IF AL CAPONE HAD A PhD.

An emailer has characterized my failure to recognize immediately the Times hate piece on Catholics for what it is. OK, so I’m not all that smart all the time. I rarely read everything with a super critical eye, especially an editorial about a leader of a religion that is none of my business published in a paper like the Los Angeles Times that poses as a literate journal.

The Times was clever, using a technique as old as civilization to smear Catholics and the Catholic Church. William Shakespeare used the same method in Julius Caesar. Mark Antony is allowed to speak on condition that he not rouse the passions of the populace with lies. He agrees and then proceeds to call the assassins dishonorable men while seeming to praise them :

The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answered it….
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest,
(For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all; all honourable men)
Come I to speak in Caesar's funeral….
He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man….
He hath brought many captives home to Rome,
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.

The vicious piece in the Times isn’t as good as the Mark Antony’s hit piece on Brutus but it did the dirty work. Statements that the new Pope was not a Nazi, not a part of the holocaust, not party to the murder of Jews in Hungary was too clever a hit piece for me to recognize unless I’d had my thinking cap on while reading it. The style worked for Mark Antony, but because bloggers much sharper than I were alert, it didn’t work for the LA Times, which is now exposed for all who choose to know.

Mass education has resulted in an army of educated criminals capable of lucid perversities couched in literate journals, adroit answers to questions never posed, and painless injections of false doctrines into the bloodstream of the body politic. I guess we all have to be vigilant when reading anything these days. It was after the Wall Street mega scandals of the 80s began to be exposed that someone observed that the crooks were all from Harvard Business School. Al Capones with Ph.Ds. Fits The Times.