A Little More on Trump's Speech

If you haven't read Fr. Geoge Rutler's take on Trump's speech, well.....you haven't read anything on the topic.  A few excerpts:

...the poet and playwright Adam Mickiewicz dramatized the theme of his suffering Poland as the “Christ of Nations” and, deprived of its national identity for two centuries, the agony worsened when, in an image borrowed by many, Poland was crucified between the two thieves of Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. It was not the West’s proudest moment when President Roosevelt complained to Stalin at the Yalta Conference that “Poland has been a source of trouble for over five hundred years.”...

Which should pretty much put to rest any thoughts that FDR was a good guy.  He was not.

Moving on...

...On July 6 in Warsaw, in Krasinski Square, the president spoke of a culture with which a generation of “millennials” have be unfamiliar: “Americans, Poles, and the nations of Europe value individual freedom and sovereignty. We must work together to confront forces, whether they come from inside or out, from the South or the East, that threaten over time to undermine these values and to erase the bonds of culture, faith, and tradition that make us who we are.”

Armchair journalists, for whom the “Christ of Nations” is an enigma, resented “a tiny speech, a perfunctory racist speech,” “xenophobic” and “a catalogue of effrontery” and a comparison was made with Mussolini. In 1978, Solzhenitsyn once was pilloried for similar themes during a commencement address in Cambridge, Massachusetts: First Lady Rosalynn Carter, with limited experience of Gulags, said he did not know what he was talking about....

Rosalynn was--unlike FDR--a good person.  Stupid, but good.

The comparison to Solzhenitsyn is striking, no?  Betcha youse guys never thought of ol'Donald that way!  Well, neither did I.

...The Warsaw speech mentioned three priests: Copernicus, John Paul II and Michael Kozal. The latter was the bishop of Wloclawek who was martyred by the Nazis in Dachau along with 220 of his priests in 1943. After lengthy torture, the Nazi doctor Joseph Sneiss injected him with a dose of phenol “to make easier” his way to eternity. St. John Paul II beatified Bishop Kojal two days after Reagan’s Berlin speech. Dr. Sneiss has his disciples now in much of Europe and he would have a busy practice today on our own Golden Shores, in California, Colorado, Oregon, Vermont, Washington, and the nation’s very capital....

So, yah, many of us live--literally--in the Valley of the Shadow of Death.  That's why Fr. Rutler brings up Charlie Gard in the next graf.

Rutler quotes Stawrowski:

...The fundamental cleavage is not the West v. Islam or the West v. the rest, but within the West itself: between those who recognize the values of Judaeo-Christian Graeco-Roman culture and those who use terms like “democracy,” “values,” “rights” but pervert the latter. So it means democracy of the elites, values of secularism, rights to kill Charlie Gard, marriage that has nothing to do with sex, sex that … is a “private” matter to be funded by the confiscatory state and your duty to support this incoherence…

Oh, yes, it's our duty.  Until we decide that it is not.

Finally, the good Father says, ever so gently, what most of us have said in far more strident terms:

...There is latitude of opinion and taste for assessing the “timeless eloquence” of any modern oratory, of which our nation has been bereft during the last administration despite all sorts of efforts to convince us that Demosthenes haunted the Potomac, even if the presidential speeches were inchoate in logic and blighted in diction. But it would be much in the order of natural virtue, let alone Christian justice, to ask an apology from those numerous savants who said in 2016 that the man who spoke with lasting significance in Warsaw on July 6, 2017 is “manifestly unfit to be president of the United States.”...

Yes, well.  I'm not any more a "neverTrump" kinda guy and am having serious difficulty with the straw-clutcher/pearl-clutcher gang at Red State, who are echoed by now-irrelevant airwave-pundits.  We're sorta waiting for them to acknowledge that Trump puts Bush 43 to shame, too.

Hello?  Hello??