Only, here’s the thing:  you can’t.  So when your DOJ leaks documents to Smear a Fast & Furious Whistleblower people find out.  And when  you target reporters for intimidation, reporters report on that.  And when the IRS is commanding its victims not to protest at abortion clinics and demanding to know the contents of their prayers(!), people want to know how high up the command chain that goes and whether it’s due to you being a massively incompetent nitwit or a scheming Richard Machiavelli Nixon.

This is, at the very least, a massive and huge failure of oversight of some elementary executive duties.  And that’s the charitable take on this.  If it turns out that we are looking, not at Obama being asleep at the switch, but active coordinating a campaign of intimidation against perceived enemies, impeach him.

“There are some remarkable examples of that kind of blindness in the readings we heard this morning, and slavery is wrapped up in a lot of it.  Paul is annoyed at the slave girl who keeps pursuing him, telling the world that he and his companions are slaves of God.  She is quite right.  She’s telling the same truth Paul and others claim for themselves,” Bishop Jefferts Schori said, referencing the first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans.

“But Paul is annoyed, perhaps for being put in his place, and he responds by depriving her of her gift of spiritual awareness.  Paul can’t abide something he won’t see as beautiful or holy, so he tries to destroy it.  It gets him thrown in prison.  That’s pretty much where he’s put himself by his own refusal to recognize that she, too, shares in God’s nature, just as much as he does – maybe more so!,” the presiding bishop said.

Dear Episcopalians: Save yourselves from this stuff while you still can.

Sadly, at least 51 people are dead and most of them are children killed when the tornado (according to Fr. Shane, perhaps the largest one ever recorded) struck the elementary school they were in.  The tornado was two and a half miles wide (!!!) and remained on the ground for an hours.  The devastation is reportedly horrrendous.

No doubt my Patheos colleague Rebecca Hamilton will have more information as things develop.  Meanwhile pray for the people of Oklahoma touched by this colossal storm.

1. Its absolute and total love affair with abortion, up to and including support for murdering children who have already been born.  In this, it expresses the sole non-negotiable core value of the Dem leadership.

2. Its obvious and deep hostility to the Catholic Church, expressed in the HHS Mandate, which aims to tell Catholics “Stay out of our bedrooms” while simultaneously frogmarching us in and forcing us to pay for what is done there.  I’m happy to stay out of everybody’ bedroom.  But don’t then stick a .45 in my ribs and make me buy your contraceptives for you.  Buy your own contraceptives.

3. Its utterly arrogant claim to be able to secretly and unilaterally decree the murder of anybody on planet earth it decides is an enemy of the state, including American citizens.

4. Its utterly arrogant claim to be able to secretly and unilaterally decree the indefinite detainment of anybody on planet earth it decides is an enemy of the state, including American citizens.

5. It is utterly arrogant for the IRS, on Obama’s watch, to be intimidating political enemies with demands that they not protest at abortion clinics and with inquiries into the content of their prayers.

6. It is utterly arrogant for the Obama administration DOJ to be leaking information to smear whistleblowers.

7. It is utterly arrogant for the Obama Administration to spy on and intimidate the press.

There are other things, but these things alone are sufficient, I believe, for anybody who cares about American liberty and about the Catholic faith to be adamantly opposed to this Administration.

Why do I mention this?  Because Peg Noonan is wondering where the outrage is about the very serious abuses of power committed on Obama’s watch that are now coming to light.  It’s not like the MSM is not covering it all over the place.  Its just that the Man in the Street is not reacting all that much.

May I gently suggest that part of the problem lies in relentless exposure to things like this 24/7/365 for five years?:

Umbrella-gate stirs outrage

Because everybody needs to have hysterics when a Marine holds an umbrella for the Prez during a speech!

Because we must all reaffirm Unit Cohesion with a Two Minute Hate About his Motor Skills and Declare His Wife a Shrew!

Because we have to have hysterics for months about the fantasy of Obama’s Kenyan birth!

Because we to have hysterics about ObamaHitler!

Because we have to have hysterics about Obama coming to confiscate a gazillion guns!

Because we have to have hysterics about the fact that Obama said “You didn’t build that” (even though he was obviously talking about things like the highway infrastructure and not the business you built)!

Because we must loudly denounce him as unmasculine and weak to reaffirm Unit Cohesion in our United Hatred of Obama!

Because we must hate him since he is just plain stupid and a tool of the Jews!

Because we must have hysterics that he is secretly a Muslim and hates the Jews!

Because we must have hysterics that in addition to being a devout Muslim, he is also an atheistic Communist!

Because we must have hysterics that Obama is sending a subliminal message to America, which he hates!

….and on and on and on, 24/7/365 for five solid years.  Dip into FB on any given day and there is a shining and unbroken stream of this stuff.

Here’s the thing, Peg: the Right Wing Noise Machine’s relentless habit of dialing up every. single. gripe about Obama to 11 results in Boy Who Cried Wolf syndrome for the average non-political man on the street who has long ago tuned out the hysterics and therefore has trouble telling when a really serious problem has appeared.

