Thank you for pointing out the irony of Towey complaining that anyone had politicized the WHOFBI operation after he basically made it into an arm of the Republican Party re-election campaign in 2004.

It's like Karl Rove complaining about someone politicizing anything in the West Wing. Ridiculous.

It's even more like Karl Rove than that! This is classic Rove: attack your opponent at your OWN weakest point, even if it requires you to tell bald-faced lies. Then, when the opponent points out that it's a pack of lies and it's YOU who have that weakness, it sounds just like he-said-she-said, and the media cover the story "in a balanced way." Presto, problem defused!

The role of the media has changed so much that big parts of the old playbooks simply don't apply any more. The Republicans get that; the Dems ... not so much.

It's what Republicans do time and time again. Blame the Democrats for what they themselves have done/are doing. What is mind boggling is not that they do this, but that they get away with it with the press dutifully accusing the Democrats of doing whatever the Republicans are actually doing.

Of course, part of the reason they get away with it is that the Dems always run and hide whenever a Republican accuses them of anything.

Nice Post, Steve, coming directly from The Source.

But will the Dems take your cue and run with it?

Why do we still have this office? The whole premise is flawed from the start. Churches didn't receive funds from tax money and therefore weren't beholden to regulations concerning the money's use. They also don't pay taxes. Why couldn't that have been enough and why are we still paying for it? Because Obama is afraid to do anything that will hurt his standing with churches? Please.

Quoting something my grandmother always said only I'm going to replace she/he/they with the media. As in, the media wouldn't know the truth if it bit them on the ass. Nuff said.

Base your faith where the sun doesn't shine, I say..

GOP in power >>> mobilize base "values voters" >>>> use administarive office in cynical "non-partisan" way >>> Office of Faith Based Blah

GOP out of power >>>> mobilize base "values voters" >>>> use grass roots in cynical "non-partisan way >>>> Tea Party.

Same shit different day.

Oh, Ken Mehlman. The middle aged guy who just suddenly realized he was totally gay, after all those years of working the Republican line any way he could.

what this country needs is a goold old fashioned disestablishmentarianism movement.

count me in

When Towey makes acccusations of politically motivated actions, it worth remembering how he responded to criticism at his last job as a college president.

When most of Saint Vincent College's tenured faculty members voted last year to criticize President James Towey's management of the Benedictine college, most professors were so nervous about retribution that few were willing to discuss their concerns in public. The Rev. Mark Gruber was an exception, and he may be paying a price for that outspokenness now.

The Benedictine monk and professor of anthropology has been stripped of his teaching duties and barred from the college and from all interaction with students, punished amid accusations of sexual misconduct that were initiated last summer by Towey and the archabbot at the affiliated Saint Vincent Seminary. Towey and Archabbot Douglas R. Nowicki called state police to Saint Vincent last summer to investigate charges that Father Mark had downloaded child pornography onto a campus computer -- allegations that the police deemed to be unfounded, because they found no images on the computer of men under the age of 18, and because the computer was in a common area and many people had access to it.

[...]

But Saint Vincent officials punished Father Mark in September, reportedly after concluding that he had violated church law by viewing online images of nude men on the college computer.
But the story told by various documents in the case -- notably a report filed by Pennsylvania State Police in August -- suggest an aggressive attempt by Saint Vincent officials to discover wrongdoing by Father Mark. He vocally criticized Towey -- and, by extension, Archabbot Nowicki, with whom Towey is closely allied -- last year. "The tenured faculty took the lead, fortunately, but there are a lot of other people who share their views, and who are tired of the overriding of collegial discourse, the discounting of the consensus way of decision making, and what I see as the obfuscation of our Catholic mission," he told Inside Higher Ed last year.

The dramatic case of the monk who filed a defamation suit against St. Vincent College for removing him from ministry after pornography was discovered on his computer has an even more dramatic subplot.

A former student of the Rev. Mark Gruber has told both state police and canonical investigators that he downloaded pornography on the priest's computer. He says that Father Gruber knew that, but couldn't say so because he had sacramentally confessed that sin to the priest before the pornography was discovered. Priests are forbidden to reveal the contents of a confession under any circumstance.

[...]

The young man testified that "Father Mark has protected the seal of confession admirably even to the point of losing his job, his priestly faculties and allowing his reputation to be maligned."

The college's response includes a state police report on an April 20 interview with the same young man. Troopers, who sought him out after someone from the archabbey showed them his canonical statement, said he provided information that only someone who had downloaded certain images on Father Gruber's computer should know.