Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Never Even Thought About It

by digby

This updates the post below about whether women should be held legally liable for having an illegal abortion. Apparently this video made the rounds some months ago (and I missed it) in which anti-abortion protesters are asked that very question. Turns out most of them haven’t ever thought about it before. (Update: Apparently we crashed their server. Greg at the talent Show generously uploaded it on to his site here.)

That is as I suspected. It’s time we make them think about it. Most anti-abortion legislation makes no sense morally and these people need to be led through the various steps that will show them this. The cognitive dissonence was apparent on these people’s faces. It’s a question that everyone from the family pro-choice supporter to professiohnal interviewers should always ask.

Picture if you will a poll in which Americans are asked if women should be jailed for murdering their unborn child with an illegal abortion. What do you think they would say? Considering the fact that even the anti-abortion picketers in that video don’t know what to say, I think it’s fair to assume that it would be rejected by more than 90 percent of the population.

That’s because it’s clear that there is almost nobody who believes that abortion is murder in the legal sense of the word. How can there be a law against “murder” where the main perpetrator is not punished? How can it be murder if these people don’t believe that the person who planned it, hired someone to do and paid for it is not legally culpable?

The looks on these womens’ faces in that video were amazing: confusion, frustration, pain. Their position is untenable and they know it.

I’m reminded of this profoundly dishonest anti-abortion activist from Kansas that I wrote about a while back. There’s a reason why she obfuscates and dodges and lies:

BRANCACCIO: I don’t understand how Kansas wouldn’t– ban abortion quit quickly after that. What do you know about the state of that debate in your state…

MARY KAY CULP: It isn’t that. It’s just that I know how the political system works. Then you can have real discussion. Then every– both sides are gonna get aired, and if the media’s fair about it, both sides are gonna get aired. That– you know, that’s a question. But at least democracy will have a chance to work on it. But, that doesn’t necessarily mean anything either way.

She wants people to believe that this is going to be a very painless and simple debate in which the world will finally hear the pro-life side and be persuaded when the truth is that she and her fellow political operatives are working very hard to get these laws firmly in place before anyone has a chance to talk about it.

So I think we need to have this discussion. Let’s debate it out in the open and “air both sides” because from where I sit it’s the “pro-lifers” who haven’t thought this thing through. Nobody says they can’t agitate against abortion and stand out there with their sickening pictures and try to dissuade women from doing it. I will defend their right to argue against abortion forever. But when they use the law to enforce their moral worldview they need to recognize that they can’t have it both ways. If fetuses are human and have the same rights as the women in whom they live, then a woman who has an abortion must logically be subject to the full force of the law. It would be a premeditated act of murder no different than if she hired a hit man to kill her five year old. The law will eventually be able to make no logical moral distinction. Is everybody ready for that?

Thanks to David in the comments for the clip.

Update: Here’s an interesting exchange between Chris Matthews and Pat Toomey in 2004 on this very issue. Toomey was stumped.

Thanks to Mitch for the transcript.

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Trotting Out The Truth

by digby

The NY Times “trots out” a snotty piece today about how the Democrats are “trotting out” the fact that the Republicans have been lax on port security. That “record of failure” is apparently not convincing to the reporter since he/she puts it in “scare quotes.”

Democrats in Congress almost daily blame their GOP counterparts for security holes in the U.S. maritime industry.

They trot out votes that show the Republican-controlled House and Senate turned back more than a dozen Democratic efforts to secure millions of dollars more for port security since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

”When it comes to protecting the ports, Republicans really do have a pre-9/11 mind-set,” said Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind.

Among the votes:

–In 2003, House Republicans, on a procedural vote, agreed to kill a Democratic amendment that would have added $250 million for port security grants to a war spending package.

–Two years later, nearly all House Republicans voted against an alternative Homeland Security authorization bill offered by Democrats that called for an additional $400 million for port security.

–Senate Republicans stood together in 2003 to set aside a Democratic amendment that would have provided $120 million more for port cargo screening equipment.

