Will a real diarist please do something with this, please? Thanks!
In light of Limbaugh's, "Pope's a marxist..." comments and the right's veneration of all things St. Ronnie, Pope Francis' message should be placed, at least in part, in the historical context of the right's twisted relationship with the church.
The Dec. 2 anniversary of this atrocity is coming up again in a few days. Limbaugh et. al. ought to be made to remember the things they've supported in the past as they comment on the new Pope's views.
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...During what we used to call The Prayer of the Faithful, which comes immediately after the Homily, we prayed for the souls of Ita Ford, Maura Clarke, Jean Donovan, and Dorothy Kazel, four Catholic missionaries who were beaten, raped, and murdered by a death squad in El Salvador in 1980.
The death squad carried out this mission at the direct order of the Salvadoran government, a right-wing horror show of which President Ronald Reagan and his incoming administration were quite proud. When Republicans boast of Reagan's foreign policy triumphs, murder and rape is part of what they're talking about.
The four women — American citizens and clergy, mind you — were brutalized on December 2. Last Sunday was the 31st anniversary of their deaths.
The case was a stench in the nostrils of the world.
Once in office, the Reagan people lied their asses off — or, worse, blamed the nuns. Jeane Kirkpatrick said that the murdered women were "not just nuns. The nuns were political activists – on behalf of the [leftist opposition] Frente." Alexander Haig, Reagan's lunatic Secretary of State, opined that "the nuns may have run through a roadblock or may have accidentally been perceived to have been doing so, and there may have been an exchange of fire." (How beatings and rape occur during "an exchange of fire," Haig declined to explain.)
The whole Central American operation was a rat's nest of blood and corruption, conducted largely in secret, often in direct contravention of both the Congress and the will of the American people.
Its aroma has not improved through history, and its partisans have remained unusually fervent.
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Read more: The Cost of America's Secret Wars, Then and Now - Esquire
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