corrente

"Catholic Publisher Quits Bush Campaign" was the way the headline read in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune

So did this publisher find he could no longer reconcile Church teachings on the death penalty, war, concern for the poor and similar issues with the iWreck mess and reverse-Robin-Hood rapacity of Bush's fiscal policies? Was he revolted by the Swift Liars campaign?

Naw. Seems he was about to be outed as a molester.

Deal W. Hudson, the publisher of the conservative Roman Catholic journal Crisis and the architect of a Republican effort to court Catholic voters, said he is resigning as an adviser to the Bush campaign because of a Catholic newspaper's investigation into accusations of sexual misconduct. The accusations involve a student at a college where he once taught.

"No one regrets my past mistakes more than I do," Hudson wrote in a column posted Wednesday on the online edition of National Review announcing his resignation. "At the time, I dealt with this in an upright manner and the matter was satisfactorily resolved long ago," he wrote, without specifying the accusations. Hudson, 54, said he had been happily married to his current wife for 17 years. Called for comment, he declined.

At Fordham University, a Jesuit school in New York where Hudson taught from 1989 to 1995, a university spokeswoman confirmed that the episode had led to Hudson's resignation.

Hudson has been an influential adviser to President Bush and a close friend of White House political strategist Karl Rove since the late 1990s. Hudson first caught Rove's attention by publishing a study in Crisis in 1998 arguing that Republican candidates could make inroads among traditionally Democratic-leaning Catholic voters by focusing on regular churchgoers, a strategy that dove-tailed with Bush's emphasis on "compassionate conservatism."

Hudson signed on as an adviser to Bush's 2000 presidential campaign, and for the last four years has been a prominent participant in a weekly conference call held by the Republican National Committee with influential Catholic supporters.

This must be WAY stinkier than they want to let on. First note the dates: this guy claims to have been pure as the newfallen snow for 17 years, yet only "left academia" nine years ago.

How else can we deduce that something slimy is going on? The man keeps very bad company. Apparently he never read this thing called the Bible, it has some strong advice against consorting with the wicked.