Scrapbook

...Cardinal O'Connor, however, refused either to accept the apparent decline of Catholicism or to live on old glories...

...Fair enough, then: Gore never said he invented the Internet...

...Such intelligence...

...Patrick's Cathedral—with the overwhelming support of the New York press...

...Will sending him to prison "feed one child...

...O'Connor held firm, however, as he had when he won his bitter battle against Mayor Ed Koch's edict that church organizations provide benefits to the partners of homosexual employees...

...Luckily, the Internet was built out with private financing too fast to be wrecked by Gore's dirigiste dreams...

...can Irish Catholic...

...The answer being no, the murderer must go free...

...The national media swooned at this...

...Nothing you discover here today," the allegedly impressive lady intoned, "will feed one person, give shelter to someone who is homeless, educate one child, provide health care for one family, or offer justice to one African-American or Hispanic juvenile...

...His support for immigration and opposition to the death penalty left him at odds with New York police unions and other historically Catholic organizations in New York's complicated civic life...

...He said, "During my service in the U.S...

...Now, Gore was a prominent cheerleader in the 1980s for a particular vision of a government-financed "information superhighway"—he always has had a good eye for a trendy issue...

...By installing Minitel terminals in every French home, the government there tied that nation to an instantly archaic national video-text network that in effect cut the French off from the Internet...

...The number of grieving memorials published about the man has been overwhelming, but no more than he deserved...

...But even that doesn't earn him the points Nelson tries to award for prescience or, in the columnist's own wording, for taking the initiative in "creating the Internet as we know it today...

...Consider Lars Erik Nelson's defense of Al Gore last week against the charge that Gore claims to have invented the Internet...

...Scrapbook Mills on the Hill The insta-celebrity of last year's Senate impeachment trial, former White House deputy counsel Cheryl D. Mills, returned to public view May 4—for just long enough to prove that she knows only one trick...

...Indeed, on abortion and homosexuality, the issues with which Cardinal O'Connor became most identified, it was hard to tell much difference between the mainstream media and radical leftists in New York...

...Nelson reports that Gore's vision was inspired by France's "Minitel home-computer network...

...In 1999, as The Scrapbook recalls, Mills made herself briefly famous by arguing, from the well of the Senate, on national television, that it was inappropriate to charge Bill Clinton with a civil rights violation in the Paula Jones case because he had a lifelong record of support for federal civil rights enforcement...

...Such scary nonsense, really—the notion that a politician may never be accused of breaking a law he claims to endorse, merely because he claims to endorse it...

...The columnist seems unaware this was one of the great government-sponsored techno-fiascos of the late 20th century...

...Such conviction...

...In fact, through the 1960s, that combination was nearly the definition of an Ameri...

...Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet...

...But this, despite Nelson's elaborate effort to argue otherwise, is manifestly untrue, and it's the sort of overstatement that rightly opens a politician up to ridicule...

...Even longtime opponents like Mario Cuomo have taken the opportunity to acknowledge his wit and his charity, and those who agree with his strong public stands on issues such as abortion have been nearly inconsolable at his loss...

...In 1989, in as open a demonstration of anti-Catholicism as America had seen in a hundred years, homosexual activists chained themselves to pews, profaned the Host, and pelted mass-goers with condoms during services at St...

...In other words: Favored Democratic social policies are the test of all government work...

...Should he be sent to prison...

...Such an impressive lady...

...Cardinal O'Connor, 1920-2000 John Cardinal O'Connor, the archbishop of New York, died last week at the age of 80, after suffering for several months from a brain tumor...

...Though he fought against the destruction of poor neighborhoods wrought by misguided welfare measures such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children, he fought as well to convince his flock of the moral necessity for other and better kinds of government programs...

...At last week's House Government Reform Committee hearing on the suppression of subpoenaed White House e-mails, Mills took the stand and immediately rebuked the committee's members, while current and former Clinton aides in attendance nodded their heads in vigorous assent...

...Nelson protests, however, that the specific verbiage of Gore's boast is often misquoted...

...He fought, inside the Church ; and outside, for the teachings of John ; Paul II, for theological consistency, for the importance of his vision of care for the poor and care for the moral state of America...

...A man has committed murder...

...It was typical of O'Connor that he and Koch became friends during the fight (they would later co-author a book), just as it was typical that he never publicized his visits to Catholic hospitals to minister to AIDS patients for use in his political battles...

...And with a compliant press corps bored by Clinton scandals and eager to "move on," they'll probably get away with it...

...The creation of the Internet in fact dates to the 1960s...

...The depth of sorrow at his death last Wednesday night suggests he may have succeeded more than ; would have seemed possible in 1983, and that he was more a shaper of the : future than a throwback to the past...

...Gore has a well-known weakness for bragging, and has himself acknowledged that his choice of words in his ill-fated interview with Wolf Blitzer a year ago was unfortunate...

...It comprises journalists more dogmatically loyal to Bill and Al than the staffers who do this sort of thing for a living...

...It is true that some conservatives' admiration for O'Connor was not unalloyed with doubts...

...A strong supporter of unions (his father was a gold-leaf painter and union activist who used to read aloud to his children in the evenings from Catholic labor tracts), he never had the support of Wall Street that his predecessor, Terence Cardinal Cooke, enjoyed...

...They're just prepared to act as if they do—if that's what it takes to spare the boss an embarrassment...

...There used to be thousands of Irish Catholics, in both politics and the Church, with O'Connor's combination of old-fashioned, blue-collar political liberalism and old-fashioned, blue-collar social conservatism...

...And now comes Mills with an important corollary to this "principle": Congress must never investigate possible illegality—in the White House or, presumably, anywhere else —unless the investigation promises to advance domestic policies of the sort Cheryl D. Mills endorses...

...But by the time ! O'Connor came to New York in 1984, those days seemed to be gone...

...Maybe next time Nelson should try praising Gore for his light touch and self-deprecating wit...

...They don't actually believe this bilge over at the White House, The Scrapbook figures...

...The Friends of Internet Al The courtier press of the ClintonGore era is a wonder to behold...

...And, in an effort to make back the capital investment, Minitel's great triumph was to bring the equivalent of a government subsidized 1-900 porno service (known as Minitel Rose) to every Jacques, Yvonne, and Pierre...

...He took these stands from conviction, however, and they won him no support from either the mainstream media or radical leftists...