You have to love reading Tina Brown, since her columns for the WashPost seem to confirm what every conservative suspects about the secular elitism of the Manhattan media crowd. See how she puts it today: “For those of us who came to Manhattan precisely because you’re guaranteed never to meet anyone who has read the ‘Left Behind’ series, America’s much-celebrated spiritual revival can have its trying moments.”
Brown got caught up in the rituals of the papal funeral and began to hope for a pope more like Barack Obama, only to be depressed by that Panzerkardinal-Rottweiler guy: “Secularists, humanists and quiet worshipers of an unpoliticized God have felt beleaguered, frustrated and unfairly disrespected. There’s no energy on the non-zealot side of the cultural debate. There’s no Voltaire, no Clarence Darrow, not even a Lenny Bruce to balance the stifling, censorious religiosity — not even a Bill Clinton or a Jimmy Carter to show that religion doesn’t have to resemble some Tom DeLay combination of contempt and pious hypocrisy. So the prayer, so to speak, was that the new pope might miraculously turn out to be a shot in the arm not just for anti-materialism but also for anti-religious humbug, anti-medievalism and anti-repressive orthodoxy.”
Secularists, humanists, and “quiet worshipers of an unpoliticized God” are bummed. The Cardinals may rest easy.