THE TAOS TATLER.

Your Tatler turns a ripe (overripe?) three score and ten soon, and as is common among doddery old men, I have been thinking back to the major events occurring in my life. One that stands out lately is the Watergate scandal, which brought down Richard Nixon’s presidency 51 years ago.

Watergate is brought to mind owing to the present scandal brewing in Washington. Surprisingly, I have yet to hear any quid pro quo references to Watergate by Dems, seeking to deflect attention from the present morass, but the likely explanation is, unlike Watergate, which received non-stop coverage from the media, this present scandal, unsurprisingly, receives scarcely any attention at all from the usual media suspects.

With Watergate, other than Democrat leadership accomplishing their single goal of attaining the head of the Baptist, via the forced resignation of hapless President Nixon, little else was accomplished. Vice President Gerald Ford, an honest and decent man, assumed the presidency and things returned to normal relatively quickly, though the Republicans did suffer losses at the polls for a few cycles.

With Watergate, President Nixon may or may not have been aware of plans for a band of bungling Cuban-American burglars, hirees of the so-called White House Plumbers, to break into Democratic headquarters and dig around for secrets to use against the Republicans. The burglars were quickly caught, tried, and convicted.

The present scandal is far worse. There is increasingly strong evidence, with more added everyday, that President Barack Obama conspired with his cohorts, holy terror Hillary Clinton, his closest advisors, and all the major intelligence agencies, to severely discredit the newly elected President of the United States, Donald Trump, by planting false evidence that he was in league with President Putin of Russia; that his loyalties were divided. As a result, President Trump’s first term was greatly hampered by his having to defend his integrity every day, and fend off accusations that he was Vladimir Putin’s puppet. It lowered his reputation so badly that when he ran for re-election, he lost to the least qualified presidential candidate in our country’s history, Sen. Joseph Biden.

Already seriously hampered by dementia, which only got worse, this country was instead in the charge of dubious shadow characters hand-picked by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. They did much damage, beginning immediately by having Biden remove all barriers from our borders, opening our country to millions of miscreants from Latin and South America, The Dem’s obvious plan was, after granting the illegals quick citizenship, to reverse the party’s decline by making them voters  With more Dem votes, the more Dems elected [sic] and with the millions of illegals as voters, the party could well have had a solid, veto-proof majority in both Houses of Congress for years to come.

To judge the efficacy of the Obama, Clinton, et al conspirators’s plot against Donald Trump, one need only compare the President’s successes in his first term with those of his second term. Now that he is free from the sea anchor imposed on him in the first term he is on fire, accomplishing more, whether you approve of them or not, in his first half year than in his entire first term, much of it reversing the damage done in the Biden administration.

That measure of difference in Trump’s performance is the measure of damage President Obama’s sabotage of Trump’s presidency caused. It does not seem out of line for your Tatler to refer to Obama’s, Hillary’s, and their co-conspirators’s evil actions as anything less than a coup d’etat, albeit a slow one. They must be tried for treason.

Or

A figure from New York City’s past, Curtis Sliwa, is running for mayor and was considered an also-ran until now. NY Post columnist Charles Gasparino provides the details but the upshot is, with the other candidates looking so dismal, Sliwa stands out by comparison and, with a 22% approval rate in a recent poll, stands a good chance of winning in a four-way race. Once regarded as somewhat the buffoon, Sliwa may now be regarded as a serious candidate.

Sliwa is not an extremist, as Gasparino explains, only, shall we say, out of the mainstream, which he has been for decades. As the founder and head of the Guardian Angels, he is no radical and holds generally sound opinions.

Charles Gasparino:

Ever the showman, [Sliwa] once staged his own kidnapping to drum up publicity.

He was once really kidnapped and shot three times, allegedly as payback for repeatedly attacking the mob for drug dealing.

He should be applauded for that.

He will cut taxes and eliminate swaths of government, like the city’s education bureaucracy that does a horrible job educating kids and does a good job employing loads of bureaucrats. 

Sliwa’s pro-business policies are why he insists it “behooves” the fat cats . . .  “to treat me with a modicum of respect. I am here to support small and medium-sized businesses, as well as the Fortune 500 guys and gals who pay the bulk of our taxes.”