And the irony?  The RWNM could have learned this simple psychological fact from the Left Wing Noise Machine.  Remember the screaming about BushHITLER?  Remember how effective that was in defeating Bush in 2004?  Remember how the anti-war Left exhausted itself finding fault with every little thing Bush said and did till you tuned them out?

This sort of thing is, by the way, more than merely politically stupid.  It is spiritually corrosive and profoundly dangerous to the soul.  Here’s C.S. Lewis:

“Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, ‘Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,’ or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything — God and our friends and ourselves included — as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.”

I limit my animosity to the Obama Administration as much as possible for two reasons.  By far the most important is given by Lewis.  The second is given by Aesop in the Boy Who Cried Wolf.

Father, hear our prayer that lives be spared and property damage be minimized.  Grant swift recovery from this disaster.  Mother Mary, pray for all affected by this. We ask all this through Christ our Lord

My best friend is in dire straits. He’s a college student studying meteorology in Dekalb, IL, and is less than a month away from losing his apartment. He lost his job a couple months back, he needs to come up with $3,000 by June 16th. He’s a;ready applied for loans, and has been turned down. Please pray, and if you or any of your readers have suggestions or solutions, please give them.

Father, hear our prayer for your provision for your servant. Sustain him with your providence through Christ our Lord that he may finish his studies and get a good job. Mother Mary and St. Joseph, pray for him!

Hey you good and awesome troops. If you know anybody in the vicinity of DeKalb who is looking to hire a college student guaranteed to work hard out of intense gratitude, could you refer them to my reader?

And, in the meantime, dear reader, what if you or your friend set up a fundraising page? There are lots of sites that do this? Or if he has Paypal, provide the link so people can donate to him. That seems like a start.

As they walked on the way, Jesus looked ahead and saw Jacob’s well.  And behold, there was a woman of Samaria carrying a jar to fill with water.  And Jesus, knowing in his spirit who she was, said to Matthew, “Come here.”

Matthew said, “Here I am, Lord.”

Jesus said, “Matthew, go ahead of me and hide behind that bush near the well.  And whatsoever you hear pass between me and that woman, take down in writing.”  And Matthew did as Jesus said.

Then Jesus commanded his disciples to stay where they were and approached the woman at the well.  Now the woman was an adulteress.  She had had five husbands and the one she was with now was not her husband.  Moreover, she was now with child by that man. And the woman’s name was Abigail, daughter of Johanan.

And Jesus said to her, “My name is Jacob, and I perceive that you find me attractive.  Come and lie with me and I will be your husband and provide you a dwelling place all the days of your life.  Only this I ask: that you destroy the child in your womb that I need not give my inheritance to another man’s son.”

The woman was troubled in her spirit. She had lived a sinful life and destroyed five of her children. Moreover, she had learned pharmakeia from the herbalists and had given potions to many other women and destroyed their children as well, so that the anger of the Lord was heavy on her and she wrestled greatly in her heart about these things. But she feared she would soon be of the age when men do not love women, and even that day her husband had threatened to put her away. So seeing that Jesus was young and handsome, and had promised her a dwelling place all the days of her life, she agreed to meet Jesus at a certain place, that she might lie with him.  And she promised that before the Sabbath, she would destroy her child as Jesus commanded her to do.  Then she departed from that place to await Jesus at the appointed hour.

But Jesus, taking Matthew with him, did not go to meet her.  Instead, he went into the woman’s village and gathered all the townspeople together, including the man with whom she had conceived her child, and read aloud to them all that had passed between them, that he might expose the evil of adultery and the great crime of child murder to which she had agreed. And he told them of all the other children she had helped to slay.

And some in the village were troubled and said, “Did you not speak falsely to her?”

But Jesus answered them saying, “I was not lying but acting, even as the Greeks do in their theatres.  Moreover, because my purpose was to expose to daylight the great evil this woman was doing, what I did not was not a lie but the truth.”

And another person asked, “But did you not tempt her to do great evil in the eyes of the Lord?”

And Jesus said, “As long as I did not lie with her, I did not tempt her or do anything wrong. The evil was all in her heart and not in my words, which are truth. In the same way, when I persuaded her to kill her child, this was not evil on my part since she had already killed five other children and was hardened in her heart or she would not have given her consent. Therefore, it was an act of righteousness to persuade her to kill her sixth.  My word only exposed the evil in her heart.  I am without sin.”

And saying that, he took up a stone and said to the crowd. “Do thou likewise and follow me.”  And then he led them to where the Samaritan Woman was waiting and together they stoned her to death, even as the law of Moses prescribed.

Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Blessed is the man who is not afraid to get his hands dirty in the fight against evil.  And cursed is the man afraid to oppose evil by any means necessary. That one is a Pharisee and will not see the kingdom of heaven. For just as the Hebrew midwives lied to save lives and Tamar lay with Judah for the greater good, so you must also speak falsely to sinners and draw them more deeply into sin, as their sin deserves, that the righteous may expose and destroy them.  As I have done, so must you also do.”