It is now Friday, September 24, 2010. All day Monday I collected news items, and all day Tuesday I put them together in this memo – but didn’t get to send it. Wednesday – the new news I had collected by mid-morning made the memo obsolete. Etc., the same thing happened every day this week until today --- when I’m reading that CNN has basically revamped its senior executive staff from the git go!!!
I was like: I’m not hornswoggled after all: THE WORLD ITSELF IS CHANGING! Such things happen, you know. The item below from Time pretty well sets the tone – notably re the whining complaint of the mother-of-two which kicked off my original memo:
By Richard Corliss
On Monday, at President Obama's CNBC town-hall meeting, one of his sharpest critics was a fellow Harvard Law School classmate and current hedge-fund boss, Anthony Scaramucci. "I represent the Wall Street community," he said, as if he'd been elected in a vote of downtown billionaires. "We have felt like a piñata. Maybe you don't feel like you're whackin' us with a stick, but we certainly feel like we've been whacked with a stick. When are we [meaning the U.S. government] gonna stop whackin' the Wall Street piñata?"
Returning to the memo which has become a patchwork quilt:
To: The mother-of-two who said she fears returning to the ‘hot dogs-and-beans era’ of her life because Obama is not helping the financially strapped middle class.
From: Laura Jones - http://www.mamaleh-larisa.com
new site - http://how-soon-jerusalem.weebly.com/
Date: September 23, 2010
Subject: Hornswoggled again!!!
I love that word hornswoggled! Everybody knows just what you mean, even if they never heard it before. Checking into its origin, I see it is contemporaneous with discombobulated! Always one of my favorites!
Brothers and sisters, it’s mentally healthy, plus we know our culture is not in fact totally moribund as all the evidence would lead us to believe, when we are totally thrown for a loop! Keep reading and you will see why this is so at present.
Below are excerpts from a keynote address by Met. Jonah. I was like: can this be the same – uh, looney is the word that leaps to mind (if someone can find another, please substitute it) who a few months ago was pressuring everybody to sign The Manhattan Declaration, which “called upon evangelicals, Catholics and Orthodox not to comply with rules and laws permitting abortion, same-sex marriage and other matters that go against their religious consciences” – yet with no allusion whatsoever to the egomaniacal self-preoccupation which drives such aberrations, and which is rampant in our good old USA. Read the Declaration on http://www.manhattandeclaration.org/the-declaration/read.aspx and see for yourself, if you are fortunate enough not to have been previously exposed to such politically abstract drivel, totally disjoined from the real world peopled by actual, autonomously intelligent, rationally functioning (under normal circumstances) human beings, who have the capacity to use these capabilities …… for very great good or for very great evil. Surely it behooves a man of the cloth placed in a position of awesome responsibility to develop the ability to discern the difference.
I mean, if we want to rid our society of abortion, same-sex marriage and other matters that go against their religious consciences, then for starters, we should work on eliminating from society, for instance, the omni-prevalence of salaciously titillating elements in the every-day lifestyle which affects all of our society, across the board, from infants on up. How can you get any more basic than our daily manner of dress, and the advertisements screaming at us from huge billboards and TV screens, down to smaller but equally ubiquitous items, babies’ pampers, for instance. It is venally cruel, to begin with, to arouse all this lust all over the place --- and then try to whitewash it with legislature which is not going to eliminate it by any means, and will only punish the most innocent victims of this omni-erotic onslaught.
Likewise with same-sex marriage. We can blame that directly on the Catholic mania for celibacy, which effectively trashes the dignity of marriage altogether. We see this especially among the Irish and those who by association have acquired an Irish conscience. For such, women are 2nd rate to begin with (the one exception being those who have born a male child who has become a priest), altho one can by being a nun notch oneself up a bit - I have experienced this in my own life, when I first became interested in Catholicism and wanted to switch from Duke Univ. to a Catholic College in order to understand Catholicism by studying philosophy. A high ranking monsignor, then head of the philosophy department of Catholic Univ. in Washington, happened by a quirk of fate to have facilitated my admission to a new Catholic college in DC for girls, he being motivated by my interest in philosophy, which enabled him to open a philosophy department there. He fawned on me in all kinds of ways throughout my undergraduate career, facilitating my attendance at his own courses, graduate ones included, during summer school, etc. Until the fateful day when, near graduation, I told him I was getting married! His hope that his female protégée would distinguish herself in an advanced academic career in philosophy instantly evaporated and with it any interest whatsoever in me! New to Catholicism, I was at first non-plussed at his downright boorish rudeness to me! I mean, is this the way to interest serious young persons (of either sex) in the married state? I don’t think I need to get started on the irreparable damage done to marriage within the Catholic Church by the world-wide sex scandal involving priests, even bishops and higher …… Let the Catholic Church clean up its act on these and other scores, and then we can talk about punitive legislation – although at that point, should it ever, God willing, come to that, there will be no need for such legislation.
As for Met. Jonah, there are indications that someone in the Orthodox Church must have seen fit to set matters right. The current Wikipedia spread on Jonah states that during his stay in Russia, he “joined Valaam Monastery as a novice, coming under the spiritual direction of Archimandrite Pankraty (Zherdev), the monastery's abbot (now a titular bishop of Troitsk, believed to have been close to Patriarch Alexius II of Moscow).” I had never previously seen, in relation to Jonah, any reference at all to Pat. Aleksi II, to whom I was myself very close from the very beginning of his pontificate. Aleksi will, and I believe very soon, be recognized as one of the great Patriarchs of any place and any time, having steered the Russian Church through the collapse of the Godless Soviet regime during which Russia raised up more martyrs than at any other time in the history of the Church since the early pagan persecution of Christians. It is thanks to Aleksi that Pat. Kirill and my own Spiritual Father, Abp. Paul, currently of Ryazan, and others of the “Nikodimtsi” (see the picture of Met. Nikodim with Pope John Paul I, with a brief note, on the home page of my website, http://how-soon-jerusalem.weebly.com/), are today able not only to guide Russia itself out of the chaos that followed the collapse of the Soviet system – not from any external force or outside pressure, but by reason of the inherently flawed nature of an entity founded on Godlessness – but to be also a powerful force for good in the whole worldwide arena. If you think I exaggerate, check out the posts on my site addressing the transmogrification of Pope Benedict – who was chosen and trained, in the years he headed the Vatican Holy Office, by Pope John Paul II for just the role we now see him playing, John Paul II having himself worked hand in hand with Pat. Aleksi II – and myself, this being the reason why I know these things, because both Pontiffs with holy shrewdness necessarily played their cards very close to their chests in those days when the animosities that gripped the entire world during the Cold War were still very much alive and a deadly threat to Godliness in any form. Those were treacherous waters, indeed, to navigate!
