Isn’t that kind of like Hamas accusing the U.S. of launching a war on Israel?
PAD
94 comments on “So Fox News is Claiming that the Democrats Have Declared a War on Women”
It’s Faux News. Obfuscating an issue for the ignorant masses is how they operate on a daily basis.
Next they’ll probably accuse women of having declared war on women.
And as everyone was making a big deal about Hilary Rosen’s statement about Ann Romney “never working,” in Wisconsin, Scott Walker has repealed a law requiring equal pay for women. Maybe he’s also planning to repeal women’s sufferage before the recall election.
Obama, bring our troops home now! This is a war we cannot win!
How do they justify that? I can figure two approaches.
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1) A woman’s natural role is as a mother and wife, by encouraging women to have more options, they’ve declared war on women.
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2) The free market is God’s perfect creation, and by championing laws that give women certain protections in the workplace, Democrats have declared war on women, by “ruining” them with mollycoddling that stops them from becoming real contenders.
Rene, you know full well that they won’t justify it, nor will they feel the need to even try.
Controlling a woman’s womb? Not a war on women. Trying to reduce or remove access to contraceptives? Not a war on women. Making sure women can’t meet equal pay to that of male counterparts? Not a war on women. I could go on all day.
A liberal saying a rich stay at home mom should maybe hold a job so she’d actually know how the vast majority of mothers actually have to live? Insert typical and completely over the top bûllšhìŧ hyperbole here.
There are issues more important to women than the legality of abortion and having to pay $9-30 a month for birth control. As for equal pay, that’s pretty funny, as can be found below: http://www.mrctv.org/node/111823
Birth control is the most important thing in the world for many women, no matter how Conservatives try to say otherwise, Jerome.
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If my girlfriend couldn’t have birth control, she could end up pregnant, and that would mean a possible delay of several years in her studies and career.
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I suppose the favored solution for Conservatives would be for her to quit college and marry me and become a housewife; or if she really wants to study, for us to give up on sex.
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Respectfully, I’d like to break the nose of anyone making such suggestions. I suspect my girlfriend would do the same, or worse.
Jerome,
That piece you’ve linked is disingenuous and misleading on a multitude of levels (I’d say I’m shocked, but I’d be lying). It mainly implies that Obama personally set the salaries of the employees in his White House – he didn’t. Federal pay salaries are set by the Office of Budget Management for all government employees regardless of where and for which agency they work. More importantly, the Federal pay scale is not gender biased; men and women in the same pay grade in the government earn exactly the same salaries, and thus the Ledbetter act doesn’t apply. Apparently the article is making the twisted logic that because there are more male employees in the White House at higher pay grades there is an inequity in pay for women employees, and I’ve no doubt that many on the right lapped it up without any further thought or investigation.
Jerome, there certainly are more important issues to women, but that doesn’t change the fact that a lot of the things Republicans have been doing in various states target specifically and only women. If a critic went after Peter’s work specifically and trashed it review after review in increasingly strange and nasty ways and about things that seemed unrelated to the work, I doubt that you would disagree with someone who said that the critic seemed to be waging a war or a crusade on Peter and his works because there were things (family, finances, etc.) in his life that were more important to him. Linda the same thing here.
As for the cost of “birth control” in various areas, that’s only true for low end stuff that is going to be used strictly as birth control. The stuff that was the subject of so much debate a while back and the reasons it’s needed isn’t quite as cheap. Trust me, I have experience with paying for it and having to budget for it. Why? Here’s my wife, a woman who went into bankruptcy once before we were married because she couldn’t get covered by insurance due to a preexisting condition and various medical expenses, including having to shell out a small fortune each year for certain types of birth control, broke her finances.
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Any woman who is against all the “birth control” issues going on in politics should switch to calling them what they really are, HORMONE INHIBITORS. Calling the drugs “hormone inhibitors” clearly states that they are a medical issue, not a pro-choice issue.
I am Roman Catholic. I have been one since I was born, and will be until I die.
I have been on “hormone inhibitors” since I was 13.
I have debilitating ovarian and breast cysts and would not have been able to function 1 1/2 weeks in four without “hormone inhibitors”. I tend to pass out and not in the way you see in the movies. I turned white and could not get the energy to move from blood loss. The pain was so bad I was rushed to the ER by my doctor because he thought I had appendicitis. That is when I went on “hormone inhibitors”.
MY PRIEST, in the confessional, said that it WAS NOT a sin to be on these drugs and that God had made them for a reason, and that I need not feel any guilt or sin for taking them.
After I had my two children I had to have surgery to do what the “hormone inhibitors” did, but with the consequence of no longer being able to have kids. In the words of all the paperwork I had to fill out, I had a “sterilization” procedure, and I am now sterile.
One other thing. I have technically had an abortion, yet I have NEVER wantonly given up a child. I had what is know as a “spontaneous abortion”, known to you and me as a miscarriage. I have no idea who’s bright idea this name change was, but all it does is create great statistics for anyone who is trying to prove a ton of women have abortions, and cause many women like myself to have serious issues at a time they are already depressed about losing a child. For me it was worse because I had to continue my pregnancy for another two months to deliver my son, whereupon I had to fill out more forms about my “spontaneous abortion” of his twin.
My health has never been what most people call good, and I often feel like everything is out of my control, but at least I had the control to make my own decisions about my own health care. Now the Republicans in various states are trying to take even that little bit of control that I had over the situation away from other women.
Jennifer Chandler
You may think that’s wonderfully funny, Jerome, but Gov. Walker of Wisconsin recently signing into a law a bill that would overturn equal pay in that state isn’t funny at all.
It sure as hëll isn’t funny in the the many states Republicans have attempted to completely destroy Planned Parenthood, regardless of the numerous and far more often used services they provide beyond abortion.
But that doesn’t matter in the Republican’s war on women. It doesn’t matter how many women’s lives they toss aside as long as they can claim a victory in the battle on abortion. As long as they get to claim victory in the battle on morality (which is a whole other crock of šhìŧ) because now all contraceptives are evil.
The Republican Party: Government small enough to fit in a vágìņá. Government equal enough that women should know their place.
Can someone tell me where Fox News has reported that “the Democrats Have Declared a War on Women”? I just googled it, and I can’t find it. I figured I’d just ask since you guys seem to know all about it.
It’s less a network-wide declaration and more a network-wide talking point picked up from the Romney campaign. First Fox was pushing the massaged figure that Romney has been throwing out there about women’s unemployment while claiming that it’s really Obama waging a war on women and then they’ve spent the last week running with the talking point that the Democrats are attacking stay at home moms; a claim only made by ignoring the full context of the original statement (i.e. lying about it) made by a CNN contributor and then claiming that as the Democrats stand on the matter despite Democrats, even Obama himself, rebuking the statement. The only Fox News host I’ve seen call out the creative bookkeeping that Romney is using so far has been Chris Wallace.
Ok. I’ll repeat the question – Can someone point me to where Fox News reported that the Democrats are waging a war on women? I don’t need commentary. I need a link.
Chris Wallace does his father proud…even Jon Stewart has said Wallace gives Fox News a legitimacy and seriousness they would not otherwise have.
Yeah, I give Fox News hëll, but I rarely find reason to fault or immediately distrust much of what I hear from either Shep Smith or Chris Wallace.
Dunno if you’re just inept at googling or just being disingenuous there, Tim, but I was able to find this in fifteen seconds:
Call me crazy, but when they do a piece that’s entitled “The Left’s war on women” (see lower right on screen) I tend to think they’re claiming the Left has declared war on women. But don’t worry; I’m sure Fox’s supporters will come up with all kinds of rationalizations as to why that doesn’t mean what it says it means.
PAD
I doubt it’s either. I put it into Google and got mostly hits on Fox News discussing the charges about Republicans waging a war on women or Romney making that charge directed towards Obama.
It’s neither, PAD. It’s either you not being honest or not knowing the difference between a commentary by an individual on an opinion show and a report issued by a news network. Unless someone can come up with something better, there’s no evidence that FOX NEWS has ever reported that the Democrats are waging a war on women. Clearly, Governor Palin believes that they are. I’m surprised you didn’t go after her instead of Fox News, since that would have been an accurate portrayal of what was said.
By your logic, Fox News has also reported that the Tea Party doesn’t know “what the f*ck” they’re talking about. (In actuality, it was a liberal commentator on Hannity’s show that said this, but it’s the same as Fox News reporting it, right?)
I disagree, Tim. Pointing to someone throwing a POV out there that’s counter to the SOP message point that Fox News is pushing while on a Fox News program doesn’t quite match up to pointing to a message being pushed on multiple shows and not being met with disagreement by the majority of the hosts.
“Governor Palin”
“Really?”
Yeah, really. It’s a formality that many stand on if they respect the person and, in some cases, even if they don’t. It’s the same reason that Newt is still referred to as “Mr. Speaker” or “Speaker Gingrich” when interviewed on CNN or Bill Clinton still gets called “President Clinton” in interviews and various fundraising emails, mailings and robo-calls.
Palin in no way has earned the respect to keep that title when she QUIT and RAN AWAY from the job when the going got tough.
At least Gingrich finished out his term.
And Nixon quit in disgrace to avoid being impeached for his crimes. It still didn’t stop him from being referenced as “President Nixon” for decades after that.
Palin was elected by the people of her state. Anything else is besides the point. I personally don’t think she deserves a title much above “Town Idiot” and she reinforces my belief in that pretty much every time she opens her mouth, but facts are facts and opinions are not facts. Taking someone to task for standing on or respecting the practice of a recognized formality just makes one look silly or extremely thin skinned.
It’s neither, PAD. It’s either you not being honest or not knowing the difference between a commentary by an individual on an opinion show and a report issued by a news network
And there it is. An opinion can no longer be attributed to a news source; one has to single out exactly how many people are saying it. So next time a Broadway musical gets slammed by the New York Times, everyone make sure to say that it was only slammed by one individual and does not necessarily represent the whole of the entity.
Because that would be dishonest.
PAD
“So next time a Broadway musical gets slammed by the New York Times, everyone make sure to say that it was only slammed by one individual and does not necessarily represent the whole of the entity.”
Which is actually what most people I know or know of do. Most people I know say that the New York Times Media Critic when referring to something they wrote. Likewise, around here, people refer to the paper’s movie critic and not the paper when talking about a review and what an ignorant jáçkášš he is.
What Tim said is basically true. Alan Colmes is still on the fox News payroll and appears on various shows as a contributor. If Alan says something that’s derogatory about the Republican front runner or the GOP, is it at all reasonable to take what Colmes says and declare that Fox News was saying about the Republican front runner or the GOP what in fact only Alan Colmes said?
