Wait a minute. Catholics are always offended when confronted with the distance between the religious message, the parousia, and their sweating selves.

How dare in other words Jehan de la Pucelle (Joan of Arc) get rowdy and make all that trouble for the good burghers of cities taken by the English?

And where did the Berrigans get off, spattering blood on draft records?

And hey how about that Sinead O'Connor?

I don't see how you can be an "antiwar Catholic" and not support this non-violent and peaceful protest, which used non-toxic and washable fake blood ... in a city in which the river is not only died green on St Patrick's day, but also in which the law isn't enforced when Cubs fans piss on people's lawns on Waveland Avenue.

4000 Americans have died in the longest war in our history. This war is the most expensive war since WWII, and it is being conducted simultaneously with another, smaller war in Afghanistan.

Sure, if these kids had done what they did as a prank, with no protest-content, something like pissing on Waveland, it would have been wrong (but given the selective enforcement of the laws in Chicago, which targets black people in preference to whites, they would not have been nailed). What I am saying is that given Cardinal George's own opposition to the war, which he shares with the Pope and the Mayor, then these kids should have gotten a medal.

To revert to tavern ravings may make you feel all masculine, but in it, you neatly undo your anti-war stance, because emotionally you're taking sides with the sort of people who think it was perfectly fine to invade Iraq.

The speech to which even progressives regress when "offended" reveals alot about actual psychological and social mechanisms which create wars and keep them going.

I'm having in other words a deja vu, like Cheech Marin. When I read the foul and homophobic comments on this site, many from people who say they "hate" Bush, I'm having a flash back to 1972, when Nixon was deliberately engaging in his "mad bomber" campaign, killing thousands of Vietnamese to "bring them back to the conference table", and, as it happened, with no effect at all on the final North Vietnamese victory in 1975.

By that time, just about everybody "hated Nixon" and disapproved of the war: but everybody was also bored by the war, and had moved on. But like a land mine discovered by a child in a field, the war kept on keeping on, kind of like a mean and nasty drunk keeps keeping on.

Those kids deserve a medal.