Against this background, I think you will agree that Met. Jonah’s address is altogether exceptional!
Metropolitan Jonah’s Keynote Address, laying out his perspective on the Episcopal Assembly process then underway in North America
See:http://ancientfaith.com/specials/canadian_assembly_2010/metropolitan_jonah_keynote_address_-_the_episcopal_assembly
Transcript (edited by LJ)
Metropolitan Jonah: This past year has been very significant for the Orthodox Church in America as we stand on the brink of changes in the structure of the jurisdictional system and indeed, the dawning of the possibility of a real unity within the greater Orthodox community. The Episcopal Assembly began that process of coming together which presents us with the necessity for a plan to unify all the Orthodox in North America by the time of the next Great Council which is posited for early in 2013.
At the same time, the Orthodox Church in America has been engaged in the process of strategic planning: coming to a self-understanding of its own internal structures and the direction it needs to go. Yet, this plan is written not only in terms of the existing OCA, but is a vision for the whole Church in North America drawing on the tradition and the particular contributions that the OCA has for the whole American, North American, experience. Particularly, this has to do with a vision of conciliarity on a broad level that is an essential element of our experience of the Church. Conciliarity refers to the Church meeting in Council, initially with the Synods of Bishops. It has come to mean a broader participation by clergy and laity in the decision-making processes of the Church and their inclusion in various levels of councils.
In the OCA, this would refer to parish councils, diocesan councils, the Metropolitan Council, and above all, the All-American Council….As we consider how to come together with other Orthodox communities and where and how we as the OCA fit into the greater scheme of the Orthodox world, there are new aspects of conciliarity that we need to consider.
The OCA was given autocephaly 40 years ago, giving it administrative independence from its Mother Russian Orthodox Church. That act established the canonical relationship with the Mother Church and defined the OCA in relation to itself. However, the autocephaly itself causes many problems as it saw in the reactions of the other churches. What is important to understand is that the Orthodox Churches are not totally independent, self-sufficient entities that have absolute autonomy. I think this is kind of a projection of our political understanding on ecclesiology, and it’s wrong. Rather, the Orthodox Churches exist in mutual interdependence, a unity in communion in which each has to take account of the other. We see this in the microcosm of Orthodoxy in North America. So also is it on the international scene. That mutual interdependence in communion is what conciliarity is, and there are conciliar structures on all levels.
Autocephaly is a status within this system that prescribes a set of relationships with the other churches that, of necessity, must be entirely mutual. By unilaterally granting autocephaly to the OCA in 1970, those relationships were only partially established. By some in the Greek world, they were categorically rejected and some of the churches are ambivalent. This played itself out in the exclusion of the OCA from the Executive Committee of the Episcopal Assembly in its non-recognition by Constantinople of having the right to vote as an Autocephalous Church.
In other words, we’re being severely challenged. Until last year, there were no protocols for the granting of autocephaly or autonomy. In fact, the canons do not even deal with these categories. Those protocols do exist now, written by the Chambesy theologians, [Chambesy, I read, is being closed as the Greeks who have been supporting it lack funds. Or has it perhaps fulfilled its purpose, and we are now moving on???], and our situation is anomalous. Just for review [pls google Chambesy], …There is a tremendous kind of authority given to these meetings basically because they were authorized by the whole synaxis of patriarchs.
In regards to the protocols regarding autocephaly and autonomy, when … a mutual church is granted autonomy, a Mother Church can simply grant autonomy to one of its archdioceses and simply notify the rest of the Church. When a church wants to grant autocephaly to one of its archdioceses, the procedure is quite different. It proposes the autocephaly to the Ecumenical Patriarchate whose job it is to build the consensus of the rest of the Church,…so that there’s a completely mutual agreement of the whole Orthodox world on the autocephaly.
Our church, in a sense, if you want to put it into the context of those protocols, is in process. It was proposed. Some of the churches have accepted it, some of the churches are thinking about it, some of the churches have not accepted it. So it’s a process. We’re in process.
On the other hand, I think we can see also that our situation is somewhat anomalous. When a regional church is granted autocephaly, it normally includes all the Orthodox Christians within its boundaries within that church. That was not the case, obviously, with the OCA where only a portion of the churches in North America received autocephaly. The implication of autocephaly is that the universally recognized autocephalous church in a particular region becomes the criterion of canonicity and any other bodies within that region must submit to it. This has obviously not happened, and the other churches have reacted variously to our autocephaly.
I think another effect is that the OCA, while becoming independent, became self-absorbed. We became not a little triumphalistic and arrogant. We did not take into account the necessary conciliar dimensions of our autocephaly, either on the local level or on the international level. We discounted the other Orthodox communities in America expecting them to submit to us, and we tried to persuade the other churches to accept our autocephaly even if it was anomalous and problematic. None of this was helpful….
But the times have changed, and there are new demands on us. We’re being called to enter in to the greater conciliar dialogue of the churches in a way that has never existed before both on the local and the pan-Orthodox worldwide levels. … Over the next several months, the bishops and other leaders of the Church will gather to discuss the question of how to proceed. Nothing has been decided as of yet. But if we are to be full participants in the Episcopal Assembly process, we will have to alter our position.
We will have to decide some key value questions, but … whatever the particularities, we remain steadfast in our vision that the only acceptable solution for North America is a fully inclusive, united autocephalous Church with a single synod of bishops, electing our own bishops and primate, and controlling our own life. We will remain committed to a vision of conciliarity, of catholicity on all levels, affirming that all Orthodox Christians should have a voice in the life of the Church. We are absolutely committed to the vision that our task is missionary, to bring the gospel to Americans, and to incorporate Americans into the communion of the Orthodox Church.
[Please note that “incorporating Americans into the communion of the Orthodox Church” does not mean turning every American into card-carrying Orthodox!!! Check out the situation in the Moscow Patriarchate which is assiduously attentive to the spiritual needs of all religions which are traditional in Russia, basically, Orthodox, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, the shamanistic religions of the aboriginal Russian peoples – cf. Pat. Kirill’s statements on his currently on-going visit to Kamchatka in Russia’s far east, where Orthodox priests have taught the people from the Bible, but leave them free to worship in line with their native customs. Nota bene: I also stress in season and out that there is no discrepancy among genuine forms of religious worship: God is God, we are his creatures, the 10 commandments, ESPECIALLY THE FIRST COMMANDMENT: YOU SHALL HAVE NO OTHER GODS BEFORE ME are binding on all peoples, just because of our existence as created. In fact, it was precisely this very issue that motivated Mohammed; “islam” means “surrender”.
