Monday, October 15, 2012

Greenwald on Raddatz etc.

Here. [h/t] One of his points is that Raddatz's questions revealed her acceptance of the U.S. foreign-policy establishment's assumptions. No big surprise there. There is a set of 'establishment' views and someone who has spent a career covering the Pentagon is likely to have absorbed them. 

This passage, from the end of Greenwald's column, may be worth quoting:
One more note about Raddatz: near the end of the debate, she asked the two Catholic candidates how their religion influences their views on abortion. This was a reasonable question unto itself, but also reflects standard DC assumptions on these issues.
It is often noted that the Catholic Church stridently opposes reproductive rights. But it is almost never noted that the Church just as stridently opposes US militarism and its economic policies that continuously promote corporate cronyism over the poor. Too much emphasis on that latter fact might imperil the bipartisan commitment to those policies, and so discussion of religious belief is typically confined to the safer arena of social issues. That the Church has for decades denounced the US government's military aggression and its subservience to the wealthiest is almost always excluded from establishment journalistic circles, even as its steadfast opposition to abortion and gay rights is endlessly touted.
I'm not sure I'd say that the Catholic Church "opposes U.S. militarism" as stridently as it opposes abortion, but there is no doubt that the Catholic hierarchy (both the Vatican and the U.S. bishops) has been critical of U.S. foreign policy. Readers of a certain age (including your blogger [cough]) may recall, just to take one well-known example, the 1983 bishops' letter on nuclear weapons. The Church also opposed Reagan-era U.S. policies in Latin America, if my memory serves, and as Greenwald's link reminds, Pope John Paul II was a firm opponent of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
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Note: Rather than a creating a topic label "Catholic Church," I'm going to use the existing label "Holy See" (which is the name for the Vatican in international law) so as not to increase recklessly the already high number of labels.

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