As it stands though, you don’t quite have that here. Palin was the featured guest for this bit of specific stupidity, but the fact is that Fox News and conservative talk radio have been pushing the talking point for a week now. Just listening to them for a couple of days in the last week (again, XM radio) was enough to hear a good two dozen examples of them pushing this talking point even if they are not declaring it as an official logo of the moment. It’s not isolated to Palin on Hannity and it most certainly has been the talking point since Romney trotted out his cooked figures on women’s unemployment and then they pushed it harder after the flap caused by the contributor on CNN.
On the other hand, Jerry, when a newspaper gives a rave review, the advertising typically says, “The New York Times says–!” “Variety says–!”
Furthermore, in the case of Fox, it wasn’t just the individual but was an actual graphic that Fox took the time to put up there and reinforce the point. And, as the Daily Show recounted, there were various pundits on Fox piling on for the supposed left wing vendetta on Conservative women and housewives. Which leads me to believe, on that basis, that the true crime is that Democrats are thinking too small: if you attack a subset of women, that’s despicable; if it’s broad based, proposing and passing laws that impact upon much broader categories of women, that’s okay.
PAD
“On the other hand, Jerry, when a newspaper gives a rave review, the advertising typically says, “The New York Times says–!” “Variety says–!””
Yes they do, but they add a bit more in there. Often it says, “John Reviewerschmuck says-! Variety”
“Furthermore, in the case of Fox, it wasn’t just the individual but was an actual graphic that Fox took the time to put up there and reinforce the point.”
True, and I did note that it’s more than just Palin on Hannity in this case. I just found the line of argument first used to rebut the idea that it was just Palin a little weak and somewhat faulty.
I dunno…Does Fox, anywhere, give the disclaimer that the views of its contributors in no way reflect the views of the Fox News corporation? That’s a pretty time-tested means for a parent company to distance itself from what’s said in its media. If they don’t say it, either before or after the fact, one kind of has to imagine that anything said by their contributors gets their stamp of approval.
“Does Fox, anywhere, give the disclaimer that the views of its contributors in no way reflect the views of the Fox News corporation?”
Do they? Beats me, I haven’t looked. But are you saying that Fox News as an entity holds the position that Ron Paul is an important voice in the GOP debate and that the Patriot Act is wrong because a single paid Fox News contributor, Alan Colmes, says so despite the fact that such a stand is in stark contrast to what most of the others hosts and contributors say?
In this case, I agree that the overall message that Fox is pushing right now, the talking point they wish to propel, is one that says that it’s actually the Dems who are engaged in a war on women or on stay at home moms because there’s more than one host, guest and contributor playing that game. But it really looks silly trying to even approach the argument that if you can cite one person paid by the network saying something on the network that it’s the POV of the network.
Ah, Tim’s going with the old “They can say it over and over for hours on end…. but if it isn’t said by a select few particular Fox News employees, it doesn’t count” defense.
In other news, the Norwegian nutjob has claimed self-defense.
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A pity he isn’t on Florida…
Who?
Anders Brevik, the guy who went on the shooting spree at the youth camp last year.
or Texas!
i heard on the radio that he claims to be a member of a militant group… that only exists in his mind. sheesh, he’s the OTHER kind of totally nuts. (as opposed to the “i hate the world” nuts) dude has made up his own reality.
This is somewhat of a classic example of Rovian Tactics by Romney and the conservative media. Romney has been making a lot of comments lately attacking Obama on things where the criticisms would be far more dámņìņg of Romney than Obama and the conservative media has been picking up the talking point that it’s really Obama and the Dems that are waging a war on women when the facts are that it’s been the Republicans who are more deserving of that charge (although it’s a bit overblown.) It’s actually kind of funny to see. It’s like watching a crack addict claiming that someone else is unreliable because they admitted to smoking a joint once back in their college days.
That’s a classic Republican tactic, though. Remember, this is the party that’s condemned Democrats for their irresponsible economic policies, then proceeded to run up massive deficits every time one of them lands in the oval office.
Thank God I don’t life in the US. Bûllšhìŧ (like this) gives me rash.
“Birth control is the most important thing in the world for many women, no matter how Conservatives try to say otherwise, Jerome.
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If my girlfriend couldn’t have birth control, she could end up pregnant, and that would mean a possible delay of several years in her studies and career.
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I suppose the favored solution for Conservatives would be for her to quit college and marry me and become a housewife; or if she really wants to study, for us to give up on sex.
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Respectfully, I’d like to break the nose of anyone making such suggestions. I suspect my girlfriend would do the same, or worse.”
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Wonderful, Rene. Nice tangent. Silly me, I thought issues like education, safe neighborhoods and available jobs – just to name three off the top of my head – might be important issues to women as well.
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But somehow we’ve reached a point where not receiving “free stuff” – no matter your income and/or beliefs or the fact that birth control is extremely affordable – is considered on par with stoning a woman who was raped because she “shamed” her family.
Jerome…seriously…knock this šhìŧ off. It’s repulsive. It’s disgusting. It’s bad enough that you popped up on my Facebook page and put forward the same basic idea, but now you’re doing it here.
Yes, there are women who are treated far more horrifically in other countries. So the reasoning that women here in the US have no business complaining because it’s worse for other women elsewhere?
Okay, ladies, you heard Jerome: Stop your whining and thank your lucky stars you’re not being stoned to death or that you’re only being raped with medical tools. Be grateful, not upset.
Seriously, Jerome: it’s repugnant. I know there’s no right wing talking point you won’t embrace, no right wing action you won’t defend no matter how heinous, but this is a new low.
PAD
There is so much demodonkey manure in this particular column that it is difficult to ascertain just where to start wading through it. This seems to be as good a place to chip in as any, but I won’t try to limit myself to the particular comments which gave rise to this particular thread.
1. It is a fact that, under demodonkeyism (and all other forms of socialism), the emphasis inevitably centers on the “free stuff” which comes from holding a pistol to someone else’s head and stealing it. Anyone who dares to oppose such a barbarous view of “government” arbitrarily is denounced as a “fascist” who is “waging a war on women” (or whoever) — when in fact it is the demodonkeys who are aping the fascists and waging war on whoever they think they can victimize, including women. It’s beyond the scope of this reply to respond to everything said here, but for the record:
1. Though it would be inaccurate to call Republicans generally “libertarians” (Ron Paul is NOT going to be the Republican nominee), I have yet to hear ANY demodonkey call for limiting out-of-control federal spending and pruning growth of an increasingly socialist-terrorist state by, e.g., NOT borrowing oodles of money from China or wherever and operating on the taxes that we have (now only about 58 cents of every dollar we spend). It would, of course, be something of a misnomer to call what demodonkeys offer instead a “war on women,” since more accurately this victimizes the unborn. It also is an undeniable fact that about half the children to be born, all expected to shoulder crushing debt incurred for even more “free” goodies and other current expenses, will be female.
Tell me: Whatever happened to the idea that taxation without representation is tyranny? Isn’t what demodonkeys advocate today a war on somebody?
2. One of the first publications in modern English history to argue for the rights of women — and children as well — was Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics (1850) — the book Oliver Wendell Holmes so famously denounced BEFORE he wrote his opinion on forced sterilization (“Three generations of idiots are enough”) and probably before he read the book. At the heart of Spencer’s argument was the contention that women were equal in mind to men but that, even if they were not, depriving them via laws and customs from using the minds they have violated the fundamental autonomy every human being possesses as a matter of will. Spencer’s idea is at the center of any libertarian’s concept of freedom and concurently is held probably by a majority of Republicans as well.
It clearly is not a central tenant of demodonkey philosophy:
3. An essential expression of that concept is maintaining freedom of contract. If a woman AGREES to do a job for less money, in what way is that different from ME agreeing to do the job for less money? None at all, except that, currently, I have the job.
Hence, the entire idea of “equal pay for equal work” simply is fallacious. The essence of competition in the workplace is that people — men AND women — bid to do equal work for LESS pay. There are many reasons why, on the average, women receive less pay for their work than men, some discriminatory, some not. But, the solution to any inequity which may exist is not to ossify the business environment with things like equal-pay laws. Governor Walker no doubt is guilty of many things. But, preventing women from competing fairly in an open marketplace with whatever abilities they have is not one of them, and such constitutes a “war on women” only in the minds of those socialists who think that freedom to do what socialists don’t want somehow is dangerous to everyone.
4. As the one person in this forum who has been in possession of an insurance license, I am eminently qualified to debunk the notion that, somehow, insurance companies are “exploiting” people by refusing to insure “pre-existing conditions” —
a. Insurance is a viable business upon two propositions: The law of big numbers (in other words, “The house always wins overall in the long run, as a matter of mathematics, just like in Las Vegas), and the inability of an individual to anticipate with certainty when he or she will be among the injured (so it’s in his or her advantage to play the house’s game and accept some loss rather than possibly suffer catastrophic loss). If either of these two conditions is vitiated in any way, the insurance company will lose money, will go broke, and then can’t insure ANYONE (men or women).
b. It therefore makes no sense for an insurance company to insure a pre-existing condition, since the chances of the possessor suffering the insured loss already is 100 per cent, and both sides know that.
c. Of course, the insurance company could avoid the financial bloodletting of insuring against pre-existing conditions by charging what it will cost to effect a remedy plus what it will cost to administer the policy, but that clearly has to be more expensive than for the insured to drop the coverage completely and simply pay for the remedy out of pocket.
d. The demodonkey responds by saying that nothing can stand in the way of the demodonkey’s need for care. EVERYTHING must yield to that, even to enslaving the doctors! So, FORCING those “evil” insurance companies to give them coverage for an injury they are certain to suffer is well within the parameters of acceptable behavior, and anyone who opposes such arrogance is a Republican cretin who is “waging a war on women” by “denying them care!”
Which is, of course, a total abuse of language and is, indeed, more like the tirades one once expected from the likes of Joachim von Ribbontrop or Joseph Goebbels. Obviously, ANYONE includes all women, wherefore advocating that which bankrupts the insurance company constitutes the REAL war on women, regardless of what demodonkeys choose to call it.
5. Demodonkeys can bray from now until the moon turns purple. When all is quiet again, what remains is that lifestyle choices are lifestyle choices, not medical conditions (and certainly not medical conditions coverable by insurance). Ignoring for the moment the use of hormone-like chemicals for non-sexual remedies, it remains true that one can prevent “unwanted pregnancy” with something as simple as an aspirin. Hold it between your knees, honey, and as long as you do that, you won’t get pregnant. Yes, Rene, it means that, for a time, you give up sex — until you can pay for the consequences on your own. In the event you flunked biology, your girlfriend is a female mammal. That female mammals get pregnant from sexual relations with men is a condition of the earth not governed by novel theories of “rights.” The earth is 4.5 BILLION years old, and life on the earth has existed for at least half that time. It is not my responbsibility to look after your girlfriend’s kids (if I wanted to do that, I would marry her myself). I’m happy to hear she wants to be an engineer. But, if she REALLY wants to be an engineer, she will put everything else aside that gets in the way of her achieving her goal. I am more than willing to grant her her freedom. What I won’t do is grant her freedom from responsibility for the lifestyle choices she makes.
No one seriously has to listen to someone whine about how “disruptive” it is to a woman’s career desires to “deprive” her of designer contraceptives when the demodonkey solution is to loose a gang of armed, fascist gangsters (the IRS) on otherwise peaceful people so that, with government-supplied guns, they can fund the purchase of the “medicine” by really disrupting the true owner’s use of his (or HER) own money. The contention to the contrary is so bøffø that it exposes at once the entire linguistic fraud being perpetrated. Calling opponents of such a fraud “anti-women” (for exposing the fraud) is laughable.
6. Many of those writing here apparently spend so much of their time watching Fox News that they have no time to watch anything else. Warning: That can be hazardous to your objectivity (the cure, perhaps, is to spend more time watching Piers Morgan).
Is Fox biased? Of course, it’s biased (it’s a conservative network). Unfortunately, writers here either forget or are too young to remember what the “news” was like before Fox News.
In the Before Time (and probably even today), the liberal icon of objectivity in news was Walter Cronkite, who did at least have a certain objectivity in his presentation. But, Cronkite was notoriously biased in favor of the moderate left, primarily in what few could see, which was his editing. It literally was IMPOSSIBLE for libertarians to get ANY coverage on CBS when he was there, because he thought of them in much the same way as many writing here do, and he refused to give them air time, even for the sake of controversy or (God forbid) ratings. Instead, we were served demodonkey pap like a 4.5 minute segment on Amy Carter’s treehouse, which Cronkite and his allies considered to be more “newsworthy” than an exposure of the Federal Reserve’s paper-money fraud (which incidentally wars on most men and most women equally, to the benefit of socialist politicians looking to steal more money and vested banking interests of any stripe).
So, you tell me what is the real story here: Some child climbing a tree, or some gang of federal officials secretly picking the pockets of a third of a billion people while those officials’ bosses pompously declare that THEY’RE not for privilege; THEY’RE for “the people and ‘fairnaess’!”
Give me a break!
Fox News is a conservative network which at least allows liberals to appear, even if it’s for a little grilling. And, yes, many of the commentators serve up softballs to guests more aligned to the commentators’ views. Considering what was the demonstrated alternative of history, this is not the end of the world, and it is a “war on women” only in the fantasies of those who seek to impose impossible conditions under perverted definitions on anyone else offering real solutions. Not surprisingly, these are the same persons who will seek once more to make someone else pay for the inevitable failure and probable disaster those conditions will cause.
I got to “demodonkey” and figured the rest of it was a waste of time.
Not surprising (I told the truth, and Craig thought it was hëll).
Of course, had I written it solely for him, I would have been wasting my time.
Craig,
I read the whole thing for you. You didn’t miss much.
Jerry! How have you been?
(For anyone new, Jerry is another one of our regular contributors suffering from Obamaitis — at least in those moments when he’s not trying to impeach the poor Gefreiter.)
I read in the interim that you’re a cop (or at least claim to be), so I have to assume (contrary to at least some of the evidence) that you are smart enough to know when someone has been caught red-handed with his hand in the cookie jar.
I read the whole thing for you. You didn’t miss much.
Good to know, Jerry. 🙂
Robert –
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I don’t feel like I should justify myself, but just for your information, every contraceptive my girlfriend has ever used has been paid with her money or mine. Money that came from hard work, by the way. So I’m not sure what is the reason for your indignation. MY indignation is directed to people who want to stop women from getting contraceptives, not for any economic reasons, but for cultural ones.
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You know, I used to consider myself a Libertarian when I was younger. Some of that remains – I’m pro-gun, for instance. But mostly, I have to say you Libertarians have been a great disappointment.
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You are very similar to the Communists that also annoyed me so much in my youth. You have such a beautiful, perfect theory! The Free Market! All hail the Free Market! Everything will be perfect with the Free Market! The communists had their impending revolution and Marxism, that also was perfect and beautiful and could solve all problems. Everything would be perfect with Marxism!
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Such bûllšhìŧ. Reality is complex, incoherent, imperfect, and the mature man navigates a sea of compromises and gray areas, no single, tidy ideology can hold all the answers.
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While American Libertarianism has a lot to recommend it in regards to personal freedom, I also think that most people intuitively are correct to distrust it in economical grounds. You guys think it would lead to a Randian Utopia, I think you’d end with, at best, a new version of Dickens’s England, with people slaving away 12 hours a day for meager payment, once we abolish Unions, regulations, taxes, and all the other “socialist” trappings you despise.
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Another thing that is very disappointing about you guys? All political folks tend to demonize their opponents, but Libertarians are the worst. Worse than Liberals, worse than Conservatives. I get the sense that everyone who believes in big government is a sub-human degenerate, in your views.
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And what the hëll has happened to you guys in these past 10 years? It looks like Libertarians spend all their time whining and criticizing Liberals, while making excuses for Republicans that are very much anti-Libertarian, perhaps more anti-Libertarian that any “demodonkey”. Santorum said openly that he wants to destroy Libertarians. He is the guy you should be attacking, but no, you probably will come up with a way to defend the guy and his theocratic little dreams, just like lots of Libertarians found a way to stand by Bush’s side, of the most anti-Libertarian presidents I’ve ever seen.
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Sometimes it seems like Libertarians are simply Republicans who want to appear cooler and more literate than run-of-the-mill GOP supporters.
I don’t know you, Robert. Your contributions here are minimal. You’ve expressed no interest, to my knowledge, in any of my work. So when you show up and post a screed that launches with some oh-so-clever insult for my party…in this place, in my little corner of the Internet…
My immediate thought on getting a graf or so in is to say, “Screw you” and move on.
Which is what I did. Didn’t bother to read beyond it.
So you may want to consider the notion that, if you actually want people to take an interest in what you say, you don’t start out insulting them, you arrogant prìçk.
PAD
Ordinarily, I simply would ignore someone who blows up in childish indignation to something I said (that’s when one is supposed to shut up after declaring victory), but since this comes from the chairman of the board, so to speak, I will respond with a few comments around the edges:
1. You’re right, you don’t know me, and you guessed correctly: I don’t read comics. That’s not a personal insult (I’m an equal-opportunity ignoramus). I HAVE studied nuclear physics, which is how I know something about Shroedinger wave equations. And, I have a degree in history from the University of California (perhaps why I simply don’t have time to read comics, even in the local newspaper).
So, I don’t know your work, have neither time nor reason to be educated otherwise, and won’t miss it if the copyright pirates ever put you out of business.
That doesn’t mean nothing is lost.
2. I tripped over you as a result of your comments here re SOPA (believe it or not, they made it to Wikipedia). Perhaps it will gratify you to know that your remarks at the time did have an internal logic to them. So, I dropped in to check you out.
3. But, he who says “A” must say “B,” and people cannot protest the way you did about the invasion of their property rights, then be taken seriously when they make themselves a fountainhead for justifying invasion of the property rights of others. That has nothing to do with political parties. It does have something to do with integrity in a man and his reasoning.
4. The Constitution of the United States was created not by any one man (Madison only was the unofficial secretary of the Convention) but by blocks of men who came together, each with their own interests to protect and constituencies to defend. The final product represents that compromise and must be understood as such, as an integrated whole. That is why slavery (though it isn’t called that) is written into a document ostensibly designed to “preserve the blessings of liberty.” Recall: It took a very bloody war, in which a good number of my ancestors served and a few died, to get that little defect out. Needless to say, I’m in no hurry to see it slipped back in.
5. The Constitution was written to rectify certain of the deficiencies which experience had exposed in the workings of the first constitution (which was the Articles of Confederation). The new Congress was given the power to tax, not to socially engineer society but to pay the bills of the government, which was to be overall sovereign in its powers but limited in its functions to that “necessary” to integrate the whole. Phrases like “interstate commerce” or the power to issue copyrights or patents don’t have any meaning independent from that. The government’s power over interstate commerce is the power to supervise, and if necessary align, conflicting legislation among the several states as such applies to business and commercial intercourse. Neither “interstate commerce” nor the power of taxation exists, in a document designed to preserve liberty, as some open-ended, secret language for erection of a comic mimic of government by Benito Mussolini.
6. Despite this, for a very long time, the Democratic Party has been oriented toward just that. It wasn’t the libertarians who ordered people sterilized; it was Oliver Wendell Holmes (Herbert Spencer’s critic). It wasn’t the libertarians who fined people or threw them in jail for growing wheat on their own farm; it was FDR’s Secretary of Agriculture, Claude Wickard. It wasn’t the libertarians who locked people in concentration camps because of their race; it was President Roosevelt, himself. It wasn’t the libertarians who campaigned incessantly from the beginning of the last century for abandonment of the gold dollar and confiscation of all gold by the government; it was the Democratic Party (starting with William Jennings Bryan — who also helped give us Prohibition before he closed his career by serving as co-counsel for the prosecution in the Scopes monkey trial).
The National Industrial Recovery Act, declared unconstitutional in the Sick Chicken case (1935), was a prescription for the erection of domestic fascism in the United States and the closest we ever actually came to it. It probably didn’t start with FDR (the fasces at the time was on the back of the dime), but it was mirrored a decade later by the War Production Authority, which for the time of World War II made the United States almost as much a fascist country as the countries we were trying to defeat. That’s not a wanton insult to “demodonkeys”; it’s the lesson of history. It’s also the lesson of history that John Kennedy preferred to throw American citizens owning gold in jail rather than oppose the evils of fractional-reserve banking (which were well known by that time, even if ignored by such as John Kenneth Galbraith). And, it’s also the lesson of history that Lyndon Johnson, to hide the costs of a war he actually campaigned against, chose when the chips were down to defraud the American public by printing the money rather than raising taxes, allowing him, in effect, to burgle every savings-and-loan in the country (many of which as a consequence went broke).
7. All of this (and far more — I could write you a real book) obliges me to ask you, Peter: Why in the world are you a Democrat? (And, please don’t answer that becoming a Republican was so much worse — the lesser of two evils is evil.) You did not sound (at least in the beginning) like someone who could be befogged by a gang of corrupt politicians determined to bášŧárdìzë English as part of “doing the little side step” in the course of hiding what they’re truly about. Democrats have been notorious for taking idiotic positions (“Medical care is the right of every American”), denouncing anyone who opposes that as “warring” on somebody, then proposing solutions which inevitably will wreck for everyone the health-care system we have.
How is that NOT a “war on women,” especially all the women doctors who will be enslaved by the result?
