PRESIDENT BUSH: ENEMY OF RELIGIOUS FREEDOM, CODDLER OF COMMUNIST REPRESSION

Courtesy of www.crooksandliars.com, I found this execrable link (news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060420/ap_on_go_pr_wh/hu_protester_11) in which President George W. Bush, big-mouth Christian and notoriously staunch conservative Republican, apologized to Communist Chinese President Hu Jintao for having his personal tranquility violated by demonstrators protesting Chinese government persecution of the Falun Gong.

Falun Gong is a form of Qigong, a school of meditation and exercise, which is said to restore one's inner balance. Sounds healthy enough to me. The problem, for the officially atheistic communist regime, is that Falun Gong has a significant load of new age spiritual baggage. The Chinese government has described Falun Gong as "a dangerous cult" and has been accused of repressing their rights by imprisonment, torture and even harvesting practitioners' organs. Because China is a secretive dictatorship it is hard to know exactly how much of this is actually true but, given the government's past record of violent oppression, the smart money is on government-sponsored brutality.

So how does President Bush respond to his dictator/guest when Hu finds himself greeted by a good, old fashioned protests, which is the sort of thing that's supposed to make our democracy great? He apologizes, natch. Once again we see where President Bush's real sympathies lie: with an unelected overlord. In view of how comfy Bush has been hob-nobbing with the likes of Saudi royalty, this is no real surprise.

The question is: Will the Democrats make hay out of Bush's implied support for a communist dictatorship's oppression of a minority religion? It would seem a no-brainer. But, Amy Sullivan notwithstanding, you know Democrats.

HAND-WRITTEN LETTERS AND THE BOMB

As I’m sure many of you know, there has been credible talk that President Bush intends to do the unthinkable and nuke Iran. We don’t know for certain that this is true, but with the Prez’s scary track record, this is a possibility that cannot be ignored. We must not allow our country to become a pariah state.

Hand-written letters (and it’s got to be hand-written—desk-top publishing is considered cheating) are the second-most effective means of lobbying after face time. One hand-written letter is regarded by your senators and house rep as representing the will of 200 voters, which is really, really huge. Each letter takes about five minutes to complete from finding your congressperson’s address on the Internet to licking and stamping the envelope. That’s really not a lot to give our supremely dysfunctional government a much-needed wake-up call.

To find the name of your representative, click here:

http://www.house.gov/

The address is: House of Representatives, Washington, DC 20515

To find the name and address of your senators, click here:

http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm

Below is a suggested letter. Feel free to copy it, although variations are slightly more effective. Keep them short (about two to three sentences is best) and polite. Please.

Dear Senator/Representative ___________,

It’s been reported that President Bush intends to use tactical nuclear weapons against Iran, not because they are a threat to anyone today, but because they may become a threat years from now.

You MUST demand the truth and reassert that it is congress’s right, not the President’s to declare war. An unprovoked nuclear attack would be a permanent stain on our country’s reputation.

Sincerely,
Your name
Your address

Please pass this around to everyone you can think of. It really is important.

CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS MOST REGRETTABLY DUE

Washing my own dishes like the he-man hunk-o-rama that I am, I had a thought. Liberal bloggers and their fellow travelers in the Reality-Based Community® a couple of weeks or so ago were quite understandably ballyhooing polls which showed that Americans now trusted Democrats more then Republicans on national defense. And that is great news because it shows that a significant number of Americans have finally woken up from the sleep of reason.

However, let us recall that members of the RBC® had, quite understandably, made lots of dirty cracks about Democratic members of congress who spent the run-up to the war patriotically lining up behind all the other lemmings and who largely still refused to question President Jesus McChimp for the longest time after it became clear that we had just pulled an en masse Wyle E. Coyote. Infuriatingly, the justification for this was that Democrats didn’t want Americans to think that they were weak. Talk about being spineless.

Horrifying irony, I think it worked. Where exactly would we be if the Democrats had stood up to the war? How much credit do you think our side would have gotten for trying to stop this debacle?

