Now we know where the snakes went

If you've been reading our posts over the last week, you'll know of our amazement at the lunacy of elite Irish-American Catholic reaction to the Pope's death compared with the relative sober assessments of Catholic Ireland. And if you've been following our links, you'll know that we've found the Daily Howler to be an excellent resource for documenting this gulf.

It's appropriate therefore that we can't do any better than reproduce a segment of today's Howler on the antics of CNN's Capital Gang last Saturday evening. A little context: the show also featured a bizarre video montage on the conversion of panelist Robert Novak to Catholicism, and a regular panelist is Kate O'Beirne, one of the resident loons at the National Review magazine. The show does a regular spot at the end called "outrage of the week." So:

And Kate O'Beirne was kookier still when she was asked for the week’s biggest outrage. O'Beirne, Novak’s plu-pious godmother [for his conversion], was simply outraged by Ireland's conduct. Try to believe this occurred:

[Al] HUNT (continuing directly): Kate.
O'BEIRNE: The Irish government refused to declare a national day of mourning to mark the death of Pope John Paul II. Reportedly, businesses in Ireland worried about the cost of shutting down for a day ...

[Howler resumes] Excuse us? Ireland didn’t shut down business to honor the pope—and that was the week's biggest outrage? Of course, we didn't shut business or close schools here [USA] either—but O'Beirne was outraged when Ireland stayed open!

Amen to that. Plenty of bad stuff had happened during that week, and our personal view was that for once, Bertie Ahern had been basically correct that the Papal funeral was a matter of personal choice on how it should be observed. But it's symptomatic of what the American reactionary right has been reduced to -- an endless quest for new enemies that now embraces the insufficiently pious along all the other categories over the last five years.

Note, by the way, that O'Beirne's outrage at the new pagan Ireland doesn't extend to her boycotting the National Review cruise there this summer.