L'Osservatore Romano's baffling take on Obama, and Winters' misleading take

George Neumayr writing for Catholic World Report:

"L’Osservatore Romano’s sympathetic front-page editorial by Giuseppe Fiorentino about Barack Obama’s first 100 days is baffling (full text available here). On every contested issue related to the natural moral law, Obama is advancing dangerous policies. Yet this editorial blithely says that even “on ethical issues…Obama doesn’t seem to have confirmed the radical changes he had aired.”

Yes, he has. [find out how here.]

... It is more than a little disturbing that an editorial as ignorant as this one could appear in the Pope’s newspaper. At the very moment orthodox Catholics in America are reeling from Notre Dame's honoring of Obama, they wake up to find this editorial softpedaling his record. Et tu, L'Osservatore Romano?"

On a related issue, I've been accused at times of having a political bias which effects my reporting of Catholic news, and especially Obama news. "Liberal" Catholics will often accuse "conservative" Catholics of loving the GOP more than the Catholic Church, or at least paying attention to the former more when it comes to political issues.

What I always try to bring the discussion back to, when accused of this, are the facts of reality: what a given politician is actually saying and doing. This is an objective measure which I hope guides my reporting and should guide all of our critical thinking on these issues. Otherwise how are we to apply the teachings of the Church when we cannot even accurately assess the record of the person we are examining?

Michael Sean Winters is particularly guilty of unfairly condemning "conservative" Catholics as partisan, when in fact they are trying to be faithful. I find this deeply ironic, considering, as I've pointed out several times before, and will now point out again below, Winters' own reading of current issues is more often guided by political/ideological affiliation than the reality of what, well, a given politician has actually said and done.

For instance, see what Jack Smith of The Catholic Key blog (run by the staff of the newspaper for the Diocese of Kansas City) said yesterday about Winters' claims.

I'm not going to quote him because it is the volume of details that Smith reveals which matters most here (as in the Neumayr article above). In other words, taking the time to do the research and the background reading is important, because otherwise we'll be taken in by what the "experts" are trying to make us believe. Or, for that matter, what Winters wants us to believe.