I mean, let’s face it, liberal Democrats stood up to the horror of Vietnam and our reward was to spend the next forty years having our patriotism questioned.

There has been a lot of talk in the blogosphere that Democrats need to stand for something because people won’t trust us if we don’t exhibit considerably more backbone. That’s true too. But if our elected officials hadn’t acted like a bunch of cowards first, we might never have been able to play hero—well, play hero and win the latest popularity contest/poll.

So thank you, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Diane Feinstein and maybe even that awful Joe Lieberman. Thank you for caving in to this president so we could cheer as our (mostly) young people could be marched off to kill and be killed for reasons that were bullshit. We couldn’t be in the quite fantastic political position we apparently are in today without you. Thank you and fuck off.

IF WE REALLY SUPPORT ABORTION, LET’S PROVE IT WITH OUR CURRENT STRATEGY

The abortion issue surely ranks among the great killers of liberal aspirations. Conservatives know this and have been gleefully playing our side like a bunch of intellectually snotty fiddles. Any liberal ambitious enough to think out of the box on this one is greeted with the most passionate sort of abuse and character assassination. Somewhere, in between chats with special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, Karl Rove is smiling.

Before going on, let’s explode a nefarious piece of bullshit that has prevented our side from finding new and more effective ways of neutralizing the abortion issue. Namely, that just about anyone who dislikes abortion enough to vote against Democrats because of it must be some ignorant, impervious-to-reason yahoo who cannot be coaxed into supporting us without giving away the store. Malarkey. We know this isn’t true because Bill Clinton got elected five times as governor of Arkansas without sacrificing his pro-choice position in the country’s third most antiabortion state (http://www.surveyusa.com/50State2005/50StateAbortion0805SortedbyProLife.htm).

How did he do it? Well, he didn’t imply that people who dislike abortion ought to be ashamed of themselves by telling them that they were engaged in a war against women (no, not even the women), or that they were a bunch of jerks who hated sex, or resort to any of the they’re-so-dumb-and-we’re-so-smart arguments that liberals love making to the delight of both themselves and Republicans working to screw the middle class. Nor did Clinton barely pretend to care what the anti-abortion side thought before looking bored and changing the subject.

He did it by taking the concerns of those opposed to abortion seriously and treating them with respect. Surprisingly, this is not the same thing as agreeing with them that they’re right.

(Incidentally, did you ever notice how, when it comes to abortion rights, feminists unintentionally parody the way conservatives deal with the issue of terrorism? After New York got bombed, I, like many liberals, tried to understand why so much of Arab/Muslim world supported Osama bin Laden in committing this mass murder because of a natural inclination to try and understand what was going on. As I’m sure you recall, many conservatives were outraged by these musings and stupidly equated any attempt to understand Arab thinking with sympathy and support for terrorists. In liberal/left circles, examining the possibly of legitimate concerns as to why people might oppose abortion is treated in exactly the same fashion. “Why do you hate America?” becomes “Why do you hate women?” It’s the exact same type of brainless lashing out that belies panic far more than it does confidence.)

There is no use denying that a large proportion of antiabortion people are, in fact, creepy, self-righteous dickheads who do regard women as second-class citizens, hate homos, want to fight reverse discrimination by bringing back Jim Crow, and still resent the Clintons for not being good, honest, truth-telling Christians like that nice George Bush. There is no question that we are never, going to get these righteous weenies to vote for a liberal Democrat who supports abortion rights. Ever.

But, the thing is, a person doesn’t have to be that far gone to be against abortion or at least find the issue troubling enough that Republicans can successfully exploit it and alienate them from their own self-interest. And, BTW, if we had been able to peel off an additional seven percent of evangelicals troubled by abortion and gotten them to vote Democratic in the 2004 election (which is three percent less than what Bill Clinton got in 1996), John Kerry would be president today. Think of that.

