Predictions for a wild 2012 - what the news could hold month by month

Newt Gingrich (EWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images)

It's that time of year again.  We can look back on another miserable year and, against all evidence to the contrary, hope for better things.  Herewith, some predictions for the year to come.

JANUARY: Since no one seemed to care when New York City Fire Department big wigs referred to Irishmen as “drunks,” budget crunchers devise a novel way to save money during tough fiscal times -- get rid of the Irish!

You might recall, in the summer, a former FDNY assistant commissioner testified that one FDNY honcho said, “You’re dealing with a lot of Irishmen who are drunks and they get into bar fights and they get arrested and they get arrested again. They fight, they sock their girlfriends…they get arrested because they fought with the police when they got arrested.”

With times so tight in New York City, officials in the police, sanitation and corrections departments quietly begin pointing out that the Irish are not only “drunks,” but also bad dancers who eat weird food.

“And what’s up with that ‘Irish goodbye?’” one anonymous source will be quoted as saying.
When asked if this is a slightly racist way to save money, another source will note: “Maybe.  But did you ever see those old cartoons that made the Irish look like apes?  They want to put that guy in the New Jersey Hall of Fame. So, I think we’re safe.”

FEBRUARY: On Valentine’s Day, Sinead O’Connor announces that her fourth marriage is coming to an end because she is going to get married to someone else.  She’s not sure who just yet.

MARCH: Recalling the surprising warmth of the reception given to Queen Elizabeth during her 2011 trip to Ireland, Pope Benedict heads to Dublin for St. Patrick’s Day.  He is baffled when greeted by signs reading “God Save the Queen.” He is no longer baffled when additional signs demand accountability for ongoing sex abuse cases.

“You guys weren’t so angry at the Germans back during World War II,” the Pope mutters before returning to the Vatican.

APRIL:  Recalling the warmth of the reception given to Barack Obama, Newt Gingrich visits Ireland.

He touts his conversion to Catholicism (even though he has been married three times), but trouble beckons when the former Baptist visits Northern Ireland.

At first Gingrich claims he is there to visit his family’s ancestral homeland, in Insihowen, Co. Donegal.
But Gingrich falls under the spell of local preachers and converts again to Presbyterianism. Gingrich also separates from his third wife.

MAY: All of the other Republican candidates for president head to Ireland with their campaign staffs and the massive infusion of tourist money lifts the nation out of its economic doldrums.

JUNE: Sinead O’Connor announces that she will marry Newt Gingrich.

JULY: Gingrich arrested during violent Loyalist July 12 march.  “This is awesome,” Gingrich says.  “In the U.S., all we have are those lame Occupy Wall Street guys.”

AUGUST: Stephen King had another blockbuster hit with his doorstopper novel 11/22/63.  The book explored what would happen if a character went back in time and tried to prevent the assassination of the first Irish Catholic president.

In his next book, entitled 8/22/22, King will go even deeper into the Irish genre.  On the 90th anniversary of the mysterious assassination of Irish freedom fighter Michael Collins, King sends a character back in time to find out exactly who killed Collins.

Collins infamously signed the treaty which freed the Republic of Ireland but left Northern Ireland in the hands of the British.  This topic turns out to be too gruesome even for Stephen King.

Once the assassination is thwarted, King’s characters come to life and look to assassinate the author himself.  Let’s just say the bullet wins out over the ballot.

SEPTEMBER-DECEMBER: Somehow, Gingrich hangs on to win the Republican nomination and he and Obama agree to a series of debates -- but only if they are held in Ireland.  Once there, the duo decide they don’t want to return to the U.S.

“The Irish people are a lot nicer,” Obama says.

Gingrich adds: “A lot of people wanted a diaspora president.  No one said it had to be the president of Ireland.”

Happy New Year!

(Contact “Sidewalks” at tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan)

Tear down statute of limitations on cases of sexual abuse of children

Markey aims to extend limitations on reporting sex abuse cases

Margaret Markey is a New York State Assemblywoman from Queens who represents heavily Irish Catholic neighborhoods such as Woodside, Maspeth and Sunnyside.

Elected in 1998, Markey, a past president of the New York State American Irish Legislators Society, has stepped into the fray over the recent spate of sex abuse horror stories and offered up a solution that seems eminently sensible.

Markey has introduced a bill that would change the current statute of limitations when it comes to criminal and civil cases.  Currently, when the victim turns 18, they have five years to come forth. 
Markey’s bill would not start the clock until the victims turn 23.

“I’m going to do what I can to get Governor Cuomo and the Senate on board,” Markey was quoted in the Daily News as saying. “I think we have a fair chance with the governor.”

It’s not hard to understand why Markey would call for the passage of this bill now.  We have read about a terrible litany of sex abuse crimes against kids in recent weeks. 

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There have been allegations coming out at a dizzying pace -- from Penn State University, from Syracuse University and from Poly Prep High school in Brooklyn, just to name a few.

And, of course, it is impossible to discuss a story such as this without acknowledging the broader history of abuse in the Catholic Church, in the U.S., Ireland and elsewhere.

And therein lies some of the trouble.

The Catholic Church has lobbied to prevent the passage of Markey’s bill.  She made note of this fact when commenting about it earlier this week.

“This bill is not about the Catholic Church,” said Markey. “It is about pedophiles. But some of my colleagues are intimidated by the Catholic Church.”

And lest anyone suggest Markey is merely jumping on a hot issue to get some headlines, she has been fighting for a bill such as this for most of the past decade.

As the Daily News noted, “Markey first introduced the bill seven years ago and it cleared the Assembly several times but has faced stiff opposition from the Republican-controlled Senate and the Catholic Church.”

Irish Americans such as David Clohessy, executive director of SNAP, the Survivors Network of Those Abused By Priests, have long supported legislation extending the statute of limitations in such cases.

Clohessy and others had hoped the ongoing horror of abuse revelations might persuade lawmakers in New York, as well as Arizona and Wisconsin, to pass Markey’s law.

This past summer, however, after intense lobbying efforts by the New York State Catholic Conference, a similar bill was defeated in the New York State Senate.

“You cannot ask institutions to take responsibility for the failures of a few individuals whose actions took place 40 and 50 years ago,” said Dennis Poust, the communications director of the New York State Catholic Conference.

There is no point in making this a story about the evil, secretive Catholic Church. 

