Catholic Deacon Takes A Swipe At Governor Palin at Christmas Mass

“And then there were all the political scandals, from the ones involving our Governor here in New York, to the Alaskan Governor…“

I may be paraphrasing slightly, but that’s how the deacon at Mass today referenced what he referred to as all the political scandals that rocked the country this year.

In all honesty, the larger point of the homily was lost to me.  It rambled, and the acoustics were poor (which has been true of almost every church I’ve ever attended — it seems almost to be intentional), but the deacon began by referencing the tumult which has been so prevalent this  year.  He went from referencing the economic crisis to political scandals.

I don’t know if he was just trying to touch both the Republicans and the Democrats, but my eyebrows raised when he sought to include Sarah Palin amongst his examples.

Sarah Palin?  Really?  She was a big source of scandal?  Really?  In a year that saw Elliot Spitzer lose his job over dalliances with whores?  In a year when the shockingly inexperienced Democratic candidate for POTUS was exposed for having unseemly ties to radicals and terrorists and nobody seemed to care?

In an environment like that, Sarah Palin is a good example of a scandal-ridden politician?

It was, to say the least, disappointing. I tried to imagine what it would have been like for her if she’d been in our church today with her family.  A good woman of impeccable character and stainless ethics, and she continues to be an object of derision and scorn from people who aren’t fit to say her name aloud much less judge her or label her as scandalous.

But there remains a strain of toxic liberalism flowing through the Catholic Church, and everytime I try to get past my incredulity over Catholics voting for Barack Obama, they go and remind me that, for some Catholics, religion comes second to being partisan Democrats.

Blizzard Blogging: The Swell Neighborhood Kids In Brooklyn

As the reluctant superintendent of my apartment building, a job that I generally despise, it is my responsibility to shovel the snow in front of the building.  At the height of the storm, I’d shoveled twice, hoping to eat away at the task little by little in order to avoid the inevitable heart attack that would come from shoveling 12+ inches of thick heavy snow all at once. 

Blizzard Blogging: The Aftermath

The Nor’easter that walloped New York City over the weekend was a record breaker, according to the official sources, but I suspect shenanigans in that declaration because it just doesn’t seem as bad as the blizzard of 2003.  What kind of chicanery?  I dunno.  It’s just that back when the 2003 blizzard hit I was living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and remember emerging from my building to waist deep piles of unshoveled snow on 80th Street.  I remember struggling through to Columbus Avenue and being rewarded with a shoveled pathway that ran beside snow piles that rose chest high.  Am I misremembering this, confusing my memories of New York 2003 with pictures of Japan from last month that I saw online, pictures like this:

That’s not the picture I was hoping to post by the way.  I spent an unseemly amount of time just now trying to find one I remembered of a lone man wandering in between two towering snowrises.  It was awesome and impressive and lonely in a solitary way that a gaggle of giggling Japanese schoolgirls will simply never be able to capture.