Politics as Usual by Jim Baron

As distasteful as it is to discuss another person’s faith and religious beliefs in the public prints, the Rep. Patrick Kennedy v. Bishop Thomas Tobin feud keeps forcing itself into the realm of the news.

Now Bishop Tobin has gone nuclear in what has until this time been a war of words and we await the inevitable fallout.
The Associated Press reports that Kennedy says Tobin has instructed him not to take Communion because of his stand on abortion rights. That would be the bishop’s prerogative, but where does he go from here?
Obviously, Patrick Kennedy has never gotten an abortion, and it is extremely doubtful, and nobody claims, that he has performed an abortion, so clearly the bishop’s action was based on Kennedy’s congressional votes on abortion issues and his statements about abortion. I would take it a step further and say that was not the motive for the bishop’s decision, either, it was Kennedy’s public criticism of the church and the Council of Bishop’s stand on the health care legislation now going through Congress that aroused Tobin’s ire.
So Patrick Kennedy is being denied Communion in the Providence diocese (meaning Rhode Island) for a thought crime. Fair enough, the heart and the mind – the soul, if you will – of a communicant are subject to the church’s instruction and rule.
But what now? That is the fallout part.
Sen. Jack Reed is a Catholic and he takes essentially the same votes and has the same public stand as Kennedy on abortion issues. If Kennedy is banned from Communion, how can Tobin allow Reed to continue to accept the Host? How about Rep. Jim Langevin? He is pro-life, but he does support stem cell research in his votes and public statements, and that is certainly counter to church teaching. Must he also be banished from Communion? (I’m betting that Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse is really happy to be an Episcopalian right now.)
For that matter, how about the thousands (perhaps even hundreds of thousands) of Rhode Island Catholics who are not public figures, but simply parishioners who practice birth control (not simply taking a public stand or stating an opinion on the issue, but actually perform the act of using birth control) are they to be similarly excluded? If that is the case, suffice it to say that it will suddenly become very easy to find a really good parking space right at the curb in front of the church for Mass every week, and priests will be delivering homilies to a lot of empty pews.
How can the bishop justify singling out Kennedy for supposed apostasy while ignoring his Catholic congressional colleagues who are similarly situated?
Bishop Tobin has swatted a hornet’s nest with his action, and it is unlikely that Kennedy is going to be the only one who gets stung. Stay tuned, this issue is unfortunately not going to go away soon.

It was clear from the start of Sen. Joshua Miller’s Senate Commission to Study the Prohibition of Marijuana that it wasn’t going be any kind of radical “legalize it” effort. In fact, despite the commission’s stated intent of studying the possible legalization and taxation of the drug, Miller’s talking points for starting the commission’s work specifically stated that legalization would not be a focus of the group’s work.
Indeed, it was pretty clear from the panel’s first meeting last week that the goal will likely be to push for a “decriminalization” law similar to the one voted into law by Massachusetts residents in a referendum last year, which treats possession of up to an ounce of marijuana as a civil infraction similar to a traffic ticket and not as a criminal act. That seems to be what Miller believes is doable under the present circumstances. Even that may be up in the air; if Miller thinks it is doable, he had better be able to do it with a vote that would survive an inevitable gubernatorial veto, and be able to talk House and Senate leaders to agree to take an override vote. 
To be taken seriously, Miller asserts, the commission must demonstrate the virtues of decriminalization within the context of what the budget savings would be to states as well as cities and towns of not arresting, prosecuting and incarcerating or subjecting to probation people caught with an ounce or less of non-medical marijuana.
Even with that modest goal, it would seem Miller has an uphill battle on his hands.

Doesn’t anybody remember the Vietnam War?
Yeah, it was almost 40 years ago now, but it was in all the papers at the time.
We were in that hostile territory for years upon years trying to prop up a corrupt regime that didn’t have the support of its own people, trying to impose on those people a type of government that they didn’t want. We thought we could do it with soldiers. When that didn’t work, we sent more soldiers, and then even more soldiers. Every time it looked like the war was going badly, the generals on the ground kept telling the president that the answer was more troops.
If anybody out there does recall, the Vietnam War was a spectacular failure that scarred this nation and haunted its leaders for decades to follow.
O, that it would haunt President Barack Obama more today.
Obama is our first president to come of age in the post-Vietnam era and it shows.
He is repeating many of the mistakes of that debacle.
In the effort to prevent al-Qaeda from using the country as a base of operation, the president is continuing the U.S. strategy of using foreign troops (us) to impose a central government on a nation divided into tribes that have no interest in a single government and no inclination to recognize one.
Even in the unlikely event we were able to cobble together such a government, the United States military would have to remain there forever and a day to enforce its rule, otherwise, it would revert to exactly where it is today five minutes after the last U.S. troop plan went wheels up. Besides, all the bad guys would have to do would be to sneak over the border to Pakistan where they could resume plotting their evildoing.
The Soviet Union, back when it was a superpower, tried and failed to install a central government in Afghanistan, and central governments were their thing. If anyone could impose a central government anywhere, it was the Soviets. Consider how many places they successfully (for a time) did so.
Obama is not dithering. He is right to take the time to consider what the United States’ mission is in Afghanistan. Contrary to what the right-wing pundits and Republican politicians seem to be saying, it is not the commander in chief’s duty to salute and do what his generals tell him to do. It is exactly the other way around.
I hope the president can summon the guts to conclude that the situation in Afghanistan is not one for which there is a United States military solution. The U.S. military is a mighty fighting force and there is almost nothing they can’t achieve. But, alas, making a governmental silk purse out of the sow’s ear of the Karzai regime is one thing that they just can’t do.
If Obama announces after Thanksgiving that he is going to send 30,000 or so more troops to Afghanistan, (not the 40,000 that the generals asked for but that is a distinction without a difference) he will be making a mistake that ignores the lessons of Vietnam.