Back to quoting Met. Jonah:] There is a very important spiritual dimension in all of this that we must not neglect. It is easy to get caught up in the political and institutional ideas of what to do or not, but the real task is spiritual. How do we grow through this process? How do we become more authentically Christian? The answer to that is that we need to repent and live in a state of repentance. Repentance is not about just feeling sorry for our sins, much less feeling sorry for ourselves in some kind of guilt trip. Rather, repentance is the basic attitude of the Christian, to be renewed in the transformation of our minds as St. Isaac the Syrian unpacks the word “metanion”, to be renewed in the transformation of our minds. Our minds and hearts are transformed by conforming more and more to the image of God, the Lord Jesus Christ, and becoming like him.
In relation to the task of entering into a deeper unity, there are several points in which we need to repent and be transformed. First, we need to drop the triumphalism and the arrogance that isolate us from our brother Orthodox in this continent….It is an expansion of our sense of ourselves, our self-concept. It is not “us” and “them”, our people and their people, but rather simply, us. Elder Safroni wrote of the expansion of our personal “I” (like me), a concept that I learned from an elder living on an island hermitage on Valon(ph) when I visited him.
We have to grow beyond ourselves. That “I” refers not just to myself, but myself includes all those whom I love, all those with whom I am united. A husband and a wife expand their personal self-concept to include both of them and then their children: one mystical body … the recapitulation in Christ as one mystical body…The great saints included the whole world. Our Lord Jesus Christ incorporated the whole creation into himself and brought it to salvation thereby.
How? By love. By loving our neighbor as our self. We are called to expand our self, our “I”, to include the Greeks, and the Antiochians, and the Serbs, and the Bulgarians, and all the other Orthodox on our continent. They are all nash [Slavonic “nash” = ours]. (Applause) They are all ours. The only criterion is Christ and his love. We must further embrace the way of repentance by living in humility. By embracing the kenotic way, the ascetic way of self-emptying and self-denial, we must, like Christ, empty ourselves, of our self. We cannot focus on our own egos demanding our own way. Rather, we enter into the communion of the whole body seeking only God’s will for the Church and not our own. The mission of our Church is essentially kenotic. The OCA exists not as the final solution to Orthodox unity in North America. Rather, our mission is to bring about that unity and to blend into it. In other words, it is not about our power and control of others to make them to submit to us. Rather, we all enter together into a new unity. The current organization is not an end in itself, rather it is a model and a type of what we believe should come. In this way, our vocation is not only kenotic but prophetic as well.
[Some time has passed since Met. Jonah’s address, and the situation between Orthodox and Catholic has moved forward sufficiently to apply the same principles of conciliarity here also:
http://www.zenit.org/article-30457?l=english
PONTIFF ASKS PRAYERS FOR CATHOLIC-ORTHODOX MEETING
Commission Again Looking at Papal Primacy in 1st Millennium
VATICAN CITY, SEPT. 22, 2010 (Zenit.org).- Obedience to Christ and today's challenges to Christianity oblige Christians to be seriously committed to full unity, Benedict XVI says. The Pope affirmed this today at the end of the general audience when he appealed for prayers for the work of the International Mixed Commission for Theological Dialogue Between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church.
The commission is meeting in Vienna, Austria, through Monday. In the three days of dialogue they have already shared, they've been examining the same theme that drew them together in 2009: "The Role of the Bishop of Rome in the Communion of the Church in the First Millennium."
Noting this theme, the Holy Father said: "Obedience to the will of the Lord Jesus, and consideration of the great challenges that appear today before Christianity, oblige us to commit ourselves seriously in the cause of the re-establishment of full communion among the Churches. I exhort everyone to pray intensely for the efforts of the Commission and for a continuous development and consolidation of peace among the baptized, so that we can give the world an ever more authentic evangelical testimony."
The Catholic co-leader of the meeting is for the first time Archbishop Kurt Koch, the new president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. He was appointed to that role in July. The Orthodox co-leader is Metropolitan Ioannis Zizioulas of Pergamum.
When the commission concluded their meeting last October on this theme, Cardinal Walter Kasper, then-president of the Vatican's unity council, characterized the dialogue as "little steps forward in the right direction." © Innovative Media, Inc.
As reported by Interfax: On Tuesday, in Vienna, a meeting of the Joint International Commission for Catholic-Orthodox Dialogue convened, with a discussion of the “primacy” of the Pope of Rome in the first millennium as the major item on its agenda. “This is the hardest topic in the dialogue between Orthodox and Catholics, because the question of the role of the Bishop of Rome is the key to contemporary life in the Catholic Church”, Igumen Filipp Ryabykh, the deputy head of the MP Department for External Church Relations, told our Interfax-Religion correspondent on Tuesday. “The fact that the Pope of Rome claims universal jurisdiction is simply contrary to Orthodox ecclesiology, which teaches that the Orthodox Church, whilst preserving unity of faith and church order, nevertheless consists of several [autocephalous] Local Churches”, he said.
The Vienna meeting is a continuation of a discussion launched in Cyprus in 2009. “Last year, the meeting of the Commission prepared a draft document; the members of the commission began a study of the text, but it was still a work-in-progress, the Orthodox side made many comments upon the text offered. We expect that the Vienna meeting will see an intense discussion on the text of the document”, Fr Filipp said. The members of the MP delegation to the meeting include Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev, the head of the MP DECR, Archimandrite Kirill Govorun, First Deputy Chairman of the MP Education Committee, and Archpriest Valentin Asmus, a professor at the Moscow Theological Academy.
“The task of our delegation is to ensure that this document reflects the Orthodox position and to remove any ambiguities, compromises, or incorrect interpretation of the patristic view of the role of the Bishop of Rome”, Fr Filipp said. He recognised that finding consensus on this matter is difficult, but he felt, “Nevertheless, we should discuss this topic, because it’s the major issue between Catholics and Orthodox. I must say that for a long time the Catholics wouldn’t discuss this topic with the Orthodox side, knowing the crucial differences in our interpretation of it. The fact that the late Pope of Rome, John Paul II, and, then, the present Pope of Rome, Benedict XVI, agreed to bring this subject to the consideration of a joint commission is a generous step towards the Orthodox side on the part of the Catholic side”.
