Word: moralisms
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...pork - could be a political liability. As a procedural matter, it makes sense to stop Representatives from slipping pet projects into law, although some legislators argue that earmarking is a useful check on executive power, and that earmarks are just a tiny sliver of the federal budget. As a moral matter, McCain's heresy on pork has made him all the right enemies, including shameless Republican porkers like Ted Stevens of Alaska; I was especially sympathetic to McCain's unpopular stand blaming the Minnesota bridge collapse on highway pork, because I took the same position. But as a political matter...
...good Germans." That notion spurred Taylor's excellent 1981 play, with Alan Howard as Halder, a liberal professor who is made complicit in the atrocities of the regime through promotions, seduction and his own laissez-faire cowardice. Casting a flinty hero type like Mortensen in the role of a moral weakling seems inspired, but the movie isn't. Its attention to period detail and emotional nuance is lax, plodding, lacking either the grinding power of inevitability or a brief, fierce glint of Halder's conflicted conscience. As he is sucked into the morass, the film and the viewer sink with...
...myth of a mysterious alchemy between vice and lyrical vision, now look frivolous from the vantage point of this more cynical era. Over time, evil has lost much of its aesthetic appeal. Society has learned to distinguish between admiration for art and abhorrence of the artist’s moral shortcomings. If anything, we now succumb to the opposite temptation. Mediocre writers like Solzhenitsyn are spuriously aggrandized for their reputations as modern-day saints. The case of George Orwell provides a useful counterpart. An ultra-earnest author of wooden allegories, Orwell wrote clumsy prose with little grasp of character...
...abortion rights. But in 2006, then-Wilmington Bishop Michael Saltarelli pressured Biden's high school alma mater into dropping plans to name a new student center after him, citing a 2004 statement from the USCCB: "Catholic institutions should not honor those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles...
...fact a "Catholics for McCain" organization. But contesting the fairness of criticism won't help Democrats this fall. They are already poised to improve on Kerry's support from Catholic voters, whose top issues this year have been the economy and national security instead of hot-button moral issues. In a TIME poll of Catholic voters conducted this summer, a full 80% said that they could vote for a candidate whose position on abortion differed from theirs. Even so, Catholic Democrats can't afford to look like the kids in the corner who don't know their Catechism...