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Two Things

Whew, things are a whirlwind at the office. Not much today. I just have a few quick things:

1. This piece from the current issue of The Atlantic about John F. Kennedy. Man, I knew the guy was a hound, but I didn't know he was this bad:

John always had girls: there were girlfriends and comfort girls; call girls and showgirls; girls on the campaign trail and girls who seemed to materialize out of thin air wherever he was. There was also the occasional wife of a friend, or the aging paramour of his randy pop, for those moments when the fancy ran to mature horseflesh or masculine competition. His penchant for prostitutes demoralized the agents assigned to protect him: “You were on the most elite assignment in the Secret Service,” the former agent Larry Newman told a television interviewer a decade ago, “and you were there watching an elevator door, because the president was inside with two hookers.”

Of course, JFK fans like to point out that, his sexual antics aside, he was a great president. I've never understood that claim, but the author puts it to bed forcefully:

He started the Peace Corps and the Vietnam War. He promised to put a man on the moon, and he presided over an administration whose love affair with assassination was held in check only by its blessed incompetence at pulling off more of them. (“That administration,” said LBJ–painted birds long forgotten, the mists of Camelot beginning to clear–“had been operating a damned Murder, Inc.”) He fought for a tax break the particulars of which look like the product of a Rush Limbaugh fever dream, he almost got us all killed during his “second Cuba” (writing of JFK and the missile crisis, Christopher Hitchens noted: “Only the most servile masochist ”¦ can congratulate [Kennedy] on the 'coolness' with which he defused a ghastly crisis almost entirely of his own making”), and he brought organized crime into contact with the highest echelons of American power. More than anyone else in American history, perhaps, he had a clear vision of what his country could do for him.

2. A priest in my diocese is creating a small Internet sensation. I know Fr. Ted personally. He's a young man of intense integrity and goodness who comes from a great family. Check out these links: Link 1 and Link 2. In Link 1, he scorches a group of liberal women with grace and good humor. He's so good that the women know they're getting thrashed and don't even mind it. I'm not sure I've ever seen anyone pull off such a thing.

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