First of all, the Catholic Church is not the only religious organization opposed to these reforms. 

Numerous Jewish groups also see the law as a way to decimate their finances, images or both.  (And further proving this is not merely a Catholic problem, Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes is currently prosecuting “an astounding 85 accused Orthodox child molesters,” according to the New York Post.)

More broadly, it should go without saying that sex abuse cases that originated years, even decades earlier, must be treated with a certain amount of sensitivity.  There is research that suggests childhood memories about such traumatic events can be unreliable. 

On the other hand, it is also clear that victims often bury their pain away in deep, dark places.  There are a thousand and one reason to do this, one of them being that a 12-year-old has positively no idea what to do with such pain. 

Adulthood finally brings with it a sense that something can be done about such a horrendous crime.
That a statute of limitations might possibly protect a criminal who, it’s quite clear, has a pattern of abusive behavior, is yet another insult to the victims who have suffered so long.

(Contact “Sidewalks” at tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan)

Give Presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich credit on immigration views

Newt Gringrich

Imagine you are political advisor to Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich. 

For months, your campaign has floundered.  Your guy was once one of the most powerful men in Washington, the speaker of the House and a man famous for his intellectual power. 

But then he fell from power and more or less vanished from the Washington scene.  So much so that when Gingrich announced he was running for president, one was tempted to say, “1996 called, they want Newt Gingrich back.”

But the only thing weaker than Gingrich seemed to be, well, every other GOP candidate. 

Herman Cain has his woman problems and Michele Bachmann’s kook factor is just a bit too high and, finally, Mitt Romney has, well, a Mitt Romney problem.  In that, he can’t convince anyone that he is anybody other than Mitt Romney and, thus, simply a lackluster political candidate.

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And lo and behold, in recent weeks, Gingrich has surged.  And so, you can imagine how his political advisors must have felt when Gingrich, finally in the lead, went ahead and made some crazy comments 

about immigration last week.

"If you've been here 25 years and you got three kids and two grandkids, you've been paying taxes and obeying the law, you belong to a local church, I don't think we're going to separate you from your family, uproot you forcefully, and kick you out."

Huh?  What was Gingrich, Mr. Conservative, actually saying?  Was he suggesting that not all immigrants are filthy freeloaders?

He continued, "I don't see how the party that says it's the party of the family is going to adopt an immigration policy which destroys families that have been here a quarter-century. And I'm prepared to take the heat for saying, ‘Let's be humane.’"

Humane?

That’s not a word that has been associated with Republican immigration policy since, well, since Rick Perry suggested it was heartless for candidates to bash immigrants.

Then again, we see how well Rick Perry’s candidacy is going these days.  And that’s why you must feel bad for Gingrich’s advisors.  But it’s also why Gingrich deserves credit for reframing the Republican debate over this contentious issue.

Needless to say, Gingrich’s opponents pounced on him, bashing his ideas as “amnesty” for illegal immigrants.

They did this, in large part, because they believe that Republican primary voters in general – and Tea 

Party backers in particular – are hungry for a hard-liner when it comes to immigration.

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And they may be right.  After all, Perry’s thinking-outside-the-box did not exactly help him. 

Furthermore, as John Heilemann noted in this week’s New York magazine, there is disturbing evidence that elements in the Republican Party have anti-immigrant tendencies on their GOP wish list.

“In a landmark book-length study being published this month, the Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, Harvard political scientist Theda Skocpol… --  on the basis of copious, careful, and not unsympathetic field reporting” found that an “animus against ‘freeloaders’…unifies the tea-partiers across the nation, with illegal immigrants preeminent in that category.”

That a group of people accused of working so hard that they steal American jobs can also be seen as 

freeloaders is another question for another time. 

As for Gingrich, perhaps he is simply hoping to make it through the Republican primaries and win some Hispanic votes in the November 2012. 

If so, maybe he has looked at past immigration voting patterns.  The Irish, for example, voted 

Democratic for over 100 years not only because local ward bosses, though often corrupt, were also responsive to their needs. 

It did not hurt that Republicans harbored some strong anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant candidates.  Then again, so did certain elements of the Democratic party in the south and Mid-West. 

And even then the Republicans could not sway significant numbers of white ethnic Catholics until the 1970s and 1980s.

There’s much talk among conservatives about the 11 million illegal immigrants in America.  They focus on the term “illegal” in that sentence. 

Perhaps Gingrich has realized that someone should focus on “11 million” and try and win some of those or their children’s’ votes.

(Contact “Sidewalks” at tomdeignan@earthlink.net or Facebook.com/tomdeignan)
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The good old days? - Anti-Irish, anti-Catholic bigots and the KKK

Thomas Nast cartoon

It is always interesting, at this time of year, to remind people that cartoonist Thomas Nast – beloved
for more or less inventing our cherished image of Santa Claus – was also a wildly anti-Irish, anti-Catholic bigot.

For proof, see any of his cartoons from the late 19th Century in which the Irish look like apes and Catholics are depicted as crocodiles or other scheming, rapacious beasts.

Nast has been in the news of late because an entity called the New Jersey Hall of Fame has suggested that he perhaps be enshrined in their institution.

Such a situation can make you think about many things, but one thing that comes to my mind is that what we think of as “the good old days” were pretty damned bad.
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Oh, without a doubt, we have our problems today.  This is reflected in polls which show that Americans feel about as bad as you can about everything from the economy to Congress.

Along with that, inevitably, comes a feeling that things were once good but we lost something along the way.

Hardly.

Look at politics for a moment.  You bet we have our problems now.  You can say we have a real problem with these boneheaded Tea Party types or these freeloading Occupy Wall Street types.

But that is baby stuff compared to the rough stuff that emerged from the political scene, say, in the 1920s.

In fact, not one but two new books have recently been published about the power and influence of the Ku Klux Klan in the early 20th Century.  Talk about your fun holiday reading!

The titles are One Hundred Percent American: The Rebirth and Decline of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s by Thomas R. Pegram and Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930 by Kelly J. Baker.

In his review of the two books in The New York Times this past Sunday, National Book Award-winner and Irish American historian Kevin Boyle blunders a bit by more or less comparing the Tea Party to the 1920s-era KKK.

