Now playing - Abortion

Back by popular demand. Pro-lifers have always borne the brunt of social criticism, criticism of the pro-choice side is scant to nonexistent. This is unfair and unwarranted like the worker who always gets yelled at while the others are doing far worse. It's always been this way as Pro-Choice is seen as the rational, the genteel position to take. It has all the courage of a non-position and when one calls themselves "pro-choice" it really doesn't tell you much at all. Simply repeating the mantra of CHOICE doesn't make one pro-choice of course just like if I recite some ancient Hebrew texts that doesn't automatically make me a Kabbalist. Choicers reflexively oppose any and all informed-consent legislation making them paradoxically into a bunch of anti-informed choicers when they should have been the ones who proposed these things in the first place. Man as a rational creature cannot knowingly fight for something evil hence those hardcore pro-choicers who can't even imagine a world without recourse to legal abortion MUST see at least some positive social good in it after all every other social movement in history from abolition to woman's suffrage to civil rights was based on fighting the good fight so the only philosophically correct description here is pro-abortion. Erik, commenting over at Daniel's latest blog about abortion comes closest in my book to being a bona-fide pro-choicer but he's in the definite minority. It's also rather ironic that it's the choicers themselves who are so obsessed with insinuating theological issues into the debate by constantly ascribing them to the lifers when the majority of them give a very logical and non-religious approach in the public square. What is philosophically so disturbing about the so-called pro-choice mentality is that it can lead to things like Nazism, chances are it won't but theoretically it can since its main premise is the scientific issue of when human life begins is no longer relevant to abortion policy or the Woman's Decision. Even Harry Blackmun, chief architect of Roe acknowledged in a footnote that should science ever prove the humanity of the unborn then of course the abortion case collapses. This is a paradigm shift in our moral thinking and it's no wonder that euthanasia is always a close cousin to abortion, it's the exact same philosophical underpinnings at work. Abortion, people deep down know it's wrong but spend all their lives trying to justify their decisions. It's an unacknowledged moral tension against Self, an erroneous mathematical formula that undermines the logic of its own premises and that's why even those choicers who chide us lifers for talking way too much about the issue talk about nothing else themselves judging by which blogs get the most hits. No matter what side we take on this controversial and troubling issue the worm of conscience brings us back to it time and again, it's the house of dark shadows and we ignore the hobgoblin in the attic making noise aka what we know in our hearts to be true. Carry on.

From a purely practical standpoint

for those of you who keep harping on why do we blog about abortion so much it certainly seems to get the most hits, the most comments going compared to some other topics and so pragmatically speaking what's wrong with it? We can blog all day about all and sundry topics especially the non-political but if abortion is what keeps the blogosphere all afire makes sense to me. Daniel hits on the theme of social conservatives, now most people equate social conservatives with opposition to abortion and so BINGO you have yourself a hot thread. Looking at my rather meager hitmeter I am almost forced to go with the topic, it's probably the only subject here that gets tao all excited. David999 recently put us all down as being stuck on stupid and that life doesn't revolve around abortion so where's his thoughts on pets, bad bosses, recipes, music, movies and blogging in general? No Dave we all know everything in life doesn't revolve around abortion but I think you like it when we discuss it anyway. If it's "oh not again!" then seems to me the best course of action would be not to leave any comments anyway on the abortion blogs, we'll see all the goose eggs and get the message.

Ya know?

How much emphasis to give the abortion issue?

Pro-life doesn't seem to be a great theme here, the higher concern, the broader context is the continuing socialist narrative. While this of course is not unimportant it shouldn't have been the only thing on the table. Maybe it's because re abortion we're so settled in our ways on the issue and we see it as a distraction from the Larger Cause but I think we could have made a more effective presentation. Obama and his Socialist Agenda, folks probably don't even know what the word means, it has that amorphous ring to it but let's say Obama is a regular reader of the conservative blogosphere as well, he might be forgiven if he concludes they don't seem to talk about the a-word all that much so why should I be nudged or cajoled towards the Center on the issue? Maybe it is all about money, our money in the end only trouble is Obama the Socialist doesn't have a womb-view, a broader package. It's Ayn Rand and reading nothing else. There was a shade of grandeur when McCain addressed pro-life head on during the third and final debate but it didn't take long for the Boat to steer back on its Animal Farm voyage. Just my post-election post-mortem for what it's worth.

