WANNABES. Membership has its privileges, but so too has apostasy, and this alumnus of a working-class Catholic grammar school and a Jesuit prep is getting a great kick out of the present Popemania.

The National Review has gone fully bullgoose, slobbering over Ratzinger's election as if it were WIII; Kathryn Lopez leads the charge with breathless bulletins ("The Holy Spirit, it would seem, endorses orthodoxy, a la PJPII"); Jonah Goldberg contents himself with deep analysis of 24 and, after a feeble attempt to ingratiate himself with the hyperRomanists, takes a long lunch.

Maybe Goldberg will eventually get with the program and go the way of Lew Lehrman and Lawrence Kudlow -- major Cons converted to the One Holy & Apostolic via Opus Dei operative C. John McCloskey, who also numbers among his conquests the Tyco mouthpiece Mark Belnick, acquitted last year of fraud and grand larceny charges -- taste and see the goodness of the Lord, indeed!

The attraction of the True Faith for wingnuts amuses those of us born into it, though I imagine it is a deadly serious matter for the world's Hewitts, who find the mission of the Church identical to that of American conservatism -- that is, not just a containment of but an end to homosexuality, adultery, and indeed every sin but covetousness, which modern Catholicism has enshrined as a positive virtue.

Whether they take to the Faith or not, it is clear these folks are looking for something like confirmation -- not the bit where the Bishop slaps you, quite, but some sign that something grand has touched them and endorsed, with glamorous robes and ethereal choirs, their cause to the Heavens. No less a Lutheran than Jim Lileks raves -- with harrumphs about "Maryolatry" (that should appease the dour local squareheads) -- that Ratzinger "wants there to be a core to which we can be shocked," that his election is a rebuke to "happy-clappy relativism," that the very name Benedict is "bracing," etc. Poor Jimbo: someone ought to stuff some incense into his vaporizer (he is currently suffering from his 74th cold of the season) and drape him with some Vatican bling, that he may dream himself into a cathedral and imagine his Nyquil the Blood of Christ.

Our President laid a few words of praise on the new Pope before heading to Springfield, IL to dedicate the new Lincoln Museum. This Museum is a very modern affair, reports the Washington Post:

It also features high-tech, Disney-style exhibits that museum curators say are aimed at making Lincoln's story more accessible... In one exhibit, Lincoln, who historians say was a lenient father, is reading the paper while one of his sons tosses an inkstand and another swings a broom as if it were a bat. In an exhibit recreating the White House kitchen, fictional conversations of black kitchen workers gossiping about the seances led by Mary Lincoln and rumors of Lincoln issuing an Emancipation Proclamation are piped in

These hilarious accomodations to modern lack of taste notwithstanding -- or perhaps withstanding, given the circumstances -- the President sought to defend his actions in the Middle East with the example of the Great Emancipator:

Our interests are served when former enemies become democratic partners -- because free governments do not support terror or seek to conquer their neighbors. Our interests are served by the spread of democratic societies -- because free societies reward the hopes of their citizens, instead of feeding the hatreds that lead to violence... We see that example and courage today in Afghanistan and Kyrgystan, Ukraine, Georgia and Iraq. We believe that people in Zimbabwe and Iran and Lebanon and beyond have the same hopes, the same rights, and the same future of self-government. The principles of the Declaration still inspire, and the words of the Declaration are forever true. So we will stick to it; we will stand firmly by it. (Applause.)

We might imagine Lincoln, a great writer as well as a great man, considering this flimsy bit of hired oratory; we might imagine him as one who favored high tariffs to protect American labor, and whose Presidency was wholly occupied by an attempt to preserve the Union, observing his legacy enlisted in an attempt to shift attention from our own ruined economy and deep divisions toward a fond hope for foreign amity. We might also imagine the Prince of Peace Himself looking down upon the highly politicized machinations of his alleged followers, and their unchurched wannabes, here on earth. But that would just be sad. Let us rather rejoice that these fools make such a glorious spectacle, and say unto them, as the old queen did unto the priest swinging his censer at High Mass, "Darling, love the dress, but your purse is on fire."

UPDATE. Hours later, National Review's staff are still rolling in Romanism, none more so than their People of the Book and I Don't Mean God And Man At Yale. Goldberg even makes a column of it, on the premise that he and Benedict have in common a hatred of the 60s ("almost everyone in the so-called 'generation of '68' was intellectually violent"). David Klinghoffer goes further, says not just he and Jonah but all Jews have a lot in common with the new Pope; for instance, ultrareligious Catholics are not moral relativists, and ultrareligious Jews (unlike those schnorrers at the Anti-Defamation League!) are also not moral relativists. Who knew? Something else, Klinghoffer adds, "our two religions share: the assumption that there is a truth out there, a singular truth, to be found and embraced." Yeah, not like Ratzinger's old employers, the Nazis -- those guys didn't know what they wanted! Sigh. Well, you know it's bullshit, I know it's bullshit, but politics is politics.

Finally some brave editor decides to stick up for materialism with this piece of P.J. faux-Rourke, in which the author affects not to know that Joe Walsh was joking and Alex P. Keaton is no longer a heart-throb.