And, there will be a result: To save itself from inevitable exploding costs, the government inevitably will have to order the doctors to charge less for their services than the market allows — no different in principle from making “ņìggërš” pick cotton for a bed out of the rain. I am pretty certain you are not a white supremecist; I’m yet to be convinced that you’re better.
What, seriously, do you think is the alternative, for example, to allowing the market (which is all of us) to apportion the dispersal of medical services? Please do not tell me that Obama and Congress can wave a magic wand that will make it possible for the supply of doctors to be decreased (since fewer will be able to afford going to school), the supply of patients to be increased by millions, and costs to come down — that gets an automatic “F” in my class, as sure as if you had told me that water is made of something other than two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen. So, what is going to happen? Instead of apportioning the care by price (whatever the “unfairness” of that), we’ll apportion it to whoever is licking the correct boot (the surest road to despotism I know).
Again: In what way is that NOT a “war on women” (and everyone else not part of the new dispensation)? You scorn Micelle Bachman for warning that there will be “death boards.” But, if you create a system where demand always must exceed supply, what other way is there to apportion the supply of care there is?
8. Absolutely none of this can be covered in any way with the disguise of tricky language — liberty either involves supporting the sovereignty of the will or it does not. As an aside to Rene: A free man (or woman) has the right to contract conditions of employment and the right to hire an agent to assist him; and, if that makes for a “union” then that is not government’s concern, for either side, other than to provide equal justice under law to both (so I really don’t understand much of your objection). I understand Governor Walker’s problem — when you get liberal union leaders negotiating with liberal politicians seeking liberal votes and not caring about costs, inevitably, it’s the taxpayers who get fleeced — but the flip side is that, without a union supporting public employees, whoever else is in office seeking the support of whoever else votes will ignore the laws and stiff the workers (what has been the pattern here in our public schools for almost as long as I’ve been alive).
The world is, indeed, complex Rene (which is why, to understand it, we need philosophy that holds water). The solution to any problem comes not from chanting mantras but by thinking.
9. Nothing in the initial post in any way claims that Walker is a saint or that Republicans (republicrats?) are faultless (I’m a Libertarian, not a Republican, except I switched my registration to vote for Ron Paul, and an atheist, not a Catholic, so I don’t care what Rick Santorum does in his private life). It does appear to be true that more Republicans are interested in personal liberty than Democrats, even if that’s only becasue Republicans want less government generally. So, it is not improper for me to come back at those who twist words to call theirs a “war on women,” especially when the only people really warring on women are people like Warren Buffett, who wants to allow the Democrats to steal more of Rene’s girlfriend’s money.
(I am, of course, assuming that she will become an engineer and will become successful in the highly inflated economy certain to come.)
9. In short, Peter, your objection is ill-spirited as well as juvenile. Yes, it’s your blog, but if with your own insults you’re going to invite opinion which cuts, you won’t be heard to complain at the first sight of yours or your own allies’ blood.
Besides, you need my support to defend your copyrights.
Robert –
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I suppose I will write more later, but for now here is something from wikipedia, from Rick Santorum’s own mouth.
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I think it is very reckless how you Libertarian dudes are supporting a party that is very much opposed to libertarianism in any way, shape, or form, except perhaps in the most narrow economic terms.
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At every opportunity, you guys minimize, apologize for, make excuses for the way Republicans constantly attack personal freedom.
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Almost like a battered woman that can’t be made to come to terms that her chosen husband is an abusive prìçk. Even if Democrats aren’t up to your definitions of liberty, Republicans aren’t any better.
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Here it is, from the rising star of the GOP, and note that Romney or whoever takes the nomination will have to bow to similar forces:
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In June 2011, Santorum said he would continue to “fight very strongly against libertarian influence within the Republican party and the conservative movement.”[155] In an NPR interview in the summer of 2005, Santorum discussed what he called the “libertarianish right,” saying “they have this idea that people should be left alone, be able to do whatever they want to do. Government should keep our taxes down and keep our regulation low and that we shouldn’t get involved in the bedroom, we shouldn’t get involved in cultural issues, you know, people should do whatever they want. Well, that is not how traditional conservatives view the world, and I think most conservatives understand that individuals can’t go it alone…”
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So, by own means, you should continue to undermine your own philosophy by supporting a party that – despite their protestations of believing in small government – are everything you should be opposing. THEY recognize this, but I suppose you’re still useful to them.
I have to go to work, so this can’t be that involved; however, the quickest response would be to point out that Santorum no more will be the nominee than Paul will be, so what he has said in the past at this point is irrelevant. If I switched parties officially to vote for Paul, the only thing you can glean from this is that, come November, I would have voted for Paul (and may vote for him anyway).
The unfortunate condition for libertarians always has been that the choice in November will not be a clear one between liberty and despotism. If people don’t follow my lead and write in a true preference, then the effective choice comes down to one of two flawed men, probably Obama or Romney. So, we have our d’ruthers re whom to put in the office, and not voting at all (especially in Florida) itself is a choice.
Since four more years of trillion-dollar deficits will destroy the country, I suppose in the end one puts a clothespin on ones nose and elects for someone else.
So, if anyone asks your girlfriend why she is running around with an aspirin between her knees and a clothespin on her nose, you’ll know whom to blame!
Actually, I’m surprised no one jumped on me for Wickard v. Filburn, since it’s only a Wikipedia click away. So-called “conservative” justices are more than willing to pull it out and dust it off when it can be used to overrule state “medical marijuana” laws, then ignore it completely when it is used to justify, e.g., regulating carrying firearms on the street.
It comes down to whatever a particular justice wants to do — but that’s just the opinion of an increasingly partisan Court, and the Constitution remains the law of the land, not the opinion of the Court.
The fact is that Wickard can be used to justify allowing the federal government to do anything (under Wickard, you affect “interstate commerce” if you die in a bed in the middle of Texas). If it remains a precedent, it is a precedent for unlimited federal power, which definitely is not what the body of the Constitution allows or ever even contemplated.
The correct analysis is to recognize that Wickard, decided shortly after the 1937 court crisis and at the height of a world war during which the power of a non-elected branch inevitably is at its nadir, simply was wrongly decided and is a sure prescription for fascism some day, even when the alternative is to put up with a bunch of people in California who are stoned out of their minds. I don’t think we are better off with people smoking marijuana, and I don’t think I would support a “medical marijuana” law, but I no longer live in California, and what they do there really is none of my business. Ignore for the moment that California is one of the United States. Standing alone, it’s still the fifth largest economy in the world! I have to presume that its legislature is competent to the state’s needs, and that if it isn’t, sooner or later the people will change it. The federal government should not be involved, and it is a dangerous perversion of “interstate commerce” to say that it can be. If the purpose of the provision were to allow the federal government to align conflicting state laws re commercial endeavor, then the reasonable interpretation of “interstate commerce” requires that there be some actual commerce which actually crosses a state line. The opinions to the contrary from the Thirties and Forties are another of these linguistic perversions.
But, I wander from the primary focus of this post, which (ignoring the insults to Fox News) I grant was more concerned with civil liberties than economic ones. So, I’ll close for now simply by observing that. without economic liberty, there is no civil liberty. If the federal government can regulate you for dying in your bed in the middle of Texas, it can regulate everything else in your house not specifically proscribed by the Bill of Rights.
That’s not the kind of country I want to live in.
N.B.: I’ll be gone a couple of days minimum (think before you write).
Silly me, I thought issues like education, safe neighborhoods and available jobs – just to name three off the top of my head – might be important issues to women as well.
See, here’s the thing: women could concentrate on these issues if they didn’t have to spend so much time defending themselves against Republicans.
And it’s pretty evident that the GOP isn’t interesting in any of those three issues you mentioned, whether by long-standing policy, or by their spending so much time fighting their war on women.
No, Craig. You may disagree with the way they go about it, but the GOP is interested in all of those issues.
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Just a few examples:
A.) Bush signed No Child Left Behind, which Ted Kennedy helped craft, so we could overcome the “soft bigotry of low expectations”
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B.) Look at New York City Before Rudy and After Rudy. The lawlessness that existed seems as far in the past as phone booths
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To be fair, Mayor Michael Nutter has been trying to solve the same problem in Philadelphia, which has seen violent crime explode recently. He has had to take decisive measures, which of course has some accusing him of being everything from a fascist to “acting white”, never mind the fact that a huge majority of those being killed are black, as is Nutter, who apparently realizes that the most basic civil right is the right to stay alive.
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Jobs? Well, Dubya had unemployment at below five percent for much of his tenure, despite the dot com bubble bursting and 9/11.
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And while we’re at it, I may as well include health care. Dubya bucked many on thew Right when he pushed for the now popular Prescription Drug Benefit. His father (and Bob Dole) also infuriated hard-core conservatives with his signing of the Americans With Disabilities Act.
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Heck, as much of a bášŧárd as Nixon could be, he made the “war on Cancer” a national priority, created OSHA, the EPA, signed the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act and put forth a plan for universal health care, which was rejected.
I don’t doubt that SOME Republicans are interested in those things, but it certainly doesn’t come across as part of the national platform of the Republican Party.
I don’t really have a well informed view of No Child Left Behind. I don’t have kids, and it’s never come up in discussions with my mom regarding my youngest two siblings’ educations, as they were still in school when it went into effect.
However, the struggle over education has become completely political. The GOP often rails against higher education: that’s it’s too liberal, that if you can’t afford it too dámņ bad, and that apparently education is just just plain bad for you. This doesn’t even get into curriculum with religion vs science.
But I really see it here at the local level with the University of Colorado in Boulder, where there’s long been a struggle between conservatives who get appointed as regents to the university and what is often viewed as a very liberal university and town.
Violent crime has generally been trending downward in the US for the last 20 years. So, while Rudy deserves credit for taking it head on, it’s been a very positive trend across the country, regardless.
Some cities, particularly Philadelphia and Detroit, you have to wonder if they’re just hopeless. Just as well, we’ve also seen an *apparent* increase in police brutality, lack of regard for one’s rights, and so on. I say apparent because the internet and cell phones certainly make it easier to catch such incidents and report on them.
Also, there’s the South. Higher rates of crime, poorer, lower in education, and often more Republican. Now, I’m not blaming Republicans per se, but again, there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of real effort to improve things in some parts of the country.
As for jobs, the national bubble burst on Bush’s watch. As much as Bush gets credit for the economy, some of that happened under Clinton. So as much as many want to blame the economy (and, well, everything else) on Obama, some of that falls under Bush, too.
The country didn’t do an overnight back flip into the tank as soon as Obama was sworn in. It was already well on its way to the bottom well before the actual presidential election was held. McCain called the economy “fundamentally sound” 2 months before the election, and it was certainly far from it at that point.
But it’s as much philosophical as anything else. The GOP platform seems to think it’s perfectly OK if somebody has to hold two jobs and still can’t make ends meet. If flipping burgers is a career, and not just a job. Sorry, GOP, but not every one can contribute to the ruination of this country by getting a 6-figure job in the financial industry.
