Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Tim D writes:

This is such overt, shameless demagoguery! Really, how stupid does Obama think the evangelicals are? Okay, they are politically stupid, I admit, but they can definitely see through such a transparent ploy. That said, however, I think talking about public morals a la Martin Luther King Jr. should be an important part of any honest candidate's campaign. National health care, living wage, demilitarization, protecting the environment/workers, political corruption, etc are all moral issues and one need not be apologetic about identifying them as such. We can rest assured though that no Democrat ever will ever adopt such a "moral" message...

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/print?id=2132963

ABC News
Obama Tells Dems to Get Religion
Democratic Rising Star Has a Message for His Party
By DAN HARRIS

June 29, 2006 --- Democrats need to get religion and mean it, according to Sen. Barack Obama.

Obama took his party to task for ceding faith to the Republican Party at a speech in front of church and lay leaders at the National City Christian Church in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday.

"If we don't reach out to evangelical Christians and other religious Americans and tell them what we stand for, the Jerry Falwells and Pat Robertsons and Alan Keyes's views will continue to hold sway," the Illinois lawmaker said.

75 years ago just about now, the lady pictured here published her first issue of a prole-oriented tabloid, whose internet incarnation notes

"On May 1, 1933, in the depths of the Great Depression, The Catholic Worker newspaper made its debut with a first issue of twenty-five hundred copies. Dorothy Day and a few others hawked the paper in Union Square for a penny a copy...."

"Dorothy traded in the 'solidarity of the international working class' for the Mystical Body of Christ. But from her close association in her formative years with the old radicals, Dorothy picked up a sophisticated political sense. She was not a political analyst, but her instinct seldom led her astray. There were few to match her! And she kept the social passion of her early years and asked, 'Where is the Catholic leadership in the struggle for peace and justice?' She would become their mother.

Of all the radicals, Dorothy liked the anarchists best because they were self-disciplined and orderly and they didn't spend all their time arguing the minutiae of Marxism but went out and did things, 'direct action,' it's called. She joined the Socialist Party but found the meetings boring and drifted away. She described herself as a Communist, not in the sense of being a card-carrying party member, but in the common parlance of the Thirties, in the sense that she worked for a Communist Party front organization, even after her conversion as she looked for other employment in order to support her daughter Tamar [with the permission of her new spiritual director]...."

She's presently soaring toward sainthood somewhere above Staten Island, despite a bad Holy Office rap sheet:

In the post World War II years, during the Red Scare and the McCarthy period, my spiritual advisors told me to stay away from Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker. Dorothy was on the "lunatic fringe" of the Church and the Catholic Worker was tinged with Jansenism. Dorothy was a material heretic, if not a formal one. She'll get you into trouble, they said.

Jansenism! Yikes! Calvinist cancer within the fold! The hazard ahead for all Mary- and Jesus-struck lace curtain Irish maidens -- apparently even former free-lovin' Red bohemians.