“Imagine,” Boyle wrote, “a political movement created in a moment of terrible anxiety, its origins shrouded in a peculiar combination of manipulation and grass-roots mobilization, its ranks dominated by Christian conservatives and self-proclaimed patriots, its agenda driven by its members’ fervent embrace of nationalism, nativism and moral regeneration, with more than a whiff of racism wafting through it.”

He’s speaking, of course, of the Klan, but leading readers to think of the Tea Party.

Even if you agree with Boyle’s characterization of the Tea Party, to see them as inheritors of the Klan’s  tradition says more about the Tea Party’s current critics than it does about the group itself.

If anything, even if you believe the Tea Party is the new Klan, this shows you how much better off we are today.  After all, there’s no denying certain, maybe even many, Tea Party members have dabbled in race-baiting, class warfare and religious zealotry.

But those things are not central to the philosophy of the Tea Party, as they proudly were to the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s.

The Irish, Italians, Jews, the Vatican.  The Klan vociferously fought against all of these things and more.

As Ken Burns’ recent documentary on Prohibition showed, the Klan was making a final stand for a rural, Protestant America that saw cities as mongrelized bastions of sin.

And when Roman Catholic Al Smith was roundly beaten in the 1928 presidential election, it might have seemed the Klan was going to win.

Perhaps most interestingly, Republicans sat out this fight.  This was an intra-Democratic clash, with the ethnic Tammany Hall wing of the Dems doing battle with the racist, anti-immigrant rural wing of the party.

Yes, the KKK had members on the Supreme Court and in Congress and in state houses across the country. But the Klan was eventually ushered off the national stage.

Their paranoid impulses, of course, stuck around.  We see vestiges of it today all across the political spectrum.

Vestiges are one thing.  Burning crosses are another.

(Contact Sidewalks at tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan)

Not much to be thankful for this Thanksgiving

President Reagan and Tip O'Neill

Earlier this month, the University of Ulster announced it would be establishing the John Hume and Tip O’Neill Chair in Peace, designed so that the school in Northern Ireland would become a world leader in peace and conflict resolution studies.

O’Neill’s association with this university stems, of course, from the late House speaker’s longtime interest in Northern Ireland. He was one of the famous “Four Horseman” of Irish American politics -- along with Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Ted Kennedy and Hugh Carey -- who pressed leaders in Ireland, Britain and the North to peacefully resolve the ancient conflict.

But O’Neill was quite good at conflict resolution on this side of the Atlantic. And a lot of Americans would be quite thankful, this holiday week, if we had some political representatives like O’Neill today.

It would also be helpful if people reacquainted themselves with an Irish American guy who served as president from 1980 to 1988. He is an idol of the conservative right, yet worked with the liberal likes of O’Neill, and even -- gasp! -- agreed to tax hikes while he served as president.

You don’t hear that from the Tea Party, do you?

Not that it’s just Republicans who are to blame here. Democrats haven’t exactly come out looking like statesmen, either.

Indeed, even if the so-called congressional super-committee in Washington manages to come up with a last-minute compromise (which looked like a dim prospect as the Irish Voice went to press), not much has been done in the last week to enhance our view of Washington. Compromise remains a dirty word, and neither the Republicans nor Democrats seem willing to do anything to change that.

This was not always the case. Consider the two Irish giants of the 1980s political scene –O’Neill and Reagan.

They were quite different. Reagan’s great-grandfather was from Tipperary, but his background was deeply American as his family settled in the generally non-ethnic Midwest and then California.

O’Neill, on the other hand, was an East Coast ethnic kid, an old style pol who knew, as his famous saying put it, that “all politics is local.”

Also, O’Neill was an old-style New Deal liberal, while Reagan was an icon of the Republican party.

And yet, somehow, the duo managed to work together, in a way that seems unthinkable today.

When you hear the likes of Michele Bachmann bow at the altar of Reagan, you think she is talking about a man who was so ideologically pure that he could not utter the word “Democrat,” much less work closely with such a creature to come up with a compromise economic plan.

And yet, O’Neill and Reagan -- and even a Republican senator named Bob Dole -- did that throughout the 1980s.

Yes, there were early tax cuts Reagan and his allies supported. But when it was clear the U.S. budget was going bust (in part because of Republican support for military spending), Reagan agreed to tax hikes nearly a dozen times in order to keep the country functional.

Now, this is not to pretend that these were the good old days. Many people saw Reagan as a right wing devil and O’Neill as a sell-out.

But it must be said that both Reagan and O’Neill understood something about the Founding Fathers that many of today’s strident political types do not.

Compromise is not a very sexy thing. There’s a fine line between compromise and selling out.
When everyone is cutting deals in a smoke-filled room, we often crave someone who is willing to stand up and be independent.

But the famous Federalist Papers written at the time of America’s founding speak at length about how political factions must compromise.

And make no mistake about it. Irish machine politicians like O’Neill knew a lot about compromising.
From Chicago to New York, they were often challenged by idealistic reformers who had lots of big ideas but knew precious little about actually getting things accomplished.

Yes, the Tea Partiers and others can claim that it is time to break away from a system they view as inherently corrupt. They can claim that the likes of Tip O’Neill were part of the problem, rather than the solution.
But they’d pretty much have to say the same thing about that notorious tax-and-spender Ronald Reagan.

(Contact “Sidewalks” at tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan)

Losing our immigrant values - little coverage of John McCarthy as Steve Jobs mourning continues

Computer scientist - John McCarthy RIP

The world is still reeling from the death of Apple computer whiz Steve Jobs, who died October 5 at the age of 56.

Jobs was recognized as perhaps the foremost pioneer in a field that defined the end of the 20th century, and will surely dominate the early decades of our current century.

It is interesting, then, that not nearly as much attention was paid a few weeks later when a computer scientist named John McCarthy died at the age of 84.

Though not nearly as well known as Jobs, McCarthy was a certified prophet of our current e-world.

According to The New York Times, McCarthy “helped design the foundation of today’s Internet-based computing and…is widely credited with coining the term…artificial intelligence.”

Nearly four decades ago, meanwhile, McCarthy “presented a paper in France on buying and selling by computer, what is now called electronic commerce,” Internet security expert Whitfield Diffie noted in the Times.

There’s no need to belabor the Jobs-McCarthy comparison.  The latter was a secular saint who made Apple one of the hippest and most profitable corporations in the world.

