Obama and Cherie

This is what struck me, what shocked me actually, about the ever-so open-minded professors (and students) at the Angelicum who were so eager to praise the speech of Cherie Blair last year. The incredible gullibility of these people, who lapped up her oh so articulate tosh and cried foul when we pointed out that they had been played. It was the obviously powerful desire to be seen to like her and accept her and take what she said on its face. To be seen, perhaps, to be as enlightened and sophisticated and non-judgmental as she. To be one of the cool kids at last.

And these people were not stupid, nor were they pro-aborts or even "liberals". Many of them, the ones I spoke to, claimed plausibly enough to be serious-minded Catholics who are enthusiastically supportive of the Church's defence of human life. But there they were, mad as hornets that anyone had dared to say anything against Cherie.

This is the power of the leftist political machinery in having created for themselves this aura, this haze, of reasonableness, of warmth, of being the only really, truly, caring people around. It is the power of the Voice of Saruman, to soothe and to cloud the mind with warm, pink, fuzzy comfort so that anyone who dares to gainsay it is instantly rejected.

"When others spoke they seemed harsh and uncouth by contrast; and if they gainsaid the voice, anger was kindled in the hearts of those under the spell."

But Novak says that is the whole point of the (frankly completely transparent) rhetoric about "reducing the number of abortions" that has so often come lately from US pro-abort politicians.

The only people the president disarms with these words are those who are convinced that abortion is the deliberate taking of the life of a unique human individual (with its own unique DNA, distinct from that of its mother and its father). It is they and only they whom the president now summons to listen to the other side, to compromise, to pull clouds of uncertainty over their previous convictions, and to begin to waver. Obama is disarming the pro-life side, and only the pro-life side. The poor young students of Notre Dame, and their inexcusably uncritical and politically unsophisticated professors, are undone by a surface appeal to reason and civility, which is actually a call for their unconditional surrender.