Kind word for Carter

...It's natural that the Republicans should be organizing to run against Carter, that's the nature of the system...

...The word asks for it, carrying as it does all' those whiffs of mysterious knowledge and secret understanding...

...The continuing problem of the Palestinians seems to trouble press and public more than an Israeli-Egyptian peace reassures them...

...The Arab world is well aware of this fact...

...If international agreements, disarmament, military selfrestraint, and the settlement of dangerous local conflicts win nothing from the public--not even from the sophisticated Commonweal: 616 public which really follows these things--but carping or bored yawns, then presidents eventually are going tO get the point and focus their attention~ on other matters...

...This is a serious matter...

...In that case, go with a winner...

...Catherine of Genoa described it as "the union of He who Is with she who is not...

...Dwight D. Eisenhower sent the Marines into Lebanon, approved four major attempts to topple foreign governments with the CIA, and elected to replace the French in Indochina...

...They have their bad moments too...

...It is the pro-choice lobby that wants tax monies to go for a specific purpose despite the majority decision of Congress...

...His enemies--and on this point Kennedy is not one of them-- see this as a weakness, and if they succeed in defeating him the next agreement--if there is a next--will be a great deal more difficult to negotiate, sign and ratify...

...Andin fact he argues that the case for federal funding of abortion for the poor shouldnot be argued on the basis of "legal right" but of "general public purpose and general public welfare" policies toward the poor...

...The over- and under-tones of mystery rub us the wrong way...

...THOMAS POWERS Of several minds: John Garvey PEOPLE WHO ARE FIRE...

...I can't think of a good answer to either question, and I suspect that when the time comes to vote, the public won't either...

...Many of the architects of these old adventures, using all the old arguments, strongly urged Jimmy Carter to intervene in Ethiopia, Iran and Nicaragua, but he would not do it...

...Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon had the same problem, but in their cases Vietnam and Watergate offer obvious explanations...

...Doesn't anybody remember Lyndon Johnson...

...It does nothing to make war less likely, unles~ the negotiation of successive treaties, with a promise of further agreements to come, makes war less likely...

...What has Kennedy done to justify a giddy Democratic rush to embrace him...

...In the West, the churches have viewed mystics with suspicion...

...and why do so many people treat his advent as if he presented the first ray of sunlight after a long dark night...

...No other leader who has them has ever suggested such a thing...

...Abortion rights proponents run grave risks in "trying to define the abortion issue as essentially religious . . . . I have seen nothing to convince me that abortion is inherently a more religious issue than justice, peace or the general social welfare...

...The wildness of 9 November 1979:617...

...The left describes him as a creature of the moneyed interests and a secret enemy of the poor...

...Like a satisfactory definition of poetry, a satisfactory definition of mysticism is probably impossible...

...This point aside, Callahan's article is filled with sound observations...

...The contrary is the case...

...There can't be many people who really miss Johnson and Nixon, but quite a few, it seems, find it hard to abandon the political tone appropriate to struggle, crisis and confrontation...

...The reaction to three things in particular makes me wonder what the rest of us can possibly be thinking about...

...Even so relentlessly healthy a spirit as Jimmy Carter's must surrender to doubt and gloom from time to time...

...why aren't the Americans?(2) Harry S Truman sent a secret army from Burma into China, involved the United States in the Greek civil war, supported the French in Indochina, and sent hundreds of thousands of U.S...

...What has Carter done to deserve rejection and defeat...

...It shifts the focus of the struggle--the thing which it is about--from Israel's right to exist, to sovereignty over the West Bank...

...Like the Palestinians, both countries must now moderate their own demands, or stew ineffectually on the sidelines...

...The criticism of Carter's initiatives in foreign policy is natural find to be expected...

...In the long run, he concludes, "the abortion rights movement will be judged by the extent to which it recognizes the moral ambiguity of abortion, and makes this sense of ambiguity clear by working as hard to reduce abortions as to increase their availability...

...It is common to f'md it defined as "an experience of one-ness with God," something which involves a radical loss of self...

...He warns that there is also "something unsavory and morally evasive in arguing for abortion services as a means of coping with spiraling welfare costs" though he believes that the plight of the poor calls for abortion funding...

...Ted Kennedy...

...Of course this doesn't mean he's solved every national problem, which are always very numerous...

...The agreement also divides Israel's traditional enemies in a manner which makes another full-scale war like 1973 extremely unlikely...

...It is easy to collect detailed indictments of Carter charging shocking surrender to special interests--Southern textile manufacturers, say, or Big Oil, or environment Luddites, or the military-industrial complex, or starry-eyed pacifists...

