Today's links

• From LRC: Benghazi, Petraeus... and al-Qaeda. Right, while national-security theatre demeans you at airports, because 9/11 Changed Everything™, ‘our’ government... makes deals with al-Qaeda. Take our soldiers out of the Mideast, stop supporting Israel against the Arab majority and all will be well.
• From Knappster: Like me in ’08, only I did it on principle, 61% of us didn’t vote.
• Sailer: election demographics. Interesting: White Catholics for Romney: 57%. I wasn’t a Romney voter (Libertarian ticket plus two local Republicans), but is this a sign of Pope Benedict’s smaller, sounder church? But: a smaller church (not the white-immigrant New York of Cardinal Spellman’s Powerhouse) means a candidate can lose the ‘Catholic vote’ (if it still exists) and still take the country (which is still majority Protestant, including lapsed, ‘spiritual not religious’ and nondenominational evangelical) anyway.
• My parish, a sound high-church magnet in the city, run by a small order of friars: white stalwarts from before the council who helped save the traditional Mass after 40 years of suppression (‘the Mass that would not die’: thanks, Archbishop Lefebvre; like Joan of Arc he may well end up canonized in the long run), young white trad families with four-six children (an 80-year-old Pope has 20-30-year-old followers; the boomers are rightly bypassed), black locals and... from what I can tell by the accent, Caribbean immigrant blacks. Anglo-Catholic alumni? (Those British colonies had many black ACs.) AC alumni don’t run the parish. Fr James (now at St Rocco’s) just took the best of American high church (what I and others would like the ordinariate to be, like Mount Calvary, Baltimore; though I’m staying put with the Tridentine) and ran with it.
• Bishop Williamson: suspicious of the official church? Understandably! Questioning the sacred number six million? Good argument and immaterial here as it’s not doctrine. He’s entitled to his other opinions. But he lost me when he recommended The Poem of the Man-God, a book the church condemned before the council. So he only represents himself, not the traditional church. The Pope should bring in the SSPX and make Bishop Fellay a cardinal.
• From RR: Greece passes ’13 austerity budget.
• Left-libertarians blame so-cons and GOP concessions to them for Romney loss. The party will go either in a ‘moderate’ so-lib direction again in ’16 or will go the Palinesque/Tea Party route to rally the base, either way pro-war and statist. Dano’s prediction: Obama’s peaked and as a lame duck has nothing to lose so he’ll go for broke, pushing through his most unpopular programs, so the Dems will get clobbered both in the midterms and in ’16, no matter who the GOP runs.
• More ‘Obama’s only a symptom’. The Prager Zeitung via Bill Tighe: The danger to America is not Barack Obama, but a citizenry capable of entrusting a man like him with the Presidency. It will be far easier to limit and undo the follies of an Obama presidency than to restore the necessary common sense and good judgment to a depraved electorate willing to have such a man for their president. The problem is much deeper and far more serious than Mr. Obama, who is a mere symptom of what ails America. Blaming the prince of the fools should not blind anyone to the vast confederacy of fools that made him their prince. The Republic can survive a Barack Obama, who is, after all, merely a fool. It is less likely to survive a multitude of fools such as those who made him their president.
• From Ad Orientem: Real-life spying isn’t James Bond.