–One year later, all but six Senate Republicans voted to reject a Democratic attempt to add $150 million for port security in a Homeland Security appropriations bill.

That “record of failure” presents “an important opportunity for Democrats to argue that they are the ones who have the right approach to protecting the country,” maintains Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster.

House Republicans were put on record again last week on port security when Democrats tried to force a debate and vote on legislation that would require congressional approval of DP World’s takeover. The effort failed. Only two Republicans voted with Democrats.

In defense, Republicans say Democrats always want to throw money at untested technology and that the GOP-led Congress has consistently given more money to port security than what the Bush administration has proposed.

Hahaha. Yeah. I hate when Democrats do that:

For the second time in two months, a test of the national missile defense system has failed, Pentagon officials said Monday.[February 15, 2005]

Military technicians say they believe the failure of the $85 million test was caused by a problem with ground support equipment, not with the interceptor missile itself. A preliminary assessment indicated that the fault had occurred in the concrete underground silo, where a variety of sensors perform safety and environmental monitoring.

[…].

The program, by some accounts, has cost $130 billion and is scheduled to require $50 billion more over the next five years. Bush’s budget request for the 2006 fiscal year cut about 10 percent from this year’s funding of almost $10 billion.

Do Republicans have any good arguments anymore? Aside from leaving themsleves wide open with a charge like that about untested technology, the Republicans in congress are reduced to saying that at least they gave more money for port security than their “tax cuts for millionaires” obsessive president. They are starting to make it look easy and that’s never good for our side. I sincerely hope that Democrats are prepared and hungry enough to go for the jugular.

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First Degree Parenthood

by digby

I have a question for the innocent life crowd: how come none of the proposed laws anywhere, as far as I can tell, believe that a woman should be tried for the murder of her child if she gets an abortion? Indeed, there is no penalty in the South Dakota law for the woman at all. She isn’t even charged as an accessory. Does that make sense? She could be tried for first degree murder for leaving a newborn baby to die on a church doorstep.

Doctors are targeted by all these laws; in South Draconian it’s a felony punishable by up to five years in prison. We normally give people life in prison or the death penalty for premeditated murder for hire in our system.

I remember once seeing Larry King, of all people, ask this question of a “pro-life” advocate. (He wasn’t laying a trap — he really wanted to know, you could tell.) The “pro-life” advocate sputtered for five minutes. It’s a question they need to answer. They’ve laid landmines everywhere with their hyperbolic nonsense about abortion being murder and “baby killing” and now they need to explain themselves.

If you ask most pro-lifers whether they think that women should be punished as murderers they say no. If you asked if they think women should be punished by the law at all, they say no. They don’t want to punish the father either. The proposed laws target only the doctor who performed the surgery (or dispensed the drug) and for much less time than they would receive for killing a child. Now that we are moving beyond the demagoguery of the pulpit and the sidewalk and into the legal arena I think we all have a right to know how these people made these distinctions and why.

As with the arguments about rape and incest, the “pro-life” argument that abortion is murder is morally inconsistent. And if it isn’t murder, then what is it?

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Democratic Sin Eaters

by digby

Speaking of Amy Sullivan’s new article in the Washington Monthly about evangelicals leaving the Republican fold to join the Democrats, Kevin says:

Religion has been a big topic in liberal circles for a while now, and I have to admit that I always feel a bit like a bystander when the subject comes up. It’s not like I can fake being religious, after all. Still, no one is really asking people like me to do much of anything except stay quiet, refrain from insulting religion qua religion in ways that would make people like Brinson unwilling to work with us, and let other people do the heavy lifting when it comes to persuading moderate Christians to support liberal causes and liberal candidates. That’s not much to ask, and Amy makes a pretty good case that it would make a difference.

Sullivan’s article is only partially persuasive to me. I’m with Atrios on this. If people are voting on the basis of abortion or gay rights, then they are unlikely to switch because of the other party’s tax platform or approach to education. Those things are indicative of a certain view of personal autonomy in which compromise isn’t very likely. I have very little hope that all this tweaking around the edges of the abortion issue with talk of abstinence or birth control will make any inroads into the GOP coalition. (There is better picking in the western libertarian camp in my view.)

However, Sullivan’s article talks a lot about an educational program “presenting the Bible in a historical and cultural context—giving students a better understanding of biblical allusions in art, literature, and music,” and (assuming the curriculum doesn’t proselytise) I think it’s a terrific idea and I’m as secular as they get. Back in the day, it was part of plain old Western Civ. and wasn”t particularly controversial. I think that teaching other religions in those terms would be useful and enlightening as well. I’ve mentioned before that I took a year of comparative world religions in high school that was just great. It’s one of those subjects that can make a big impression on a young mind by showing that many religious beliefs are anchored in the same concepts. It promotes tolerance — which may be one reason why the Christian Right is against this new Bible curriculum. (What fun is religion without coercion?)

But I doubt that it will change anything politically. If there is a religious divide, it’s not about being religious per se. Almost the entire country considers itself religious to some degree or another. The parties are divided by religious intensity which is something else entirely. The big divide is between those who go to church more than once a week and those who don’t.

Sullivan says, however, that there are a whole bunch of evangelicals who are willing to jump:

But a substantial minority of evangelical voters — 41 percent, according to a 2004 survey by political scientist John Green at the University of Akron — are more moderate on a host of issues ranging from the environment to public education to support for government spending on anti-poverty programs. Broadly speaking, these are the suburban, two-working-parents, kids-in-public-school, recycle-the-newspapers evangelicals. They may be pro-life, but it’s in a Catholic, “seamless garment of life” kind of way. These moderates have largely remained in the Republican coalition because of its faith-friendly image.

I’d love to see some data to back that up. It’s possible, but I think it’s just as likely that they aren’t voting for Democrats because of taxes or gay marriage or simple tribal identity rather than because the Dems are great except they aren’t “friendly” to faith. After all, millions of religious Democrats don’t have this problem. The numbers indicate that the party already gets 48% of the “abortion should be mostly/always illegal” and 29% of the “gays should have no legal recognition” crowds. I think that is probably the maximum social conservative vote that the Democrats can expect to get. (Well, unless it plans to completely sell out its principles, which is always possible.)

That is why this part of the article made me cringe when I read it:

The immediate post-election conventional wisdom was that Democrats lost because they couldn’t appeal to so-called “moral values” voters. Democrats immediately embarked on a crash course in religious outreach and sought out people who could teach them about evangelicals. Brinson, who had caught the attention of the Democratic youth-vote industry, seemed like an obvious choice.

As for Brinson, when the Democratic chief of staff on the other end of the line asked whether the doctor would be willing to meet with some Democrats, he thought about his recent experiences with the other side and decided “maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to talk to these Democratic people.” In quick succession, the lifelong Republican found himself meeting with advisors to the incoming Democratic leaders—Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.)—field directors at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and aides to Howard Dean at the Democratic National Committee. What they found is that their interests overlapped: The Democrats wanted to reach out to evangelicals, and Brinson wanted to connect with politicians who could deliver on a broader array of evangelical concerns, like protecting programs to help the poor, supporting public education, and expanding health care. It had seemed natural for him to start by pressing his own party to take up those concerns, but Democrats appeared to be more willing partners. They even found common ground on abortion when Brinson, who is very pro-life, explained that he was more interested in lowering abortion rates by preventing unwanted pregnancies than in using the issue to score political points.

Those Democrats who had initially been wary about working with a conservative evangelical Republican from Alabama found Brinson convincing. They also realized that conservatives had done them an enormous favor. “Listening to him talk,” one of them told me, “I thought, these guys bitch-slapped him, and he’s willing to play ball.”

Who’s playing ball and who’s getting bitch slapped, again?

Hey if I were a social conservative who was trying to leverage some clout against the Republican party for failing to deliver on its promises while in power, I’d run right over to the Democrats too. After all, everybody knows that they have no convictions and are willing to do anything to win. Why not co-opt them with visions of retaking the red states with the evangelical vote? It worked for Republicans on race.

