This is not only indicates a failure of the media to inform, it indicates that our culture in general has failed to be the least bit enlightening.
We have lost the propaganda war. One reason for this is that we have allowed education to become nothing more than propaganda.
I am really starting to detest the whole idea of American Idol. I think that our pop-culture is the real paradigm for the American electoral process and for the education of our average countryman.
512 Obama Voters 11/13/08-11/15/08 MOE +/- 4.4 points
97.1% High School Graduate or higher, 55% College Graduates
Results to 12 simple Multiple Choice Questions
57.4% could NOT correctly say which party controls congress (50/50 shot just by guessing)
81.8% could NOT correctly say Joe Biden quit a previous campaign because of plagiarism (25% chance by guessing)
82.6% could NOT correctly say that Barack Obama won his first election by getting opponents kicked off the ballot (25% chance by guessing)
88.4% could NOT correctly say that Obama said his policies would likely bankrupt the coal industry and make energy rates skyrocket (25% chance by guessing)
56.1% could NOT correctly say Obama started his political career at the home of two former members of the Weather Underground (25% chance by guessing).
And yet…..
Only 13.7% failed to identify Sarah Palin as the person on which their party spent $150,000 in clothes
Only 6.2% failed to identify Palin as the one with a pregnant teenage daughter
And 86.9 % thought that Palin said that she could see Russia from her “house,” even though that was Tina Fey who said that!!
Only 2.4% got at least 11 correct.
Only .5% got all of them correct. (And we “gave” one answer that was technically not Palin, but actually Tina Fey)
Update:
Mary Victrix 
I’m ashamed to admit that I would not have answered all of this correctly either. Why? Because the news simply refuses to cover much of it and if you don’t know all the places to dig for the truth, you simply cannot find it. I don’t get the fancy cable lineup that would give me Foxnews. It used to be on the Basic cable lineup but it isn’t anymore and it atleast enlightens you more on the conservative side of things.
I keep thinking that if a national newspaper (even a number of local ones) could TRULY give bipartisan news and make an honest effort to cover BOTH sides of things and move away from the emotional tirades that happen from the left which block the right from being able to see anything, people would be ecstatic. We could start to really make educational decisions … I don’t know why any printing presses don’t go for it.
I realize that most people get their news on-line now, but there needs to be one that can truly give both sides of the issues and cut through the garbage … like the *clothes* thing with Palin. How that became a huge piece of decisive news during an election is beyond me!!! We need to demand so much more depth than that from these news stations. It reminds me of that song back in the 80’s … we like dirty laundry. We like the gossip … kick ’em when they’re up, kick ’em when they’re down. We like the *juicy* story. News has become just another source of entertainment. We’re back to the days of the Gladiators where entertainment is at the expense of someone else and we relish in watching a person be destroyed and think THAT’S helping us discover the truth.
Totally off topic, but I just wanted to share this with all of you. Our prayers are working! Please keep up the fight and keep the Faith!! (Source: I first heard this this morning on the Laura Ingraham Show.)
Another ‘champion of abortion’ becomes defender of life: the story of Stojan Adasevic
Madrid, Nov 12, 2008 / 09:21 pm (CNA).- The Spanish daily “La Razon” has published an article on the pro-life conversion of a former “champion of abortion.” Stojan Adasevic, who performed 48,000 abortions, sometimes up to 35 per day, is now the most important pro-life leader in Serbia, after 26 years as the most renowned abortion doctor in the country.
“The medical textbooks of the Communist regime said abortion was simply the removal of a blob of tissue,” the newspaper reported. “Ultrasounds allowing the fetus to be seen did not arrive until the 80s, but they did not change his opinion. Nevertheless, he began to have nightmares.”
In describing his conversion, Adasevic “dreamed about a beautiful field full of children and young people who were playing and laughing, from 4 to 24 years of age, but who ran away from him in fear. A man dressed in a black and white habit stared at him in silence. The dream was repeated each night and he would wake up in a cold sweat. One night he asked the man in black and white who he was. ‘My name is Thomas Aquinas,’ the man in his dream responded. Adasevic, educated in communist schools, had never heard of the Dominican genius saint. He didn’t recognize the name”
“Why don’t you ask me who these children are?” St. Thomas asked Adasevic in his dream.
“They are the ones you killed with your abortions,’ St. Thomas told him.
“Adasevic awoke in amazement and decided not to perform any more abortions,” the article stated.
“That same day a cousin came to the hospital with his four months-pregnant girlfriend, who wanted to get her ninth abortion—something quite frequent in the countries of the Soviet bloc. The doctor agreed. Instead of removing the fetus piece by piece, he decided to chop it up and remove it as a mass. However, the baby’s heart came out still beating. Adasevic realized then that he had killed a human being,”
After this experience, Adasevic “told the hospital he would no longer perform abortions. Never before had a doctor in Communist Yugoslavia refused to do so. They cut his salary in half, fired his daughter from her job, and did not allow his son to enter the university.”
After years of pressure and on the verge of giving up, he had another dream about St. Thomas.
“You are my good friend, keep going,’ the man in black and white told him. Adasevic became involved in the pro-life movement and was able to get Yugoslav television to air the film ‘The Silent Scream,’ by Doctor Bernard Nathanson, two times.”
