These questions come to me as, almost simultaneously, the pope resigns, America's leading newspaper reports day after day about continuing sexual abuse, homosexual culture and political intrigue in the Church, and Professor Wills, this country's most longstanding and prolific Catholic gadfly, publishes perhaps his most iconoclastic book yet about Christian faith.
You know, I'm proud to have my nation compared to Slovakia. I'm pleased that the new head of state in Peru -- Ol' What's His Name -- is tamping down the leftist rhetoric and embracing the investor class, rather than flamboyantly consolidating his own power, like the guy who runs Brazil. And rather than concern myself with the soggy sleep-ins and warmed-over anarchism of Occupy Wall Street, I'm sending some money to Somalia, because despite the fact that the Somalians are dirt poor, they have their priorities right. Rather than organize for relief of the destitute, they're demonstrating against an offshoot of al Qaeda, which heretofore was and forever hence will never be on our list of strategic priorities.