...There are no disasters of that sort to explain the airy, off-handed, almost willful spirit in which otherwise serious people have belittled Carter's contributions to peace...

...Paul writes of words "so secret that human lips may not repeat them...

...The most obvious test of bigotry is not that of outright persecution...

...Gerald Ford sent the Marines in to recapture the crew of the May aguez and secretly tried to involve the United States in a civil war in Angola...

...If Carter was too bold and hopeful of disarmament when he entered the White House, he has been sober and steadfast in its pursuit ever since...

...The worrying thing is the nearly universal indifference, even contempt, for what he has done outside of his own administration...

...It's not their failure to satisfy all the people all the time which gets them down, one imagines, but the ocean of grey prim, a great carping wave of it washing in every week, which suggests it's impossible to satisfy any of the people any of the time...

...1) The Camp David agreement between Israel and Egypt marks the first substantial step towards peace in the Middle East in thirty years...

...You can say what you like about the military initiatives of Carter's predecessors, but he is the first American president since Herbert Hoover who has not ordered American soldiers to kill or be killed in faraway places...

...The word "mysticism" has a pejorative meaning lately...

...But why does his own party seem so ready to abandon him...

...The fight seems to consider him as the reincarnation of Joseph Chamberlain, giving away the Panama Canal and surrendering to the Russians...

...It is hard to know why the press and the public have been so grudging of Carter's achievements...

...Thus in criticizing the argument that government should withdraw from such a morally sensitive area, Callahan points out "there is no principle in our policy, which allows individual taxpayers to pick and choose those things they would like to see their tax money spent for . . . . What is open to citizens is to work politically to change those policies to which they object...

...What can possibly explain Washington's extraordinary resistance to everything he has done or tried to do, Carter must want to know, and to tell the truth, I'd like to know too...

...They attack Carter as if he were as dangerous as his predecessors, but better disguised...

...He hasn't squeezed oil out of the ground, or halted thirty years of decline in the nation's cities, or found a substitute for the family car, or slowed inflation while booming the economy, or satisfied all the just demands of women and minorities, or persuaded the Russians and Japanese to stop killing whales, or sprung all the world's political prisoners...

...This is healthy...

...at least on this point "the normal democratic political process" has supported their position...

...He seems to want to submit the problem to legislatures rather than courts, but without sufficient notice of the fact that at least the federal legislature has overwhelmingly acted on this issue, and the whole drift of the pro-choice movement has been to find a way to override this majority...

...Chappaquiddick was an awful mess, and it 9 November 1979:615always will be an awful mess, but Chappaquiddick aside Kennedy is a serious man and worthy opponent...

...people disagree...

...But this does not seem to be noticed, and critics of the agreement point to the absence of Syria and Jordan as if that meant nothing had changed...

...The misrepresentation in the newspaper and radio reporting is directly traceable to the calculated emphasis on "Catholic magazine Commonweal" in the original press release...

...RECOVERING MYSTICISM T HERE HAS been a debate for years over the place of mysticism in religion--is it central, or an aberration...

...SALT II, as we all know, xt...

...II I I Of several minds: Thomas Powers KIND WORD FOR CARTER DO PEOPLE REALLY MISS LBJ & NIXON...

...soldiers to Korea...

...He indicates how unrealistic it would be to consider Medicaid funding of abortion in keeping with "a policy of strict neutrality...

...Richard Nixon invaded Cambodia...

...He stands for things which matter...

...Presidents are the subject of unreasonable expectations, and cannot be fairly judged by the ocean of particular public complaint...

...A definition of "mysticism" is difficult...

...Good public policy, in effect, might lead a legislature to fund abortion services, but that is not a position to be derived from constitutional rulings...

...In addition to being numerous the indictments are hard to answer, involving, as they tend to do, highly particular changes of language in subparagraph 21, annex two, of an amendment to a motion to restrict debate on a vote to table a bill to revise Public Law 281 providing free lunches for the children of minorities in designated urban communities under 20,000 in population which have been declared disaster relief areas within the last five years--or whatever...

...After his Harvard address Alexander Solzhenitsyn was accused of mysticism for pointing out the public effect of living in a spiritual void...

...the experience is in a sense totally beside the point, apparently, and there is an insistence that 9 the self which seems to be lost comes into its own, and is only truly itself, in this encounter...

...John F. Kennedy authorized a secret invasion of Cuba and committed the United States to the military rescue of South Vietnam...

...The center appears to be plain bored, and I am confused...

...it is whether representatives of one's group are always singled out for a religious identification...

...Lyndon Johnson sent troops to Vietnam and the Dominican Republic...