And in the end, the GOP thrives on convincing people that all of this is actually good for them. That you too can be part of the privileged if only you believe in pipe dreams.
I forgot about health care. Jerome, if universal health care was such a great idea under Nixon, under Clinton when the Republicans brought it up then, and of course with Romney in Massachusetts, why is it so loathed whenever a Democrat brings it up now?
Apparently it’s good enough of an idea that Republicans have also put it forth at times, yet they treat it like the plague whenever Democrats bring it up.
Either it’s a good idea or it isn’t. I happen to think it’s a dámņ good idea, and I really don’t give a crap which party gets it done. And FWIW, I have problems with Obamacare, as my biggest beef with health insurance is generally with the insurance companies more than anything else. No, we often do not get the best care in the world, and the care we do get we pay too dámņ much for.
Well, a woman’s education would be seriously hampered by an unexpected pregancy. An unexpected kid would be also a finantial burden that could force a family to move to a cheaper neighbourhood., particularly if the woman is forced to give up her job to take care of the zillion kids she could have without birth control. Not all of us are as well-off as Santorum, that can support 9 kids.
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Family planning is vitally important for women, because it’s tied to everything else.
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And that without mention to the health issues that Jerry’s wife alluded to. My girlfriend also took pills for health reasons, even before she met me and sex entered the picture.
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It’s not just the matter of free contraceptives. It’s that modern conservatives have been consistent at opposing family planning as immoral, from preaching abstinence as the only sort of sexual education, to demonizing single mothers, and more.
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And they don’t want to be called anti-women? Okay, how about anti-independent women, then?
I typically call them anti-choice, but it turns out they are in fact pro-choice if it’s a choice of which they approve. For instance, a woman deciding to be a stay at home mom is a choice they absolutely will defend. They just won’t defend the choice to not be a mother.
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Jerome, the problem with the line of thought here is comparing what happens in third world countries to what happens here. It’s not a solid argument to make.
What you’re doing is about the same as someone on the Left piping up and telling someone on the Right to shut the hëll up about high taxes because they could be paying a lot higher taxes if they lived in X country or nation instead of the U.S. When you complain about the high price of a gallon of gas and how much of your paycheck is going to fill up at the pumps, I doubt that you find it very relevant when someone says that you should stop complaining because you’d be paying a higher per-gallon cost in some other countries.
For that matter, I doubt you would find it a fairly intelligent reply by some here if you were talking about what you felt were attacks on the church or Christianity in this country by some groups on the Left and someone were to post that you should consider yourself lucky to live here since in some countries, some of the very same countries that you reference by mentioning stoning a women to death as a matter of fact, you wouldn’t be able to openly practice your faith, let alone complain openly in a public forum about it. Hëll, it might even be pointed out that you wouldn’t be able to access a site like this on the web thanks to government blocks on “subversive” sites.
Sorry, Jerry. You are absolutely correct. My argument was not as well though-out or reasoned as I would like.
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There are times when I reach a point where I’ve just had it and that post was on just such a day.
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It gets frustrating dealing with people who make broad sweeping statements and want to attack me personally or by association.
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I have been called everything from a “ņìggër lover” to a racist to my face recently, because I choose to deal with things on a case by case basis rather than buying into fear from both sides that minorities – especially blacks and Hispanics – are the reason my hometown area has been struggling economically for a while now.
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At the same time, there are issues that need to be addressed both locally and when talking about Trayvon Martin or even that that I don’t like the job Obama is doing. That’s when I’m called the “r-word”.
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It gets tiresome being called a racist, homophobe, misogynist, etc. While I ma somewhat used to it and people being unable to exchange ideas and being more comfortable with name-calling, the constant “War on Women” meme pushed by the Democrats ever since the declaration that Catholic institutions would be required to provide benefits against their beliefs, then the presentation by Sandra Fluke and then her ascension to yet another liberal those who disagree with aren’t allowed to respond to because Rush was admittedly an áššhølë.
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Everyone from DNC’c Debbie Wasserman-Schultz to Juan Williams who works for (gasp!) Fox have staed the “War on Women” as if it is a fact.
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If you disagree, the opinion by a depressingly large segment of the population is that you are therefore part of the war and hate women.
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That is beyond frustrating, so I actually did take particular glee in the fact that Rosen’s statements were used to turn the tables, since it is the Left who has been inflaming people with this “war” in the first place.
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And it is beyond ridiculous that people want to ghettoize my opinions by acting as if I’m a robot who just spews talking points when you know from here and elsewhere that that just isn’t so.
Republican politicians in New Hampshire wanted to roll back domestic violence laws.
Making it so that a cop will not be able to “immediately arrest” a domestic abuser if they didn’t catch them in the act. The cop would have to go get a warrant in order to make the arrest. And if the domestic abuser violated a restraining order, the three NH Republicans wanted to make it more difficult to arrest the abuser for that violation.
Fortunately, the NH Republican bills were defeated (HB 1581 and HB 1608).
Then there is also what they are trying to do to rape victims.
Republicans have a long history of making weird comments about domestic abuse and rape and such in modern times. One of my (for lack of a better term) favorites for quite some time now has been this one –
“Ðámņ it, when you get married, you kind of expect you’re going to get a little sex.” – Senator Jeremiah Denton, Republican, Alabama, speaking out against tougher spousal rape laws in 1981.
It seems to be a mindset carried over from “the good old days” that so many elected Republican officials tell us about.
“The husband cannot be guilty of a rape committed by himself upon his lawful wife, for by their mutual matrimonial consent and contract,the wife hath given up herself in this kind unto her husband, which she cannot retract.” — Sir Matthew Hale, Chief Justice, during the mid-17th century in Merry Old England
Oh yes. Such fine wonderful men. Men of worth, of admiration, and the envy of their fellow humans. No, really … I can’t say enough good things about them. Look at them …
what a picture they make.
Faced with a growing realization that modern women actually have options available to them ~ options that don’t require their presence and leave them out of the equation entirely ~ and, that thought scares the hëll out of these men. Such brave men!
So, they scurry about passing all sorts of laws and what-not to limit or deny altogether pursuit of those avenues of growth for women. All in the name of re-assuring their obsolete selves of some imagined self-worth. Such fine upstanding men!
Elsewhere, these men actively seek to limit the objectives and goals for the female population for fear that they might be upstaged by them and leave the way clear for themselves only. How honorable!
In short, they wanna make sure that the only voice that matters in any discussion is their own. For them, the only way to do that is to make it impossible for anyone to point out to them that they’re wrong from the get-go. How deviously logical of them.
Of course, they don’t want to held responsible for any of their actions ~ blame the other guy! The way they figure it ~ if they say it loud enough and, often enough, they might drown out any objections. Turn the volume up would you please? Methinks, I hear some noise out there.
Seriously, folks ~ look at the right hand … see what it’s doing! Never mind, what the left hand’s doing. Focus on the right hand.
It’s called sleight-of-hand … an old trick to be sure but, apparently, one that still has some use for those adept at finding new uses for the the art. Works quite frequently.
Yeah, women are a big threat all right.
Almost as big a threat as Christmas. Liberals are at war with that, too.
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And kudos to THE DAILY SHOW for assembling a collection of clips from Fox News that have Fox anchors and guests claiming the Democrats promote a “phony war on women” — and follow it with Fox anchors and guests claiming a “liberal war on…” for just about any cause where liberals disagree with conservatives. (TDS has also done a good job showing how Fox News claims liberals whine about being victims or treated unfairly — and then has clips where Fox News plays the victim and claims unfair attacks.)
Yeah, that talking point about how it’s somehow out of line or insulting to label something a “war” while a real conflict is ongoing coming from the conservatives in general and Fox News hosts and guests specifically is hilarious. These are the same nimrods who, during the height of the Iraq war and while things were sliding badly in Afghanistan, ramped up their noise machine every November to fight against the (make believe) evil, liberal “War on Christmas.”
I’d probably laugh more at the stupidity of it, but the stupidity of it is getting too old and worn out to be all that funny anymore.
What would you expect. Both sides are more interested in scoring cheap shots than fairness, but the Conservatives take the cake.
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What I find hilarious is that, really, does anyone not already a diehard Conservative actually believes that Liberals look down at stay-at-home-moms?
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I never met any Liberal that sneers when meeting a housewife. I don’t think such people exist. That sort of hysterical feminist had its heyday in the frikking seventies, for god’s sake.
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Are they that clueless or actually malicious? Do they believe we still smoke dope while listening to John Lennon albums and preaching free love or something?
“I never met any Liberal that sneers when meeting a housewife. I don’t think such people exist. That sort of hysterical feminist had its heyday in the frikking seventies, for god’s sake.”
What’s even dumber about this entire Hilary Rosen/Ann Romney/Stay at Home Moms flap is that it’s completely fabricated in every way by the Republicans. You could only believe that Rosen, let alone Democrats, are heaping scorn on the contributions of stay at home moms if you ignore all facts and context around what Rosen said and accept the Republican narrative as fact.
Mitt Romney was telling crowds on the stump that he knew what women really wanted and were concerned about because his wife reported to him on the matter and told him that they were concerned about unemployment, jobs and other such economic matters and not the stuff the Democrats were discussing, Rosen, in a less than classy way but honest nonetheless, pointed out that Ann Romney has barely had to work a day in her adult life. Work – As in held a paying job outside of the home and would thus worry about being unemployed or having a tight budget on a small paycheck. This gets turned into Romney defending stay at home moms from Rosen’s “attack” on them and trotting his wife out as a stage prop to talk about how she worked so hard to raise their kids.
Except that the fact is that Rosen never mentioned stay at home moms and the discussion on CNN where she made her comments had nothing to do with stay at home moms. The entire “attack on stay at home moms” here is a complete work of fiction by the conservative talkers and the Romney Campaign with absolutely zero basis in reality at all. But, man, are they working it hard for their base.
Throw in the fact that Democrats from the President on down have denounce the idea of attacking stay at home moms (and in Obama’s case, even commenting on a candidate’s family at all) in far stronger and clearer terms than most the Republicans and Conservative pundits denounce the nuts on their side (wonder how Mitt feels about chasing Ted for an endorsement now) and the idea should be totally laughable, Yet I know conservatives that have swallowed it hook, line and sinker and are all on board with denouncing the Dems as haters of the sweet, wonderful stay at home moms like the ones they grew up with.
Of course, if you’re poor, you can only have dignity by putting your kid in daycare and getting a real job.
“I never met any Liberal that sneers when meeting a housewife. I don’t think such people exist. That sort of hysterical feminist had its heyday in the frikking seventies, for god’s sake.”