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McCarthy was one of several people who played a key role in formulating the technological world we live in today.

There is, however, one more key similarity. Both Jobs and McCarthy were the children of immigrants.

Jobs’ father was born Abdulfattah Jandali in Syria. He goes by the name of John and famously gave Jobs up for adoption.  

McCarthy, meanwhile, was the son of an Irish immigrant labor organizer in Boston. McCarthy’s dad was a member of the Communist Party, as was his wife, a Lithuanian immigrant active in the women’s suffrage movement.

It’s important to think of McCarthy and Jobs as we slog through yet another depressing chapter in America’s immigration debate.

Lawmakers in Alabama recently passed what is believed to be the most severe immigration law in the U.S., targeting undocumented immigrants.

Over a dozen nations from Latin America and the Caribbean, meanwhile, have joined in the Justice Department's lawsuit against a controversial South Carolina law that would require police officers to contact federal officials if they believe someone is in the country illegally.

Just to make things really interesting, the South Carolina law was signed by Republican Governor Nikki Haley, herself the daughter of immigrants from India.

It is very easy to bash the Republicans and point out that this is the latest battle in a deeply schizophrenic country, where a deep nativist streak does battle with America’s inherent pride in its immigrant tradition.

It is easy -- but necessary.  

We lose something profound when we decide that now, finally, is the time to build walls and seal the borders.  When we convince ourselves that there were absolutely no illegal immigrants back when it was mostly the Irish and Italians and Poles and Jews who were streaming into America.

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But conservatives like Haley, as well as Alabama governor Robert Bentley, are right about one thing.  The federal government has dropped the ball on immigration.  

As a Haley spokesperson put it, “If the feds were doing their job, we wouldn’t have had to address illegal immigration reform at the state level.”

And, yes, we do need to think about criminals and terrorists when we think about immigration.  

But you know what else we need to think about?  What kind of country America is going to be in the 21st century.

And do you what else we need to think about? The next John McCarthy or the next Steve Jobs. 

Again, let’s not pretend we live in a time unlike any other.  Immigrants have always been a lightning rod for controversy.  

Consider McCarthy’s parents, immigrant Communists in Brahmin Boston.  A Catholic and a Jew.  

Surely had you asked a select group of Bostonians what to do with such a couple, they would have told you something about cramming these radicals back into steerage and sending them back to Ireland or Lithuania.

But consider what we would have lost.  Is that sentimental view of immigration?  

Perhaps.  But that doesn’t necessarily make it wrong.

(Contact Sidewalks at tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan)

Occupy Wall Street - NYPD, Ray Kelly and Pat Lynch can’t win

New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Ray Kelly and Patrick Lynch are often at odds.  After all, the former is a “boss,” the New York City police commissioner, while the latter represents the average street cop for the PBA, the city’s largest police union. 

But the crime-fighting duo are also the Irish face of New York City law enforcement. 

The NYPD is not nearly as Irish as it used to be, but to have a guy named Kelly running things, and a guy named Lynch representing thousands of officers illustrates how Irish the NYPD remains.

That being said, these are tough times for Kelly, Lynch and the NYPD.  The department is currently enduring a ticket-fixing scandal in the Bronx.  This comes as cops have also endured other sleazy allegations ranging from rape to racism.

In an article entitled “Is Ray Kelly’s NYPD Spinning Out of Control?,” The New York Observer recently wondered, “Between racist cops, rape cops, ticket-fixers, gun-runners and 'white shirts' gone wild, New York's Finest are losing their shine. Is the commissioner to blame?”
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True, as that same article noted, Kelly is still viewed quite favorably by average New Yorkers.  In fact, 25% of New Yorkers in a recent poll said they would vote for Kelly for mayor, the best showing of any local politician. (Kelly has said he has no interest in City Hall.)

Still, there is trouble looming. Perhaps the biggest problem for Kelly – as well as Lynch’s beat cops – is the ongoing occupation in downtown Manhattan at Zuccotti Park. 

Already we’ve seen ugliness as cops wrestle, pepper spray and otherwise not-so-gently subdue Occupy Wall Street protesters.

It should go without saying that there is plenty of blame to go around here.  No American’s right to assemble and express should be infringed, even if some of those people are peeing and pooping on the street. 

On the other hand, you can imagine an average beat cop’s sentiments towards the protesters.  They have been reassigned from locations all across the city to essentially babysit a ragtag group of folks who (at least some cops might think) don’t seem to have anything better to do.

That, to me, is where things get really interesting.  What do Lynch and other PBA officials think about the Occupy Wall Street movement? 

After all, yes, cops are charged with keeping the peace and keeping the city safe.  But they are also union men and women.

As one 21-year-veteran of the NYPD told the Observer, “We’re working stiffs, we have families to support. People seem to forget that we work as hard as everybody else.”

Furthermore, they are “working stiffs” in a cash-strapped city which actually delayed the hiring of a new class of NYPD recruits back in April.

Other unions, from the United Federation of Teachers to the Service Employees International Union, have expressed support for at least some aspect of the Occupy Wall Street movement.  And yet, police officers have essentially been put into a position where they are in direct opposition to the movement.

In fact, you might go so far as to say the cops are in a position where they literally cannot win.  Their bosses are telling them to monitor the protestors closely, so much so that any messy attempt to keep the ultimate peace might be taped via cell phone camera and end up on YouTube or the front page of the New York Post.
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On the other hand, let’s say the police succeed in essentially muting the pro-union themes among the many messages coming out of Zuccotti park.   Are cops, then, acting against their own best interest?

I hate to sound like an old-fashioned Marxist class warrior, but for the longest time, police officers – for all of the flaws people like to bring up about them  – have been asked to protect the interests of the elite, even though they themselves live far from elite lifestyles. 

To use the terms currently in vogue, your average police officer is without a doubt a member of the 99%.  And yet, it seems as if they are acting on behalf of the 1%.

That old union song asked, “Which side are you on?”  For now, it looks like New York’s Finest have two choices -- bad and worse.

(Contact “Sidewalks” at tomdeignan@earthlink.net)

Please leave John F Kennedy rest in peace

Stephen King

You know how they say it took Richard Nixon - someone with strong anti-Communist credentials – to visit China back in the 1970s?

Well, maybe it’s going to take an Irish Catholic to say something uncomfortable about John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

Enough.  Really.  Enough.

