Editor’s note: Michael Ackley’s columns may include satire and parody based on current events, and thus mix fact with fiction. He assumes informed readers will be able to tell which is which.
The “ardent, practicing Catholic”: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who thinks the Catholic Church’s position on the beginning of life is ambiguous, scrambled Catholic history (or legend, if you will) at the annual congressional St. Patrick’s day luncheon.
Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowan, who attended, must have cringed when the speaker chirped (she always chirps), “Today, we celebrate the life of a saint – Saint Patrick – who had been exiled from Ireland. And when he traveled back, he traveled throughout the island, bringing prayers, faith and good works. Ireland is indeed blessed by St. Patrick.”
Patrick, as anybody who attended parochial school knows, was kidnapped by Irish brigands and sold into Hibernian slavery. He escaped after six years servitude, returning about two dozen years later to propagate the Catholic faith.
Do you suppose Madame Speaker believes America’s black slaves who availed themselves of the Underground Railroad were “exiled” from the South?
Save families! Deport illegals: Nobody called Pelosi on her erroneous view of Irish history, but she caught a little heat for calling United States immigration law enforcement “un-American.” The speaker buys the view that deporting illegal alien workers is un-American because it separates families. Often, of course, the opposite often is the case, as deportations restore men and women to the families they have left behind in Mexico and points south.
Amateur Hour: Our president was outraged that AIG executives received bonuses, but apparently was unaware that a provision in the bailout law which would have prevented such compensation was deep-sixed “at the request of administration officials.” Anyway, that’s what Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd says. Surely President Obama was unaware of what his underlings were doing, just as he is unaware that as part of the stimulus bill they are close to terms on the purchase of the Brooklyn Bridge.
More outrage: A refresher course on the Constitution is in order for Congress, which seems collectively to have forgotten Article I, Section 9, paragraph 3, which provides: “No bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law will be passed.”
Nevertheless, our “outraged” Congress seems ready to pass a bill retroactively taxing the AIG bonuses. The website techlawjournal.com quotes James Madison’s Federalist Paper No. 44, “Bills of attainder, ex post facto laws, and laws impairing the obligations of contracts, are contrary to the first principles of the social compact, and to every principle of sound legislation.”
Perhaps we are too hasty in prescribing an constitutional refresher course. It is apparent many in Congress never have read the Constitution at all. Otherwise they wouldn’t pass laws sure to embroil the state in costly, and losing, litigation.
Either that or – dare we say it? – they’re grandstanding. We dare.
Just wondering: How long will our news media allow Barack Obama to get away with saying “what I meant was” every time his words come back to haunt him? Silly question. In the case of this president and these media, the answer is “forever.”
One more for the speaker: Pelosi has asked the Justice Department to ease off of anti-trust rules to keep the San Francisco Chronicle alive. This would be a worthy goal – if it were government’s business to sustain every failing enterprise. Unfortunately, it is not government’s business to sustain every failing enterprise, any more than it is government’s business to sustain the family farm, the button hook industry or any other institution doomed by competitive pressure.
About 15 years ago, yours truly interviewed the CEO of a major newspaper chain, and we asked if he feared the Internet. “No” was his answer, and he added that newspapers already were best positioned to gather and dispense information. This view infected most monopoly newspapers (and most newspapers in the United States enjoy market monopolies), where the idea of real competition has been no more conceivable than the idea that the quality of their products has been in decline or that their customers actually care.
Now, they’re been trampled in the onslaught of the Net and can’t seem to grasp why.
As Tennyson wrote, “The old order changeth, yielding place to new.”