21 Sept 2010 Interfax-Religion
http://www.interfax-religion.ru/?act=news&div=37468
Now back to Met. Jonah :]
…That breadth of vision is something essentially Orthodox. It is essentially catholic. Our church in North America is incredibly diverse. On a typical Sunday in the OCA, the liturgy is being celebrated in at least a dozen languages, some of them European, some Native American. Our church is composed of dozens of ethnicities and reflects the diversity of our three countries. Already we have grown beyond a narrow, ethnic self-definition. Indeed, most of our bishops and priests and half of our people are converts. But we are called to grow still further, and to incorporate all the other Orthodox into our hearts. Only when we do this will our mission be truly fulfilled, that we become one Church in North America. (Applause) End of Address
Mutatis mutandi, this is what we have to do in the US political arena – let the American people practice some repentance and metanoia for a BIG, BIG CHANGE!!! I was impressed that in recent news reports, the one on the lady who complained she was “exhausted” from defending Obama was reported by several news media. Yes indeedy – it’s exhausting trying to cut through the thick skins of these self-coddling types who expect their every need to be served with the wave of a credit card --- and most especially when we ourselves are just such self-coddlers. That’s what it takes, guys, get used to it!!!
It’s the only way to get yourself un-hornswoggled!!! But I promise that when you do manage to experience being liberated from the tyranny of me, myself, and I --- you will think you are in heaven, because you will be!!! And you will even enjoy summoning up the lively imagination it takes to make hot dogs and beans the basis of a very healthful diet!
As you can tell, that was the end of the memo before the latest additions. I’ll finish off so I can alert you to this new stuff so that you can pick up on it yourself – I can’t wait to see what the new and improved CNN will have in store for us:
There were any number of really asinine headliners about Obama being “indecisive”!!! I mean, spare me! Not only does he decide for himself, he decides in the face of overwhelming media criticism (thank God CNN is doing a reassessment!) but all these polls are reflecting voter dissatisfaction so the candidates don’t want to be identified with him. The fact of the matter is that Americans by and large don’t even listen to the other person in a conversation, they are just waiting for the other person to take a breath so they can get their turn to spout off. And this is in no small measure thanks to the leadership – or absence thereof – of the Christian churches all over the place, which are themselves so at odds with one another, God forbid that a Catholic and an Orthodox should AGREE!!! How will they each maintain their creedal mis-identity if they agree on anything at all??? So what it all boils down to is that Americans are panicked by the mere suggestion that they don’t know something, that they might be themselves hornswoggled!!! And look at the Republicans: They are so unwilling to admit that something has just got to give, we can’t go on and on digging our own graves, they used to be the Party of “no”, but now the Tea Party threat is forcing them to – well, I honestly can’t figure out what they ARE doing, if anything at all, but in the face of the Tea Party trouncing they took in the primaries, they are now the party of STOP! Sorry, but we just have to leave you behind in the dust, guys.
One very loud silence denotes a substantial shift in the direction being taken by those “on the move”:
The Silence on Iran... From Obama's Critics
Time – Swampland blog
Posted by MASSIMO CALABRESI Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Presidents Barack Obama and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will deliver speeches at the United Nations General Assembly in New York Thursday, but it's more interesting to note who isn't speaking about Iran this week: critics of the Obama administration's “dual-track” diplomatic approach to the Islamic Republic. These critics traditionally fall into three categories—American conservatives and neoconservatives, Israelis, and Arabs—and this fall, each has its own reason for silence. But the combination amounts to that rarest of things these days: broad, albeit unspoken, support for an Obama policy.
The first group that is not barking is American conservatives and neo-cons. Given the opportunity to attack the administration's approach on Iran they would. But they have traditionally had two options for doing so: criticizing Obama's outreach to Iran or his failure to make sanctions tough enough. Recently, Obama has refused to accept Iran's offers of talks. More important, the surprise of the last few months has been the success of the administration's sanctions push. Few expect sanctions to radically change this Iranian regime's behavior, but the new sanctions imposed at the UN and other penalties from the US, EU, Australia, Japan and South Korea have hurt Tehran more than even some members of the administration thought they would, constraining the flow of refined petroleum to the country and squeezing its economy elsewhere.
That means critics on the right can't attack Obama for failing to be tough—indeed, the hardest punch the right has been able to land is to say that Obama's policy is the same as George W. Bush's pro-diplomacy approach during his last two years in office. Writing in the National Review, former Bush UN ambassador, John Bolton, said of the Obama and Bush approaches, “Neither has been successful.” In fact, Obama has had more success than Bush did with diplomacy, and for the most part Republicans, conservatives and neo-cons prefer to avoid the subject.
The second non-critic this week is Israel, which in the past has accused Obama of insufficiently focusing on Iran in favor of Palestinian peace talks. Previously, Israeli officials quietly leaked to local and American media that by the end of this year Iran would reach break out capacity—the ability rapidly to construct a nuclear weapon—and that Israel might be forced to launch a military strike. Now, however, there are reports that deficiencies in the Iranian nuclear program have deferred Israeli concerns, and Primer Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has even had positive things to say about the administration's efforts to pass sanctions at the UN.
The last quiet critics are the Arab states, which have simultaneously attacked the U.S. in public for being tough on Iran while imploring it in private to do more to halt Iran'sperceived march towards nuclear weaponization. The Arabs too like the sanctions success. But they also like the massive weapons sales the U.S. has recently announced it will make to Arab countries in the region. The Arabs, who oppose the Iranian regime, like weapons systems that might be used to help defang the regime Tehran, or at least raise the price of Tehran attacking them.
Things were not always so rosy for Obama and his national security team. There was a point last winter when China walked away from talks and the two-track approach to diplomacy with Iran--sanctions pressure on the one hand and an offer of talks on the other--looked all but dead. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates even sent a memo saying the administration's Iran policy was not coherent. So the administration deserves credit for sticking with its dual track approach and paying it off with broad support at home and abroad.
That said, the critics may get another bite at the apple if Obama and company reopen the door to talks with Iran in coming days, which they may. The administration will defend itself by saying it has always taken a dual track approach. And even if the administration does tack back to engagement it may become harder for the critics to land a punch against Obama. If Iran again stalls or walks away from talks as it did last year, the administration's international position would be strengthened, potentially opening the way to more multilateral action against Iran. Which from the looks of it this week is a policy winner at home and abroad.
