Mr. McCain seems to be making the argument that because there are liberals who claim to profess the Catholic faith, therefore, ipso facto, Catholicism and Catholic social teaching are liberal. As we say in Catholic circles (when considering bad Catholics & good non-Catholics) “there are many wolves within and many sheep without”. Mr. McCain is, no doubt, a friendly sheep who, in scourging the ravenous wolves within (the Catholic Church) commits the error of thinking that the wolves are the Church, or at any rate the social thinking side of the Church.

Perhaps it shocks our esteemed colleague that there are men and women—alas, cardinals, even!—who clothe their revolutionary thought in a whitewash of ostensibly Catholic terminology (c.f. Dr. Zmirak’s aforemention Catholic Bull-whatnot Generator) but who actually have no sympathy or understanding of Catholicism except as a convenient vehicle for advancing themselves and their ideas. But the point of Dr. Zmirak’s Catholic Bull-ahem Generator is not that the Bull-whatnot produced actually is Catholic but rather the opposite: it is Bull that is created by Catholics, for Catholics, and with a make-believe “Catholic” aura, but that, despite all this, there is next to nothing actually Catholic about it.

Also, to throw back the stone which has been hurled, is Mr. McCain not aware that there are Protestants who are die-hard propagandists for the Clinton-Bush-Obama liberal-imperial cause? And for Obama-Hillary health socialism? I am sure that should you spin the globe of error and put your finger down on some random evil cause, there will be a Catholic, a Protestant, and a Jew working together for its advancement (and probably with a Washington think-tank to back them up).

Where dear Robert is wrong is when he says I believe the Church “is a bulwark of conservatism”. Not so: it is a bulwark of truth, which is quite another thing entirely. Nonetheless, our esteemed colleague is undoubtedly correct is when he writes:

There can be little doubt about this. Instead of accepting the task charged to them by successive popes, Catholic leadership since at least the First World War, and probably longer, has concentrated more on steering a “middle” course between the revolutionary Left and the revolutionary Right, and often not even bothering about the course being middle. In fact, they should have been laying the education, economic, and social bases for the rejection of the revolutionary danse macabre by the souls in their care. The fact that they either failed (as in Germany with the Volksverein & Italy with the Unione Popolare) or never bothered trying (as in America) is something which we can all lament.

As for the Austrian school of economics Mr. McCain professes such a devotion to, I admit being woefully ignorant of it other than a few articles I’ve read on the website of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and thus incapable of judging it. I suspect that there might be a lot that is useful in Austrian economics, but, being a pragmatist at the end of the day, it all comes down to what is done with it. If Austrian economics is used to increase the prosperity of all and further the decentralization of power, then bully for it! However, if it is used to bulldoze peasant villages to make way for shopping malls and to demolish classical buildings to be replaced with glass-plated monstrosities, then all that can be said is “Take aim and fire!”

To fulfill my esteemed colleague Robert Stacy McCain’s prediction that “daring to think that perhaps Leo XIII could have been mistaken about political economy will, of course, get you denounced in a hurry by the same kind of devout Catholics who praise your writings on marriage, abortion and homosexuality”, I should like to denounce his suggestion about Leo XIII. Mr. McCain is, as he admits, a proud Protestant, and Protestantism (along with Socialism, Capitalism, & Liberalism) is on the side of the Revolution (the writings of Dr. John C. Rao on this theme are worth reading).

It is no surprise then when a Protestant or a conservative (in the American sense of the word) condemns the ideas of Catholic social thought — its day in the sun, alas, has not yet come — but blaming Leo XIII for “liberation theology” is a bit like blaming Evelyn Waugh for the rise of foppery in England after the 1981 “Brideshead Revisited” miniseries. “Liberation theology” and prancing about college with a teddy bear are both worthy of condemnation, but we musn’t commit the schoolboy error of throwing the baby out with the bath water by ridding ourselves of Catholic social teaching or the novels of Evelyn Waugh.

This is the issue I explore in a piece on the latest in a long series of changes at the Paris-based newspaper owned by the New York Times. The Times used to share ownership of the IHT with the Washington Post, but ever since it wrangled complete ownership from the Post in 2007, its been one bad idea after another at the Herald Tribune.

While the late Alexander Solzhenitsyn was well-known as a critic of Communism, I believe he will be remembered more for his criticism of the West—best summarized in his 1978 commencement address at Harvard University—and I say so here.

The shady powers that control the world wide web have announced that everything you now know about the internet is about to change. Top level domains, or TLDs, are things such as .com, .org., .us and so on. Some are descriptive — .com, commercial; .edu, education — and others are geographical — .ca, Canada; .de, Germany — while still more are both — .com.au, commercial & Australian; .ac.uk, academic & British.

Now that you have gotten used to them all, ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) have decided to open the floodgates and are planning to allow almost anything to be a TLD. Veteran ICANN-watchers will not be terribly surprised by this, as the consortium has tended towards greater laxity and disorder. First they introduced “.info”, extending TLDs to four letters straight, then they introduced the horrendously unhandsome “.museum” (would not “.mus” have been more sensible?). The do-gooders over at ICANN have now simply thrown up their hands and said “Feck it all, sort yourselves out”.

Libertarians will, no doubt, rejoice, but I think there was a certain harmony and order to the current (soon to be previous) set-up. The stalwart .com, the stately .co.uk, the exotic .co.za, the “we weren’t quick enough to get a .com address” .net, the slightly suspicious .cn — all these will stay, but they will be diminished by the addition of God knows what. Perhaps .sex, or .drugs, or .rocknroll. Maybe we will see the heralds of progress change their URLs: weeklystandard.neo and thenation.lib? How about johnmccain.war and obama.tax? The ever-fading National Review might try to recall its better days with nationalreview.wfb.

And what about we conservatives? There is at least some comfort for Knickerbocker reactionaries like me in that we may one day have email addresses that end in @yahoo.nn (for New Netherland), and I know of at least a dozen Europeans who would love to have to have @yahoo.sri addresses (that’s Sacrum Romanum Imperium, not Sri Lanka). I just hope the good people of Newfoundland grab .nfl before the football people do.

He’s about as conservative as most urban liberal Republicans but the new Mayor of London, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, has New York beat in that he was actually born in New York, whereas Michael Bloomberg is of decisively foreign birth (Brighton, Massachusetts, to be precise). So the Mayor of London, England was born in New York, and the Mayor of New York was born in New England. I’ve written a bit more of our mayoral connections here on my own “blog”.