Yesterday, Dreher dealt with his credulous calumny of the Catholic Church the only way he could. He minimized his role while pointing the finger at others. He printed extracts of the AP's correction of its outrageous reporting of the bogus Taum story, along with a unrelated hoax story. He wasn't so brief when he was pointing the finger. The headline of the post doesn't mention Tuam or dead babies or any to the juicy bits that got him incandescent a month ago.
It's important to note that when first passing this story along, he did so with prosecutorial relish. Then, he started to hedge when his fellow hysteric, Andrew Sullivan, converted the unripe hoax into an anti-hetero plea for acceptance of buggery. As the initial reports of Catholic awfulness dissolved in the solvent of a little fact finding, Dreher backpedalling, denying that he made any judgement of fact. Some of his more rational commenters took him to task for his attack on Tom Piatek and Chronicles magazine. Dreher knows his overeagerness to hammer his former Church damaged his brand. Now he is reduced to off handedly noting this story as as the AP's affair. It's as though this is now a story about an anodyne statistical error by the Congressional Budget Office.
His original headline was, "EIGHT HUNDRED DEAD IRISH CHILDREN." Does that read like a dispassionate account of an allegation that might or might not be true? "These poor children were treated as subhumans by nuns,and by the church, and the State that didn't dare speak up for them, because those babies came into the world outside wedlock."
Dreher is incapable in reporting on the Catholic Church in a professional manner. His horror at the scandal of priestly child abuse so unmans him that he is useless as an objective observer. Dealing with evil takes sterner stuff.
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ME
- Thomas O. Meehan
- I am retired from government, law enforcement, politics and all other pointless endeavors. I eat when I am hungry and sleep when I am tired.
I'll add this theory that was tossed out by the Esteemed Journalist Rod Dreher:
ReplyDeleteThe idea is that these kids may have been used as guinea pigs, presumably (if this turns out to be true) because they were seen by the Church and Irish society as throwaways.
Sure, he'll claim that the "if this turns out to be true" qualifier gets him off the hook. But it's the same old trick -- people remember the charge (Irish nuns used throwaway children as guinea pigs) but never the counterfacts.
Yes Dreher starts out willing to believe anything but usually remembers to slip in some tiny disclaimer to cover his Bias (ass). I've always thought his problem is a form of cowardice. He wants to be a conservative but he doesn't want to make all his liberal, homosexual, conservative Inc, friends angry. So he cultivates them while writing conservative-lite drivel. Sometimes his instincts are sound but his fear of offending always subverts his message.
ReplyDeleteI hope two things: 1) this causes readers to come around a bit more to our way of thinking: that Dreher has an anti-Catholic bias and is not a trustworthy reporter on the Catholic church PERIOD, and 2) that Dreher himself examines his conscience on this matter and recognizes the anti-Catholic bias within himself and in his industry, the news media. I have more hope for #1, but I hope for both nonetheless.
ReplyDeleteTo be fair to Dreher, I think his horror at child abuse by Roman Catholic clergy drove him to the mentality he now holds. Remember, his experience of being bullied as a child is a big deal to him. So in my opinion, he just lacks the maturity and to use an old fashioned expression, Grit to face unpleasant realities. His problem is a certain lack of virtu. A man takes in the horrors of human imperfection, fully feels them and reacts with manly resolve to do what a man can. I'm not saying here that Dreher is a sissy, but I am saying that he is weak and more than a bit willing to self-delude in order to work his little corner of the internet. In short, he is an inferior man with annoying habits.
ReplyDelete