You don’t hear many New York politicos talking like that.

By default, Sliwa has become a viable candidate for mayor, and with a grossly unsatisfactory choice among the major candidates, he might just pull it off.

Update: a friend writes that Sliwa has been married four times and keeps fifteen cats in his small studio apartment. Admittedly, that is a little unsettling, to say the least.

ABC News reports Muslims are contributing to socialist Zohran Mamdani’s New York mayoral campaign in far greater amounts than expected, but for obvious reasons. All well and good, we should all contribute to our preferred candidates with our time, our money (if possible), and our votes. Democracy in action, etc.

Mamdanì is now the leading candidate for mayor in New York and if the past is any guide, candidates in the City (and other left-wing havens) who promise the sun, moon, and stars and more (see the candidate’s website) usually do well in local elections. If Mamdani, with his existing edge, also gets a good portion of the 9% Muslim vote, he stands at a better-than-even chance of becoming the City’s next mayor. In addition to his already extravagant promises, will he, like most other candidates in past elections, heap special, and costly, favors on his own people? It will be interesting to find out, from 2000 miles off.

h/t GWR

In an earlier post, this  blogger wrote of the ordeal suffered by two teenagers, who were expelled from their Catholic high school, because its administrators mistakenly believed they had worn blackface four years earlier. Their excessive punishment owed to liberalism run amok in the Church over the past 50-plus years, doing untold damage to traditional worship and beliefs.

In a short but gratifying essay by Msgr J Batule in the Catholic Thing, titled, The Decline of Liberal Catholicism, he writes of the heartening decline of liberalism among the young men coming into the priesthood.

Msgr Batule writes:

[C]hanges are apparent in the pulpit, at the altar and in the Confessional, and in the classroom where there are parishes with elementary and high schools. In contradistinction to the examples I used from my first assignment, Holy Hours are regular occurrences in many parishes now, Pre-Cana presentations are more apt to point out not just the incongruity but the sinfulness in cohabitation, and, relatedly, that marital chastity is not attained so long as contraception is practiced.

Even Holy Church, alas, is vulnerable to political trends ex ecclaisiam, so it is gratifying to see her moving away from the fairly common, if absurd, beliefs among the previous generation of the clergy.

And the king answering, shall say to them: Amen I say to you, as long as you did it to one of these my least brethren, you did it to me. (Douay-Rheims Matthew 25:40)

By now the appalling story of two teenage lads in Mountain View, California, is well known. They were classmates at a local Catholic High School, St Francis, and when younger applied an acne remedy to their faces, causing them to turn black (dark green, really)

Regrettably, and no doubt foolishly, the two boys took selfies of themselves at the time, and eventually those photos got around, causing a furor.

That act resulted in their lives becoming a living hell for several years. Every single leftie in a vast radius, whose mission is to keep a constant vigil on all those whose personal activities are suspect, no matter how innocent, took notice and the screaming fest began. For when a white man is caught in blackface, no exculpatory explanation is sought nor needed, they are guilty, quod erat demonstrandum.

These were the kind of people, some even brother Catholics, that these poor kids had to endure for their silly mistake. They were ejected from the high school football team and shortly afterward, expelled altogether from St Francis High, ruining their chances of getting into a decent college. CBS Austin reports Saint Francis Principal Katie Teekell, brave soul, she, even had the nerve to tell the students’s parents the expulsions were for “optics,” rather than “intent.”

The sorry saga continued for several years, the details of which will not be related here, except to report that the situation, after litigation, has been resolved, with the school ordered to pay $1 million to the two families, plus refunding them $17,000 in tuition payments.

The only comment this blogger cares to make is to heap scorn on the spineless administrators at St Francis High School. Perhaps it is hopeless naiveté, but that cowardice is all of a piece one associates with public schools, not Catholic, where scripture is presumably read at least occasionally, and a sense of justice might have prevailed in this deplorable incident. Was it too much to hope the administration of St Francis High could have shown some spine and stood up for their young charges, instead of immediately surrendering them to the wolves of leftist groupthink?

Late word: the school is considering appealing the award. Shame.