I was like: I’m not hornswoggled after all: THE WORLD ITSELF IS CHANGING! Such things happen, you know. The item below from Time pretty well sets the tone – notably re the whining complaint of the mother-of-two which kicked off my original memo:
- Thursday, Sep. 23, 2010
By Richard Corliss
On Monday, at President Obama's CNBC town-hall meeting, one of his sharpest critics was a fellow Harvard Law School classmate and current hedge-fund boss, Anthony Scaramucci. "I represent the Wall Street community," he said, as if he'd been elected in a vote of downtown billionaires. "We have felt like a piñata. Maybe you don't feel like you're whackin' us with a stick, but we certainly feel like we've been whacked with a stick. When are we [meaning the U.S. government] gonna stop whackin' the Wall Street piñata?"
- Aside from the entertainment value of an over-educated, way too-rich money manager talking like Christopher Moltisanti on The Sopranos, Scaramucci's plaint had an unintended poignancy often found among the morally myopic. What the federal government did, Mr. Scaramucci, was give you and your pals a billion-dollar bailout after you gamed the world financial system close to bankruptcy. Then "the Wall Street community" went on doing business the same rapacious way, making risky bets and refusing loans to people who needed them. You were the guys with the stick; it's America's investors and home owners who got whacked.
- Find this article at:
- http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,2021140,00.html
Returning to the memo which has become a patchwork quilt:
To: The mother-of-two who said she fears returning to the ‘hot dogs-and-beans era’ of her life because Obama is not helping the financially strapped middle class.
From: Laura Jones - http://www.mamaleh-larisa.com
new site - http://how-soon-jerusalem.weebly.com/
Date: September 23, 2010
Subject: Hornswoggled again!!!
I love that word hornswoggled! Everybody knows just what you mean, even if they never heard it before. Checking into its origin, I see it is contemporaneous with discombobulated! Always one of my favorites!
Brothers and sisters, it’s mentally healthy, plus we know our culture is not in fact totally moribund as all the evidence would lead us to believe, when we are totally thrown for a loop! Keep reading and you will see why this is so at present.
Below are excerpts from a keynote address by Met. Jonah. I was like: can this be the same – uh, looney is the word that leaps to mind (if someone can find another, please substitute it) who a few months ago was pressuring everybody to sign The Manhattan Declaration, which “called upon evangelicals, Catholics and Orthodox not to comply with rules and laws permitting abortion, same-sex marriage and other matters that go against their religious consciences” – yet with no allusion whatsoever to the egomaniacal self-preoccupation which drives such aberrations, and which is rampant in our good old USA. Read the Declaration on http://www.manhattandeclaration.org/the-declaration/read.aspx and see for yourself, if you are fortunate enough not to have been previously exposed to such politically abstract drivel, totally disjoined from the real world peopled by actual, autonomously intelligent, rationally functioning (under normal circumstances) human beings, who have the capacity to use these capabilities …… for very great good or for very great evil. Surely it behooves a man of the cloth placed in a position of awesome responsibility to develop the ability to discern the difference.
I mean, if we want to rid our society of abortion, same-sex marriage and other matters that go against their religious consciences, then for starters, we should work on eliminating from society, for instance, the omni-prevalence of salaciously titillating elements in the every-day lifestyle which affects all of our society, across the board, from infants on up. How can you get any more basic than our daily manner of dress, and the advertisements screaming at us from huge billboards and TV screens, down to smaller but equally ubiquitous items, babies’ pampers, for instance. It is venally cruel, to begin with, to arouse all this lust all over the place --- and then try to whitewash it with legislature which is not going to eliminate it by any means, and will only punish the most innocent victims of this omni-erotic onslaught.
Likewise with same-sex marriage. We can blame that directly on the Catholic mania for celibacy, which effectively trashes the dignity of marriage altogether. We see this especially among the Irish and those who by association have acquired an Irish conscience. For such, women are 2nd rate to begin with (the one exception being those who have born a male child who has become a priest), altho one can by being a nun notch oneself up a bit - I have experienced this in my own life, when I first became interested in Catholicism and wanted to switch from Duke Univ. to a Catholic College in order to understand Catholicism by studying philosophy. A high ranking monsignor, then head of the philosophy department of Catholic Univ. in Washington, happened by a quirk of fate to have facilitated my admission to a new Catholic college in DC for girls, he being motivated by my interest in philosophy, which enabled him to open a philosophy department there. He fawned on me in all kinds of ways throughout my undergraduate career, facilitating my attendance at his own courses, graduate ones included, during summer school, etc. Until the fateful day when, near graduation, I told him I was getting married! His hope that his female protégée would distinguish herself in an advanced academic career in philosophy instantly evaporated and with it any interest whatsoever in me! New to Catholicism, I was at first non-plussed at his downright boorish rudeness to me! I mean, is this the way to interest serious young persons (of either sex) in the married state? I don’t think I need to get started on the irreparable damage done to marriage within the Catholic Church by the world-wide sex scandal involving priests, even bishops and higher …… Let the Catholic Church clean up its act on these and other scores, and then we can talk about punitive legislation – although at that point, should it ever, God willing, come to that, there will be no need for such legislation.
As for Met. Jonah, there are indications that someone in the Orthodox Church must have seen fit to set matters right. The current Wikipedia spread on Jonah states that during his stay in Russia, he “joined Valaam Monastery as a novice, coming under the spiritual direction of Archimandrite Pankraty (Zherdev), the monastery's abbot (now a titular bishop of Troitsk, believed to have been close to Patriarch Alexius II of Moscow).” I had never previously seen, in relation to Jonah, any reference at all to Pat. Aleksi II, to whom I was myself very close from the very beginning of his pontificate. Aleksi will, and I believe very soon, be recognized as one of the great Patriarchs of any place and any time, having steered the Russian Church through the collapse of the Godless Soviet regime during which Russia raised up more martyrs than at any other time in the history of the Church since the early pagan persecution of Christians. It is thanks to Aleksi that Pat. Kirill and my own Spiritual Father, Abp. Paul, currently of Ryazan, and others of the “Nikodimtsi” (see the picture of Met. Nikodim with Pope John Paul I, with a brief note, on the home page of my website, http://how-soon-jerusalem.weebly.com/), are today able not only to guide Russia itself out of the chaos that followed the collapse of the Soviet system – not from any external force or outside pressure, but by reason of the inherently flawed nature of an entity founded on Godlessness – but to be also a powerful force for good in the whole worldwide arena. If you think I exaggerate, check out the posts on my site addressing the transmogrification of Pope Benedict – who was chosen and trained, in the years he headed the Vatican Holy Office, by Pope John Paul II for just the role we now see him playing, John Paul II having himself worked hand in hand with Pat. Aleksi II – and myself, this being the reason why I know these things, because both Pontiffs with holy shrewdness necessarily played their cards very close to their chests in those days when the animosities that gripped the entire world during the Cold War were still very much alive and a deadly threat to Godliness in any form. Those were treacherous waters, indeed, to navigate!