Horror master Stephen King has just writing a 900-page time-traveling novel about how the JFK assassination could have been prevented.

So.  Enough.

This might be the kind of reaction you would expect from a Kennedy-bashing conservative, or a twenty-something slacker who has no interest in any history prior to the great Y2K scare.

That’s not me.  And yet, I’m compelled to, if not banish all Kennedy-related studies, then at least declare a moratorium.

Later this month, we will again mark the anniversary of the assassination that supposedly changed everything.

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Fittingly, as the fateful date approaches, new waves of Kennedy studies wash upon our cultural shores.

Last month there was a new book from Caroline Kennedy about her mom, Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy.

Now there’s Stephen King’s tome and TV pundit Chris Matthews’ new (500 more pages!) book Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero.

Matthews does an interesting job putting the Kennedys on the couch, psychoanalyzing the family dynamic as well as the lingering bigotries they had to confront.

Joe Kennedy Jr., of course, was seen as the family’s brightest light.

For his parents, Joe “would be their bridge to both joining and mastering the WASP society from which they, as Roman Catholics in early twentieth-century America, were barred.”

JFK, meanwhile, had to carve out a space as the “second son,” which is the title of one of Matthew’s chapters.

“Unlike his older brother, bound to a more conventional blueprint, Jack wasn’t under the same pressure. There was a lightness to him, a wry Irishness that blended with the WASP manner rather than aspiring to it,” Matthews writes.

“With that combination, he could enter where his father, mother, and brother could not.”

I’m not suggesting the Kennedys in general and JFK in particular are not interesting.  But I can’t help but think the amount of energy which we continue to focus on this clan means we are no longer interpreting the family and their times.

We are now interpreting the already-countless, already existing interpretations.

There’s also a lot of nostalgia involved in this.

Yes, every generation is susceptible to this.

Nevertheless, certain children of the 1960s have clung to Camelot with a passion bordering on disturbing.

A Washington Post contributor recently wrote, “As a prominent television personality himself, (Chris) Matthews understands the riddle of being constantly in the public eye, but also in another space the public doesn’t see. And he has brought this intuition to a reexamination of JFK, who you might think is the most chronicled and therefore the best understood president in modern history. Not so.”

Not so?  Well, maybe that’s best as it is.

Maybe we already know enough about this president, not to mention his killer and the folks who surrounded this president and his killer.

If you don’t think so then consider King’s new book, simply titled 11/22/63.  If Oliver Stone, in his movie JFK, depicted the assassination of Kennedy as a crime so heinous it simply must have been hatched at the highest levels, then King goes Stone one better.  (FYI: Early reviews suggest King’s book accepts the notion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.)

What King’s book does feature is a character who stumbles upon a portal which allows him to travel back to 1958 and, thus, possibly stop the assassination before it happens.

Maybe the world would still be a great place, then, right?

It’s hard not to look at all of these Kennedy books and realize they have little to do with JFK himself.

They seem to give a voice to our own fantasies about bold, youthful leadership and more innocent times.
 
Very basic questions, of course, would force us to confront the fact that there really were no more or less innocent times.

Ending our JFK obsession would, I believe, force us to grow up a little bit more as a nation.

So let’s let Jack rest in peace.  For a little while.

(Contact “Sidewalks” at tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan)

Rebelling against the Catholic Church - the nuns versus the Cardinals

Cardinal James Francis McIntyre

It is a time of great tension in the Catholic Church.  People are asking questions that people never used to ask.  

 
It seems as if the men in charge cannot keep up with the pace of change, and a widely-read national magazine puts the crisis on the front cover.  

 
The story inside explores “The Catholic Exodus,” and explores the difficulties American parishes are having staffing schools and churches with priests and nuns.

 
You can be forgiven if you think this is a story from 2011.  But it is, in fact, from 40 years earlier.  

 
It was way back in 1970 that Time magazine wrote about the Catholic “exodus,” and tried to explain “why priests and nuns are quitting.”

 
Indeed, it is easy to believe the crisis in the Catholic Church in the U.S. is a fairly recent thing.  

 
But in some ways, the debate that is going on now is an extension of debates that have their roots in the 1960s.

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This came to mind last week when I read about the death of a 95 year-old nun named Anita Caspary.  Her name is no longer a household one, but it was her’s on the cover of Time when the magazine explored the Catholic crisis decades ago.

 
Caspary came to be seen as a “rebel nun” who had a conflict with one of the most powerful Irish American Catholics, Cardinal James Francis McIntyre, who rose through the ranks of the church under Cardinal Francis Spellman, dubbed by one biographer as the “American Pope.”

 
In the end, some 300 nuns initiated a series of changes in day-to-day life that they thought were in the spirit of the times.  

 
Cardinal McIntyre, whose mother was born in Kiltormer, Co. Galway, disagreed.  When all was said and done, the nuns parted ways with the church. Some see it as one of the largest breakaways in Catholic American history.  

 
The trouble between the cardinals and the nun has its roots in the changes wrought by the reforms which came out of the Second Vatican Council.  Spellman had attended the meetings in Rome and feared liberal forces had hijacked the proceedings.

 
Spellman, whose Irish grandparents had settled in Massachusetts, was named sixth archbishop on New York in early 1939.  Later, he would also be named Apostolic Vicar for the U.S. Armed Forces, a key position with World War II looming on the horizon.

 
Since Spellman had to serve New York and the military, he relied heavily on an auxiliary bishop – James Francis McIntyre.

 
Both were seen as traditionalists, at a time when many Irish Americans were still familiar with the sting of anti-Catholicism. (In fact, Spellman accused Eleanor Roosevelt of being anti-Catholic.  When, however, a Catholic ran for president, Spellman supported Richard Nixon, an early indication of the Irish drift away from the Democratic Party.)

 
In the late 1940s, McIntyre went west to become the second Archbishop of Los Angeles.  The area’s population boom made McIntyre an influential figure.

 
When the impact of Vatican II became clear, McIntyre and Spellman were seen as opponents. 

 
The Los Angeles-based Sisters of the Immaculate Heart, however, believed that the time was right to propose a series of changes -- nuns would no longer need to wear habits, or follow traditional Vatican guidelines when it came to prayer and even reading material.

 
The sisters believed they were doing what a good Catholic does -- following the rules that were coming out of the Vatican.  

