service of the rights of each citizen, and in particular of the more vulnerable, the very foundations of a state based on law are undermined."

For this -- for one of the oldest teachings of the Church of whom he was nominally a priest, for the words that should have been a lifeblood given his nominal Order -- Drinan had nothing but contempt.

Conservative Catholics are often accused, by the Protestants who sit in our pews and pretend to be Catholic more liberal of our brethren, of whom Robert Drinan was one, of being obsessed with abortion, and overlooking issues like poverty, general social and economic justice, and burning topics like whether we should have married priests. What they -- let's be kind -- forget is that, putting to the side that the second sin in the Bible was a murder, that, to use Lockean language, life is the prerequisite right from which all other rights flow. Put differently, no one cares about insufficient housing if he's dead. The unshaken -- all too often ignored, but unchanged -- rule of the Catholic Church has been that deliberate murder of an innocent human life (and, explicitly, therefore abortion) is "gravely contrary to the dignity of the human being, to the golden rule, and to the holiness of the Creator. The law forbidding it is universally valid: it obliges each and everyone, always and everywhere."

And this -- one of the cornerstones of our nominally shared Faith -- he flouted. He derided, and called "no great thing." He praised President Clinton's veto of the partial birth abortion ban -- and thereby defended a practice so awful that even Supreme Court justices recognize its evil. And he did this from a position of authority. He did it as a prominent Congressman and former Congressman; as a priest (and a well-known one); as a law professor; and as a public activist. He defended the murder of the unborn day after day, and did so from authority; for that scandal alone, our Fallen world is cleaner for his absence.

That's the easy part. Then, there's this:

He grew up in Hyde Park and was educated at Boston College when it was a small school atop the heights of Chestnut Hill. He became a Jesuit, got his law degree at Georgetown, and became dean of the BC Law School in 1956 as it was moving from a downtown location to a new building near the college. He could have been content to let the law school serve a Catholic population in more spacious surroundings, but he had greater ambitions.

"He stood for inclusivity, opening up the law school to faculty and students of all faiths, colors, and genders," professor Sanford Katz said in a telephone interview yesterday. Drinan set up a presidential scholars program to attract top students from around the country. He established the law review and a legal aid clinic in Waltham to help the poor. He was in the vanguard of those who transformed Boston College into a national institution.

I see nothing wrong with a law school open to students of all faiths, colors, and sexes. I can overlook someone being pretentious enough to use "inclusivity" instead of "inclusiveness"; I think we can safely assume that the Faculty of Boston College recently formally decided that the former word is now doubleplusgood. The crime for which Drinan must answer is being one of the breakers of higher-level Catholic education in this country. Georgetown is as Catholic as Boston College, which is to say, as Catholic as Adolf Hitler (who had been Catholic until he was ten! Seriously! That proves the Holocaust was a Catholic event!). The degradation of the Catholic model of education -- to the point where there are Hemlock Society, Communist Party, and NARAL chapters on nominally Catholic campuses -- is a more pervasive (if not so grave) sin against humankind, and a more direct one than all his blathering and activism combined. Catholic universities, as a rule, are now neither. For this, Robert Drinan bears at least part of the blame.

I could go on, for days, if not weeks -- and I think there is a credible argument that his calls for the abandonment of the many Catholic and Buddhist South Vietnamese to the death camps, and his votes to do the same, will weigh on his soul at Judgment -- but suffice it to say we are well-rid of the man.

To Hell with you, old man. I'll be seeing you there soon enough.

In honor of Steve Gilliard:



Rest whatever way God feels appropriate.