Against this background, I think you will agree that Met. Jonah’s address is altogether exceptional!
Metropolitan Jonah’s Keynote Address, laying out his perspective on the Episcopal Assembly process then underway in North America
See:http://ancientfaith.com/specials/canadian_assembly_2010/metropolitan_jonah_keynote_address_-_the_episcopal_assembly
Transcript (edited by LJ)
Metropolitan Jonah: This past year has been very significant for the Orthodox Church in America as we stand on the brink of changes in the structure of the jurisdictional system and indeed, the dawning of the possibility of a real unity within the greater Orthodox community. The Episcopal Assembly began that process of coming together which presents us with the necessity for a plan to unify all the Orthodox in North America by the time of the next Great Council which is posited for early in 2013.
At the same time, the Orthodox Church in America has been engaged in the process of strategic planning: coming to a self-understanding of its own internal structures and the direction it needs to go. Yet, this plan is written not only in terms of the existing OCA, but is a vision for the whole Church in North America drawing on the tradition and the particular contributions that the OCA has for the whole American, North American, experience. Particularly, this has to do with a vision of conciliarity on a broad level that is an essential element of our experience of the Church. Conciliarity refers to the Church meeting in Council, initially with the Synods of Bishops. It has come to mean a broader participation by clergy and laity in the decision-making processes of the Church and their inclusion in various levels of councils.
In the OCA, this would refer to parish councils, diocesan councils, the Metropolitan Council, and above all, the All-American Council….As we consider how to come together with other Orthodox communities and where and how we as the OCA fit into the greater scheme of the Orthodox world, there are new aspects of conciliarity that we need to consider.
The OCA was given autocephaly 40 years ago, giving it administrative independence from its Mother Russian Orthodox Church. That act established the canonical relationship with the Mother Church and defined the OCA in relation to itself. However, the autocephaly itself causes many problems as it saw in the reactions of the other churches. What is important to understand is that the Orthodox Churches are not totally independent, self-sufficient entities that have absolute autonomy. I think this is kind of a projection of our political understanding on ecclesiology, and it’s wrong. Rather, the Orthodox Churches exist in mutual interdependence, a unity in communion in which each has to take account of the other. We see this in the microcosm of Orthodoxy in North America. So also is it on the international scene. That mutual interdependence in communion is what conciliarity is, and there are conciliar structures on all levels.
Autocephaly is a status within this system that prescribes a set of relationships with the other churches that, of necessity, must be entirely mutual. By unilaterally granting autocephaly to the OCA in 1970, those relationships were only partially established. By some in the Greek world, they were categorically rejected and some of the churches are ambivalent. This played itself out in the exclusion of the OCA from the Executive Committee of the Episcopal Assembly in its non-recognition by Constantinople of having the right to vote as an Autocephalous Church.
In other words, we’re being severely challenged. Until last year, there were no protocols for the granting of autocephaly or autonomy. In fact, the canons do not even deal with these categories. Those protocols do exist now, written by the Chambesy theologians, [Chambesy, I read, is being closed as the Greeks who have been supporting it lack funds. Or has it perhaps fulfilled its purpose, and we are now moving on???], and our situation is anomalous. Just for review [pls google Chambesy], …There is a tremendous kind of authority given to these meetings basically because they were authorized by the whole synaxis of patriarchs.
In regards to the protocols regarding autocephaly and autonomy, when … a mutual church is granted autonomy, a Mother Church can simply grant autonomy to one of its archdioceses and simply notify the rest of the Church. When a church wants to grant autocephaly to one of its archdioceses, the procedure is quite different. It proposes the autocephaly to the Ecumenical Patriarchate whose job it is to build the consensus of the rest of the Church,…so that there’s a completely mutual agreement of the whole Orthodox world on the autocephaly.
Our church, in a sense, if you want to put it into the context of those protocols, is in process. It was proposed. Some of the churches have accepted it, some of the churches are thinking about it, some of the churches have not accepted it. So it’s a process. We’re in process.
On the other hand, I think we can see also that our situation is somewhat anomalous. When a regional church is granted autocephaly, it normally includes all the Orthodox Christians within its boundaries within that church. That was not the case, obviously, with the OCA where only a portion of the churches in North America received autocephaly. The implication of autocephaly is that the universally recognized autocephalous church in a particular region becomes the criterion of canonicity and any other bodies within that region must submit to it. This has obviously not happened, and the other churches have reacted variously to our autocephaly.
I think another effect is that the OCA, while becoming independent, became self-absorbed. We became not a little triumphalistic and arrogant. We did not take into account the necessary conciliar dimensions of our autocephaly, either on the local level or on the international level. We discounted the other Orthodox communities in America expecting them to submit to us, and we tried to persuade the other churches to accept our autocephaly even if it was anomalous and problematic. None of this was helpful….
But the times have changed, and there are new demands on us. We’re being called to enter in to the greater conciliar dialogue of the churches in a way that has never existed before both on the local and the pan-Orthodox worldwide levels. … Over the next several months, the bishops and other leaders of the Church will gather to discuss the question of how to proceed. Nothing has been decided as of yet. But if we are to be full participants in the Episcopal Assembly process, we will have to alter our position.
We will have to decide some key value questions, but … whatever the particularities, we remain steadfast in our vision that the only acceptable solution for North America is a fully inclusive, united autocephalous Church with a single synod of bishops, electing our own bishops and primate, and controlling our own life. We will remain committed to a vision of conciliarity, of catholicity on all levels, affirming that all Orthodox Christians should have a voice in the life of the Church. We are absolutely committed to the vision that our task is missionary, to bring the gospel to Americans, and to incorporate Americans into the communion of the Orthodox Church.
[Please note that “incorporating Americans into the communion of the Orthodox Church” does not mean turning every American into card-carrying Orthodox!!! Check out the situation in the Moscow Patriarchate which is assiduously attentive to the spiritual needs of all religions which are traditional in Russia, basically, Orthodox, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, the shamanistic religions of the aboriginal Russian peoples – cf. Pat. Kirill’s statements on his currently on-going visit to Kamchatka in Russia’s far east, where Orthodox priests have taught the people from the Bible, but leave them free to worship in line with their native customs. Nota bene: I also stress in season and out that there is no discrepancy among genuine forms of religious worship: God is God, we are his creatures, the 10 commandments, ESPECIALLY THE FIRST COMMANDMENT: YOU SHALL HAVE NO OTHER GODS BEFORE ME are binding on all peoples, just because of our existence as created. In fact, it was precisely this very issue that motivated Mohammed; “islam” means “surrender”.
