Doug Kmiec Striles Back!!! A Response!!!

Doug Kmiec has lashed out at all the people that are critical of him. See A Tangled Web The Election & the Blogosphere

It might as we be called HOW DARED YOU QUESTION ME. There is something very sad about his response.

Here is just a few:
A longtime Republican who served in the Reagan administration, I nonetheless endorsed Obama last spring.

Kmiec always makes this bigger than it seems. One would think he had Reagan's ear on everything Judicial. It is an nice thing for a resume and truly something that is special but Kmiec came in the very last days of the Reagan Administration.


Ever since, I’ve been subjected to unrelenting personal attacks launched from right-wing Catholic keyboards-blogs (and bloggers) so coarse and uncivil they make the insults of talk radio sound like actual journalism.

Please when you read in full keep seeing how he uses the term "right wing". Kmiec is very good about talking about how people are partisan and he represents some authentic Catholic thought neither left or right but his writings have been full of partisan jabs the last year.

Further, the lack of civility that rules the right-wing Catholic blogosphere has infected mainstream Catholic journalism as well. In a syndicated assessment of the 2008 election, one usually thoughtful conservative columnist employed the following descriptions of Catholic Obama supporters: “decadent,” “tribal,” “immoral,” “certainly stupid,” “mindless,” and in need of basic “adult education.” And those were all in a single paragraph!

Can Kmiec name names provide a link to the article to let us all judge?

Of course, bloggers deny there is anything “personal” in such attacks. My online tormentors like to claim that their beef with me is my alleged abandonment of the prolife cause or willful misstatement of church teaching. Neither charge is true.

Can Kmiec name some names. I mean blogs is sort of a vast Universe. Someone can get a blog in 2 minutes. Who has been unfair to him and what arguments. Notice he puts everyone in the same camp.

I’ve publicly said that were the Holy Father to tell me I had contradicted the magisterium on any given page of my Obama book, I would tear out that page.

This is so funny and often a defense he brings up. First I doubt the Pope of Rome is going to go on record and get that political. He knows that. Plus he knows that perhaps if he called Kmiec( and is the Pope of Universal Catholic Church really concerned about Kmiec to call him up) it would be produce another martyr op ed by him

No, the real problem with the blogospheric reaction to Obama lay in the responses themselves, which all too often mixed the smallest dollop of substance into a big steaming stew of personal contempt.

Wow sort of condescending there huh Doug? I mean no it was all personal we just hated Obama and none of us brought forth any substance. Yeah right. Do we see a problem in that one sentence of a man that thinks a whole heck about himself and his arguments

As the vilification of Catholic Obama supporters progressed over the months, it became something of a bloggers’ sport to conjure up ridiculous explanations for what was wrongly described as my “apostasy.

I agree that people are a loss and stillare. I has shown on numerous blogs and in the papers what concerned people was that Kmiec seemed to have changed his position on numerous issues 180 degrees within a short period of time. This went far beyond Obama.

Noting my continued good health, the editors of Commonweal invited this essay which I submit even as I acknowledge the wisdom of Sr. Pius’s eighth-grade counsel: “Douglas, just offer it up!” That was good advice; and indeed I have at times considered the blog calumnies hurled at me as penance for occasions when I have put on a bit of a false front.

Oh Gosh how funny.

This essay is not about abortion, but at least this much must be said: blog lies to the contrary, there is no real legislative interest in FOCA. The attempt to use FOCA to drive a wedge between the church and the incoming administration is unjustified. The bishops, having stated clearly their opposition to FOCA-and rightly so-should not allow the right wing to obscure what Obama shares with the church: concern for the poor; support for the average family; a commitment to ending an unjust war; and respect for our environment

There it is the "right wing". Does Prof Kmiec think that the leading Cardinals and Bishops of the U.S. are influenced by blogs about FOCA. I mean are not blogs responding for the most part very much responding to the concern of the Bishops and Cardinals?

Unless the sore losers of November 4 manage to poison the well, the Holy See and the Obama administration should be working more closely together in service to others than any administration in modern memory.

So speaking out on FOCA is now poisoning the well? The Bush White House had very good relations with the Vatican. However I can never recall that when the Vatican disagreed with the White House that the "right wing" was yelling and complaining about how the Church was being unfair and to please stop it.. Where was Mr Kmiec urging restraint on those of the left that pretty much proclaimed that Benedict was going to lay a public butt whooping on Bush because they disagreed on certain things.

Having drawn the blogs’ Machiavellian FOCA gambit into the open, I am certain now to be called, yet again, a “useful idiot” (or worse) in service to the new president.

Notice what the "fair minded" Kmiec is doing here. To talk about concerns about FOCA is now "Machiavellian". Notice the use of words. Do I need to show the repeated statements of Cardinals and Bishops that were repeated on blogs as to the concern.

Such a prospect returns me to the subject of blog caricature and its consequences. While I may have felt personally wounded in the free-for-all that followed my endorsement of Obama, I never thought it was mainly about me.

I really wonder after getting through half this argument if that is really true. That is if he thinks it's really about him.

A hate-filled blogosphere, on the other hand, feeds a politics of odium, misleading people of faith and good will, diminishing and at times obliterating our ability to know one another. Our faith urges us to presume the stranger is kind, and to seek out opportunities to manifest love of neighbor. Sadly, neighbor-love is not what has overwhelmed my in-box since my Obama endorsement. Instead, right-wing blogs and their readers have launched missiles of hate, delivering ad hominem invective of an astonishing vehemence and crassness. I am “an embarrassing shill,” “hysterical,” and “pathetic”; also “a fool,” “an Obama shill of such mystifying obtuseness that one suspects a head injury,” “a slimeball,” “an unfaithful, cowardly betrayer”; just “another so-called Christian who flashes a Bible and looks righteous to the pagans,” and so on. “I hear,” wrote one Catholic blogger, cutely summoning the gospel, “that Sen. Obama will be FedExing thirty pieces of silver to Doug Kmiec.”

Gosh can hi give his opponents the respect of naming them. Is he talking about a Catholic blogger that set up an account and had a post or two and said something nasty or talking about bloggers are of some significance. Also well politics is not bean bag. Kmiec for instance implied at last comments on the matter that reason he was mad was not Republicans voted against ROMNEY (who he supported because he was a Mormon). Now he offers no evidence for that but I get the sense that Kmiec is appalled that people might have though unlike him that Romney should not be the nominee

The post goes on and on. For a person that is talking about wanting true dialogue his rants and thrashing out do not show that to me. He complains about name calling and motive but engages it non stop!!!!

More later. I am sure better talented writers than I will point out the problems in his argument as well as he is being a tad two faced faced with his own writings of the last year.

I mean this is the man that said McCain was just as Pro Choice as Obama because McCain saw the issue of the Abortion partly through Federalism. That was so outlandish that even some allies called him out on that.

More later
Update-

The issue is for many of us was again so well put by a Law Prof from Notre Dame and despite the gnashing of teeth is still not answered in this latest article

First, as I contended (many -- too many? -- times), here and elsewhere, the problem with Kmiec's arguments was not their pro-Obama-all-things-considered conclusion, but their failure (in my view) to correspond with and take account of the relevant abortion-policy-related facts and history. Second, I do not believe Kmiec provided (and, because he is not a reluctant, "hold my nose" Republican but a longtime conservative public intellectual and partisan, I think it was incumbent on him to provide) an admission that he was changing his mind (on a number of issues) and an account of why he was changing his mind. (Remember Mitt Romney?) .

Related is my second post on this matter Thou Shall Not Question Doug Kmiec