Pork along Chuck

"Most Americans don't care about pork."

Au contraire, Senator Schumer. Pork is a symptom of political corruption. Pork shows partiality for some Americans over others. At a time of national economic turmoil when the Congress should be putting tax dollars where they will help, it should not be putting them where they won't, or advancing a liberal political agenda (such as gov't controlled health care) under cover of a needed stimulus bill. Meanwhile, the President rails against those who would delay this pork bill.

Instead of being the most transparently honest government in American history, this Congress and this administration is quickly shaping up as arrogant, demagogic, and transparently corrupt.

St. Scholastica pray for us!

Senatus Populusque Americanus

This week the People of the United States of America exerted their governing will through the changing of the President and some members of the republic's Senate and House of Representatives. From one point of view it was a tranquil event, occurring without any one's assassination, as was often the case in ancient Rome when rivals bested their enemy. However, from another point of view it was earth-shattering, or at least potentially so.

The new President, Barrack Obama, will have a majority of Democrats in both houses of Congress to help him fulfill his promise of "Change". Yet, the program of the modern Democrat Party is quite a different creature from the Party of the 1930s or even the 1960s, which so many Catholics supported with its votes and its labors. That party embraced the social conscience of the ecclesia romana, but also its moral code (at that time held by Protestants and Jews, as well). Not so the contemporary Democrat Party, which while continuing to pay lip service to Roman Catholic social concerns (a closer analysis suggests differently), for the most part seems closer to the morality of the Roman Republic than the Roman Church. (The briefest viewing of HBO's hyper-accurate Rome will verify this point).

Across the legislative aisle, though the numbers are now smaller matters seem somewhat better, at least for the time being. However, there were few real gains on the big moral issues of the day (abortion, embryonic stem cell research, homosexual "marriage" etc.) during the Republican tenure of Congress, which ended in 2006 and the Bush tenure which ends in January. Nonetheless, some gratitude for holding the barbarians of the culture of death at bay is certainly due.

What ails this American Republic! Well, that's a blog for another day -- and probably a long one at that.

St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, pray for us.

SPQR