The U.S. Bishops are urging Catholics to contact Congress to oppose President Obama’s desire to bomb Syria.
Pope Francis is insisting that more bombing is not an answer.
Even Jon Stewart (explicit content warning) doesn’t hesitate to call President Obama’s bomb proposal absurd.
But pundits of the Catholic Left can’t muster up the courage to unequivocally oppose their Democratic president’s bomb-mongering.
The National Catholic Reporter’s Michael Sean Winters has written a meandering screed supporting Obama. He doesn’t even mention the Pope, or the Bishops, much less rebut their statements. Can you imagine Winters failing to mention Pope Francis and the U.S. Bishops if they called for action on any other issue such as immigration, guns, or for that matter a Republican-instigated war?
On the NCReporter’s main page, it has forgotten how to plainly condemn bombing. It lists some articles in favor of the bishops’ view, yet at the same time it hosts what can only be called a “diversity” of views on the topic.
In addition to Winters, NCReporter’s exclusive Jesuit “analyst” Fr. Thomas Reese wrings his hands about whether more bombs should be dropped. Fr. Reese cannot muster simple condemnation of more bombs. Reese prominently features the thoughts of William Galston, who offers a variety of justifications for the president.
So when Pope Francis, the Vatican, and the U.S. Bishops criticize Republican-led wars, or capitalist economics, pundits on the Catholic Left treat their messages as ex cathedra doctrine. When these same Catholic bishops strenouously oppose President Obama’s desire to drop bombs on Syria, Catholic Left pundits start to wonder if bombs aren’t so bad after all.
I don’t remember NCReporter hosting bloggers who defended dropping bombs in Iraq, or offered pro-waterboarding “moral voices,” or theological defenses of nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
A militaristic NCReporter: yet another fruit of “hope and change.”
UPDATE: E.J. Dionne, the NCReporter fellow traveler and frequent pundit at Commonweal, has jumped on the bombwagon. Dionne gushes about how “lucky” we would all be if Obama gets to drop his bombs on Syria to display a “strong message of American determination.”
To Dionne the bombing would not only produce an immediate glee of destruction, but would at last usher in a joyful era where we see America “finally liberating itself from the shackles” of being reluctant to bomb countries that are not attacking us.
Dionne can’t wait until we shed that sad reticence and restore the freedom-to-bomb for Democrat presidents like Clinton and Obama–a divine right of the Left, but one that the evil Bush stole from them and tarnished in the eyes of the American people (by committing the crime of bombing-while-Republican).
NCReporter, of course, through Michael Sean Winters, thinks Dionne’s vista of renewed Democratic American belligerence is “one of his best columns ever.”