Eric Fehrnstrom
American Catholics, left, right, and center, practice their faith with flexible
interpretations of core doctrine that are only made more complicated by the
thorough integration of Protestant theological assumptions into American
political thought and culture. American
Catholics are “cafeteria
Catholics” who confront immorality the way Supreme Court Justice Potter
Stewart famously confronted the question of what constitutes pornography.
Craven and ham-fisted efforts to twist these popular approaches to the practice
of Catholicism into prima facie evidence of hypocrisy or bigotry do a disservice
to our national political conversation and contribute mightily to the dumbing
down of American politics.
Move over Jeff Jacoby, Eric Fehrnstrom’s appears to be gunning for your beat over at the Globe. A couple weeks back I gently debunked Fehrnstrom’s transparently weak argument that Trump could beat Clinton. This week, he has published an even more transparently weak attack on Hillary Clinton’s candidacy that I will herein debunk a bit less gently. Frankly, Mr. Fehrnstrom writes like a graduating senior taking a course pass-fail, though I’m not sure he deserves credit for giving it “the old college try.”
Eric Fehrnstrom thinks that Donald Trump could beat Hillary Clinton. Barring the unforeseeable, he’s wrong, and more importantly for my purposes here, including the unforeseeable in ostensibly serious political analysis kind of negates the point of offering serious political analysis.
Speculation about when or if Senator Elizabeth Warren would endorse one of the candidates battling for her party’s nomination has been hot and heavy. Sanders’ backers, in particular, have been confidently speculating that Warren would eventually side with Bernie. The truth is that Warren will not endorse until the nomination is a fait accompli. She will not put her foot on the scale to help the now faltering protest candidacy of Bernie Sanders primarily because she believes in the Democratic Party. She believes that a strong united Democratic Party is the key to electoral victory and policy accomplishment.