But McIntyre did not accept the nuns’ proposals. If they moved ahead with their changes they would not be allowed to teach in Catholic schools.

 
“All these changes were taking place without incident in the majority of dioceses around the country. Cardinal McIntyre simply was saying, ‘Not in my diocese,’” Sandra M. Schneiders, a professor emeritus at the Jesuit School of Theology, told The New York Times this week.

 
The 300 nuns eventually formed a communal Christian organization that served the poor and elderly and still has over 150 members.

 
So, while the times are rough these days for American Catholics, maybe they’ve been that way for a long time.

(Contact “Sidewalks” at tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan)

Touch of Southie in Brooklyn as Donnie Wahlberg and Michael Patrick MacDonald speak to students

Michael Patrick Macdonald

What do a former teen heartthrob and a son of Southie have to say to roomful of Brooklyn high school students?

Plenty it turns out.

Last week, an extraordinary meeting of minds took place in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

As regular readers of this column know, I have a day job as an English teacher at Automotive High School.

In my prior life as an Irish Voice reporter, I got to know author Thomas Kelly, best-selling author of books such as Empire Rising, Payback and The Rackets.

Kelly’s latest gig is a job as a writer and producer on the hit CBS TV show Blue Bloods.  The show is about an Irish American family of cops led by patriarch Frank Reagan, the New York City police commissioner, played by Tom Selleck.

One of the main characters in the show is Chief Reagan’s son Danny, played by Donnie Wahlberg, who has appeared in films such as The Sixth Sense, Zookeeper and Saw IV and V.

Of course, in Wahlberg’s past life, he was one-fifth of the chart-topping band New Kids on the Block.  The kids -- now known as NKOTB -- still get together and perform. But Wahlberg has also successfully made the transition from singing to acting.

One thing Kelly and Wahlberg share is a desire to remember where they come from.

Both currently make fine livings in show business, but their beginnings were humble, to say the least.  So they understand that kids in traditionally underserved communities sometimes need different kinds of motivation.

That’s where the Actors and Writers Book Club of the Writers Guild Of America East (WGAE) Foundation comes in.

The club sends actors and writers to high schools to read and discuss works of literature to get students excited about reading, writing and story telling.

So Kelly asked if my students would be interested in a program featuring Wahlberg, as well as the acclaimed memoirist Michael Patrick MacDonald, whose book All Souls: A Family Story of Southie, is perhaps the definitive look at that most Irish of cities, South Boston.

In the past I’d taught MacDonald’s book in my English classes.  Though it is about poor and working class Irish Catholics, the book’s themes have always resonated deeply with my students who are largely black and Hispanic.

MacDonald writes poignantly about the scourges of crime and drugs, fatherlessness, as well as the perseverance of large families living in poverty.

The Southie disdain for snitches and rats is also something my students are quite familiar with.

I decided to spend two weeks with my current 12th grade students (60 overall) reading excerpts from All Souls to prepare them for MacDonald and Wahlberg’s visit.

This was particularly timely since just a few months back, the most infamous South Bostonian of them all, Whitey Bulger, had been arrested.

This time around, my students were consumed by the question of how we -- how MacDonald, how we all -- are shaped by our environment.

Are you destined to follow in the footsteps of alluring criminals like Whitey Bulger, as one of MacDonald’s brothers did?  Or is it possible to not only break the cycle but return to help others do the same, as Michael Patrick MacDonald did?

“Destiny -- that’s a powerful word,” replied Wahlberg last Friday in the Automotive auditorium, when he was asked by a student if he believes “geography is destiny.”

Wahlberg went on to note that his own large family from Dorchester was “poor,” surviving on welfare and “government cheese.”

But Kelly, MacDonald and Wahlberg agreed that with passion and tenacity, you can become anything you want, wherever you come from.

“My own brother was in prison,” Wahlberg added, when the New Kids were getting big.

Wahlberg, of course, is referring to world famous actor and Oscar nominee Mark Wahlberg, most recently seen as Irish Micky Ward in The Fighter.

The Brooklyn teenagers peppered the writers and singer/movie star with questions about acting and singing, passion and show biz.

“That was great,” Wahlberg said afterwards.

And in case anyone thought he was merely acting, he vowed to return to the school for a basketball game when the season kicks off next month.

Was Catholicism worse than Communism?

John Banville

If you are looking for a good anti-Catholic rant, you can listen to certain Evangelical Protestants or rigid atheists.

But why bother? Many Catholics these days are as reliably anti-Catholic as the Vatican’s oldest enemies.

This is understandable, given the revelations of the last decade or so.

Living as a devout Catholic requires a tremendous amount of dedication and sacrifice. That was especially true in a largely Protestant nation such as America, where Irish Catholics were a distinct minority for the century or so following the Famine.

But these days, it seems as if Catholics are the ones who want to throw stones at the stained glass windows.

This was made crystal clear by two recent developments in the ongoing tension between the Irish and Rome.

First came the announcement that members of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) have filed a complaint with the International Criminal Court in The Hague, outlining how Vatican officials tolerated and enabled “the systematic and widespread concealing of rape and child sex crimes,” as Irish American SNAP leader David Clohessy has written.

Clohessy added, “After many years of effort in the United States and around the world, the (abuse) problem became too big to ignore. … We finally began to feel heard. And now we want these crimes investigated and prosecuted.”

Clohessy knows this move may not be popular.

“Some may be shocked that we are accusing the world leader of a church, a man considered by many people of faith to be a holy leader. But one cannot be the head of an institution and escape accountability for that institution’s continuing criminal cover-ups,” he writes.

Clohessy then quoted Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Enda Kenny, who said, “The rape and torture of children were downplayed, or ‘managed,’ to uphold instead the primacy of the institution — its power, its standing and its reputation.”

Most observers feel that SNAP’s ploy is not likely to be successful -- unless, of course, by successful they mean drawing more attention to an urgent problem.

Still, whatever the technical outcome, trying to haul the Vatican before a human rights tribunal means that at least some people want to equate priestly crimes with systematic atrocities committed under brutal dictatorships in places such as Haiti and China and Chile. Or, for that matter, old Communist regimes.

Which is why I was taken aback when I heard a recent interview with acclaimed Irish writer John Banville, a widely admired writer who has won the Booker Prize (for his novel The Sea) and is now gaining a larger following for his mystery novels, written under the pen name Benjamin Black.