A recent post on X

[Q]: Mr. President, Russian drones hit a maternity hospital in Ukraine overnight.

"You'll be seeing things happening," Trump's remark on Russian drone attacks in Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/CddyloRcnJ

— Polymarket Intel (@PolymarketIntel) July 11, 2025

I suspect we will.

h/t Instapundit

From Fox 11 Los Angeles:

In a statement, San Bernardino Bishop Alberto Rojas announced a “decree dispensing from the obligation to attend Sunday mass.”

The decree allows parishioners who are unable to attend Sunday mass or masses on holy days of obligation “due to genuine fear of immigration enforcement actions” to be “dispensed from this obligation.”

This seems like a pointless gesture, intended more for the garnering of applause from liberals than anything else.  Catholics are indeed required to attend Mass on Sundays and holy days, and it is a grave sin not to. However, as the Catechism makes clear, if there is a serious cause forcing you not to attend Mass, then you are excused. Bishop Rojas is surely aware of that, so this decree of his seems more of an attention-getting stunt than anything else.

The Catechism states:

2181 The Sunday Eucharist is the foundation and confirmation of all Christian practice. For this reason the faithful are obliged to participate in the Eucharist on days of obligation, unless excused for a serious reason (for example, illness, the care of infants) or dispensed by their own pastor. 119 Those who deliberately fail in this obligation commit a grave sin.

Bishop Rojas makes no mention of the fact that those who cannot attend Mass because they are dodging the immigration authorities are breaking the law, not only for crossing our border illegally, but for evading justice. His Grace said in an interview with ABC News:

There is a real fear gripping many in our parish communities that if they venture out into any kind of public setting they will be arrested by immigration officers.

However, the Catechism says:

1899 The authority required by the moral order derives from God: “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore he who resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment.”

It appears then that Bishop Rojas is encouraging the continued flouting of the law by giving a pass to the illegals in this country. On the other hand, and this is only speculation, how many illegals attend Mass? They are lawbreakers and they know it. This blogger has rarely heard of people outside of the law regularly attending Mass, or any other church services.

Public libraries’s purpose is lending books and providing a quiet and comfortable space to read them. Research libraries also provide extensive resources for study and researching.

Now another service is offered by many public libraries, especially in urban locations: homeless shelters. Many may argue that most urban areas already have facilities for the homeless, offering services far more suited to their needs. Some disagree however and they are not whom you might expect.

Zac Bissonnette in the Free Press:

I was excited about the Mandel Public Library when I moved to West Palm Beach . . . Fodor’s Travel had named Mandel the fourth most beautiful public library in America.

Then I started going there . . . In the new books section, a guy yelled into his phone that he’d been kicked off the bus for arguing with a driver. Other homeless people slept in chairs and snored; the smell made you hold your breath.

Between 2012 and 2019, according to the Institute of Museum and Library Services, visits to the Mandel Library declined 27 percent, and total circulation—the number of items, including e-books, borrowed by library patrons—fell 26 percent.

Who are the culprits responsible for making libraries unusable for those who simply want to read books in peace? Professional librarians, who consider their purpose providing space for people who have no interest in reading, researching, studying, or bathing, as equal, or more important than those who wish to use libraries in their traditional sense.

Librarians, you see, are mostly public service, unionized employees, who, in general, regard the middle-class conventions of manners, decency, and courtesy with disdain. Read what the American Library Association has to say about the homeless in their libraries.

People experiencing poverty or homelessness constitute a significant portion of users in many libraries today and this population provides libraries with an important opportunity to change lives. As the number of poor children, adults, and families in America rise, so does the urgent need for libraries to effectively respond to their needs. Access to library and information resources, services, and technologies is essential for all people, especially the economically disadvantaged, who may experience isolation, discrimination, and prejudice or barriers to education, employment, and housing.

Oh dear, we’ve heard that before, the same leftist claptrap preached by those on the left. They simply adapt the party line to whatever their particular situation, and rattle it off as fact. No doubt, they feel ever so virtuous for their devotion to the oppressed homeless, but it comes at the expense of serving their middle-class clientele, and those striving to be. It’s a well-worn tale.