Before suggesting how we can fix the problem, let me draw you a picture showing how it’s perfectly plausible for a non-asshole to have profound misgivings about the morality of abortion and then follow that reaction to the point where they become rigidly anti-choice.

First of all, fetuses as they go along in the gestation process, start to look awfully human, especially when they’re far enough along to be candidates for partial-birth abortion (a term many consider objectionable because of its tasteless accuracy). There is a laudable instinct among many people not to kill things that look human which fetuses, after a certain point, do. Not only that but, not having been born yet, the fetus enjoys a natural presumption of innocence. Furthermore, every human atrocity throughout history has been founded on the assumption that certain people (i.e., slaves, Christians, Jews, blacks, homosexuals, women, Asians, etc.) are not fully human and, therefore, do not warrant having their humanity considered as a moral issue. Between you and me and the nearest listening device, I would argue that a general bias towards respecting the humanity of others is the kind of thing that ought to be encouraged.

Once someone’s instinct tells them that a fetus looks human and, therefore, ought to have the same rights as an individual, the question becomes, exactly when does its humanity start? As there is no obvious delineation point this becomes extremely problematic. To many, the safest and easiest decision becomes making no real decision at all but to try and buffalo their way through the dilemma by declaring that the fetus’s humanity begins at conception when it really is just an undifferentiated mass of cells—a position, which is not too difficult to understand, even if it is plainly irresponsible. (It seems obvious that many abortion opponents sense this, since that would explain why they are willing to make exceptions for rape and incest.* If an embryo actually qualified as a human being, this would make no sense whatsoever.)

Once someone decides that a fetus ought to be considered human all the way from conception to birth, it isn’t at all hard to understand why they would turn a deaf ear to complaints that by doing so they are “saying that they own women’s bodies” or “they are treating women as second class citizens” or “they are treating women as mere containers.” The fact of the matter is that pregnancy lasts about nine months but death is forever. And, like it or not, women are, unavoidably, vessels for future human beings. No matter how much you may desire keeping a person’s gender out of it, women are, ultimately, always the ones left holding the baby. Complaints that their rights are being infringed because of sexism seems an obvious distraction to people who aren’t already on our side of the issue The standard feminist response of declaring that it’s a woman’s decision and leaving it at that, likewise comes off as an evasive, utterly unsatisfying answer.

So, let’s say that you want to prevent abortion because you’ve decided it’s murder, even if it is a hell of a stretch to declare an undifferentiated mass of cells a human being. In principle, the simplest way to prevent abortion is to prevent unwanted pregnancies from occurring in the first place or it would be if keeping unwanted pregnancies from occurring were an easy matter, which it isn’t as people are impelled to bonk even when it’s against their better judgment. At this point it isn’t that hard to understand why someone, would want abortion to be illegal under the delusion that this is going to solve the problem by scaring a large majority of women into not having sex or at least forcing them to give birth. Nor is it at all hard to see how the same people could delude themselves into thinking that abstinence education is the answer. The alternative, reality-based sex education, does imply that people are going to do the nasty whether others likes it or not and that, when people do, there will be unwanted pregnancies many of which will ultimately end in abortion, which, in the minds of opponents, is to say murder.

And let us acknowledge something about sex that is rarely bluntly stated. Sex is wonderful and sex is hot, but sex is also profoundly unsanitary. And dangerous too. Not only are there unwanted pregnancies, there’s the clap, herpes, Chlamydia and, everybody’s favorite, HIV. If sex wasn’t so ravishing, we’d consider it disgusting. Yes, even fisting. The fact that gays are still having gobs of sex despite HIV should disprove the effectiveness of draconian prohibitions combined with scare stories (though it did wipe out the bathhouse scene) but unfortunately that sort of thing isn’t going find a place in the minds of those who want a definitive solution to stopping what they consider to be the murderous horror of abortion.

