I have, for a while now, subscribed to the CRISIS Magazine email newsletter. I know the author, Deal Hudson, is extremely conservative, and obviously, I don’t agree with him about a lot of things (I should point out that at least one of his email newsletters consisted of three stories that I liked). I primarily subscribe to it to get an opposing viewpoint, and an idea of what is going on in the conservative world.
I have since discovered that not only is CRISIS Magazine published by the Notre Dame press (or was, at one point), which makes me more interested (as a student of Notre Dame myself), but Deal Hudson is quite the Washington power broker.
I have also discovered that Deal Hudson is a hypocrite, and an adulterer. He must have found it interesting that Clinton did exactly the same thing he did. That, however, did not stop him from writing that it is a “lie that a person’s private conduct makes no difference to the execution of their public responsibilities. It’s this lie, alive in our culture of death, that has shaped the character of Bill Clinton and encouraged the moral softness in all of us.”
Anyway, I digress. The National Catholic Reporter is a newsmagazine that generally focuses on Catholic-related news issues. As Deal Hudson is Catholic and (was) quite possibly the most powerful Catholic lay-person in the country (he had/has the ear of the Bush administration), they did a profile about him. In so doing, they discovered Hudson’s past. They sent a letter to Hudson asking for a comment so they could do their story. Instead of responding to them, he published a preemptive (conservatives like that word, don’t they?) letter on the National Review’s website in an attempt to discredit or mitigate the effect of the NCR’s unpublished article. That article is now published, and is available here It’s a real humdinger, and a long article at that (it was supposed to be a chronicle of Hudson’s rise to power and influence, and was intended to be long), but it’s very worth the read.
Deal? You are an interesting piece of work.
