Father Greeley Unhinged

By John Julian Vecchione

I just read Father Andrew Greeley's unhinged analysis of the present moment on RealClearPolitics' website. In it, Father Greeley compares the present liberation of Iraq with Hitler's aggression in search of Lebensraum. Father Greeley also attacks the "neo-cons" for driving us into this war: a war approved by both houses of Congress and entered only after 17 different U.N resolutions on Saddam Hussein.

The good prelate mentions nothing about our more than 35 nation allies (who have lost men during the war), nor the sarin and mustard gas canisters found in Iraq, or the completely illegal missiles, or the funding of terrorists, hiding of Abu Nidal and other terrorists in Baghdad, the mass graves, corrupt oil for food starvation technique, the wars of aggression by Saddam Hussein against his neighbors or the assassination attempt against an ex-President of the United States. Nor does he address the Al Queda links detailed by Stephen Hayes in his new book.

Father Greeley, a man of the Left, uses the Big Lie, effectively. Rather than seeing the removal of Saddam's fascist regime as a pure good, like the removal of Mussolini's and Hitler's, Father Coughlin compares George Bush to the latter dictator. Worse yet, Father Greeley publishes this in and from Berlin! Just as the notorious Father Coughlin accused FDR of truckling to the Jews and getting America involved in an unnecessary war, Father Greeley hurls the "neocon" epithet and for good measure blames Bush's Protestantism for the war. Yes, the aggressive Jews and the blinkered Protestants always combining to lay waste to innocent middle-eastern mass killers. I will not even go into the counter historical nonsense Father Cough...Greeley pedals as a lead up to his slanders.

The final matter however is his paean to John Kerry. A man who voted for the war, says it was necessary and he would change only how it was conducted (for instance with his vote it would be conducted without the 87 billion dollars needed support the troops). Now, personally I think John Kerry is lying to preserve his political viability, but Greeley, who supports him, must as well. Otherwise, how is the prosecution of the Iraq war, which John Kerry says he would have done, and would continue, Hitleresque under George Bush and Homeric under John Kerry? How does the Marshal Plan to rebuild Europe and the Berlin airlift to preserve it from Stalinism lauded by Greeley differ in kind from the aid now give to Iraq and the military efforts to prevent Iran and Syria from conquering it?

Worse, he adds fuel to anti-Americanism in Germany, a country America has no cause to look to for moral uplift, and where anti-intellectual leftist pap like this does not have to be imported. Germany used all of its diplomatic, economic and military might in the 40's to support mass murdering dictatorships against America, and it uses all of its diplomatic, economic and military resources to support a mass murdering dictatorship against America today. It had a media savvy priestly anti-American admirer then, and evidently it has one today.

Father Greeley should stick to frothy, racy, novels set in Chicago, and forgo any analysis of geopolitics. He embarrasses his faith (and mine); his country, his city, and his publisher.

Posted by publius at June 12, 2004 04:33 PM