So, here we’ve gone step-by-step from a fairly laudable desire to protect something that looks and, at some point arguably is human to a rather rigid and draconian set of ideas as to what ought to be done about it without once bringing in irrational hatred of sex or desire to oppress women for its own sake into the picture. The etiology of the worldview on display here is every bit as easy to understand as it is ultimately impractical. That’s bad because there are far too many people on this planet for safe operating conditions already. Clearly something needs to be done to get more people on our side but accusing the antiabortion crowd en masse of being sexist or treating them like they’re stupid or saying that they’re only pretending that abortion horrifies as an excuse for inflicting their puritanical ideals on the rest of us is not the way out of this particular box. Not when the Republicans are successfully painting our side as self-involved, amoral snobs it’s not.

So, how do we lure them our way? A good place to start would be to admit that they have a point about the “ickiness” of abortion—to borrow the term favored by one of our more entertaining, if occasionally tone-deaf bloggers. By treating antiabortionist beliefs with respect if not agreement we retain the potential to get the ones who aren’t just a bunch of automatic reactionary jerks to see the considerable common ground we do have.

One way to combat a moral conundrum that’s making it difficult for people to agree with you on an issue is to throw up another one that undermines their current preference. This is something we are finding out courtesy of South Dakota, which has passed a bill making it a felony for doctors to perform an abortion, punishable by up to five years in prison with no exception made for rape or incest. Defining an actual punishment and parties who are to be punished has understandably given some earlier supporters pause as the reality of that part of the equation sinks in. (It also disproves the shibboleth that this is a war against women since, if that were true, they’d be the first ones in line for getting arrested and carted off to jail instead of doctors.) The question of what should be the punishment for abortion and who should get penalized is almost as sticky as deciding when a fetus should rate as an actual human being.

But mostly, echoing Hillary Clinton (who, truth be told, has been a disgusting coward on the war as well as other matters but, politically, is a very hip chick indeed) it should be our compulsively ballyhooed goal to make abortion safe, legal and rare. Why? Because it offers to mitigate the moral discomfort many people have with abortion, thereby respecting and acknowledging their feelings, while still insisting that women maintain the right. Once we have augmented or moral legitimacy by doing that, then we’re going to be a hell of a lot more effective at talking about healthcare, education, a dignified retirement, honest talk, an intelligent, fact-based foreign policy and all the other crucial things Republicans notoriously suck at.

Not only would be more effective than what we’ve been doing, it’d be a whale of a lot more fun.

PS: In the Inconvenient Facts Good Liberals Probably Don’t Want to Know About department, while doing what little research I did for this essay, one unanticipated stat I found leapt out at me. In 1992, the last year for which I could find a complete state-by-state breakdown, the state with highest rate of abortion per 1,000 residents was California, which came in at 42.1 per (the lowest was Wyoming at 4.3 per). However, the District of Columbia which is 60% black rang up a garish 138 per thousand. That’s a factoid some racially-motivated wing nut could have a pretty good field day with. Better you should hear it from me.

EXIT MR. DELAY

One of the ideas I like to use to test the limits of people’s patience with is the concept that what is happening to conservatives today pretty much parallels what happened to the liberal left just before the great Republican comeback. Excuse me while I bore on.

At the end of “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them” Al Franken mentions an airborne conversation with a Rabbi who explained that God’s curse on liars is that they ultimately come to believe their own lies. He didn’t quite spell it out, but to this boy, the meaning is clear: Lying ultimately becomes such an unconscious habit for liars, that, without realizing what’s happening to them, they lose touch with reality and wind up imploding under the weight of their own accumulated hooey. You don’t have to believe in God to believe in that.

Liberalism had a good 60-year run starting in 1933, but by the time the Contract with America (an excellent PR stunt, we must admit) rolled around, liberalism wasn’t just out of gas, it was off its nut. Beating back Jim Crow, supporting gay rights, accepting women in the workplace and opposing Viet Nam had made our side so addicted to the idea of its own inevitable correctness that reality checking became regarded as tantamount to betrayal. Rosa Parks was replaced by the much less satisfactory Tawana Brawley. Feminists had gone from demanding an end to sexism to stereotyping men as a bunch of violent sexist creeps who needed to be more like them, and who then topped that contradiction off by claiming to have discovered a secret international Satanic/patriarchal conspiracy that was forcing them to eat babies without their own knowledge. There were circles where one didn’t even think about suggesting that gay promiscuity might be relevant when discussing the spread of AIDS.

