Monday, November 23, 2009
'Kennedy stumbled into the conflict,' Part II
The Catholic Church is taking center stage in the race to fill Ted Kennedy's seat. While Kennedy's son duels the church in Rhode Island, Martha Coakley is going to have some explaining to do in Massachusetts on an old case in which she should have picked a fight a lot earlier with the church.
My hunch is the story won't make much of a difference for Martha, though it does bring back bad memories of a not-too-distant past when Boston's Catholic pols took the opposite Patrick Kennedy approach, i.e., falling all over themselves to avoid picking a fight with the church.*
Mickey Kaus-like paranoia self-analysis alert: The two Catholic Church stories breaking at the same time is activating Hub Blog's deeply embedded conspiracy-theory gene. But it doesn't make sense. I'd need a bigger Glenn Beck chalk board to explain and connect all the Kennedys-vs-Coakley dots. But suffice to say any conspiracy theory would have to explain PK running to Projo to spill the beans about his woes in Providence, burying the Coakley-Geoghan story under a mountain of PK-vs.-Tobin stories in the process. No one could plan such bumbling.
* Note: I briefly posted a variation of this paragraph as an update in the item immediately below. I bumped it up and tinkered with the wording a bit.
Update -- Outraged Liberal has more. He seems to think that Coakley may have a major problem on her hands. We'll see. ... I disagree with his assessment about PK taking on Biship Tobin. I don't believe, for a moment, that Ted Kennedy would have picked such a public fight, openly calling into question the church's commitment to health care and mocking its pro-life stand. No way.
The Catholic Church is taking center stage in the race to fill Ted Kennedy's seat. While Kennedy's son duels the church in Rhode Island, Martha Coakley is going to have some explaining to do in Massachusetts on an old case in which she should have picked a fight a lot earlier with the church.
My hunch is the story won't make much of a difference for Martha, though it does bring back bad memories of a not-too-distant past when Boston's Catholic pols took the opposite Patrick Kennedy approach, i.e., falling all over themselves to avoid picking a fight with the church.*
Mickey Kaus-like paranoia self-analysis alert: The two Catholic Church stories breaking at the same time is activating Hub Blog's deeply embedded conspiracy-theory gene. But it doesn't make sense. I'd need a bigger Glenn Beck chalk board to explain and connect all the Kennedys-vs-Coakley dots. But suffice to say any conspiracy theory would have to explain PK running to Projo to spill the beans about his woes in Providence, burying the Coakley-Geoghan story under a mountain of PK-vs.-Tobin stories in the process. No one could plan such bumbling.
* Note: I briefly posted a variation of this paragraph as an update in the item immediately below. I bumped it up and tinkered with the wording a bit.
Update -- Outraged Liberal has more. He seems to think that Coakley may have a major problem on her hands. We'll see. ... I disagree with his assessment about PK taking on Biship Tobin. I don't believe, for a moment, that Ted Kennedy would have picked such a public fight, openly calling into question the church's commitment to health care and mocking its pro-life stand. No way.
