Honest to God

Parable of the Mote and the Beam, print by Jan Collaert after Ambrosius Francken, 1585,  British Museum.

Here's National Review writer and conservative Catholic Ramesh Ponnuru criticizing Pete Buttigieg (not that I'm that crazy about Buttigieg, as yet) for bringing religion into his presidential campaign:

Buttigieg's argument about the progressive implications of Christianity is heartfelt. It is also partisan nonsense. @bopinion https://t.co/sNuNCItfDe

— Ramesh Ponnuru (@RameshPonnuru) April 16, 2019

It struck me as kind of upside down. After all, most people get their religious indoctrination starting pretty early in life, and start thinking about politics later; wouldn't the former inform the latter rather than the other way around? If Buttigieg was brought up a liberal Episcopalian, wouldn't that idea of Christianity lead him to think Christianity favors liberal political principles? Indeed, Ponnuru writes,

Cheap shots, heels, and mountains of dreck

Yesterday I said something to the effect that Donald Trump was fearless, but I was wrong: as the Scarecrow had his terror of a lighted match, as Achilles dreaded an injury to his heel, so there's one thing the Donald fears: Questions from Fox News's ice princess.

Megyn Kelly. Photo by Alexei Hay/GQ, December 2010, via TeaParty.org. So that's what fuck-me heels are?

Amazing Conservative Logic of the Year:

I know it's still only January, but this from David Beckworth (Mercatus Institute) and Ramesh Ponnuru (American Enterprise Institute) in the New York Times is an instant classic:

The audacity of Pope

Image by FBarok via Ken's Birdhaus.

Buckleyist theologian Ramesh Ponnuru at Ten Miles Square:

“Inequality is the root of social evil,” Pope Francis wrote in a Twitter post yesterday, with words that thrilled the left worldwide more than anything he had said since denouncing “trickle-down theories” of economics. We could read the definite article in his latest statement as indicating that the pope believes all social evil has inequality at its root. The price of that reading, though, would be to render the statement absurd. (In an apostolic exhortation, Francis had called inequality the root of “social ills,” which also suggests that reading is mistaken.)

I don't know about the thrill among the worldwide left there, since I haven't heard about it in my own circle and Ponnuru doesn't offer any links, but I did think it was curious how he seems to think you could appeal to the tweet's English grammar as a window onto the Pope's thinking in what presumably started off in some other language, like maybe Italian.*

Sure enough, there's an original Italian tweet, and it seems pretty clarifying: