These are the pre-John-XXIII Catholics. The people who knocked the penises off Renaissance sculptures. Their leader was Savonarola.

I cut and paste from http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/lecture5a.html#savonarola

"The republic of Florence was to be a Christian commonwealth, of which God was the sole sovereign, and His Gospel the law: the most stringent enactments were made for the repression of vice and frivolity. Gambling was prohibited an the vanities of dress were restrained by sumptuary laws. Even the women flocked to the public square to fling down their costliest ornaments and Savonarola's followers made huge "bonfires of the vanities."

Hmm, sounds familiar. The Taliban would approve. In fact, Savonarola was part of the Church's reaction to the humanism of the preceding Medici rule.

Mr. Donohue, in rejecting the ironic icon of a chocolate Easter Christ, focuses on one thing: his nakedness. Mr. Donohue should therefore go through the Vatican with an ax and torch, because there's a lot of naked Christs in St. Peter's.

If it's any consolation for the sane, Savonarola, a Dominican friar, became increasingly unpopular. Again, from the History Guide.

"He was brought to trial for falsely claiming to have seen visions, and uttered prophecies, for religious error, and for sedition. Under torture he made avowals which he afterwards withdrew. He was declared guilty and the sentence was confirmed by Rome. On May 23, 1498, this extraordinary man and two Dominican disciples were hanged and burned..."

I'd start writing letters to Benedict, asking for the same poetic justice for Donohue.

You have seen the real war party: it's the Bush party, which took the unprecedented step of committing us to an aggressive war by telling lies about it. (Oh, okay, James K. Polk, too.) With the heartbreaking exception of Vietnam, The Democrats have a pretty good record. If you don't make any difference between World War II and the CIA's dirty wars in Africa, or between Iraq and Bosnia, then I don't know what to think of you. No wars? Never? So we should have turned our cheek to Japan and ignored Hitler? Should we also live Vegan? Have sex in a commune because possessiveness, man, is like, such a drag?

Go ahead. Try to convince a sizable number of Americans that pacifism is a viable option. You've lost me from the start.

Pelosi worked very hard to get what she wanted, or at least what was possible. Do you think the Democratic Party is, or ever will be, a revolutionary vanguard? Don't be ridiculous. It's the oldest political party on earth, operating in an institutional framework erected by the constitution. So they're not going to march on the White House with machine guns. Nor should they.

FDR was a wealthy man who ran as a Democrat. He headed off a growing leftist rebellion within the U.S. and moved the Democratic party to the left. He had to make a deal with the Democratic South, though it went against his impulses and certainly against his wife's impulses. The showdown on segregation came a lot later, and, as Johnson predicted, it put the Democratic Party in limbo for at least a generation. This is American politics the way it's supposed to be played -- that's the way the Federalist Papers saw things playing out. Equal branches. There wasn't even supposed to be parties, but that was impossible.

Is there room for the revolutionary impulse? Sure. Pure consensus politics without input from the streets, or from thinkers in the press, or academe, or bohemia, ends up being too much about compromise.

What is very annoying is this: the left wants to control a party they didn't build, don't influence any large number of votes in, and wants to be a pain in the ass for the next two years. Why? Why don't you just keep organizing larger and larger demonstrations? That might do something. There are now a number of center-left institutions building. Want to contribute to something further left? Go ahead. Then when the next historic shift to the left comes, and it's coming, you'll have influence.

Our common enemy is the sort of misrule that started, really, in 1968, the last time the left got out ahead of the people, and lost the center to the Reagans and Bushes. Attack them, fer chrissakes.