Adasevic has told his story in magazines and newspapers throughout Eastern Europe. He has returned to the Orthodox faith of his childhood and has studied the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas.
“Influenced by Aristotle, Thomas wrote that human life begins forty days after fertilization,” Adasevic wrote in one article. La Razon commented that Adasevic “suggests that perhaps the saint wanted to make amends for that error.” Today the Serbian doctor continues to fight for the lives of the unborn.
There is another part of this story which I think is worth mentioning. I’m noticing that in the diocese where I come from, even some of the ‘conservative’ priests are beginning to ‘talk PAST abortion’. I mean that they are beginning to think the war is lost now and we Catholics need to turn to other things. They are doing this because their spiritual and dogmatic formation for the last 40 years has been immersed in theological novelties like: Fundamental Option, Historical Criticism (which undermines the inerrancy of scripture), Moral Proportionalism, New Age, Ecumania, Liturgical Experimentation, Feminist Theology. I’m watching these guys become more liberal each day!
The fact of the matter is that most priests where I come from take a very ‘pastoral’ stand on contraception and homosexuality. By ‘pastoral’ I mean they are weak and very confused because of the feminazi’s that run the diocese and that teach theology & religion here. Even the ‘rock solid’ priests are afraid of ruffling feathers and have to ‘check with their parish council’ before deciding to move the tabernacle back to the center of the Church!
It was very late in the day when a handful of bishops came out and made outright statements decrying the abortion party of the Dems. It was too little too late (about 30 years too late).
So there is a real deficiency in the formation of diocesan priests and nobody seems to be doing anything about it. The very rich in my locality control the seminary and though the bishop makes the final decisions on what is being taught there… I can tell you that he is very unlikely to ruffle feathers when it comes to some of the nuns (who wear their habit on their lapels) who have subverted theology here for 40 plus years and who are in deep with the ‘contributors and patrons f the seminary.
As for the ‘conservative Catholics’ in my diocese… they are great at organizing tea parties and cocktail events. But if they ever had to directly challenge a heretical priest… they would dimply fold up and move to a more ‘orthodox’ parish. They do not wish to read or study encyclicals or dig into modern day neo-conservativism and compare it with some of the very Catholic paleo-conservativism which is of old. They seem willing to let the goal post’s drift gradually left each election cycle and they stick to the Republican party which is becoming indistinguishable from the Democrat party in their freemasonic ideals.
These 2 attributes: The inabilitiy or unwillingness of bishops to embrace orthodoxy and the laziness of so-called ‘Conservative Catholics’ makes me want to leave the Republican party and join SSPX at the same time. I may do the former, but I cannot bring myself to do the latter so easily since it is also dysfunctional and saps those of us who are in a regular canonical position of strengh and vitality. But honestly, I am so frustrated with the ‘conservative Catholic’ because they don’t fight with their bishop and they look more and more like Sean Hannity each and every day!
Not to mention the SSPX is in formal schism with the Church. Now there’s non-orthodoxy for ya!
Patty: A point of clarification. The members of SSPX are not in formal schism, just the 5 people involved in the consecration (Lefebvre and the 4 bishops).
Cardinal Hoyos has stated this pretty clearly. Nevertheless… I consider them a distraction since they sap all the strength away from dealing with the real problem. They (SSPX) take the good men among us and remove them from our parishes, which effectively neutralizes the remainder who wish to stay and fight.
We hemorrhage from 2 places: False traditionalism (liturgical comfort at the expense of abandoning the village) and the Marxification of our local parishes.
Honestly, I’m watching my conservative friends move further and further to the left every day where I live. It’s not a pretty picture.
Patty and Pascendi,
(Nice alliteration.)
This is a real problem. Maintaining the balance is tricky business. There is a kind of cultural conservatism which is a relativistic as any liberalism. But IMHO Traditionalism is not the answer. Within so many different cultural manifestations of the Church certain trappings of Catholicism are selectively adopted as the “solution” to the modern problem at the expense of common sense and a consistent philosophy.
Quite frankly, I think this is true of the Traditionalist movement, the charismatic movement, the Theology of the Body thing, social conservatism and sometimes even of the pro-life movement. For example, charismatics react to the rigidity of some forms of Traditionalism, and while they at times play fast and loose with liturgical norms, they are not imperceptive to recoil from certain forms of puritanism. Something similar could be said of the Traditionalist critique of the charismatic movement.
Traditionalists will argue doctrine over human relations; the charismatics vice-versa. The problem is, unless the primacy of doctrine is promoted by means of the basic norms of human courtesy and fraternal charity the Church does not effectively evangelize.
When I talk like this, I always run the risk of being too facile in my analysis, but IMO it is better to be too facile and say what needs to be said than to be too nuanced and not get the point across.
It is true, I think, that the soft evangelism of cultural orthodoxy has been largely ineffective, but I don’t think any form of sectarianism is the real answer, whether it is liturgical sectarianism, doctrinal sectarianism, pentecostal sectarianism, cultural sectarianism or anything else.
We all need to do a lot of soul searching. But again, as I have said elsewhere, we need leaders who will slap everyone into line, who are not afraid to confront anyone no matter where they are in the Catholic spectrum.