U.S. Pulls Embassy Out of the Vatican

I have long thought it a farce that the United States - not to mention many other countries - has an embassy to the Vatican in recognition of the Mussolini/Pope Pious XII brokered deal that created the fiction that the Vatican is a separate sovereign nation.  The Vatican is the headquarters of a church, plain and simple and if the U.S. were to be consistent, there should be embassies for Islam - perhaps in Mecca - and other world religions.  Thus, it make sense that the U.S. is closing its separate freestanding embassy to the Vatican and down grading it to the status of an annex to the Embassy to Italy.  A far better move would be to simply close the embassy to the Vatican completely and relegate the Catholic Church to the status of other world religions.  Needless to say, far right American Catholic are NOT happy campers. A piece in The Daily Beast looks at the move:

Citing security concerns without naming a specific threat, the U.S. State Department is planning to shutter its embassy to the Holy See inside the lush Villa Domiziana overlooking the Circus Maximus and Palatine Hill in central Rome.

The embassy, which has been in operation since 1984 when Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II signed an accord, will essentially be swallowed up by the larger, more influential U.S. embassy to Italy.

After the move to the American embassy to Italy, scheduled for January 2015 when remodeling work is expected to be completed, the embassy to the Holy See will inhabit a small annex with a separate entrance, but it will be far less independent than it is in its current position across town. 

The move is not sitting well with conservative Catholics who prefer to maintain diplomatic distance from United States policy on issues in direct defiance with Catholic teachings, including same-sex marriage and abortion. Vatican expert John Allen, who first broke the news of the downsize this week in his column in the National Catholic Reporter, quotes a former American ambassador to the Holy See calling the move “a massive downgrade.” . . .  Though unconfirmed, the Holy See ambassador is reportedly being shunted to an apartment not far from the embassy.

Creating a larger American diplomatic compound on Rome’s swishy Via Veneto will follow the lead of other major countries that have also consolidated their diplomatic properties. Israel has always had consolidated embassies, even sharing staff and services. In 2006, the United Kingdom moved its embassy to the Holy See to its embassy to Italy grounds, creating a similar uproar among British Catholics who wanted to maintain diplomatic distance. A few years later the Netherlands followed suit. In 2011, Ireland closed their embassy to the Holy See entirely, and rely on visiting envoys to keep up diplomatic ties.

The Vatican has not publicly commented on the reports of the American diplomatic consolidation, but given Pope Francis’s own reform-minded approach to running the Catholic Church, it is unlikely he will object to the shake-up.

Romney's Pandering Statement Bites Him in The Ass

Virtually with every passing day my opinion of Mitt Romney goes lower.  The man is shameless, uncaring and willing to stoop to any lengths to try to get himself elected - something that ought to scare the hell out of rational, thinking Americans (yes, I know - that excludes the GOP base).  But seriously, even before he knew the facts and details of yesterday's sad events in Egypt and Libya, Romney was trying to score political points with no regard for the families of those at risk.  Fortunately, the reaction from all but the Kool-Aid drinker crowd seems to be uniform in its condemnation of Romney.  Here are excerpts from a piece on Politico:

The folks at First Read capture the snap consensus among the political class that Mitt Romney's statement on Egypt and Libya was a big tactical mistake:

*** Over the top Yesterday we noted that Mitt Romney, down in the polls after the convention, was throwing the kitchen sink at President Obama. Little did we know the kitchen sink would include — on the anniversary of Sept. 11 — one of the most over-the-top and (it turns out) incorrect attacks of the general election campaign. Last night after 10 .pm. ET, Romney released a statement on the attacks on the U.S. embassies in Egypt and Libya. After saying he was “outraged” by these attacks and the death of an American consulate worker, Romney said, “It's disgraceful that the Obama administration's first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.” 

Yet after learning every piece of new information about those the attacks, the Romney statement looks worse and worse — and simply off-key. First, Romney was referring to a statement that the U.S. Embassy in Egypt issued condemning the “efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims.” But that embassy statement, which the White House has distanced itself from, was in reference to an anti-Islam movie and anti-Islam pastor Terry Jones, and it came out BEFORE the embassy attacks began. Then this morning, we learned that the U.S. ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, and others died in one of the attacks.

 *** When news-cycle campaigning goes awry: Bottom line: This was news-cycle campaigning by the Romney campaign gone awry. Why didn’t the Romney campaign wait until it had all the facts?  .   .   .  .  But how much time do you give an administration to work through a diplomatic and international crisis before trying to score immediate political points? You’d expect the Sarah Palins of the world to quickly pounce on something like this, and she predictably did. But a presidential nominee running for the highest office in the land? After the facts have come out, last night’s Romney statement only feeds the narrative that his campaign is desperate.

There are a lot of problems with Romney's reaction to the U.S. consulate attacks, but the most straightforward one may be that it burns away time his campaign didn't have. We're now going to spend at least one news cycle — and probably more — analyzing and responding to Romney's incendiary statement, and the issue will surely carry through to the Sunday shows this weekend. When you're trailing in a presidential election with eight weeks to go, you can't afford to spend one of those weeks defending a provocative statement that you didn't have to make in the first place, especially when you were already on the defensive on national security.

Andrew Sullivan summed up Romney/Ryan's unfitness for office well:

These people are simply unfit for the responsibility of running the United States. The knee-jerk judgments, based on ideology not reality; the inability to back down when you have said something obviously wrong; and the attempt to argue that the president of the US actually sympathized with those who murdered his own ambassador in Benghazi: these are disqualifying instincts for someone hoping to be the president of the US. Disqualifying.