At one part in his victory speech Obama threw an olive branch to us, "and to those who didn't vote for me I hear your voices" but does he really? Well if he's listening we're taking notes, well some of us are anyway, for when he runs for his second term and it's quite obvious that's a given since he said it's probably gonna take more than one term to clean up The Mess. Now it is assumed that Mr. Men's Vogue is pro-choice of course, it is the only rational position after all but most folks really don't know the extent of it. He needs to distance himself from the FRINGE of NOW and Planned Parenthood, it's like the friend you need to dump, who holds you back, who pulls you down and this would finally free him up to formulate his own abortion policy. I never really got why social conservatives hitched their wagon to the Republican Party in the first place, they really don't give a damn about the issue anyway, they became infatuated with a whore. Should have gone their own way but that's a pet peeve of mine. Obama has said to pro-abortion groups that his very first act as president will be to sign the Freedom of Choice Act which would codify Roe vs. Wade should that decision ever be overturned but when he attempts to woo The Middle again in 012 it'll come back to haunt him.....

the socialist narrative will continue after these brief commercial messages.

It was a personality-driven election anyway

McCain had a more than respectable showing, there's gonna be the usual grumblings about doing something with the electoral college and apparently Beth's homestate is the most important state in the nation. My channel-surfing was on overdrive last night, there was Bob Schieffer saying Palin was terrible during interviews, the WonderBoy over at ABC, Shepard Smith and the babes on FOX (yum-o), Brian Williams, Gwen Ifill...My id thought up a terrible joke that I haven't seen black people this happy since O.J. Simpson got acquitted but ya wanna know something? they participated in the process, my brothers were happy at work today, all was civil and there ain't anything undemocratic about it. So why should Obama govern from the center? with a Democratic House and Senate he doesn't have that leavening effect that Clinton had with a Republican Congress so expect at least four years of polar liberalism. As for abortion we've had our Republican day in the sun and abortion is still legal but regardless of the legal status of abortion if we want to call ourselves a pro-life country people need to stop having abortions. Yes I was down for a time last night when the election was beginning to take on definite contours, I'm not into getting hardcore drunk but I had an extra helping of the Christian Brothers just the same. The future of the Supreme Court is depressing and I haven't read the rest of the blogs yet but I would imagine they would say the usual in such a dire situation that we need to focus our energy and grassroots on the mid-terms. Sean & RUSH for four more years, I ain't gonna subject myself to this. The turnout was absolutely massive yesterday, a historic one where close to 65% of the country actually voted, biggest turnout in the last hundred years they said so whatever you think of the results this is heartening.

People who work off the clock during their day off even though the company doesn't want them to, the black man would never do this. People who punch for lunch and then work through lunch, the black man would never do this.

Reagan?

What's a play about Obama without a skinhead or two?

Call me cynical but it's almost like it had to happen, the feds just busted a plot involving two skinheads who planned to drive towards Obama and shoot from open windows and also for good measure to shoot up a black high school. Now I agree with Joe the Blogger who holds that Al-Qaeda poses the biggest threat to Obama, radical Muslims who hold that Muslims converting to Christianity is punishable by death but there's a point to this whole ObamaDrama with two skinheads in the dramatis personae. I caught the report on the UPN 9 News last night here in New York and there was some expert talking of course and up flashed on the screen "Keeping Tabs on the Radical Right", you know something the ADL (the Anti-Defamation League) might have as a regular bulletin for concerned citizens. Now I've lost alot of respect for Abe Foxman's group over the years ever since they lumped Ralph Reed and the Christian Coalition in with various and sundry hate groups, being strident or shrill or rigid is not necessarily the same thing as being hateful and plotting mayhem. It's hard to read these things when they flash up on the screen and you're about to go to bed but I caught part of a sentence that went "even on more traditional websites..."