...This situation may not last forever;, Israel might squander the present opportunity to reach an accommodation with her neighbors...

...Maybe he's just' lucky...

...But why does he have to run now, Carter must ask himself...

...It is the absence of a credible threat of war, on which the Palestinians have always depended in the past, that inclines them to negotiate now...

...Carter has been a good president, and he even seems to be a good man...

...You would think--I would think-that this achievement, for which Carter deserves substantial credit, would be much remarked...

...the alternative to special interests is ein volk, ein Reich, ein Fdhrer...

...But of course the opponents of Medicaid funding for abortions are ndt "individual taxpayers" protesting a democratically established policy...

...Sitting around the White House on a rainy November Sunday, with the papers of a dozen cities strewn about, sick of reading, sick of talking, sick of the sullen petulance of un-pleaseable Washington, presidents must wonder if it was really a good idea to go after the job...

...These and other failures make a lot of people unhappy...

...The real test of presidents is not what they have failed to do--invariably a great deal--but what they have done...

...This may sound like an obvious ide~,, but it's not...

...Is it something all religions have in common, or are some more prone to it than others, the way certain families exhibit a tendency toward male pattern baldness...

...There m. ay be subtleties here which escape us, but it does seem that, at'one moment, Callahan wants to rescue this topic from the sphere of "rights" and place it in the sphere of "prudence" but, at the next moment, he can't quite do it...

...Standing at the bulletproof window, watching the drops of rain slide down the glass, he must wonder what he could have done to deserve...

...His article was, in the main, addressed to abortion rights advocates and warned them, among other things, against clumsy efforts at religious manipulation...

...But for the present Israel is not seriously threatened with a major war, much less the apocalyptic defeat which always loomed in the background of earlier wars...

...Presidents are political creatures...

...Look up then lightly and say to thy Lord, 'That that I am, Lord, I offer unto Thee, for Thou it art.' And think nakedly, plainly, and boisterously, that thou art as thou art...

...Callahan's argument is not free of muddle--whose is, in this treacherous area?--on the question of federal funding for abortion services...

...Doesn't anybody remember Richard Nixon...

...And what about Catholicism...

...The special interests are generally twice as numerous as the unsolved problems...

...A quiet front page, it seems to me, is a sign of public health and a call for rejoicing...

...At the close of the Tractatus Wittgenstein says that the mystical is not to be found in what the world is, but that it is--an echo of The Cloud of Unknowing, whose anonymous author spoke of finding "a blind feeling of thine own being...

...To tell the truth, I wonder too...

...3) Carter negotiated and signed the second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty and has even advocated ridding the world of nuclear weapons...

...But in view of the resulting publicity, it is Callahan's reflections on the religious dimension that is most ironic...

...leaves enough rmssiles and warheads in place to reduce the world's cities to something resembling downtown Berlin in May, 1945...

...SALT II is an imperfect step, but it's better than standing still, and its opponents seem to be advocating an about-face march fight back into the heart of the Cold War...

...The simple fact is that Syria and Jordan do not have the strength to challenge Israel on their own and both know it, while Israel's other enemies-principally Iraq and Libya--have no way of getting at her...

...His worst enemy is a kind of public ennui...

...Carter has been a good president...

...But mystics have also pointed out the danger of seeking experience...

...in the opinion of his critics, the "fight kind" of religion should be private --"like button collecting," as Lenin used to say...

...Roman Catholic legislators opposed to abortion are usually labeled as 'Roman Catholic legislators' -- others are simply 'legislators.' " One might add that ethicists who have a Roman Catholic connection in their background are liable to have that prominently displayed in press releases rather than more relevant labels...

...But once a policy has been put in place by the normal democratic political process, then individual taxpayers cannot be allowed to act in disregard of that policy...

...It would seem wise to us if the people who sponsor and edit Family Planning Perspectives would not only publish articles like Callahan's and write press releases about them--but take them to heart as well...

...Callahan was not writing as a Catholic dissenting from the institutional church's position on Medicaid funding...

...Reading the newspapers was one long agony from February, 1965 until August, 1974...

...But later, after numerous references to "the right of free choice," Callahan concludes that "the right to an abortidn would be de facto discriminatory if government policy precluded those unable to pay because of poverty from exercising their right...

...Political debate requires a lot of homework, and the charges of moral turpitude flung about so freely rarely indicate anything more than the fact that this--whatever it may be-- means a lot to somebody...

...B EING PRESIDENT isn't all roses...

...At one point, he insists that "whatever else it may have decided,Roe v. Wade did not establish the right of a woman to obtain an abortion at public expense...

...Still, it is a haunting presence, since it forms an undeniable part of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism...