After all she had the audacity to suggest that Barack Obama better represented American Catholics than the Pope.

And she slammed the Bishops for having “lost their way” during the health care fight because they didn’t want abortion to be considered health care.

So now that Maryland is having a public debate about the nature of marriage, here she is again. This time the former governor and daughter of RFK is campaigning in support of same-sex marriage.

The Left gets it. When you need a high-profile supporter of abortion or same-sex marriage, nothing beats having a ‘Catholic’ — and a Kennedy to boot!

And the scandal just continues…

An Obama Catholic calls it quits. Rep. Jerry Costello, a Catholic Democrat representing the 12^th District of Illinois (Belleville/suburbs of Saint Louis), will not be running for reelection in 2012. http://cvote.to/5B Costello votes pro-life about 65% of the time, but he also supported Obamacare. Costello also provided cover for Barack Obama, serving on Obama’s Catholic National Advisory Council during the 2008 presidential campaign. http://cvote.to/5C His district has only a +2 edge for Democrats and pundits have already called the seat a tossup. http://cvote.to/5G

Rocco Palmo is reporting that the USSCB has reaffirmed their 2007 Faithful Citizenship text. There will be a new introduction, but that will be the only change from the current document. http://cvote.to/5A Thomas Peters notes this only underscores the need of individual bishops to speak out on these issues. http://cvote.to/5H

A majority of Americans (55%) in a Washington Post/ABC poll expect Barack Obama to lose in 2012. Not surprisingly, 83% of Republicans expected that result. But even 42% of Democrats expect him to lose in 2012. Obviously the election is still 13 months from now. But with a second recession looming, these numbers might get worse. (Sounds good to me.)  http://cvote.to/59

Other articles of interest:

The Vatican’s newspaper criticizes the BBC decision to change to “common era” dating. http://cvote.to/5D

A great round-up on the Catholic New Media Conference by Matthew Warner. http://cvote.to/5E Next year’s CNMC is in Dallas apparently. Not sure when.

Gov. Bobby Jindal, a Catholic, ordered flags flown at half staff for Archbishop Hannan funeral. http://cvote.to/5F

And for those keeping score at home, the Democratic Senate hasn’t passed a budget in 888 days.

Great news from the Granite State: Pro-abortion Democrat John Lynch, who professes to be Catholic, won’t seek re-election to a fifth two-year term as governor of New Hampshire. His decision opens the race for governor wide open. Pro-life Catholic Ovide Lamontagne, who lost to (now Senator) Kelly Ayotte, is running for the GOP nomination. http://cvote.to/3Q

The Pennsylvania GOP (which controls the Legislature and Governor’s mansion) is considering changing the distribution of electoral college votes in the Keystone state from the current winner-take-all to allocating them by Congressional district. http://cvote.to/3R While considered a swing state, Democrats have won the state every presidential election since 1988. No Democrat has won a presidential election without Pennsylvania in over 60 years. If the proposal becomes law, Obama will have a tougher time reaching 270 votes. But Pennsylvania Republicans might face a backlash from independent voters that put them in control of the Legislature in 2010.

Republicans in the Wisconsin Legislature are considering a proposal that would ban the research use of cells derived from fetal tissue in Wisconsin. Joel Schmidt, a biochemist and Catholic blogger has more details. http://cvote.to/3S

In Michigan, Republican legislators have submitted six different bills to increase school choice, including lifting the cap on the number of charter schools. http://cvote.to/3T

Other articles of interest:

Bad news for Obama administration: The Treasury Department has joined in the investigation of Solyndra, the now bankrupt company that was a touted as a model of President Obama’s green energy program. http://cvote.to/3U

Your tax dollars at “work”: Almost $19 billion in state unemployment benefits were paid in error over the last three years, according to data from the Labor Department. http://cvote.to/3V

Requests for unemployment benefits last week jumped to the highest level in three months, a sign that layoffs could be increasing. http://cvote.to/3W

Apparently … not:

Outgoing U.S. Ambassador to Malta Doug Kmiec has reiterated his support for President Obama and said he will almost certainly endorse him again in the 2012 presidential election.

Kmiec told the Sunday Times of Malta that there is a “98 percent chance” that he will endorse the president, adding “I think that the president is doing a great job.”

“He’s someone who has made good on his principal promises against substantial headwinds,” he said. Kmiec cited the president’s response to economic troubles, the extension of health insurance coverage and his work in international affairs. [CNA] [Read/Watch the full interview here]

Where to begin to respond to this level of self-delusion? Who actually thinks — besides diehard Democrats — that President Obama’s policies have helped the economy recover? Who is actually excited at the prospect of the Catholic health care system being lumped in with and forced to abide by progressively more restrictive government policies which are often directly opposed to Catholic moral teaching? Who actually thinks what Obama’s foreign policy (that is, if you can even define what his foreign policy is) has accomplished besides encouraging America’s enemies to continue to encroach upon the freedom of their less powerful neighbors and countrymen, often trampling over Christians and religious liberty as a start?

[Kmiec] said that the State Department never really understood his mandate to promote interfaith dialogue in Malta given to him by President Obama.

Again, more delusion.

Then, this bombshell:

The outgoing ambassador also revealed that his fatal car accident in California in August 2010 was caused when he fainted because of medication he takes for Parkinson’s disease. The accident killed two of his friends, a priest and a nun.

I have long heard rumors that Kmiec had Parkinson’s disease, but I refused to publish them because I thought it would be gossip. Plus I could discern no sincere reason why he would hide his condition from even his public supporters when he served a very public role.

Now we find out that, not only does he have it, but that his condition caused the crash which killed two people. When the news of Kmiec’s accident broke, I asked for prayers for him and the victims. I half expected that some explanation would eventually be given as to what caused the accident, but none was ever given. Well, now we know.

So, three years after Kmiec’s switch to the cause of Obama, he’s left the administrative post to which he was assigned as a reward for his support, continues to show no understanding of what actually caused him to have to leave, while relentlessly spinning the record of the President he so admires, all so we can be treated to four more years of disastrous policy.

Which leaves me to wonder, will no pro-Obama Catholic come clean on the recent past?

Dare I say that, if a Catholic of widely-esteemed personal principles and integrity were to exhibit the same unwavering support of a deeply flawed political figure who happened to be a Republican, the cry from the Catholic Left would be “he’s a partisan hack!”

Well, Mr. Kmiec strikes me as little more than, well, not much more than, just so.

I’m not surprised by the news. Kmiec’s resignation is only the latest episode in a long, slow decline of intellectual integrity which first became public when he endorsed Obama for President in 2008. Kmiec’s story and his stories about Obama’s true agenda passed beyond absurdity some time ago.

I pity Kmiec personally but I do believe it is important to write about this news involving him because I believe we can all learn a great many lessons about what befalls us when we begin to put our political agendas and personal ambitions ahead of the Gospel.

Kmiec, as we all know at this point, was the most visible Catholic, “pro-life” champion of Obama in the Presidential campaign and since then. He helped convince on-the-fence Catholics (and the wider American population) that Obama’s positions could be reconciled with the Catholic Church. His support of Obama was quickly identified as useful to those who wanted Obama elected, and they were happy to supply him with a platform before the election, and a reward after the election (the ambassadorship to Malta).

Then, like all men who serve an expedient purpose for a time, once Kmiec became more of a liability than an asset to the administration, he was first internally criticized, practically reigned-in, and finally allowed to resign – with no assistance from his “friend” Obama.

Liberal Catholics are trying to make Kmiec into a martyr for religious freedom … as if being appointed the ambassador of a seaside resort country –complete with a staff that by Kmiec’s own admission he employed as his research assistants– were purgation! Would that religious “oppression” always came with such trappings of prestige and comfort.

Of course Kmiec is not a martyr for religious freedom. He’s a constitutional scholar who should have known at the outset that his public voice would have to be sublimated to the real, practical responsibility of being America’s official state ambassador to a foreign power.

But that’s just the point: the real world is increasingly not the world that Kmiec thinks he inhabits. Kmiec’s world ceased to be the real world when he convinced himself (and still tries to convince others) that Obama is a “Catholic” president. The rest of the story is tragically predictable.

This connection between Kmiec’s self-delusion about Obama’s agenda and his delusion about his actual role in that agenda is the only thing that can begin to make sense of the recurrent disconnect between what Kmiec says about Obama’s agenda and politics and what we see happening in the world – what we have seen Obama do, and why the State Department thought it was inappropriate that one of their Mediterranean ambassadors had decided to act as if he was some sort of “religious-based diplomacy” international ambassador-at-large with a personal mandate from the President.

More revealing still is to see how Kmiec’s top enablers – progressive Catholics – expected Kmiec’s battle against the state department to go his way. Joe Furella wrote five days ago:

“Obama now needs to step in, along with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and support the man who has supported them.”

Well, the Obama cavalry clearly never arrived. That’s because it was never sent. That’s because Kmiec used to serve Obama’s needs, and now he doesn’t. None of that was hard to predict.

Michael Sean Winters is an even better example of liberal self-delusion in this situation. 10 days ago he accused Jack Smith of the Catholic Key of “making a molehill out of a molehill” by bringing up Kmiec’s reprimand by the State Department. Well then, by Winters’ own admission, Kmiec evidently resigned over a molehill, or it wasn’t actually a molehill in the first place, and Winters was wrong. Who’s surprised?

Winters tried to argue instead that Kmiec’s extra-curricular activities constituted a “deepening of his official duties, rather than a straying from them.” But reality would disagree. Kmiec’s unilateral interpretation of his responsibilities were opposed to the commitment he made to U.S. officials when he accepted the diplomatic position they offered him.

Instead, to explain the Kmiec problem, liberal Catholics have tried to create this new absurdity about Kmiec’s previous political statements somehow targeting him for political revenge.

But even this is untenable. So all Winters has left is to falsely claim: “…everyone, not just Catholics, are scratching their heads over [Kmiec's resignation].” Well, I’m not confused. I would suggest the proper reaction isn’t to scratch one’s head, it’s to open one’s eyes. I’ll explain.

Liberal Catholics who enable Obama’s agenda constantly fall into the temptation of thinking Obama loves their “Catholic” positions, when he in fact loves that their “Catholic” positions endorse his political program. To make a Chess metaphor, Kmiec and liberal Catholics are pawns who think they are bishops and are thereby taken by surprise whenever their King decides to sacrifice them in his own defense. Kmiec’s posturing in his Maltese position was becoming an embarrassment for the current administration, so they told him to quit it. He decided to quit entirely, because he cared more about his non-diplomatic role than his actual diplomatic role.

At the beginning of this Lent I issued a letter to prominent Catholics who publicly supported Barack Obama: “Come Clean on Obama.” In it, I named Kmiec as one of the Catholics I was calling to.

Now, in the final week of Lent, Kmiec has before him visible, tangible, unavoidable evidence that what he thought Obama wanted him to do was not the case. His illusion about what Obama wanted him to do has come to an end. Now is the time for Kmiec to reexamine what else about Obama he may have gotten wrong – for him to confront the deeper illusion. Now is the time to come clean. It’s never too late.

Deacon Keith Fournier says that Kmiec has come home. Sadly, he has only done so in the geographical sense. It remains to be seen – and I pray that it does come to pass – if he will come home to the full reality about Obama’s agenda and how it fundamentally opposes our Catholic principles, principles which lead to human flourishing in the real world because they match the reality God has inscribed in the world and in each of us.

In the meantime, my Lenten prayer for this pro-Obama Catholic must remain.