Under Today's Radar

Our news services seem to be only cable of reporting one story at a time; right now it is the economic crisis, but a few events of recent days are as important.

1. The Pope, for some reason, felt obliged to pardon--lift the excommunication of--a certain man named Williamson who had been made a bishop by the late renegade Bishop Marcel Lefebvre who detested Vatican II and anything that happened in the Catholic Church after 1962.
Williamson is a virulent anti-Semite and Holocaust denier and the cringing Pope says now that he had no idea of that when he welcomed him back. There is a test of wills going on here and Benedict is not winning it. Benedict, you have brought the poison back to the heart of the Church, expunge it now--cut the SOB loose or resign and be mercifully forgotten.

2. The Taliban have just attacked Kabul with ease and killed many people. President Obama has said repeatedly that Afghanistan is the center of our focus on terrorists and that this war cannot be lost. He will make a major effort there this year.

3. General Jim Jones is the National Security Adviser in the Obama Administration, but who knows it? He is the silent and invisible man thus far, but he is too strong and talented for this to last: he and Obama are up to something--Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran. Something on the foreign policy front is brewing and will soon be served.

4. Obama's press conference this week showed once and for all that he is a serious man who thinks as he speaks and who speaks in sentences and paragraphs. Listening to him for an hour I realized how lazy I have become in paying attention to any words of government officials. For years we have heard tripe and were lulled into stupor. Now we have a President who respects ideas, language, and the people he speaks to. Time to sharpen our minds again, this new teacher knows what he's talking about.