OK, so there you have it. There is a metaphysical, mystical association between the rest of us right-wingers and those skinheads, this goes beyond the loose ties of Obama/Ayers, these are spiritual wisps in the minds of the Left. To the msm we all share the same politics but the neo-Nazis rachet it up a notch or two is all. "Keeping Tabs on the Radical Right", um no, there's the right-wing and then there are skinheads and we don't inhabit the same political universe, sorry. Same thing they tried to do a few years back with mainstream pro-lifers and the occasional abortion clinic bomber, lump us all together and I can only think that this latest episode in ObamaDrama can only help the candidate, a few independents out there may equate conservative opposition to affirmative action let's say with a couple of weirdos out in the hinterlands. You've heard of sleight-of-hand, well the media practices sleight-of-mind, juxtapose certain things on the screen when you're tired and have to work the next day, it's a political imprint and the average person ain't even aware of it and not only that McCain looks positively dull by comparison. I mean if some people hate Obama that much he must really stand for something, the only person McCain might piss off is the cashier at the local supermarket ("it says here the Metamucil's on sale"). It's all like a coloring book, pass the crayons please.

It's McCain's to lose

He practically avoids the whole abortion issue by which he could make headway against Obama. Obama, if he wasn't a senator running for the highest office in the land could just as well be the president of Planned Parenthood. McCain should focus on his opposition to the "Born-Alive Infants Protection Act" which even Hillary and Ted Kennedy supported which practically puts Obama to the left of Freddy Krueger. Also culturally many aren't in tune with modern-day feminism anymore, it's more than a little off-center and has messed up women's heads. Fems have refashioned suitors from the old school as stalker-types with the kind of funny result that women routinely go out with and even marry the porn-addled average Charlie rather than a guy who sends them roses so add feticide to their psychologically vague male hatred and you have a potent mix. Telling a risque joke in the workplace is a crime in their book but strangling a mid-term infant on a cold metal table is not. Ayers is yesterday's news, if McCain can't paint Obama into a corner with the a-word and continues on his present course he deserves to lose. It's a culture war out there and although Pat Buchanan was demonized at the time for bringing this term into our national lexicon nowadays even liberals use it. Just make the feminist link is all, tie him in with the NOW crowd and on abortion legislation he's keeping it psycho. As it stands now conservatives have too many reasons to stay home. Cojones, grow a pair!!

McCain's past ties to abortion clinic bomber

Now that I have your attention. It' s not true of course but imagine if it were! and would the msm even use that all-important adjective tangential to describe his past associations? Now I understand why Bill Moyers has guests on his show saying Obama's past...er...links? to former Weathermen Underground terrorist Bill Ayers is irrelevant, inaccurate and in bad taste for the McCain campaign to point out but everyone seems to be saying it these days like trendy Demochick and FOX News analyst Kirsten Powers. I don't mean talking about the Obama/Ayers matter for three whole hours every day like Hannity does but what I'm not getting is why exactly is Obama's past ties, however tangential, to Ayers that unimportant? and why am I a racist if it's just one of many factors entering into my decision to vote against him? We are in love with Bam, what can I say?

Shades of Gray

From a recent blog of napqueen's at http://www.napqueenspress.blogspot.com/ under "Are Conservatives Stupid? "Liberals can see the gray areas of an issue while conservatives see only black and white and are too stupid (emphasis mine) to see the gray."

Ah yes! I've been patiently waiting for this moment of ultimate clarity. It's the Peter Principle applied to moral philosophy and the result is moral relativism or agnosticism, a marked inability to come to final moral conclusions about things. We've reached our level of incompetence, our Final Placement, we can' t figure out Right from Wrong and we're never to be promoted...and we're happy about it! It's a Cohiba moment.

