The American Spectator

p> Nuclear Waste (posted 4/18/03 12:01 a.m.) br> The Enemy of the Week will return next Friday. But you might want to keep CNN in your thoughts. A week after it confessed to helping prop up Saddam Hussein’s torturers, its future is nonexistent. A great many august media types refuse to address the implications of what is now known. But this story won’t go away. At some level everyone knows it. CNN has become radioactive, and its half-life is behind it. We saw a symptom of its breakdown yesterday when it posted six premature obituaries on its website, ranging from Dick Cheney to Bob Hope to Ronald Reagan. The question immediately came up: Why hadn’t it posted its own? Surely it’s written and rarin’ to go. /p> p> Excommunicado br> Just in time for the darkest day on the Catholic and Christian calendar, the Weekly Standard ‘s J. Bottum, the most influential South Dakotan this side of Tom Daschle, reports that said Daschle is in deep trouble with his home diocese of Sioux Falls. There’s hope, in other words, that liberal Democrats who are Catholic might still be expected to respect the teachings of the church to which they claim to belong. In the Senate alone, that would mean no more pro-abortion Catholicism from “Biden, Collins, Daschle, Dodd, Harkin, Kennedy, Kerry, Landrieu, Leahy, Mikulski, Murray, Reed, and more,” as Bottum puts it. /p>

Already in 1997, Daschle was scolded by his bishop for his permissive position on partial-birth abortion. Note how Tom responded. Bottum writes: “Daschle…rose on the floor of the Senate in Washington to denounce his own bishop back in South Dakota for speaking in a way ‘more identified with the radical right than with thoughtful religious leadership.’” How lucky for the bishop he wasn’t subject to Senate confirmation. At least not yet.

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