Banville told the editor of The New York Times Book Review that Ireland in the fifties “was a time of great secrecy. We were in the clutch of the Catholic Church. The church for us was what the Communist party was for Eastern Europe.

“We only discovered this when we got older, how unfree we were. And everything was hidden, as we have discovered, to our horror, in the past five or 10 years.”

Are SNAP and Banville right? Do the church’s transgressions rise to the level of the 20th century’s worst dictatorial regimes?

We probably do need to make distinctions between Ireland and America, though Catholicism did pervade big-city parishes in the U.S. nearly as thoroughly as it did elsewhere.

Indeed, Banville’s comparison is particularly jolting for Irish Americans. They often flaunted their anti-Communism to prove to native WASPs just how patriotic they could be.

And now it is being said they themselves were no better off than the victims of Communism?

I’d say SNAP may be on to something, but I will respectfully disagree with Banville.

Moreso in Ireland, but also in America, parish institutions pervaded every aspect of life. To say they were as negatively pervasive as Communism’s rigged elections and secret police is simply too strong a case to make.

The saddest thing, of course, is that the case can actually be made at all.

(Contact tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan)

Governor Christie’s ‘crazy’ Catholic problem - why he relishes conflict

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie

Last May, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie explained why he seems to relish conflict.

“I have an Irish father,” said Christie, who on Tuesday announced that he would not seek the GOP presidential nomination, “and I had…a Sicilian mother. For those of you who have been exposed to the combination of Irish and Sicilian, it has made me not unfamiliar with conflict.”

Meanwhile, Christie’s wife, Mary Pat, has not only been tabbed as a highly influential partner. She is also “the ninth of 10 kids in a close-knit Irish Catholic family,” according to the New York Post.

A long time family friend, New Jersey state Senator Joe Kyrillos, was recently quoted as saying, “(Mary Pat) does not get pushed around. She’s a tough Irish woman. She comes from a family of 10 kids!”
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So, if Christie ultimately decided to throw his (ample) weight behind a presidential run, it would have added a decidedly Irish Catholic flair.

And that could have been a big problem.

On the surface, an Irish Catholic Republican is no big deal these days. The problems come when you dig deeply into the conservative GOP base, where strong vestiges of anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant sentiment still linger.

Now, it is true that Republicans already have a Catholic (Rick Santorum) and a Mormon (Mitt Romney) in their crowded field. But it’s also true that neither of them have exactly wowed vast numbers of Republicans.
And as one religious expert wrote in The New York Times in July, “Hardline fundamentalists remain anti-Mormon (and anti-Catholic, for that matter); they may not ever support any but their own.”

And let’s not forget the Muslims! Christie himself scolded conservatives who groaned when the governor appointed Muslim American Sohail Mohammed to the New Jersey Superior Court.

“I think it is terrible to try to exclude someone from office based only on his religion, and that’s what was happening here,” said Christie, before looking back to a pivotal moment in Irish Catholic American history.

“President Kennedy had to stand up in Houston and say his own personal faith wouldn’t intersect with his public life. Since then I thought we wouldn’t have any more of this ridiculousness,” he said.

Christie also famously said, “I’m tired of dealing with crazies.”

Well, that’s just what he would have had to deal with if he had jumped into the race.

Catholicism remains a problem when you wander away from the moderate Republicanism of the Northeastern suburbs and into the more intense hotbeds of evangelical Protestantism in the south and West.

Michele Bachmann has been linked to a Lutheran church with nearly half a million members whose admiration for Reformation leader Martin Luther has led them to label the papacy “the anti-Christ.”

Yes, Bachmann has left this particularly loving church. But how many Democrats do you really think are among the half a million members of the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod?

Meanwhile, don’t forget that John McCain had to repudiate the endorsement of a notorious anti-Catholic preacher four years ago.

“The McCain campaign had already endured a series of other disclosures of controversial past statements from (Reverend John) Hagee about his views of Catholics,” the Times noted in 2008.

Hagee is far from a footnote these days. Word is he is thinking of endorsing Rick Perry.

The point of this is not to tar these candidates with the radical views of certain anti-Catholics. The point is to note that a significant number of influential conservatives still hold these views.

Now, it is true Christie is solidly opposed to abortion. But as his defense of a Muslim American judge suggests, he has also taken a generally moderate stance on immigration. (As, by the way, did Ronald Reagan, as Linda Chavez noted in an interesting New York Post column last week.)

It all comes down to this -- how will this ethnic Catholic who won’t bash immigrants and who talks about John F. Kennedy in a positive light fair in the Republican primary?

How many “crazies” would Christie have listened to before his famous temper made it clear that he is quite unelectable?

We won’t find out this time around, but maybe in four years . . .

(Contact “Sidewalks” at tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan)

Governor Rick Perry’s gaffes and the heart and soul of immigration in the US

Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry (AP Photo/Joe Burbank, Pool)

So Texas Governor Rick Perry went ahead and voiced support for the radial notion that the children of illegal immigrants should be able to pay in-state tuition costs when they attend college.

Furthermore, Perry, running for the GOP nod for the presidency in 2012, suggested that since immigrants tend not to hail from the elite classes, making sure they have access to college might actually pay off for America in the long run.

You know what this means. It may be time to serve up the Perry toast. He may well be done.

Ever since Perry made these comments at a GOP debate late last week, Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann and other Republicans desperate to make their anti-immigration sentiments clear have been bashing Perry as “soft on immigration” (Rick Santorum’s actual words).

Can Perry survive his admission that, sometimes, you have to “have a heart” when it comes to certain vulnerable citizens?  It is amazing, in a race filled with so-called Christians, that this comment would actually cause a stir.

It is also interesting that this immigration scuffle came the same week that venerable, Pulitzer-Prize winning historian Oscar Handlin passed away, at the age of 95.

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Handlin’s most famous work was written way back in the early 1950s.  Entitled The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations that made the American People, Handlin changed the way we think about immigrants and immigration.  He did so at a time of hyper-American patriotism, and, hence, disinterest in all things “ethnic.”

Handlin himself was a wise college investment.  He was one of four sons of an immigrant grocer from Russia.  And yet he went on to become a Harvard professor, and turned to the Irish for his first book about Boston’s immigrants.