Z's Law of the Power of Negative Appraisal

A rather potent force in politics, in Life in general and here's how it works. A typical conservative will say something like liberals are pro-abortion or in favor of destroying the unborn. The lib says "oh no that's not us. We're not really for abortion, in fact nobody is, in what universe?" It also works the other way. A typical liberal will say conservatives don' t care at all about the poor and the poor conservative will reply "yeah but we give more." So criticism, especially political criticism, by its very nature exerts a powerful inward pull towards the direction of the position of the critic. So the law of criticism or negative appraisal is for the target to deny the point and then to move gradually towards the critic's stance so all I have to do is make a critical point and look what power I have! Liberals may be from Mars and conservatives from Venus but we take each other's points personally, to heart. This is why Obama has of late made great strides at least towards the political center in his rhetoric, it's all that name-calling in the past that he's a hardcore lib. Of course the exception to Z's Law of the Power of Negative Appraisal are all the left-wing bloggers out there who live in a universe all their own who can't understand one of their own being subject to the same laws of political gravity as the rest of us.

Liberals hoist by their own petard

Now if we posit that racism is a part of human nature, I've heard a few libs in my day assert such a universal "truth", then it should cut across the board, no? Like when some social conservative brings up the racist philosophy of Planned Parenthood's founder, eugenicist Margaret Sanger, and why are so many abortion clinics located in so many poor urban areas and NO, their liberal anger at such an accusation, it's like you're a rightie version of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright but I mean if we're all racists deep down and we have to work on this...

The AmChurch

Bob Novak, in today's column, talks about some major Catholic pro-abortion politicians who received Communion during the two masses celebrated by Pope Benedict XVI during his six-day stay here. They are House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Sens. John Kerry, Christopher Dodd and Edward M. Kennedy on the Democratic side and Rudolph Guiliani on the RINO side. The three Dems received the sacred host at Nationals Park in Washington courtesy of Archbishop Donald Wuerl there and Guiliani at Yankee Stadium courtesy of New York Cardinal Edward Egan although I heard on the radio just now that Egan says he was against Guiliani's action and agrees with the Pope's declaration on the matter. I call this the Bob Novak Effect, just like when he nailed Hillary and her plans to get and broadcast dirt on Obama and she immediately denied that so now Cardinal Egan is saying, in so many words, that this impeccable and well-respected journalist of many decades standing has his facts wrong. As I keep saying there's the official Roman Catholic Church headed by the pope in the Eternal City with its official and unchangeable doctrines and dogmas and then there's the AmChurch (American Church). Gotta love that Bob Novak Effect though, it's off the hook.

Pope Benedict's remarks at youth rally

This was in my neck of the woods, St. Joseph's Seminary in the big YO on April the 19th on a lovely Saturday, would've loved to have gone but watched it on TV just the same. Closed-captioning is wonderful, it helps not just the hard of hearing but all of us. I was able to enjoy a fine cigar outside on the patio while reading Pope Benedict's inspiring words on the screen while looking through the window. One of his main messages to these young people was this era of moral confusion we live in and what he called "the manipulation of the mind" that produces this moral confusion. He did not mention the a-word (abortion) or any other specific word for that matter since he deliberately seems to have cultivated a pastoral style that goes to first principles in a generalized way in the hopes of making us more amenable to the Church's teachings, he wants to get beyond the NO-NO-NO part as he is fond of saying but we all know what he's talking about. One passage in particular struck me and he seems to have purposely evoked the Message of Fatima as his predecessor often did: "The second area of darkness - that which affects the mind - often goes unnoticed and for this reason is particularly sinister. The manipulation of truth distorts our perception of reality and tarnishes our imagination and aspirations...yet freedom is a delicate value. It can be misunderstood or misused so as to lead not to the happiness we all expect it to yield but to a dark arena of manipulation in which our understanding of self and the world becomes confused and distorted by those who have an ulterior agenda." It's as if this is Benedict's own theological explanation for part of the Message of Fatima wherein the Virgin Mary says to Lucia: "Look my child, don't be surprised if, at a certain moment, a certain diabolical disorientation affects the best of minds, a disequlibrium, so that they no longer judge according to the voice of my Son and of Peter." What better way to describe the times we now live in?