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Go Dolly

by digby

I guess we can all agree now that Dolly Parton isn’t a real American. She wrote a song about God and a transgendered person that didn’t condemn that person to hell.

Here’s the effete, latte swilling, NT Times reading, out of the mainstream, left wing elitist making excuses for herself:

KING: And the lyrics are directly for the film. Example, “I’m out here on my journey trying to make the most of it. I’m a puzzle. I must figure out where all of my pieces fit.” Did you like the movie?

PARTON: Well actually I thought it was very touching. It was very emotional to me to see someone, you know, that really frustrated with who they are and trying to become who they are and trying to become accepted and seen and loved for that.

And I really think Duncan, the director, handled it so well, all the parts of the movie. I was very, very touched with it. Even the son, little Kevin, I thought he was wonderful. I thought his part was great. And I think just all the ways that they all played together and how tastefully it was done for such a sensitive subject. I was real impressed with it all.

[…]

KING: Why have you been — you’ve been interested for a long time in gay/lesbian, transgender stories, why?

PARTON: Well, I’m not interested in anything. I haven’t made any efforts to do — I just am totally accepting of people. I really believed that everybody should be allowed to be who they are.

KING: That’s what I mean.

PARTON: Well yes, I’m very tolerant of just people in general. I believe we’re all God’s children. I think we all have a right to be who we are. I’m certainly — I’m not a judge and I’m certainly not God, so I just try to love the God core in all people. And I know that is in the center of us all, so I just try to accept people for who they are, whatever that is.

Typical liberal moral relativist. Wasn’t her most famous song called “In My San Francisco Russian Hill Home?” I think so.

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Three Years Later

by digby

Appropriately, Taylor Marsh has a nice post up today about movies. Tonight’s the big night in this town and if you are anywhere near downtown Hollywood you’ll see more limousines in one place than anywhere else on the planet. Until recently, the oscars were always on Monday, which was fun if you worked in the biz. There was a holiday feel to it and even if you weren’t going to the show there were parties all over the place so everybody left work early. Now it’s on Sunday and it’s a whole different deal.

It occurred to me today as I was making my predictions (I think “Crash” is going to win Best Picture) that three years ago I was disappointed in Hollywood and the music industry for its cowardice in the face of the Iraq invasion. I wrote a long post about how odd and disjointed I felt watching this glamorous show in which the war was barely mentioned while the invasion was being presented as an epic patriotic pageant 24/7. There were pictures of GI’s who had been captured all over the TV that day and I had been looking at the al Jazeera web-site pictures that were horrible:

… I’m disassociating from the reality. And, it occurred to me that maybe we are all doing that to some degree — maybe because we are biologically programmed to do so just to keep ourselves from going crazy in times of war…

So, when I watched the Oscars last night, something I normally enjoy and go out of my way to see, I was just hoping for someone to say something heartfelt about peace. I was actually hoping that a lot of them would say something about peace — not necessarily in the political sense, but in the universal value sense. Instead, sadly, most of them just pretended that nothing was happening.

But a few — foreigners mostly — did say some words about peace. Almodovar said, “I also want to dedicate this award to all the people that are raising their voices in favor of peace, respect of human rights, democracy and international legality. All of which are essential qualities to live.” (Thanks, Pete. At least the Europeans love us, even if our own timid political brethren want us to tone down the rhetoric and let Rush Limbaugh dominate the discourse.)

But then Adrian Brody, the guy nobody expected to win, came up and let himself be human and emotional — for his win, naturally, but also because of the the nature of the role he was being rewarded for playing. He said:

“My experiences of making this film made me very aware of the sadness and the dehumanization of people at times of war,” he said. “Whatever you believe in, if it’s God or Allah, may he watch over you and let’s pray for a peaceful and swift resolution.”

Dehumanization. That’s what I’m feeling when I see the scared faces of those POW’s and the horrors of decapitated children.