Back to quoting Met. Jonah:] There is a very important spiritual dimension in all of this that we must not neglect. It is easy to get caught up in the political and institutional ideas of what to do or not, but the real task is spiritual. How do we grow through this process? How do we become more authentically Christian? The answer to that is that we need to repent and live in a state of repentance. Repentance is not about just feeling sorry for our sins, much less feeling sorry for ourselves in some kind of guilt trip. Rather, repentance is the basic attitude of the Christian, to be renewed in the transformation of our minds as St. Isaac the Syrian unpacks the word “metanion”, to be renewed in the transformation of our minds. Our minds and hearts are transformed by conforming more and more to the image of God, the Lord Jesus Christ, and becoming like him.
In relation to the task of entering into a deeper unity, there are several points in which we need to repent and be transformed. First, we need to drop the triumphalism and the arrogance that isolate us from our brother Orthodox in this continent….It is an expansion of our sense of ourselves, our self-concept. It is not “us” and “them”, our people and their people, but rather simply, us. Elder Safroni wrote of the expansion of our personal “I” (like me), a concept that I learned from an elder living on an island hermitage on Valon(ph) when I visited him.
We have to grow beyond ourselves. That “I” refers not just to myself, but myself includes all those whom I love, all those with whom I am united. A husband and a wife expand their personal self-concept to include both of them and then their children: one mystical body … the recapitulation in Christ as one mystical body…The great saints included the whole world. Our Lord Jesus Christ incorporated the whole creation into himself and brought it to salvation thereby.
How? By love. By loving our neighbor as our self. We are called to expand our self, our “I”, to include the Greeks, and the Antiochians, and the Serbs, and the Bulgarians, and all the other Orthodox on our continent. They are all nash [Slavonic “nash” = ours]. (Applause) They are all ours. The only criterion is Christ and his love. We must further embrace the way of repentance by living in humility. By embracing the kenotic way, the ascetic way of self-emptying and self-denial, we must, like Christ, empty ourselves, of our self. We cannot focus on our own egos demanding our own way. Rather, we enter into the communion of the whole body seeking only God’s will for the Church and not our own. The mission of our Church is essentially kenotic. The OCA exists not as the final solution to Orthodox unity in North America. Rather, our mission is to bring about that unity and to blend into it. In other words, it is not about our power and control of others to make them to submit to us. Rather, we all enter together into a new unity. The current organization is not an end in itself, rather it is a model and a type of what we believe should come. In this way, our vocation is not only kenotic but prophetic as well.
[Some time has passed since Met. Jonah’s address, and the situation between Orthodox and Catholic has moved forward sufficiently to apply the same principles of conciliarity here also:
http://www.zenit.org/article-30457?l=english
PONTIFF ASKS PRAYERS FOR CATHOLIC-ORTHODOX MEETING
Commission Again Looking at Papal Primacy in 1st Millennium
VATICAN CITY, SEPT. 22, 2010 (Zenit.org).- Obedience to Christ and today's challenges to Christianity oblige Christians to be seriously committed to full unity, Benedict XVI says. The Pope affirmed this today at the end of the general audience when he appealed for prayers for the work of the International Mixed Commission for Theological Dialogue Between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church.
The commission is meeting in Vienna, Austria, through Monday. In the three days of dialogue they have already shared, they've been examining the same theme that drew them together in 2009: "The Role of the Bishop of Rome in the Communion of the Church in the First Millennium."
Noting this theme, the Holy Father said: "Obedience to the will of the Lord Jesus, and consideration of the great challenges that appear today before Christianity, oblige us to commit ourselves seriously in the cause of the re-establishment of full communion among the Churches. I exhort everyone to pray intensely for the efforts of the Commission and for a continuous development and consolidation of peace among the baptized, so that we can give the world an ever more authentic evangelical testimony."
The Catholic co-leader of the meeting is for the first time Archbishop Kurt Koch, the new president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. He was appointed to that role in July. The Orthodox co-leader is Metropolitan Ioannis Zizioulas of Pergamum.
When the commission concluded their meeting last October on this theme, Cardinal Walter Kasper, then-president of the Vatican's unity council, characterized the dialogue as "little steps forward in the right direction." © Innovative Media, Inc.
As reported by Interfax: On Tuesday, in Vienna, a meeting of the Joint International Commission for Catholic-Orthodox Dialogue convened, with a discussion of the “primacy” of the Pope of Rome in the first millennium as the major item on its agenda. “This is the hardest topic in the dialogue between Orthodox and Catholics, because the question of the role of the Bishop of Rome is the key to contemporary life in the Catholic Church”, Igumen Filipp Ryabykh, the deputy head of the MP Department for External Church Relations, told our Interfax-Religion correspondent on Tuesday. “The fact that the Pope of Rome claims universal jurisdiction is simply contrary to Orthodox ecclesiology, which teaches that the Orthodox Church, whilst preserving unity of faith and church order, nevertheless consists of several [autocephalous] Local Churches”, he said.
The Vienna meeting is a continuation of a discussion launched in Cyprus in 2009. “Last year, the meeting of the Commission prepared a draft document; the members of the commission began a study of the text, but it was still a work-in-progress, the Orthodox side made many comments upon the text offered. We expect that the Vienna meeting will see an intense discussion on the text of the document”, Fr Filipp said. The members of the MP delegation to the meeting include Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev, the head of the MP DECR, Archimandrite Kirill Govorun, First Deputy Chairman of the MP Education Committee, and Archpriest Valentin Asmus, a professor at the Moscow Theological Academy.
“The task of our delegation is to ensure that this document reflects the Orthodox position and to remove any ambiguities, compromises, or incorrect interpretation of the patristic view of the role of the Bishop of Rome”, Fr Filipp said. He recognised that finding consensus on this matter is difficult, but he felt, “Nevertheless, we should discuss this topic, because it’s the major issue between Catholics and Orthodox. I must say that for a long time the Catholics wouldn’t discuss this topic with the Orthodox side, knowing the crucial differences in our interpretation of it. The fact that the late Pope of Rome, John Paul II, and, then, the present Pope of Rome, Benedict XVI, agreed to bring this subject to the consideration of a joint commission is a generous step towards the Orthodox side on the part of the Catholic side”.
