Judging by the spittle-flecked hatred coming his way, Attorney General Bill Barr scored a bull’s-eye on the intolerant left with his speech at Notre Dame Saturday defending religious liberty.
For 50 years, he said, militant secularists have been waging deliberate war on the Judeo-Christian morality that underpins our system of government, with terrible consequences for the health of our society, including family breakdown, alienated males, drug addiction, depression and suicide.
He explained that the Founding Fathers set up America as a unique “experiment” in which they trusted the people to govern themselves.
But for this to work it needed people of virtue and moral discipline, capable of imposing internal restraints over their own base instincts rather than having restraints imposed by the state.
Religion helps form those internal restraints and “teach, train, and habituate people to want what is good.”
Barr quoted John Adams: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.”
No secular system of values has yet been found that replaces the role of religion. What we call “values” today are just the “vapor trails of Christianity.”
The Founding Fathers knew the greatest risk to America would not come from external foes but would be because its people couldn’t handle freedom, said Barr.
It’s a brilliant, clear-headed speech, and you don’t have to be religious to appreciate the historical logic.
The problem today is that militant secularists — as in people who hate religion and want to drive it out of the public square, if not eradicate it by force — are not content to live and let live.
As if to prove Barr’s point, the assault on his speech was swift and vicious, especially at that woke citadel of militant secularism, The New York Times.
Readers could barely contain their rage in 1,500 odd comments gathered under a column trashing Barr by Occupy Wall Street fan Paul Krugman, titled “God is now Co-conspirator.”
Krugman dismissed the distinguished lawyer, who has served his nation twice as attorney general, as a mere Trump “minion,” preaching the stuff of “witch hunts and pogroms.”
“How inappropriate” for Barr, “of all people,” to give such a speech, Krugman wrote. The “nation’s chief law enforcement officer has no business denouncing those who exercise that freedom by choosing not to endorse any religion.”
Of course, Barr had said nothing of the sort.
It’s hard to believe that anyone acting in good faith, who listened to the speech or read the transcript, could possibly have drawn the conclusions in Krugman’s column.
It’s not clear whether his comprehension skills are disordered or he just was so determined to malign Barr that he went off half-cocked on the basis of a couple of quotes in news stories.
Surely a professional columnist wouldn’t pronounce on something he hadn’t seen. The speech is only 37 minutes long, just 4,000 words.
Whether or not Krugman familiarized himself with the material before penning his diatribe, his perverse misrepresentation of Barr’s speech does his readers a grave disservice.
Not that most of them seemed to mind, commenting freely about a mythical speech Barr did not give and that they had not bothered to watch.
Supremely confident in their ignorance, they concluded Barr was “a repressed, sanctimonious fundamentalist Catholic,” “a self-righteous phony,” “a disgrace to his office,” “someone who believes in magic spirits in the sky,” “Bible toting bigot!” “Trump enabler,” “scariest person,” “disturbing, disingenuous, disgusting.”
The speech was “practically straight out of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale.’”
It was “theocracy based on Opus Dei principles,” “authoritarian boilerplate,” “fanatical,” “the ole’ Catholic Inquisition,” “theocracy based on Opus Dei principles,” “Constitutional depravity,” “fascism,” “fanaticism.”
“Anyone who believes in preposterous mythologies is not qualified to hold a governmental position.”
“William ‘Barr’ should be disbarred!”
“Eliminate the religious tax exemption.”
A Biden curse
It was hard not to feel sorry for Hunter Biden during his ABC interview this week, as he tried to explain the nepotism that has sparked such controversy. He might be 49, but he has the air of a lost boy.
When you know about his childhood it makes sense. He was 3 when he was injured in a car crash that killed his mother and baby sister. By all reports his father, Joe Biden, was a loving but largely absent father in Washington.
Hunter has suffered addiction issues and appears to hero-worship his dad.
“There’s literally nothing, as a young man or as a full-grown adult that my father in some way hasn’t had influence over,” he said, admitting he “probably” would not have been paid $50,000 a month to join the board of a Ukranian gas company if his father hadn’t been vice president.
“I don’t think that there’s a lot of things that would have happened in my life if my last name wasn’t Biden.”
It is Joe Biden who is at fault for placing his trusting son in an invidious position, and he’s still not taking responsibility.
Pete kicks ‘Butt’
The meanest, but most satisfying, moment of the Dem debate Tuesday night was Pete Buttigieg’s pungent zinger for poor Beto O’Rourke.
“I don’t need lessons from you on courage,” the Navy veteran told the overgrown skateboarder. Ouch.
So Mayor Pete packs a punch behind the choirboy good looks.
He also landed a beauty on Elizabeth Warren for evading questions on the multitrillion-dollar costs of Medicare for All: “Your signature, Senator, is to have a plan for everything. Except this.”
But he left it to Amy Klobuchar to really sink the boot in, telling Warren: “The difference between a plan and a pipe dream is a plan is something that you can actually get done.”
The “pipe dream” tag will come to define Warren.