USCCB and Bully Bill Getting Bad Press re: Attempt to Break SNAP

Bully Bill Donohue's gloating remarks about his insider information vis-a-vis the U.S. Catholic bishops and their current campaign to bully SNAP are not getting good press coverage in the blogosphere.  I'm referring here to the statement that the Catholic League director made yesterday in Laurie Goodstein's New York Times article about the attempt to bully SNAP through hardball legal tactics in Missouri, where Bishop Robert Finn is now facing criminal indictment.

As my posting about this yesterday (to which the first link above points) noted, Donohue told Goodstein that “the bishops have come together collectively" to fight SNAP (and, implicitly, the survivors of clerical sexual abuse SNAP defends), though he can't give Goodstein specific names of bishops about whom he's speaking.  As I stated, though the USCCB media spokeswoman Sister Mary Ann Walsh denies any such concerted effort of bishops to collude in bullying SNAP in Missouri, I'm inclined to think Dohonue is boasting about insider information he really does have, since he clearly works hand and glove with the USCCB, and, in particular, with the USCCB president His Eminence Timothy M. Cardinal Dolan, with whom Donohue shares an office building.

Donohue does the dirty work the U.S. Catholic bishops don't want the public to see, so that they can pretend their own hands are clean.

And so, in a piece yesterday entitled "The Hierarchy Re-Abuses the Sex-Abuse Victims," Andrew Sullivan notes that it's increasingly difficult to support the institutional hierarchy of the Catholic church these days, and zeroes in on Donohue's ugly boasts to Goodstein, noting, 

Donohue is a thug. But he is for the hierarchy what Hannity is for the GOP base. And the line about "altar boys"? Sometimes, you realize that for some Catholics, nothing has changed since the revelation of the mass rape of children, altar boys often a prime target.

And Josh Glasstetter at Right Wing Watch notes,

As for Donohue, he really can’t seem to help himself. He may have been an asset for right-wing bishops at some point in the past, but now he’s a liability. He attacked rape victims without denouncing pedophile priests, and then dropped in an altar boy quip. It’s almost as if he’s in the fight to amuse himself, not to win any arguments or friends.

But we probably shouldn’t be surprised. After all, Donohue has a history of this sort of thing.

Remember that as the criminal case against Finn got underway, Donohue tried to take out an expensive full-page ad in the Kansas City Star attacking SNAP, and was then so incensed when the paper refused to print the ad that he flew out to Kansas City to raise a stink?  Bully Bill has been right in the thick of the mess in Missouri from the outset, with his usual gobs and gobs of money from unnamed sources helping him fund his unsavory attempts to 1) smear and attack SNAP, 2) defend the indefensible (i.e., Bishop Robert Finn, who shielded a priest with child porn on his computer and permitted him access to minors after this was known), and 3) scatter red herrings all around to distract attention from what is most central to the Missouri discussion--the criminal indictment of a Catholic bishop on charges of endangering children by flaunting laws requiring the reporting of those who possess child porn to criminal authorities.

As Colleen Baker explains very clearly in a stellar posting at her Enlightened Catholicism blog yesterday, what's going on now with the attack on SNAP--to which Donohue and the unnamed deep pockets who continuously fund his dirty work are absolutely central--is all about trying to deflect attention from Finn's criminal indictment.  And from Finn's impending trial.

It appears the USCCB will stoop to any level, no matter how low in the gutter, to try to draw attention away from what Finn has done and the fact that he's under criminal indictment.  No matter how far down in the gutter--and so enter Dr. Donohue of the Catholic League, with his insider knowledge of a conspiracy of the USCCB to break the back of SNAP and the victims of clerical rape the organization serves.