21 Sept 2010 Interfax-Religion
http://www.interfax-religion.ru/?act=news&div=37468
Now back to Met. Jonah :]
…That breadth of vision is something essentially Orthodox. It is essentially catholic. Our church in North America is incredibly diverse. On a typical Sunday in the OCA, the liturgy is being celebrated in at least a dozen languages, some of them European, some Native American. Our church is composed of dozens of ethnicities and reflects the diversity of our three countries. Already we have grown beyond a narrow, ethnic self-definition. Indeed, most of our bishops and priests and half of our people are converts. But we are called to grow still further, and to incorporate all the other Orthodox into our hearts. Only when we do this will our mission be truly fulfilled, that we become one Church in North America. (Applause) End of Address
Mutatis mutandi, this is what we have to do in the US political arena – let the American people practice some repentance and metanoia for a BIG, BIG CHANGE!!! I was impressed that in recent news reports, the one on the lady who complained she was “exhausted” from defending Obama was reported by several news media. Yes indeedy – it’s exhausting trying to cut through the thick skins of these self-coddling types who expect their every need to be served with the wave of a credit card --- and most especially when we ourselves are just such self-coddlers. That’s what it takes, guys, get used to it!!!
It’s the only way to get yourself un-hornswoggled!!! But I promise that when you do manage to experience being liberated from the tyranny of me, myself, and I --- you will think you are in heaven, because you will be!!! And you will even enjoy summoning up the lively imagination it takes to make hot dogs and beans the basis of a very healthful diet!
As you can tell, that was the end of the memo before the latest additions. I’ll finish off so I can alert you to this new stuff so that you can pick up on it yourself – I can’t wait to see what the new and improved CNN will have in store for us:
There were any number of really asinine headliners about Obama being “indecisive”!!! I mean, spare me! Not only does he decide for himself, he decides in the face of overwhelming media criticism (thank God CNN is doing a reassessment!) but all these polls are reflecting voter dissatisfaction so the candidates don’t want to be identified with him. The fact of the matter is that Americans by and large don’t even listen to the other person in a conversation, they are just waiting for the other person to take a breath so they can get their turn to spout off. And this is in no small measure thanks to the leadership – or absence thereof – of the Christian churches all over the place, which are themselves so at odds with one another, God forbid that a Catholic and an Orthodox should AGREE!!! How will they each maintain their creedal mis-identity if they agree on anything at all??? So what it all boils down to is that Americans are panicked by the mere suggestion that they don’t know something, that they might be themselves hornswoggled!!! And look at the Republicans: They are so unwilling to admit that something has just got to give, we can’t go on and on digging our own graves, they used to be the Party of “no”, but now the Tea Party threat is forcing them to – well, I honestly can’t figure out what they ARE doing, if anything at all, but in the face of the Tea Party trouncing they took in the primaries, they are now the party of STOP! Sorry, but we just have to leave you behind in the dust, guys.
One very loud silence denotes a substantial shift in the direction being taken by those “on the move”:
The Silence on Iran... From Obama's Critics
Time – Swampland blog
Posted by MASSIMO CALABRESI Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Presidents Barack Obama and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will deliver speeches at the United Nations General Assembly in New York Thursday, but it's more interesting to note who isn't speaking about Iran this week: critics of the Obama administration's “dual-track” diplomatic approach to the Islamic Republic. These critics traditionally fall into three categories—American conservatives and neoconservatives, Israelis, and Arabs—and this fall, each has its own reason for silence. But the combination amounts to that rarest of things these days: broad, albeit unspoken, support for an Obama policy.
The first group that is not barking is American conservatives and neo-cons. Given the opportunity to attack the administration's approach on Iran they would. But they have traditionally had two options for doing so: criticizing Obama's outreach to Iran or his failure to make sanctions tough enough. Recently, Obama has refused to accept Iran's offers of talks. More important, the surprise of the last few months has been the success of the administration's sanctions push. Few expect sanctions to radically change this Iranian regime's behavior, but the new sanctions imposed at the UN and other penalties from the US, EU, Australia, Japan and South Korea have hurt Tehran more than even some members of the administration thought they would, constraining the flow of refined petroleum to the country and squeezing its economy elsewhere.
That means critics on the right can't attack Obama for failing to be tough—indeed, the hardest punch the right has been able to land is to say that Obama's policy is the same as George W. Bush's pro-diplomacy approach during his last two years in office. Writing in the National Review, former Bush UN ambassador, John Bolton, said of the Obama and Bush approaches, “Neither has been successful.” In fact, Obama has had more success than Bush did with diplomacy, and for the most part Republicans, conservatives and neo-cons prefer to avoid the subject.
The second non-critic this week is Israel, which in the past has accused Obama of insufficiently focusing on Iran in favor of Palestinian peace talks. Previously, Israeli officials quietly leaked to local and American media that by the end of this year Iran would reach break out capacity—the ability rapidly to construct a nuclear weapon—and that Israel might be forced to launch a military strike. Now, however, there are reports that deficiencies in the Iranian nuclear program have deferred Israeli concerns, and Primer Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has even had positive things to say about the administration's efforts to pass sanctions at the UN.
The last quiet critics are the Arab states, which have simultaneously attacked the U.S. in public for being tough on Iran while imploring it in private to do more to halt Iran'sperceived march towards nuclear weaponization. The Arabs too like the sanctions success. But they also like the massive weapons sales the U.S. has recently announced it will make to Arab countries in the region. The Arabs, who oppose the Iranian regime, like weapons systems that might be used to help defang the regime Tehran, or at least raise the price of Tehran attacking them.
Things were not always so rosy for Obama and his national security team. There was a point last winter when China walked away from talks and the two-track approach to diplomacy with Iran--sanctions pressure on the one hand and an offer of talks on the other--looked all but dead. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates even sent a memo saying the administration's Iran policy was not coherent. So the administration deserves credit for sticking with its dual track approach and paying it off with broad support at home and abroad.
That said, the critics may get another bite at the apple if Obama and company reopen the door to talks with Iran in coming days, which they may. The administration will defend itself by saying it has always taken a dual track approach. And even if the administration does tack back to engagement it may become harder for the critics to land a punch against Obama. If Iran again stalls or walks away from talks as it did last year, the administration's international position would be strengthened, potentially opening the way to more multilateral action against Iran. Which from the looks of it this week is a policy winner at home and abroad.