But it was in The Uprooted that he did something quite radical.  He looked at the Irish as well as the other major American immigrant groups and argued that, as The New York Times put it, “Immigration -- more than the frontier experience, or any other episode in its past -- was the continuing, defining event of American history.”

Imagine saying this in 1950s America. There had not yet been a Catholic in the White house. World War II had (supposedly) erased so many ethnic differences and immigration quotas from the 1920s had drastically reduced the number of foreign-born Americans.

In fact, in the early 1950s, venerable Ellis Island was shuttered with very little fanfare, and many of its buildings were left to rot.

Handlin, though, captured the misery as well as the drama and triumph of the Irish and Germans and Italians and Slavs who emigrated to the U.S.  By implying that the journeys of these humble immigrants -- and not the struggles of the founding fathers or the cowboys in the west – is what “made the American people,” Handlin was doing quite a bold thing in early 1950s America.

This, after all, was an era when adding the words “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance passed for social reform.

Since the 1920s, Americans had proven themselves fed up with immigrants. If you want proof of this, check out Ken Burns’ new documentary of the Prohibition-era, set to air on PBS stations Sunday, October 2.

It is no accident that immigration restrictions and the prohibition of alcohol were passed within a few years of each other.  The anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant Ku Klux Klan also rode to prominence once again in the twenties.

Middle American Protestants were fed up with what they viewed as the corrupt ethnic cities, with their exotic religions and old world vices.  Irish pubs and political machines, German radicals, Italian gangsters, all of these flamed fear of the big bad city.

It took 25 years for Oscar Handlin to weed through such stereotypes to find the poetry, the sadness, and the epic heroism, in the immigrant story.

And yet, the likes of Bachmann and Santorum believe that the way to the White House is to blast Perry (of all people) for charging in-state tuition to the children of illegal immigrants.

The sad part is, such comments have consistently been met with lusty applause at Republican debates, with Bachmann calling for fences "on every mile, on every yard, on every foot" of the Texas-Mexico border.

Almost makes you glad you can still have drink.

Then again, that may change if any of these folks actually get into the Oval Office.
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Irish ghosts haunt the presidential campaign trail

Ron Paul. (AFP/Getty Images)

As Martin McGuiness embarks on an Irish presidential race that is sure to resurrect a fair share of ghosts from the past, Americans are also slogging their way through a tough presidential campaign.

Recently, an interesting spat broke out involving a controversial candidate, a current Irish newspaper columnist, and a fascinating yet forgotten pundit from the past.

The next thing you knew, the charges of anti-Semitism and McCarthyism were flying, and it was real hard to tell who the liberal and who the conservative was.

More broadly, there is ongoing confusion about the Irish and their politics in America.  Were they really predominately union-loving Democrats before becoming, predominately (or not) Reagan-loving Republicans?

Perhaps it’s time for you to meet John T. Flynn. Flynn is touted as a great thinker by the presidential campaign of Republican maverick -- or is that kook? -- Ron Paul.

On the campaign trail, Paul touts Flynn’s many controversial books, such as As We Go Marching, The Epic of Freedom and The Road Ahead.

Though Mitt Romney and Rick Perry get all the press, Paul recently placed second in a closely watched Iowa straw poll and often places an impressive third in Republican polls.

The number of folks who remember Flynn is small these days, but he was a towering intellectual figure -- loved and loathed -- in the 1930s and ‘40s.

What did Flynn believe?  Well, that’s where things get complicated.

John Thomas Flynn was born outside of Washington in 1882 to John and Margaret
Donovan Flynn.  As John E. Moser writes in the 2005 book John T. Flynn and the Transformation of American Liberalism, “In good Irish Catholic fashion, (Flynn) was educated in parochial schools.”


Famed for his passionate argument, an intellectual adversary once described him as an “eternal Hibernian in eruption.”
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Flynn rose to prominence as a basher of the elite and supporter of FDR’s New Deal, which aimed to heal the scars of the Great Depression.  So, Flynn’s a liberal, right?

Well, not quite.  He grew to hate Roosevelt, seeing the president himself as an elite.  He later embraced the rabid anti-Communism of fellow Irish Catholic Joseph McCarthy.

Super-conservative, right?  Well, no, because Flynn clashed with right-wing icon William F. Buckley and bashed military spending as a problem which drove Americans into debt.

He also opposed American military involvement abroad, and was a prominent member of the America First Committee, along with Socialist Norman Thomas and hero-turned-Jew-baiter Charles Lindbergh.  This opened Flynn up to charges of anti-Semitism.

To this day, no one can quite piece the puzzle of John T. Flynn together.

Irish American Newark Star-Ledger columnist Paul Mulshine, for example, is a Paul supporter who has traded barbs with a conservative radio host named Mark Levin.

A recent article in the American Spectator magazine argued, “When a [Ron] Paul supporter like…Mulshine repeatedly zeros in on conservative talk radio host Mark Levin, always dismissing the Jewish Mr. Levin…Mulshine seems to be conjuring the ghosts of Ron Paul’s favorite, John T. Flynn.”

In other words, Mulshine -- and Flynn -- are anti-Semites.

Mulshine would have none of this, noting that he is “as Irish as Paddy’s pig.”

On occasion Mulshine also calls “Sean Hannity…as dumb as a Dublin doorknob.”  That, Mulshine says, “does not make me anti-Irish.”

Perhaps the only tradition John T. Flynn fits neatly into is the very complicated Irish American political tradition.

Like many Irish Democrats, Flynn was raised to be wary of elites. And yet, like Joseph P. Kennedy, his belief (perhaps because they were still insecure Catholic in Protestant America) was that Americans should not sacrifice their lives in foreign wars.  Especially ones which allied them with the British.

Finally, like Joe McCarthy and, yes, even the sainted Bobby Kennedy, anti-Communism was a central tenet for John T. Flynn.

That’s one reason why, in 2000, the fanatically anti-Communist John Birch Society named Flynn, alongside dictators such as Franco and Pinochet, as one of its top 25 heroes.

Interestingly, the fellow who wrote the list for the Birchers was the group’s Brooklyn-born President, a lad named John F. McManus.

Where does that leave us in 2012?  I guess it means that a vote for Ron Paul is a vote for John T. Flynn.

What that means exactly is entirely up to you.