Yesterday I re-registered to vote

This time as a member of my state's Conservative Party (as Sean is fond of saying "I'm a conservative first, a Republican second"). Last time I voted as one of those influential and much-feared and sought after Independents. Years ago it was RTL (Right-to-Life). Now a pattern emerges here and that is I've been shying away from becoming an official Republican. I've analyzed this and I think it has to do with I'd be walking around one day and get poked in the butt with somebody's horn.

The speech Rudy never gave

I still say that there is almost a poetic requirement that the Mayor of 9/11 be the One to continue and eventually win the War on Terror but most people don't seem to agree with this script, Life need not be that artistic I guess but Rudy's big mistake was this. He courted his party's conservative base way too late in the game, if you're going to woo you have to get your application in early otherwise you're transparent, maybe a bit frenzied and not at all sincere. He should have laid the groundwork a year or two ago with a major speech or two soley on the Life Issues as in, "Upon further reflection I've come to the conclusion that the abortion issue lends itself best to some kind of legislative solution which Roe vs. Wade pre-empted. How can the Supreme Court, any Supreme Court, act like a bunch of OB-GYNs and dictate to the nation as a whole that aborting the fetus is legal up to the 3rd month or the 6th or even up until birth? You can even have some choicers who believe early abortions are ok but who are against some of the later mid-term ones still allowed by the Court. The late Harry Blackmun, who wrote the majority opinion in Roe, endlessly complicated the issue and for this reason I've adjusted my earlier pro-choice views. Federalism is the best way of dealing with this contentious and highly emotional issue."

If he had done this early enough some of us might even have gotten a faint whiff of sincerity in the man, we all reserve the right to change or modify or calibrate our views over time and it would have showed that he gave further thought to the issue. It's just a hunch but I think most conservatives would more than gladly put up with a true pro-choice federalist in office.

In the curious matter of the male fetus...

...how is this just a part of the Woman's Body if you catch my drift? just one of many many inconsistencies of the choice movement like the 24-week cutoff point many states use to proscribe later abortions, by what mysterious alchemy is the unborn child not human just 3 days before "viability"? I call this the Cinderella Paradox as in "quick, it's 11:45, abort it, the fetus turns human at midnight!" OR the common agnostic approach to abortion which is we don't know the moral and human status of the fetus but let it happen anyway. You should have to prove the fetus is not human before you can suck it into oblivion which brings up the next point. Our science in general and in particular the study of the unborn known as fetology is so far advanced (think transvaginal ultrasound) that we can no longer fall back on the agnostic position, it ain't a bovine fetus after all.

It's all just masturbation of the mind folks.

Fred Thompson - a consistent political philosopher

He may not be a pro-life purist like Judie Brown of the American Life League, always going for the touchdown, aka that Constitional Amendment, but he's not a life-choicer like Mitt Romney either. He's a federalist or a believer in states' rights. Laura Ingraham brought up the fact that he was against government intervention in the Terri Schiavo case, well he can say he was consistent in his own head anyway. I myself was more into the whole angle of Terri could swallow on her own and so the laws in all 50 states say you have to feed a person by mouth. Her feeding tube was always a side issue anyway, they could have given her saline hydration by IV and as for his misguided comments about a federal law banning abortion meaning women and possibly their Moms and Dads going to jail, this had a silver lining. It allowed pro-lifers and in particular us bloggers to clarify the issue, hey, maybe Fred knew this all along. Anyway he has my vote if he's the nominee.