This is why civilization was supposed to be beyond the superficially logical rationalizations of “preventive war” and grand global ambitions of world domination through military force. While tallying up the 20th century’s horrific body count we were supposed to have recognized that war must be a last resort in the face of NO OTHER OPTION. There can be no excuse but immediate self-defense to justify it. If Vietnam didn’t teach us that, then it taught us nothing. Wars of aggression, by definition, cannot be glorious.

This war never met that test. And we have opened up Pandora’s Box.

The historians will sort out the rightness and the wrongness of the policy. But as I was watching that glamorous telecast being held just a few miles from where I live, I could not help but be struck, once again, by the fact that we Americans are the luckiest people on the planet. I hope that we stay that way. We are good people, decent people, but we are being led astray by a leadership that is perpetrating a wrong. We simply cannot expect to remain safe and prosperous if we create a world in which it is the prerogative of one country, our country, to decide that a potential future threat is enough to justify a war. It is a dehumanizing undertaking that devalues every single one of us. It is not the America I know.

Three years ago. And I am now desensitized to the images I wrote about in the beginning of that post, the war images and the pictures of death. And new awful images have come and gone since then. I now argue with people about whether it is acceptable to torture — a concept that would have been completely foreign to me three years ago. I would just as easily have believed we would be arguing about whether it is acceptable to molest children. I now accept that the president and his administration truly and deeply believe they are above the law, something I would have scoffed at not five years ago after the endless bellowing from the right during the Great Clinton Panty raid.

On the other hand, a lot has changed. Bush was a colossus, then. His approval rating was around 70%. The Dixie Chick boycott had just hit the news. It was a difficult time for dissent as I’m sure you all recall. The pressure on the media was perhaps exemplified most starkly by this:

A leaked in-house report said Phil Donahue’s show would present a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war.” The problem: “He seems to delight in presenting guests who are antiwar, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration’s motives.” The danger — quickly averted by NBC — was that the show could become “a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.”

The good old days. How nice then to realize that this year’s crop of socially conscious and politically themed movies must have been green-lighted right around that time. It usually takes between 18 months and forever to get a movie done. Therefore, while I was fretting about the movies losing their political voice because nobody spoke out at the Oscars, Hollywood was quietly setting about speaking out in a much more powerful way: through its art.

People can’t stop talking about how “unsuccessful” all the movies were this year and that everybody wants to watch nothing but re-makes of “the Sound of Music.” (See Wolcott for for a quick dispatch of that braindead trope.) But the truth is that all these movies succeeded as art, as politics and as popular works on their own terms. Hollywood made these films that are nominated this year because the artists involved had something to say, but they also made them for money. All of them were profitable, which is more than we can say for overpriced behemoths like that piece of shit “The Alamo” which lost 113 million or “Sahara” which lost 75 million and counting.

Perhaps it sounds silly to say that it took courage to make these movies, but I think it did. That night three years ago when I was watching the Oscars, I wondered if the new Republican reality would be with us forever. The shallow, fatcat, money grubbing studios made a bet that three years later this country would come to its senses and reject that awful craziness. Damned if they weren’t right. Bush and the Republicans are in deep, deep shit today, Iraq is a mess, race is once again a hot topic and the cause of civil rights marches on. Maybe those guys and gals are worth the ridiculous sums of money they are paid to predict the zeitgeist after all.

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Tears of A Klein Redux

by digby

As most of you undoubtedly already know, Jane has been holding a “Joe Klein, in his own words” contest these last few nights and they’ve come up with some doozies. It’s down to the final round and I’m sorry to see that my favorite didn’t make the cut:

The Great Society was an utter failure because it helped to contribute to social irresponsibility at the very bottom.

As with virtually everything else he has ever written, he was spouting bullshit GOP propaganda

If there is a prize for the political scam of the 20th century, it should go to the conservatives for propagating as conventional wisdom that the Great Society programs of the 1960s were a misguided and failed social experiment that wasted taxpayers’ money.

Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, from 1963 when Lyndon Johnson took office until 1970 as the impact of his Great Society programs were felt, the portion of Americans living below the poverty line dropped from 22.2 percent to 12.6 percent, the most dramatic decline over such a brief period in this century.

Has there ever been a more useful Republican idiot than Joe Klein? I don’t think so. If you don’t believe me, check out the huge array of idiotic statements he’s written over at firedoglake. Jane says, “No one man can claim credit for the minority status of Democrats today, but Joe Klein can certainly rest easily knowing that he has done more than his fair share.” I think he and all his fake liberal pundit friends are the most responsible of all. They are killing us. People on both the left and the right confuse Joe Klein with a real Democrat and mistake his incomprehensible political philosophy for that of the Democratic Party. If there is nothing else that the liberal blogosphere can do, we must make it clear to the American people and the Democratic politicians that Joe Klein speaks only for his elite, insider cadre of cocktail weenie addicts. His opinions are irrelevant to serious Democratic politics.

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Don’t Fuck

by digby

I got a track-back from the blog “Responding To the Left” to the post below, specifically the story of the woman who had an abortion because she already had two small children and couldn’t afford another. I think it is an eloquent and honest representation of the way that many in the pro-life movement feel and it’s great to see it out in the open so we can begin to debate this thing honestly:

I don’t really get it. I am supposed to feel sorry for this woman? Does Digby expect me to sympathize with her? I hope not, because she’s a selfish woman who was thinking only of herself.

That’s right. You read that correctly. She couldn’t afford to have another child so she terminated the pregancy. That is selfish. She wanted to have her fun and get laid, but she didn’t want to have to deal with the possible consequences of her actions and guess what people? When a man and a woman have sex and the make is capable of producing sperm and the woman is capable of producing eggs, there is the possibility of the woman getting pregnant.

Digby makes the wisecrack about her not having sex. I can only take from his comment, that he is like so many other’s of the same ilk who believe we’re all like jungle animals and have to hump when the mood strikes. Of course, that isn’t the case. People don’t walk down the street and just bump into each other and start screwing (unless it’s a Cinemax movie). We have the mental capacity to be able to take care of such business in private. We also have the ability to abstain. Nothing is going to happen to us if we don’t have sex.

And if you’re in a position like this woman, a low paying job and two kids already. Guess what? Don’t fuck.

As human beings, we have the cognitive ability to think before we act. The choices we make carry consequences. And we have to accept responsibility for those choices. If we choose to smoke 2 packs of cigarettes a day, we have to accept it when we get lung cancer. If we drink and then drive, we have to accept it if we kill somebody in a car wreck. If we eat at McDonalds every day, then we have to accept it when we gain weight. It’s about choices. Having sex is a choice. It’s as simple as that. Saying, “I can’t afford it” when a woman learns she is pregnant because of that choice is not accepting the results of that choice.
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Personally, I believe abortion is a moral issue, not a legal one. Therefore, contrary to my personal feelings regarding abortion, I don’t support South Dakota’s law. As pro-life as I am, I find this law to be too draconian. That’s not going to stop me from calling out this woman as a selfish person who is concerned more with making herself feel good then dealing with the consequences of the choice she made.

This person assumes that I believe humans are animals who can’t control ourselves, but that is wrong. I don’t believe that we are unable to control ourselves, but I do believe it is a fundamental part of life — unstoppable, inexorable, relentless. It is not immoral (even for poor people) to do it. Nor is it even remotely realistic to think they won’t. People have sex and lots of it, even when the “consequences” are severe. It’s basic. And sometimes birth control fails or people lose their heads in the heat of the moment. Accidents happen. It is so banal and mundane and common that it’s a bit bizarre to even have to make that explicit in the argument. Accidental, unwanted pregnancy happens every single day by the millions on this planet. Nature (or perhaps the “intelligent designer”) expects women to get pregnant as often as possible and created the human sex drive to make that happen. Women, independent sentient beings that they are, want to control how many children they have. It’s a constant battle and often times “nature” wins. It isn’t a matter of morality. Sex between consenting people is simply human. And the right to abortion is simply a matter of human liberty — a woman’s right to decide her own fate and a woman’s right to be a normal sexual being. Without both of those things, she can never truly be free.

