An Incensed Catholic Republican Leans Left

Regarding recent Republican efforts to turn out conservative Catholics for President Bush on Election Day, and in particular, the mere existence of this Kerry Wrong for Catholics Web Site sponsored by the Republican National Committee, a friend simply says:

It's wrong for any political party, including the Republicans, to speak on behalf of Catholics.

An agnostic like myself takes issues of right and wrong a bit lightly, of course, but when a devout conservative Catholic says something is wrong, he means it. It grates on him, that as an Irish Republican Catholic, for generations he and his family's political opinions were denigrated by the assumption that they had to toe the Democratic Party line with other Irish Catholics. Now the offense is coming from the other direction.

Thus is born another Kerry supporter.

Frank Rich at the New York Times has an interesting review (unfortunately requiring login) of a new DVD called "George W. Bush: Faith in the White House". Frank Rich states the DVD...

must be seen because it shows how someone like General Boykin (the general in charge of tracking down Osama bin Laden) can stay in his job even in failure and why Mr. Bush feels divinely entitled to keep his job even as we stand on the cusp of an abyss in Iraq. In this pious but not humble worldview, faith, or at least a certain brand of it, counts more than competence, and a biblical mission, or at least a simplistic, blunderbuss facsimile of one, counts more than the secular goal of waging an effective, focused battle against an enemy as elusive and cunning as terrorists. That no one in this documentary, including its hero, acknowledges any constitutional boundaries between church and state is hardly a surprise. To them, America is a "Christian nation," period, with no need even for the fig-leaf prefix of "Judeo-."

Far more startling is the inability of a president or his acolytes to acknowledge any boundary that might separate Mr. Bush's flawed actions battling "against the forces of evil" from the righteous dictates of God. What that level of hubris might bring in a second term is left to the imagination, and "Faith in the White House" gives the imagination room to run riot about what a 21st-century crusade might look like in the flesh. A documentary conceived as a rebuke to "Fahrenheit 9/11" is nothing if not its unintentional and considerably more nightmarish sequel.