The Diplomatic Dimwit Strikes Again!

He's done it again.

Our beloved half-wit has demoted the Pope publicly,
evidently thinking that "eminence" was high enough!

(from Whispers in the Loggia)

POTUS Demotes Pope

The protocol's never been any sort of state secret: the Pope is addressed as "Your Holiness" or, by his own, "Most Holy Father."

But as he began his farewell visit to B16 last Friday, President Bush -- whose administration has shown a bizarre, uncheckedpenchant for the, er, unique term "His Holy Father" over the years -- took the salutation to an even odder place:

"Your Eminence, you're looking good," Bush told the pope.

For the record, the greeting would've been perfectly delivered... were the President giving it to a cardinal.

Little Lizzie Borden

Little Lizzie Borden Mosaic 2
Originally uploaded by wingsinthewater

On June 20, 1893, Lizzie Borden was acquitted on the murder of her father and stepmother. She moved out their house with her sister and thereafter resided in a stylish house, "Maplecroft" across town . She never married. When she died in 1927, she left $30,000 to the local animal rescue league and $500 for the perpetual care of her father's grave.

Meet the New Rosenbergs:

...At Guantanamo

On this day in 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in Sing Sing, NY.

"We are the first victims of American fascism".

(From Wikipedia)

Their case has been at the center of the controversy over communism in the United States ever since, with supporters steadfastly maintaining that their conviction was an egregious example of persecution typical of the "hysteria" of those times and likening it to the witch hunts that marred Salem and medieval Europe.

There are, of course, differences in the Rosenberg case and the detainees at Guantanamo: first, they were allowed legal counsel and, second, they were given a trial. And they had supporters:

Jean-Paul Sartre called the case "a legal lynching which smears with blood a whole nation. By killing the Rosenbergs, you have quite simply tried to halt the progress of science by human sacrifice. Magic, witch-hunts, auto-da-fés, sacrifices—we are here getting to the point: your country is sick with fear... you are afraid of the shadow of your own bomb." Among other opposers to the execution: Dashiell Hammett, Jean Cocteau, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, Einstien, Pope Pius XII, the all-Black International Longshoremen’s Association Local 968, Fritz Lang and Bertolt Brecht.

Note: of the many voices against the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo, there don't seem to be many religious ones. There was a play entitled "Jesus, The Guantanamo Years," by Abie Philbin Bowman, but it certainly didn't have a Christofascist bent. Or even a Progressive Christian leaning.

So, no one with a clerical collar is laying down his life for Gitmos. Figures.