Oh, you should have a talk with my wife. She was a stay at home mom until my kids hit their teens. She was talked down to, criticized, and insulted. At the minimum, the typical liberal response was “oh, I guess that’s ok too” when they asked what she did. There were people that lectured her, and were flat out offended that she chose to stay home. She was told she set back women’s rights, and “the movement”. And of course, I was a villain as well, because I obviously forced her to stay at home with the kids. (When the truth was, I had worked out with my job to be able to work from home, so she could work – it was just that after our first was born she decided she wanted to be at home.)
yeah, but, Jerry, I think you may be also backing Rene’s point to a degree. The way you’re talking about this, it sounds like you’re talking about things that happened a while back. That would still fall under older ideas that are fading out.
My wife is a stay at home mom for our two kids and has been since our the day she first got pregnant with our now five-year-old son. She’s never run into that kind of thing and we occasionally travel in some circles that have a lot of people in them who make me look like a hard right, women hating conservative by comparison. You still saw a lot of it in the 80s and early 90s. You saw a lot less of it as the 90s closed out. You rarely see it now at all.
I’m not that old. This was just over the past 10 years. And in Oklahoma of all places.
I must have been a very lucky guy. I never met these mythical frontline fighter femininists in real life.
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I also never met those women Republicans are always whining about, the ones that supposedly are proud to have had abortions and smugly tell that to everybody they just met in the same tone they’d discuss their last plastic surgery.
“I must have been a very lucky guy. I never met these mythical frontline fighter femininists in real life.”
Well, is/was your wife a stay at home mom? If not, then that may be the reason. It’s a pretty strong sore point with my wife. And as someone who’s been married to her for 17 years, don’t pìšš øff the short, redheaded, Irish woman. She doesn’t tend to forgive anything.
No, my girlfriend is an engineering student, and we’re not married yet. She wants to work after getting her degree.
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It’s good to know she is not with me for my money, she will probably earn more than I do. That was a joke, by the way. If she wanted to stay at home, I’d support her decision.
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To use a cliche, I think people should follow their own dreams. My Mom was a stay at home mom, but bitter about it, like many women of her generation, she felt powerless and stunted in her marriage.
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But, if a woman actually wants to be a housewife, then more power to her.
I’m imagining a political comic where an elephant and a donkey are standing next to an attractive woman, and the elephant reaches out and grabs the woman’s bum, then when she whirls on the pair, the elephant points innocently at the donkey, who’s standing there utterly confused. That’s the level our national politics have descended to.
I live in Arizona, where in the past week, bills were passed that:
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1) Essentially made it so that every menstruating women is considered pregnant.
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2) Made it so that doctors are allowed to lie to pregnant women so that they don’t have an abortion, even if it means that the mother or baby’s health is at risk. (This includes things like ectopic pregnancies.)
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3) Made it so that in sex education classes, teachers can only tell girls that birth the only option if they are pregnant. (Well, birth and adoption. But since adoption requires birth…)
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There was another bill here that was going to make it so that birth control would only be available to women if it were deemed medically necessary. That bill has been pushed to the side for now, but it hasn’t disappeared. None of these bills were proposed by Democrats.
Yeah, I was reading up on some of that the other day. They passed a bill into law that put the date of conception at a date that can only be described as insane; it would have to be almost two weeks before the actual act of sex that gets a woman pregnant. So, yeah, a bit how you put it, any woman walking down the street who is of childbearing age and physically capable to have a child is by definition “pregnant” in the state of Arizona right now. And I’m sorry, but these laws being pushed by Republicans in multiple states that let doctors legally lie to women are disgusting; almost as disgusting as the lawmakers pushing for them.
I live in Arizona, where in the past week, bills were passed that:
Rene, to answer your question above: when you look at what states like Arizona are doing, there’s really no doubt it’s malicious.
I wonder what would have happened had Rosen managed to phrase her statement slightly differently, and said Anne Romney had never worked outside of the home a day in her life.
I’m sure there still would be uproar and stuff, but it would have cut the main legs of the argument being made.
By the way, there’s a spin-off war here. In response to Hilary Rosen’s comments, the official Twitter page of the Catholic League had this to say.
The Catholic League: “Lesbian Dem Hilary Rosen tells Ann Romney she never worked a day in her life. Unlike Rosen, who had to adopt kids, Ann raised 5 of her own.”
So now a branch of conservatives are re-declaring war on homosexuals and now declaring was on adoption? Way to go CL, slag on adoption, adopted children and the parents that adopt them and imply that they’re somehow second class when compared to “real” families that don’t need to adopt kids.
Úšhølëš.
I’ll second that. What a bunch of bull.
That’s no surprise, Jerry. After all, this occurred recently as well:
Yep, a representative put forth by a Catholic school called adopted kids “sociologically unstable”.
And this is along with the other recent stories about how we’re now finding out that the Catholic church pushed for countless women over decades to give up their babies at birth.
Force ’em to be born, then shove ’em aside. That’s the Catholic way!
And another Catholic bishop makes a complete ášš of himself:
I’m also thinking it’s high time that the Catholic Church is forced out of our schools and hospitals and so on until they get their own house – which should probably be condemned – in order.
Jennie Breeden is an extremely intelligent and creative person. One of the highlights when I go to conventions is chatting with her.
You know, as always, I expect this sort of thing from the Repubs. It’s the uninformed masses gobbling it all up like it’s science – and maybe science isn’t the best analogy for that demographic – that drives me nuts.
One of the major reasons I am a liberal, is that the major conflict of our times is pretty clear to me: a free society has religious freedom, but a free society can’t have religious hegemony. And the problem is that what some Christians and a LOT of the Christian leadership really want is hegemony.
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I don’t expect them to lower their heads and just accept that their faith don’t have the kind of power they used to have in the early 20th century and earlier. They will keep hugging to themselves any remnants of power they have.
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And to those who think “secular” institutions rule the world, consider this: if any secular organization had a huge pedophilia cover-up scandal, they’d be history, period. The big churches are the only ones that are so powerful that they can survive this kind of šhìŧ.
So… Penn State isn’t secular?
Define “huge”, John. Penn State was a disaster, but it was one guy doing the abuse, that could have been solved by punishing all of the involved. Compare that to the Catholic Church, with several abusive priests that had no relation to each other, and it appears to me that the problems with the Catholic Church are far more systemic.
There are any number of issues with Penn State, and having rambled on enough in my reply to Jerome, I’m not sure I want to do it again already this morning. 🙂
Penn State is a public research university.
That said, Paterno was Catholic (I’m not sure about anybody else involved), so the comparisons can certainly be drawn there to the priests and how this entire situation was covered up. He was occasionally referred to as Pope Joe, and you can see why.
But obviously it went far, far beyond that. State College itself is a pretty insular community, several hours removed from other major cities. On top of that you also have the culture of athletics – this kind of cover up happened some 30 years ago with the Boston Red Sox, and it’s happened in youth hockey in Canada.
But more specifically, it’s college athletics, where coaches like Paterno are treated as gods. Where it’s protect and defend the program and/or the coach at all costs, truth and facts be dámņëd.
All of these factors contributed in varying degrees.
There is something that connects sports to religion. Both are very tribal and territorial. Both have a sort of “us versus them” mentality.
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Any crime that a member of the team may commit is not really important, and must be covered up by other members of the team. Doing otherwise will only make the team as a whole weaker, and be a gift to their enemies.
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That was the reason Church documents mentioned to cover up pedophile priests. They didn’t want to give ammunition to enemies of the Church. The kids be dámņëd.
Please link me a site/newspaper that has a comparable image such as this.
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At least Cupp came across well during the interview with Beck.
Would a symptom of a “war on women” be beating the šhìŧ out of a pinata with the face of one of the most powerful women in the country taped to it? And those surrounding the “leader” inciting violence cheering it on?
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Here it is..it actually happened: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DZq2jOscBU
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Oh wait, that’s South Carolina AFL-CIO President Donna Dewitt laying the smackdown to the image of SC Governor Nikki Haley. And the crowd cheers her on for doing so and encourages her to keep it up.
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Haley, in addition to being a woman is of Indian descent, which in today’s political climate would make her “protected” and special> Yet Dewitt’s wielding the bat comes just days after Phil Bailey of the South Carolina Democratic Party called Haley a “Sikh Jesus” on Twitter.
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I tend to think we’ve become a bit too easily offended as a society, but what really pìššëš me off is that you know dámņ well if Nikki Haley had a D next to her name, the media would make this a front page, above-the-fold, lead the broadcast story nationwide. The narrative would be “racist Tea Partiers beating up the female, conservative governor in effigy.
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But nope, Nikki Haley is a REPUBLICAN MINORITY, which to many on the Left makes her less than human and self-loathing. In stories like these, the media likes to cast a victim and a victimizer. In their view and that of many on the Left – same thing! – a woman and minority and who has signed on with the Republicans has automatically chosen to be a victimizer and therefore can’t be thought of as a victim.
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In fact, when she should be seen as a victim, many on the Left see it as mere payback!
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It is almost depressing that this is the case but this has been the m.o. of many on the Left/in the media for decades. What would be front page news for days in a row on the “New York Times” if Nikki Haley were a Democrat will be barely covered.
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Thankfully, this will allow Mitt Romney another day to focus on Obama’s handling of the economy.
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Given all this, no wonder he’s closing his “gender gap” with women: http://www.redstate.com/california_yankee/2012/05/23/romney-closes-the-gender-gap/
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It’s Faux News. Obfuscating an issue for the ignorant masses is how they operate on a daily basis.
Next they’ll probably accuse women of having declared war on women.
And as everyone was making a big deal about Hilary Rosen’s statement about Ann Romney “never working,” in Wisconsin, Scott Walker has repealed a law requiring equal pay for women. Maybe he’s also planning to repeal women’s sufferage before the recall election.
Obama, bring our troops home now! This is a war we cannot win!
How do they justify that? I can figure two approaches.
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1) A woman’s natural role is as a mother and wife, by encouraging women to have more options, they’ve declared war on women.
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2) The free market is God’s perfect creation, and by championing laws that give women certain protections in the workplace, Democrats have declared war on women, by “ruining” them with mollycoddling that stops them from becoming real contenders.
Rene, you know full well that they won’t justify it, nor will they feel the need to even try.
Controlling a woman’s womb? Not a war on women. Trying to reduce or remove access to contraceptives? Not a war on women. Making sure women can’t meet equal pay to that of male counterparts? Not a war on women. I could go on all day.
A liberal saying a rich stay at home mom should maybe hold a job so she’d actually know how the vast majority of mothers actually have to live? Insert typical and completely over the top bûllšhìŧ hyperbole here.
There are issues more important to women than the legality of abortion and having to pay $9-30 a month for birth control. As for equal pay, that’s pretty funny, as can be found below:
http://www.mrctv.org/node/111823
Birth control is the most important thing in the world for many women, no matter how Conservatives try to say otherwise, Jerome.
