Nuns Would Have Beaten Hillary Sensless

Old School Catholic nuns never would have let Hillary Clinton lie and evade questions

Gary Kolba was battered silly by the time it was over. The seventh-grader’s neck and face were scratched, in some places heavily enough so that specks of blood trickled from the streaks of raw skin. His head, although full of brown hair, was bumpy from the beating he had received from the pair of bony, 70-year-old fists.

Sister Mary Zita, a tottering, shrunken, old nun with wrinkled, scaly skin, was out of breath, but she had seen to it that Kolba would never again dare do what he had just tried getting away with.

It wasn’t over, though, for Kolba, a tall, goofy-grinned smart-aleck who thought he could pull one over on the elderly nun. Sister Mary Francis de Sales had heard the commotion coming from room 204 at Our Lady of Grace grammar school and hurried over from her room to investigate. Sister Zita angrily sputtered to Sister de Sales what Kolba had done. Sister de Sales, a large, stout, lumbering nun who admired Green Bay Packers middle linebacker Ray Nitschke, trudged over to Kolba, and in front of the class, yanked his hair with her left hand and remorselessly pounded his skinny back with the underside of her ham-like right forearm.

As Kolba staggered back to his desk, Sister de Sales sternly informed the class why he had been beaten to a pulp and why he would get more of the same if he persisted in his insulting and unacceptable behavior.

“When you are asked a question,” she bellowed, “you answer it directly and honestly.”

Never again did Kolba, when asked who the fifth president of the United States was, or when asked to spell “magazine,” launch into a rambling denunciation of Christopher Columbus, colonialism or the superiority of spelling words the way they sounded. He had learned his lesson: When asked a question, you answer it directly and honestly.

It’s too bad that Sisters Zita and de Sales, or any Catholic nun from the 1940s through the early 1960s, aren’t the moderators for today’s presidential and other political “debates.” If they were we wouldn’t have the likes of Hillary Clinton or any other presidential candidate ducking, dodging, evading and otherwise refusing to answer simple, straightforward questions. If they did, they’d be beaten with fists, wooden pointers, steel-edged rulers and anything else the nuns could get their hands on. And we’d all be better off for it.

There’s a disgraceful epidemic in the U.S. of politicians at the national, state and local levels refusing to answer even the simplest questions. It has become political strategy to evade and prevaricate. Politicians and their consultants now believe it’s their duty and right to deflect and avoid answering questions. They shriek that anyone who presses for an honest answer to the simplest query is a demented, insensitive and unprofessional jerk. Sadly, this sick and twisted joke on the American public has been working.

When Hillary Clinton was recently asked about her flip-flops on the war in Iraq she rambled on for three minutes about Social Security. When NBC’s Tim Russert, not the hardest hitting guy around, asked her about releasing documents about her reign as First Power Grabber in husband Bill’s White House, she fumbled and bumbled and refused to answer. Same thing when she was asked about giving drivers licenses to illegal aliens. When Russert pressed for an answer, Clinton became miffed.

The day after the “debate,” Clinton’s operatives started spreading the line that Russert was a crazed, female-hating bully who deserved to be shot—deserved to be shot—for demanding a direct answer to a simple question.

Millions of Americans actually think that Clinton and her pals are right in saying that Russert was wrong in believing that he deserved an honest answer from someone seeking the world’s highest office and to head what was founded as a government of the people, by the people and for the people. They think he’s a perverted freak for daring to ask her anything other than, “Tell us, Mrs. Clinton, how is it you became so brilliant and we so deserving of your rule?” They think that she was perfectly right in dodging, obfuscating, evading and being purposefully and blatantly dishonest.

The fault of elevating sneakiness and dishonesty to an expected, accepted and protected level is all of ours. We’re the fools who sheepishly nod our heads when an idiot politician shouts that we’ve got to “get our arms around our problems” without ever detailing what those problems are and exactly how they should be solved.

We’re the dopes who stomp our feet, whistle and scream in adoring approval when one of these professional panderers tells our group that our concerns, no matter how trivial and single-issued they are, are paramount to everything else that confronts the nation and threatens human liberty.

We’re the idiots who cheer the lies and scorn the truth.

Most of all, though, the fault of this sick situation is that of the people in the news media—the celebrity-obsessed TV and newspaper reporters who’ve let the politicians get away with this garbage for way too long. It used to be that reporters—the eyes, ears and voice of the public—believed in and lived by the creed of “without fear or favor.” They were well informed people who were loyal to the truth as best as they could discern it, and cared nothing about being liked by the people they covered. They were equal opportunity offenders who asked tough questions of all candidates, no mater what their party affiliation.

Somewhere that changed. Instead of being proud, snarling, solitary watchdogs who took pride in not being liked, and who would have spit out mouthfuls of cheap whiskey and coughed up lungfuls of unfiltered cigarette smoke if offered membership into any club, they’ve morphed into pathetic lapdogs whose only desire is to be liked by the idiots, liars, morons and plastic-faced hypocrites they cover. In their effort to be liked and invited to celebrity parties, they turned into sissified wimps who refused to challenge an unanswered question or an outright perversion of the facts.

The politicians and celebrities approved and invited the docile losers to cheese and champagne parties. The wimps, eager for more approval, willingly had their teeth replaced with marshmallows, and their brains with invitations to more parties if they just behaved and let the non-answers and lies go by without challenge.

That’s where these politicians got the idea that they are entitled to refuse to answer questions that are important to the survival of democracy and human freedom.

Hillary Clinton’s self-deluded supporters might think it’s perfectly appropriate to shoot someone who dares to demand that their hero honestly answer a simple question, instead of dissembling and evading it. That’s their right.

But I can tell you this: Before they ever could have pulled their guns on those nuns, Sisters Zita and de Sales would have beaten them senseless.