No, people aren’t mindless animals who can’t control themselves. But, saying to women, “if you can’t afford another child, don’t fuck” is not entirely different than saying “if you can’t afford food, don’t eat.” Of course, she won’t literally die if she doesn’t ever have sex again (or at least until she’s past her fertile years.)But for many women it would be a death of another sort: the death of her humanity. Sex is elemental.

In any case, however much you exhort them not to, women will still have sex and without a right to abortion (and soon birth control) they’ll end up in forced childbirth, bearing more offspring than they can afford and they’ll end up having back alley abortions and they’ll end up dying. I suspect the people who believe having sex if you are unprepared to procreate is irresponsible will find comfort in that.

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The Sodomized Virgin Exception

by digby

South Dakota:

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Napoli says most abortions are performed for what he calls “convenience.” He insists that exceptions can be made for rape or incest under the provision that protects the mother’s life. I asked him for a scenario in which an exception may be invoked.

BILL NAPOLI: A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.

Do you suppose all these elements have to be present for it to be sufficiently psychologically damaging for her to be forced to bear her rapists child, or just some of them? I wonder if it would be ok if the woman wasn’t religious but she was a virgin who had been brutally, savagely raped and “sodomized as bad as you can make it?” Or if she were a virgin and religious but the brutal savage sodomy wasn’t “as bad” as it could have been?

Certainly, we know that if she wasn’t a virgin, she was asking for it, so she should be punished with forced childbirth. No lazy “convenient” abortion for her, the little whore. It goes without saying that the victim who was saving it for her marriage is a good girl who didn’t ask to be brutally raped and sodomized like the sluts who didn’t hold out. But even that wouldn’t be quite enough by itself. The woman must be sufficiently destroyed psychologically by the savage brutality that the forced childbirth would drive her to suicide (the presumed scenario in which this pregnancy could conceivably “threaten her life.”)

Someone should ask this man about this. He seems to have given it a good deal of thought. I suspect many hours have been spent luridly contemplating the brutal, savage rape and sodomy (as bad as it can be) of a religious virgin and how terrible it would be for her. It seems quite clear in his mind.

Meanwhile, outside the twisted imagination of Senator Psycho there, we have reality:

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: One patient she saw was this woman, probably in her early 20s. She would not reveal even her age. With a low-paying job and two children, she said she simply could not afford a third.

“MICHELLE,” PATIENT WHO TERMINATED HER PREGNANCY: It was difficult when I found out I was pregnant. I was saddened, because I knew that I’d probably have to make this decision. Like I said, I have two children, so I look into their eyes and I love them. It’s been difficult, you know; it’s not easy. And I don’t think it’s, you know, ever easy on a woman, but we need that choice.

Too bad. She shouldn’t have had sex. Three kids and no money are just what the bitch deserves. Her two little kids deserve it too for choosing a mother like her.

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You Talkin’ To Me?

by digby

John Aravosis is following this delicious Katrina feud. He writes:

Ohhhh, this infighting is really getting interesting these days. “Heckuva job Brownie” is lashing out at his former boss Chertoff. All of that GOP discipline seems to be collapsing faster than Enron.

Hah. It does show you once again that Bush’s vaunted loyalty is actually a necessity. Everytime he fires somebody the tales they tell are damning. It was particularly stupid to try to lay off the epic death and destruction of Katrina on poor little Brownie alone. They left him no choice but to try to publicly recover his reputation. He’s destroyed. If they’d have played it smart they would have fired Chertoff and a couple of others too and just said it wasn’t personal, it was a systemic failure and these people all fell on their swords because they are honorable men. They could have then been bought off with lucrative careers, no harm no foul. But they left poor little Brownie no choice. Now he is going to use every opportunity available to him to keep it in the headlines and convince a very receptive public that the fault was not his.

Rove must really be sweating this Plame thing because he has completely lost his touch.

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