Give me three words to describe Tom Roeser and they’d be conservative, Catholic, and curmudgeon. With room for more, I wrote in 2007 that Roeser, “full of years and beans, writes the most fully realized blog I know (blog.tomroeser.com). He’s a ruminator, his decades in politics the cud he now chews twice, and he’s spellbinding. . . . Roeser, who wears his values on his sleeve, admires some people and despises others.” And, I might have added, leaves you in no doubt about who falls into which category.
“He said a typically baffling thing,” Roeser recalled in a long e-mail answering a series of questions I just put to him. “That he didn’t need or welcome CCI’s intrusion or support for the matter. That poisoned the well and it’s still weird to me.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
“My goodness,” he wrote in mockery, “you’d think that if only the Hyde amendment language were included in the Senate draft, the bishops would rush to embrace it, tossing their miters in the air and fanning the air with their crosiers.”
If in fact Roeser does regularly spew hate in his blog, the cardinal might have protested when someone besides himself was its target. Like everyone else, princes of the church are least attractive when most self-involved.
Roeser wrote me, “There’s no doubt I’m a tough correspondent and I pull no punches anywhere in my blog but the words Mary Anne and others object to are these: I called him ‘bald.’ Gee, if I were writing a profile of him for a newspaper or magazine, I’d call him ‘bald.’ Second, I called him ‘short.’ Again: he is short. . . . Third, I said that he hasn’t worked in the private sector and that he has not much of a sense of what it is to work for a living. . . . Fourth, I said his hands are ‘soft’ emphasizing he hasn’t done physical labor. That is taken as a grave insult. Shit my hands are soft and I haven’t done much physical labor around this house as my wife will be first to testify. Frankly his umbrage with me is pathetic.”