Borrowing heavily on the moral strength they had acquired from previous deserved victories, they denounced skeptics as racist, sexist homophobic, etc. and refused to acknowledge error when obvious problems arouse with their stories. Despite its popularity as a ploy, castigating one’s audience for not believing horseshit has consistently proven to be bad public relations. By the time Rush Limbaugh coined the term “feminazi” you didn’t have to be a Dittohead to appreciate its aptness. Remembering those dark, immensely stupid days makes me regard my advancing age almost with relief instead of dread.

Which brings us, thankfully, to Mr. Delay.

Questioning the loyalty of opponents to this stupid war, massively screwing the middle class and getting caught taking and handing out money he’s not supposed to take or hand out seemed for a while to have only impelled Mr. Delay to keep bailing water into his rapidly foundering boat. Having gotten away with lying to and bullying people all these years, he seems to have become helpless in dealing with his present situation. According to Mr. Delay the prosecutor who indicted him is a pious hypocrite on a partisan vendetta (in other words, he’s Ken Starr). People questioning his deceitful, money-grubbing ways, are—get this—enemies of Christian values. Even with a MSM that’s been bribed and bullied into the GOP’s pocket, the weight of inescapable reality has caused his political future to crumble. He may managed to come back as a lobbyist once he gets out of jail but, as a leading politician, the guy’s a dead mackerel. And for Republicans the fun is just beginning.

On a related note, only a handful of fellow politician has seen fit to stand behind Russ Feingold for making an issue of President Bush’s nakedly unconstitutional and illegal domestic spying program. Without taking into consideration the validity of his argument, the conventional wisdom has dismissed his behavior as too unusual and extreme to be taken seriously, qualifying it as an embarrassment.

Forgive the not entirely apt comparison, but that’s exactly what they used to say about Rush Limbaugh.

FRIENDS LIKE THESE

As strategists, the liberal/left side of the political spectrum are self-defeating boobs who can be roughly divided into two camps, neither of which appear able to understand why their own behavior marks them as screw ups. The first is the professional class, which regards their grassroots supporters as a necessary evil that must be tolerated but never too openly humored, lest the association embarrass them. These cheese balls are only to willing to sacrifice both fiscal and national security plus basic constitutional principles so Republicans will think more highly of them. The Grassroots, on the other hand, while often right on the larger issues, seem to have no idea the kind of impression they’re making or why some of the things they do legitimately causes people to consider them obnoxious. The situation has gotten to be so extreme, one almost expects Republicans to toss their hands up in despair and ask just who they have to fuck to throw the next election. Just don't say it’s Ann Coulter and her bountifully infected quim.

That was rude, but perhaps you see my point. I remember the dark days of political correctness when it was the left that suggested the idea of a reality-based community was some patriarchal conceit cooked up by The Man. I remember the multiple-personality disorder/satanic ritual abuse hysteria, the Tawana Brawley fiasco and people on our side who were incensed at Bill Clinton for rebuking Sistah Souljah—an angry, self-righteous twit of the first water—just because she suggested that black people set aside a week for killing whites. How dare he!

This is an important moment in history. The Republicans are desperately trying to tell us who we are, if only we had enough sense to listen. We are good at national security. They aren't. We are good at sound fiscal management. They aren't. We care about a decent social safety that will help see regular people through hard times. They don't. We care about basic constitutional principles. They don't. By almost every conceivable measure, Democrats are not only better than Republicans at doing what we’re supposed to be good at, we’re better at what Republicans are supposed to be good at too.

If we didn't have ourselves as allies, life would be a cinch.