What Mike Huckabee really is ~~~

~~~is a pro-life Democrat in the Bob Casey mold.

I was thinking...

...you'd think by now abortion would peter out and become more or less a thing of the Past, we have about a 100 methods of birth control now and even if you're for abortion there's always the annoyance and inconvenience of having to make an appointment and going through with it (myself? I hate having to get haircuts and oil changes, can you take my car in for me please?) and geez, you could've really used that $300 for something else not to mention the off-chance that your God just might be against it in the End.

Some people thrive on chaos.

Pro-lifers are single-issue people? Would that were the case

The more pro-life conservatives expound on other issues the more I wish they would just stick to pro-life. Dr. Laura, a stalwart pro-life conservative woman on the radio giving traditional moral advice to the confused until one day she wrote that women should look at a man's bank account prior to making a decision to go out with him, in short the moral case for golddigging, and now where is she? I mean why sour your base with a materialistic crapshoot of a point, and then there's National Review's Rich Lowry, more useful than she but who never met a Big Business practice he didn't like and then there's that hot Asian babe, the Malkin chick, who pretty much thinks the whole anti-war movement is about giving Michael Moore a rimjob. Laura Ingraham, same deal. Now Malkin, Lowry and Ingraham are the best in the pro-life biz as far as I'm concerned, their argumentation is fresh and vital to a debate that George Will considers stale but it's the other stuff, like Laura once pooh-poohing studies that show Americans are in a blue funk mood because they're overworked and don't have enough leisure time.

Should conservatives help Obama's campaign?

He says he's a fresh face who wants to end the partisanship in Washington and solve problems, sounds good but behind his moderate mask is a doctrinaire liberal who reflexively criticizes recent conservative Supreme Court rulings having to do with affirmative action and late-term abortion. The question before the Board today - should conservatives help his campaign anyway in order to defeat Hillary? This is purely a pragmatic calculation and it's been done before, support a liberal against another liberal because you like that liberal even less, and even if Obama is the Democratic nominee any Republican contender worth his weight should make short shrift of his inexperience in the Congress and his naivete regarding foreign policy. And he's not all bad, he talks about blacks taking on personal responsibility which sounds like he has Coz as a campaign advisor, that's more than can be said for Hillary who just this past March took money from a rapper who used the n-word at least 20 times in a song. A Hillary presidency would definitely revive Rush's radio career which, let's face it, has been in the doldrums of late. Though he denies it to this day Bill launched his career and Hillary can ripen it but what's in it for the rest of us?

The New York Times has noted a small but fledgling movement of young Republican conservatives who have decided to help Obama and says it may be a harbinger of things to come. I think these people are attracted to his character not his policies, they would agree that Bill's recent condemnation of Bush's "pardoning" Scooter Libby only shows how arrogant this Washington power couple still is despite them living with the owls in Chappaqua. Barack is like opening the window to some moldy and cobwebbed attic and letting the sunshine and fresh air in, that musty old yearbook of the Clinton scandals lying in the corner, just put it on the sidewalk with the rest of the recyclables.

So please help the brother. Make checks payable to Barack Obama.....

Affirmative action

As a conservative I'm naturally against it but a better deal for everyone would be if, instead of a government program based on race we had an informal system based on economic need this way poor whites on welfare would benefit as well as blacks and Hispanics. At any rate one of the unintended consequences of affirmative action as it is today is that, on occasion, you do get someone who totally does not belong in that job, everyone knows it and at first you're mystified that nobody seems to talk about it and that nothing is done, it's a classic elephant in the living room moment. This is not the goal of the proponents of race-based hiring but I've seen it on at least a few occasions and that's when your Peter Principle kicks in.

Isaiah Washington, the black actor on "Grey's Anatomy" who made the gay slur against co-actor T.R. Knight, has been fired from the show and the man is angry, said he did everything they told him to re atoning and that they now want to have Knight's character as a centerpiece of the show so this is interesting, apparently gay men trump African-American men in the victim stakes only it took a while longer to fire Washington than CBS Radio did in canning the I-man, well he was just a rickety old white cowboy anyway. If T.R. had responded in kind and called Washington the n-word it would have had a kind of karmic cancelling effect or something and would have confounded and stunned the whole pc crowd, what to do? two members of historic and time-honored victim groups have engaged in name-calling! do we fire them both and so not have a tv series at all or send them both off for reprogramming? Barring that maybe all T.R. has to do is question global warming and become pro-life and he can join the growing ranks of the damned.