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If my girlfriend couldn’t have birth control, she could end up pregnant, and that would mean a possible delay of several years in her studies and career.
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I suppose the favored solution for Conservatives would be for her to quit college and marry me and become a housewife; or if she really wants to study, for us to give up on sex.
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Respectfully, I’d like to break the nose of anyone making such suggestions. I suspect my girlfriend would do the same, or worse.
Jerome,
That piece you’ve linked is disingenuous and misleading on a multitude of levels (I’d say I’m shocked, but I’d be lying). It mainly implies that Obama personally set the salaries of the employees in his White House – he didn’t. Federal pay salaries are set by the Office of Budget Management for all government employees regardless of where and for which agency they work. More importantly, the Federal pay scale is not gender biased; men and women in the same pay grade in the government earn exactly the same salaries, and thus the Ledbetter act doesn’t apply. Apparently the article is making the twisted logic that because there are more male employees in the White House at higher pay grades there is an inequity in pay for women employees, and I’ve no doubt that many on the right lapped it up without any further thought or investigation.
Jerome, there certainly are more important issues to women, but that doesn’t change the fact that a lot of the things Republicans have been doing in various states target specifically and only women. If a critic went after Peter’s work specifically and trashed it review after review in increasingly strange and nasty ways and about things that seemed unrelated to the work, I doubt that you would disagree with someone who said that the critic seemed to be waging a war or a crusade on Peter and his works because there were things (family, finances, etc.) in his life that were more important to him. Linda the same thing here.
As for the cost of “birth control” in various areas, that’s only true for low end stuff that is going to be used strictly as birth control. The stuff that was the subject of so much debate a while back and the reasons it’s needed isn’t quite as cheap. Trust me, I have experience with paying for it and having to budget for it. Why? Here’s my wife, a woman who went into bankruptcy once before we were married because she couldn’t get covered by insurance due to a preexisting condition and various medical expenses, including having to shell out a small fortune each year for certain types of birth control, broke her finances.
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Any woman who is against all the “birth control” issues going on in politics should switch to calling them what they really are, HORMONE INHIBITORS. Calling the drugs “hormone inhibitors” clearly states that they are a medical issue, not a pro-choice issue.
I am Roman Catholic. I have been one since I was born, and will be until I die.
I have been on “hormone inhibitors” since I was 13.
I have debilitating ovarian and breast cysts and would not have been able to function 1 1/2 weeks in four without “hormone inhibitors”. I tend to pass out and not in the way you see in the movies. I turned white and could not get the energy to move from blood loss. The pain was so bad I was rushed to the ER by my doctor because he thought I had appendicitis. That is when I went on “hormone inhibitors”.
MY PRIEST, in the confessional, said that it WAS NOT a sin to be on these drugs and that God had made them for a reason, and that I need not feel any guilt or sin for taking them.
After I had my two children I had to have surgery to do what the “hormone inhibitors” did, but with the consequence of no longer being able to have kids. In the words of all the paperwork I had to fill out, I had a “sterilization” procedure, and I am now sterile.
One other thing. I have technically had an abortion, yet I have NEVER wantonly given up a child. I had what is know as a “spontaneous abortion”, known to you and me as a miscarriage. I have no idea who’s bright idea this name change was, but all it does is create great statistics for anyone who is trying to prove a ton of women have abortions, and cause many women like myself to have serious issues at a time they are already depressed about losing a child. For me it was worse because I had to continue my pregnancy for another two months to deliver my son, whereupon I had to fill out more forms about my “spontaneous abortion” of his twin.
My health has never been what most people call good, and I often feel like everything is out of my control, but at least I had the control to make my own decisions about my own health care. Now the Republicans in various states are trying to take even that little bit of control that I had over the situation away from other women.
Jennifer Chandler
You may think that’s wonderfully funny, Jerome, but Gov. Walker of Wisconsin recently signing into a law a bill that would overturn equal pay in that state isn’t funny at all.
It sure as hëll isn’t funny in the the many states Republicans have attempted to completely destroy Planned Parenthood, regardless of the numerous and far more often used services they provide beyond abortion.
But that doesn’t matter in the Republican’s war on women. It doesn’t matter how many women’s lives they toss aside as long as they can claim a victory in the battle on abortion. As long as they get to claim victory in the battle on morality (which is a whole other crock of šhìŧ) because now all contraceptives are evil.
The Republican Party: Government small enough to fit in a vágìņá. Government equal enough that women should know their place.
Can someone tell me where Fox News has reported that “the Democrats Have Declared a War on Women”? I just googled it, and I can’t find it. I figured I’d just ask since you guys seem to know all about it.
It’s less a network-wide declaration and more a network-wide talking point picked up from the Romney campaign. First Fox was pushing the massaged figure that Romney has been throwing out there about women’s unemployment while claiming that it’s really Obama waging a war on women and then they’ve spent the last week running with the talking point that the Democrats are attacking stay at home moms; a claim only made by ignoring the full context of the original statement (i.e. lying about it) made by a CNN contributor and then claiming that as the Democrats stand on the matter despite Democrats, even Obama himself, rebuking the statement. The only Fox News host I’ve seen call out the creative bookkeeping that Romney is using so far has been Chris Wallace.
Ok. I’ll repeat the question – Can someone point me to where Fox News reported that the Democrats are waging a war on women? I don’t need commentary. I need a link.
Chris Wallace does his father proud…even Jon Stewart has said Wallace gives Fox News a legitimacy and seriousness they would not otherwise have.
Yeah, I give Fox News hëll, but I rarely find reason to fault or immediately distrust much of what I hear from either Shep Smith or Chris Wallace.
Dunno if you’re just inept at googling or just being disingenuous there, Tim, but I was able to find this in fifteen seconds:
http://video.foxnews.com/v/1559439426001/lefts-war-on-women/
Call me crazy, but when they do a piece that’s entitled “The Left’s war on women” (see lower right on screen) I tend to think they’re claiming the Left has declared war on women. But don’t worry; I’m sure Fox’s supporters will come up with all kinds of rationalizations as to why that doesn’t mean what it says it means.
PAD
I doubt it’s either. I put it into Google and got mostly hits on Fox News discussing the charges about Republicans waging a war on women or Romney making that charge directed towards Obama.
It’s neither, PAD. It’s either you not being honest or not knowing the difference between a commentary by an individual on an opinion show and a report issued by a news network. Unless someone can come up with something better, there’s no evidence that FOX NEWS has ever reported that the Democrats are waging a war on women. Clearly, Governor Palin believes that they are. I’m surprised you didn’t go after her instead of Fox News, since that would have been an accurate portrayal of what was said.
By your logic, Fox News has also reported that the Tea Party doesn’t know “what the f*ck” they’re talking about. (In actuality, it was a liberal commentator on Hannity’s show that said this, but it’s the same as Fox News reporting it, right?)
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/im-going-to-be-fired-bob-beckel-detonates-a-high-volume-what-the-f-live-on-hannity/
Governor Palin
Really?
I disagree, Tim. Pointing to someone throwing a POV out there that’s counter to the SOP message point that Fox News is pushing while on a Fox News program doesn’t quite match up to pointing to a message being pushed on multiple shows and not being met with disagreement by the majority of the hosts.
“Governor Palin”
“Really?”
Yeah, really. It’s a formality that many stand on if they respect the person and, in some cases, even if they don’t. It’s the same reason that Newt is still referred to as “Mr. Speaker” or “Speaker Gingrich” when interviewed on CNN or Bill Clinton still gets called “President Clinton” in interviews and various fundraising emails, mailings and robo-calls.
Palin in no way has earned the respect to keep that title when she QUIT and RAN AWAY from the job when the going got tough.
At least Gingrich finished out his term.
And Nixon quit in disgrace to avoid being impeached for his crimes. It still didn’t stop him from being referenced as “President Nixon” for decades after that.
Palin was elected by the people of her state. Anything else is besides the point. I personally don’t think she deserves a title much above “Town Idiot” and she reinforces my belief in that pretty much every time she opens her mouth, but facts are facts and opinions are not facts. Taking someone to task for standing on or respecting the practice of a recognized formality just makes one look silly or extremely thin skinned.
It’s neither, PAD. It’s either you not being honest or not knowing the difference between a commentary by an individual on an opinion show and a report issued by a news network
And there it is. An opinion can no longer be attributed to a news source; one has to single out exactly how many people are saying it. So next time a Broadway musical gets slammed by the New York Times, everyone make sure to say that it was only slammed by one individual and does not necessarily represent the whole of the entity.
Because that would be dishonest.
PAD
“So next time a Broadway musical gets slammed by the New York Times, everyone make sure to say that it was only slammed by one individual and does not necessarily represent the whole of the entity.”
Which is actually what most people I know or know of do. Most people I know say that the New York Times Media Critic when referring to something they wrote. Likewise, around here, people refer to the paper’s movie critic and not the paper when talking about a review and what an ignorant jáçkášš he is.
What Tim said is basically true. Alan Colmes is still on the fox News payroll and appears on various shows as a contributor. If Alan says something that’s derogatory about the Republican front runner or the GOP, is it at all reasonable to take what Colmes says and declare that Fox News was saying about the Republican front runner or the GOP what in fact only Alan Colmes said?
As it stands though, you don’t quite have that here. Palin was the featured guest for this bit of specific stupidity, but the fact is that Fox News and conservative talk radio have been pushing the talking point for a week now. Just listening to them for a couple of days in the last week (again, XM radio) was enough to hear a good two dozen examples of them pushing this talking point even if they are not declaring it as an official logo of the moment. It’s not isolated to Palin on Hannity and it most certainly has been the talking point since Romney trotted out his cooked figures on women’s unemployment and then they pushed it harder after the flap caused by the contributor on CNN.
On the other hand, Jerry, when a newspaper gives a rave review, the advertising typically says, “The New York Times says–!” “Variety says–!”
Furthermore, in the case of Fox, it wasn’t just the individual but was an actual graphic that Fox took the time to put up there and reinforce the point. And, as the Daily Show recounted, there were various pundits on Fox piling on for the supposed left wing vendetta on Conservative women and housewives. Which leads me to believe, on that basis, that the true crime is that Democrats are thinking too small: if you attack a subset of women, that’s despicable; if it’s broad based, proposing and passing laws that impact upon much broader categories of women, that’s okay.
PAD
“On the other hand, Jerry, when a newspaper gives a rave review, the advertising typically says, “The New York Times says–!” “Variety says–!””
Yes they do, but they add a bit more in there. Often it says, “John Reviewerschmuck says-! Variety”
“Furthermore, in the case of Fox, it wasn’t just the individual but was an actual graphic that Fox took the time to put up there and reinforce the point.”
True, and I did note that it’s more than just Palin on Hannity in this case. I just found the line of argument first used to rebut the idea that it was just Palin a little weak and somewhat faulty.
