First, give the President props:



Now. If you're in the mood for further discussion about the Popenfuhrer, please have at it.

If you're sick of pope-chat, I offer this:

Resolved: "Palindromes" is the best film ever made. Why or why.

Via AmericaBlog:

German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Vatican theologian who was elected Pope Benedict XVI, intervened in the 2004 US election campaign ordering bishops to deny communion to abortion rights supporters including presidential candidate John Kerry.

In a June 2004 letter to US bishops enunciating principles of worthiness for communion recipients, Ratzinger specified that strong and open supporters of abortion should be denied the Catholic sacrament, for being guilty of a "grave sin."

He specifically mentioned "the case of a Catholic politician consistently campaigning and voting for permissive abortion and euthanasia laws," a reference widely understood to mean Democratic candidate Kerry, a Catholic who has defended abortion rights.

Uh, death penalty, you shrivelled Nazi? Waging voluntary war? You remember something about waging voluntary war, don't you, you dolled-up corpse?

I hope this guy gets to have his feeding tube kept in for a long, long, long time.

Courtesy (weirdly enough) of Throwy.


Pure, virile youth of the realm, unite!

Responses to questions with obvious answers:

OUT: Is the Pope Polish?

IN: Did the Pope help kill Poles?

The modern world, Ratzinger insisted, has jumped "from one extreme to the other: from Marxism to liberalism, up to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism and on and on."

From Marxism "to liberalism"? What about, oh, fascism? What about the forces of liberalism who liberated the concentration camp factories you guarded, you pathetic piece of Hitler Youth shit?

And I don't think someone who lounges around in robes and jewels amid priceless artistic treasures, winking over at his child-molesting buddies, should have anything to say about "libertinism." Thus guy probably has an on-call squadron of catamites. A eunuch wrestling team. Whatever.

I hope this filthy Kraut-corpse chokes on his own black smoke.

Frank Rich provides a nice encapsulation of those DeLay-Abramoff shenanigans.

This time the plot begins with money. Two K Street fixers, a lobbyist named Jack Abramoff and a flack named Michael Scanlon, managed to snooker six American Indian tribes into handing over $82 million in exchange for furthering their casino interests. According to The Washington Post, some of their tribal takings, cycled through a nonprofit center for "public policy research," helped send Mr. DeLay golfing in Scotland. The pious congressman, a gambling foe, says he had no idea of his trip's sinful provenance. Never mind that Mr. DeLay was joined abroad by Mr. Abramoff, whom he has described as one of his "closest and dearest friends," or that Mr. Scanlon had once been his spokesman. Mr. DeLay was as innocent of the goings-on around him as a piano player in a brothel.
…
Mr. Abramoff, who is now being investigated by nearly as many federal agencies as there are nights of Passover, is an Orthodox Jew who in his salad days wore a yarmulke to press interviews. In Washington, he opened not one but two kosher restaurants (I hear the deli was passable by D.C. standards) and started a yeshiva. His uncompromising piety drove him to condemn the one Orthodox Jew in the Senate, Joe Lieberman, for securing "the tortuous death of
millions" by supporting abortion rights. Mr. Abramoff's own moral constellation can be found in e-mail messages in which he referred to his Indian clients as "idiots" and "monkeys" even as he squeezed them for every last million. A previous client was Zaire's dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, who, unlike Senator Lieberman, actually was a practitioner of torture and mass murder.

Embattled DeLay rips media

HOUSTON (AP) -- House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, under fire for alleged ethics violations, accused liberal Democrats and the national media of giving him a hard time in a keynote speech at the National Rifle Association's annual convention Saturday evening.

DeLay only briefly mentioned the ethics accusations, telling members of the gun-rights group that he appreciated their support.

"When a man is in trouble or in a good fight, you want to have your friends around, preferably armed. So I feel really good," the Republican from nearby Sugar Land, Texas, said.