One of my least favorite people who I have encountered on Saint Blog’s. I recall circa 2011 when she and Shea were claiming that it was a mortal sin to use undercover agents against Planned Parenthood. Now they are both devotees of the political party that views abortion as a secular sacrament. As an aside, I have found that anyone who puts academic degrees after their name, except in limited professional circumstances, is invariably someone to avoid.
Dawn of the Party of the Jackass
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
Ugh. I knew a Harvard lawyer who got his law degree at Harvard and made sure that everyone who talked to his Harvard-lawyer self found out about a certain thing he’d done….
Families, immigrants, working people, and the poor.
I’m unaware of squat the Democratic Party does for families qua families. Public agencies should not be doing much of anything for immigrants qua immigrants; if your immigration policy is manufacturing clients for the welfare department, you’re using the wrong screens; the Democratic Party does nothing for employed persons qua employed persons, either. It does nothing very important for ‘the poor’ either except perhaps to make the definition thereof less stringent in order to expand the clientele of means-tested programs. (It’s dead set against improving inner city schooling or reducing the frequency of inner-city crime).
The evolution of Eden’s cultural, social, and political viewpoint over the last 30 years is something to ponder if you’ve the time. While we’re at it, please note that she doesn’t know much about certain subject.
Hey, Donald, I occasionally use the phd, particularly when at a medical appointment. And if during the conversation I can drop the name and study pursued for that “piled higher and deeper,” it more often than not gets better service.. One wants to be on an equal footing, As for Dawn, she’s irrational, and with all due respect for post-graduate study, not all disciplines require a rational mind. BTW, what is STHD a doctoral degree in? Social Theology?
Bob, my professor in legal ethics, the late and great Ron Rotunda, related the time his unemployed phd brother got them a table at a restaurant by referring to himself as Doctor Rotunda, after Ron had been turned down! I think her doctoral degree is in Sacred Theology. A General once told me that an officer who was continually throwing around his rank at every opportunity, probably had the leadership ability of a flea.
Not surprising at this point. BTW, in fairness to Shea, initially when the report was released, he was head of the pitchfork brigade when it came to calling for Planned Parenthood to be burned to the ground. And he wasn’t alone. I can’t recall anyone at the time who wasn’t outraged. It was Eden and some other fellow who published the infamous ‘wait a second everyone, we need perfect honesty before saving the innocent’. Which led to the wretched ‘liars for Jesus’ period, culminating in a pediatrician Mark linked to who said he would let a thousand children be tortured to death rather than compromise our souls by telling even a white lie to save them. That was when I began to suspect online teachers of Catholic doctrine weren’t all they were cracked up to be.
I have a suspicion some people just get lost in verbal assemblages of their own manufacture. What’s meant to render their thinking more reliable and systematic ends up misleading them.
I don’t see Eden and Shea as equivalents. Shea strikes me as someone consumed by his emotional self. Eden strikes me as someone suffering from a dearth of social connections in meatspace (she is 55 and has never married or had any children).
Art:
I live in central California and am surrounded by Harris-fans, Trump-haters and all sorts of nutty liberals whose ideas I can’t stand. But being around these people reminds me that they are (for all their nuttiness) human beings, as flawed as I am. So I can still despise their ideas, but I don’t feel as negative towards them (in most cases). It’s spiritually dangerous to lose sight of the humanity of your political opponents, which seems to happen to too many blogatyrs (pardon my Russian neologism).
Attempts to humiliate the base on the right were what gave rise to Trump’s presidential run in the first place.
If the Republicans had forced McCain on us, doubled down with the even worse Romney, and told us that we had to hold our noses and vote for them, because the public would never support anyone who cared about petty things like illegal immigration, then Trump never would have gotten off the ground.
But they made the MAGA movement permanent when they didn’t even have the grace to hold their noses and support Trump when he as the nominee.
There is no way that Never Trumpers can stop what they have unleashed. Every attempt they make to bring things back to the “status quo” only makes the MAGA movement more popular.
Doctorates in “whatever” have never impressed me. Including doctorates in engineering of which I have met a few -they were unimpressive academics who never actually worked a project.
“As an aside, I have found that anyone who puts academic degrees after their name, except in limited professional circumstances, is invariably someone to avoid.”
AMEN! As someone that has more letters than the average person, I can say that in a professional career spanning 50 years I can’t EVER remember telling anyone I had them. I have had to prove that I did for various admissions but not in the name.
My beloved wife, who started but never completed any degrees, preferring to raise our children and grandchildren, used to say that people get dumber with each successive degree. I tried not to take offense since I have four, But I think she’s right. What she did have was a childlike Faith, unbelievable common sense with occasional really profound insights. She showed people who she was (1 Cor. 13) not what she was.
The corollary to this are people that have a PhD and insist upon being called Doctor.
AMEN! As someone that has more letters than the average person, I can say that in a professional career spanning 50 years I can’t EVER remember telling anyone I had them. I have had to prove that I did for various admissions but not in the name.
In forty-one years I have had one client out of thousands of clients ask me where I went to law school.
No one forced Republican voters to cast ballots for the succession of characters who were nominated over the period running from 1988 to 2012. AFAICT, about 1/3 of the Republican electorate always voted for the same person – “the guy whose turn it is”. That proved an insuperable hurdle for the other candidates. When the most recent runner-up was outre (e.g. Pat Buchanan), they reached for the previous one (R. Dole) or they reached for the son of the previous president (GW Bush). Note also that the competitive candidates during those years were generally of the careerist / Capitol Hill apparatchik variety. The people who had an actual fixed perspective tended to be demonstration candidates rallying a constituency or pressing a discrete issue (see Pat Robertson, Pat Buchanan, Steve Forbes, Alan Keyes, Ron Paul). It’s doubtful any of them actually wanted the office in question. The exceptions might have been Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, and Newt Gingrich.
I don’t know what happened to that lunkhead electorate, but I do know that the candidates Glitch McConnell would have preferred in 2016 collared about 25% of the vote in the Republican primaries. Ted Cruz on his own outpolled all of them together. The donor crew McConnell cultivates puked money into Jeb Bush’s coffers and he proceeded to make a bonfire with it. There was definitely a cultural shift in those four years. Some of it may have been actuarial tables, some of it may have been a realization of just how malevolent the Democratic Party is and some of it may have been a realization of how crooked and worthless was the congressional caucus leadership.
I think Art it was the disappointment over the Romney loss. Republican voters were never that enthusiastic about Romney but they were told he was electable, and then he did worse than McCain in 2008. It was that bitter disappointment and the suspicion that too many in the GOP establishment were happy to be Avis, laid the groundwork for an outsider like Trump. The reaction of some professional Republicans to flipping and supporting Clinton in 2016, Biden in 2020 and Harris now, convinced many Republican voters that too many commenters and strategists for the GOP were simply grifters all along.
This is a melancholy reminder of some Catholic voices from what seems like a decade ago. Poor Eden! She really seems to have lost her mind; she was always so quick to block or ban those who disagreed with her (a’ la Elizabeth Scalia–anyone remember her?)–not the mark of a true Doctor of S. Theology, at least not of the Scholastic variety (i.e. the best).
And Mark Shea! I barely remember him except for the vitriol towards his opponents and the obsequious way in which he indulged the quasi-Marxists who regularly contributed to his blog. I wonder if he ever found peace?
Finally, Steve Skojec! The Cautionary Tale himself. I hope these sad cases at length found some kind of peace and consolation!