I dunno…Does Fox, anywhere, give the disclaimer that the views of its contributors in no way reflect the views of the Fox News corporation? That’s a pretty time-tested means for a parent company to distance itself from what’s said in its media. If they don’t say it, either before or after the fact, one kind of has to imagine that anything said by their contributors gets their stamp of approval.
“Does Fox, anywhere, give the disclaimer that the views of its contributors in no way reflect the views of the Fox News corporation?”
Do they? Beats me, I haven’t looked. But are you saying that Fox News as an entity holds the position that Ron Paul is an important voice in the GOP debate and that the Patriot Act is wrong because a single paid Fox News contributor, Alan Colmes, says so despite the fact that such a stand is in stark contrast to what most of the others hosts and contributors say?
In this case, I agree that the overall message that Fox is pushing right now, the talking point they wish to propel, is one that says that it’s actually the Dems who are engaged in a war on women or on stay at home moms because there’s more than one host, guest and contributor playing that game. But it really looks silly trying to even approach the argument that if you can cite one person paid by the network saying something on the network that it’s the POV of the network.
Forgot the link.
Alan Colmes saying so.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onaaPdYl1m4
Ah, Tim’s going with the old “They can say it over and over for hours on end…. but if it isn’t said by a select few particular Fox News employees, it doesn’t count” defense.
In other news, the Norwegian nutjob has claimed self-defense.
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A pity he isn’t on Florida…
Who?
Anders Brevik, the guy who went on the shooting spree at the youth camp last year.
or Texas!
i heard on the radio that he claims to be a member of a militant group… that only exists in his mind. sheesh, he’s the OTHER kind of totally nuts. (as opposed to the “i hate the world” nuts) dude has made up his own reality.
This is somewhat of a classic example of Rovian Tactics by Romney and the conservative media. Romney has been making a lot of comments lately attacking Obama on things where the criticisms would be far more dámņìņg of Romney than Obama and the conservative media has been picking up the talking point that it’s really Obama and the Dems that are waging a war on women when the facts are that it’s been the Republicans who are more deserving of that charge (although it’s a bit overblown.) It’s actually kind of funny to see. It’s like watching a crack addict claiming that someone else is unreliable because they admitted to smoking a joint once back in their college days.
That’s a classic Republican tactic, though. Remember, this is the party that’s condemned Democrats for their irresponsible economic policies, then proceeded to run up massive deficits every time one of them lands in the oval office.
Thank God I don’t life in the US. Bûllšhìŧ (like this) gives me rash.
“Birth control is the most important thing in the world for many women, no matter how Conservatives try to say otherwise, Jerome.
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If my girlfriend couldn’t have birth control, she could end up pregnant, and that would mean a possible delay of several years in her studies and career.
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I suppose the favored solution for Conservatives would be for her to quit college and marry me and become a housewife; or if she really wants to study, for us to give up on sex.
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Respectfully, I’d like to break the nose of anyone making such suggestions. I suspect my girlfriend would do the same, or worse.”
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Wonderful, Rene. Nice tangent. Silly me, I thought issues like education, safe neighborhoods and available jobs – just to name three off the top of my head – might be important issues to women as well.
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But somehow we’ve reached a point where not receiving “free stuff” – no matter your income and/or beliefs or the fact that birth control is extremely affordable – is considered on par with stoning a woman who was raped because she “shamed” her family.
Jerome…seriously…knock this šhìŧ off. It’s repulsive. It’s disgusting. It’s bad enough that you popped up on my Facebook page and put forward the same basic idea, but now you’re doing it here.
Yes, there are women who are treated far more horrifically in other countries. So the reasoning that women here in the US have no business complaining because it’s worse for other women elsewhere?
Okay, ladies, you heard Jerome: Stop your whining and thank your lucky stars you’re not being stoned to death or that you’re only being raped with medical tools. Be grateful, not upset.
Seriously, Jerome: it’s repugnant. I know there’s no right wing talking point you won’t embrace, no right wing action you won’t defend no matter how heinous, but this is a new low.
PAD
There is so much demodonkey manure in this particular column that it is difficult to ascertain just where to start wading through it. This seems to be as good a place to chip in as any, but I won’t try to limit myself to the particular comments which gave rise to this particular thread.
1. It is a fact that, under demodonkeyism (and all other forms of socialism), the emphasis inevitably centers on the “free stuff” which comes from holding a pistol to someone else’s head and stealing it. Anyone who dares to oppose such a barbarous view of “government” arbitrarily is denounced as a “fascist” who is “waging a war on women” (or whoever) — when in fact it is the demodonkeys who are aping the fascists and waging war on whoever they think they can victimize, including women. It’s beyond the scope of this reply to respond to everything said here, but for the record:
1. Though it would be inaccurate to call Republicans generally “libertarians” (Ron Paul is NOT going to be the Republican nominee), I have yet to hear ANY demodonkey call for limiting out-of-control federal spending and pruning growth of an increasingly socialist-terrorist state by, e.g., NOT borrowing oodles of money from China or wherever and operating on the taxes that we have (now only about 58 cents of every dollar we spend). It would, of course, be something of a misnomer to call what demodonkeys offer instead a “war on women,” since more accurately this victimizes the unborn. It also is an undeniable fact that about half the children to be born, all expected to shoulder crushing debt incurred for even more “free” goodies and other current expenses, will be female.
Tell me: Whatever happened to the idea that taxation without representation is tyranny? Isn’t what demodonkeys advocate today a war on somebody?
2. One of the first publications in modern English history to argue for the rights of women — and children as well — was Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics (1850) — the book Oliver Wendell Holmes so famously denounced BEFORE he wrote his opinion on forced sterilization (“Three generations of idiots are enough”) and probably before he read the book. At the heart of Spencer’s argument was the contention that women were equal in mind to men but that, even if they were not, depriving them via laws and customs from using the minds they have violated the fundamental autonomy every human being possesses as a matter of will. Spencer’s idea is at the center of any libertarian’s concept of freedom and concurently is held probably by a majority of Republicans as well.
It clearly is not a central tenant of demodonkey philosophy:
3. An essential expression of that concept is maintaining freedom of contract. If a woman AGREES to do a job for less money, in what way is that different from ME agreeing to do the job for less money? None at all, except that, currently, I have the job.
Hence, the entire idea of “equal pay for equal work” simply is fallacious. The essence of competition in the workplace is that people — men AND women — bid to do equal work for LESS pay. There are many reasons why, on the average, women receive less pay for their work than men, some discriminatory, some not. But, the solution to any inequity which may exist is not to ossify the business environment with things like equal-pay laws. Governor Walker no doubt is guilty of many things. But, preventing women from competing fairly in an open marketplace with whatever abilities they have is not one of them, and such constitutes a “war on women” only in the minds of those socialists who think that freedom to do what socialists don’t want somehow is dangerous to everyone.
4. As the one person in this forum who has been in possession of an insurance license, I am eminently qualified to debunk the notion that, somehow, insurance companies are “exploiting” people by refusing to insure “pre-existing conditions” —
a. Insurance is a viable business upon two propositions: The law of big numbers (in other words, “The house always wins overall in the long run, as a matter of mathematics, just like in Las Vegas), and the inability of an individual to anticipate with certainty when he or she will be among the injured (so it’s in his or her advantage to play the house’s game and accept some loss rather than possibly suffer catastrophic loss). If either of these two conditions is vitiated in any way, the insurance company will lose money, will go broke, and then can’t insure ANYONE (men or women).
b. It therefore makes no sense for an insurance company to insure a pre-existing condition, since the chances of the possessor suffering the insured loss already is 100 per cent, and both sides know that.
c. Of course, the insurance company could avoid the financial bloodletting of insuring against pre-existing conditions by charging what it will cost to effect a remedy plus what it will cost to administer the policy, but that clearly has to be more expensive than for the insured to drop the coverage completely and simply pay for the remedy out of pocket.
d. The demodonkey responds by saying that nothing can stand in the way of the demodonkey’s need for care. EVERYTHING must yield to that, even to enslaving the doctors! So, FORCING those “evil” insurance companies to give them coverage for an injury they are certain to suffer is well within the parameters of acceptable behavior, and anyone who opposes such arrogance is a Republican cretin who is “waging a war on women” by “denying them care!”
Which is, of course, a total abuse of language and is, indeed, more like the tirades one once expected from the likes of Joachim von Ribbontrop or Joseph Goebbels. Obviously, ANYONE includes all women, wherefore advocating that which bankrupts the insurance company constitutes the REAL war on women, regardless of what demodonkeys choose to call it.
5. Demodonkeys can bray from now until the moon turns purple. When all is quiet again, what remains is that lifestyle choices are lifestyle choices, not medical conditions (and certainly not medical conditions coverable by insurance). Ignoring for the moment the use of hormone-like chemicals for non-sexual remedies, it remains true that one can prevent “unwanted pregnancy” with something as simple as an aspirin. Hold it between your knees, honey, and as long as you do that, you won’t get pregnant. Yes, Rene, it means that, for a time, you give up sex — until you can pay for the consequences on your own. In the event you flunked biology, your girlfriend is a female mammal. That female mammals get pregnant from sexual relations with men is a condition of the earth not governed by novel theories of “rights.” The earth is 4.5 BILLION years old, and life on the earth has existed for at least half that time. It is not my responbsibility to look after your girlfriend’s kids (if I wanted to do that, I would marry her myself). I’m happy to hear she wants to be an engineer. But, if she REALLY wants to be an engineer, she will put everything else aside that gets in the way of her achieving her goal. I am more than willing to grant her her freedom. What I won’t do is grant her freedom from responsibility for the lifestyle choices she makes.
No one seriously has to listen to someone whine about how “disruptive” it is to a woman’s career desires to “deprive” her of designer contraceptives when the demodonkey solution is to loose a gang of armed, fascist gangsters (the IRS) on otherwise peaceful people so that, with government-supplied guns, they can fund the purchase of the “medicine” by really disrupting the true owner’s use of his (or HER) own money. The contention to the contrary is so bøffø that it exposes at once the entire linguistic fraud being perpetrated. Calling opponents of such a fraud “anti-women” (for exposing the fraud) is laughable.
6. Many of those writing here apparently spend so much of their time watching Fox News that they have no time to watch anything else. Warning: That can be hazardous to your objectivity (the cure, perhaps, is to spend more time watching Piers Morgan).
Is Fox biased? Of course, it’s biased (it’s a conservative network). Unfortunately, writers here either forget or are too young to remember what the “news” was like before Fox News.
In the Before Time (and probably even today), the liberal icon of objectivity in news was Walter Cronkite, who did at least have a certain objectivity in his presentation. But, Cronkite was notoriously biased in favor of the moderate left, primarily in what few could see, which was his editing. It literally was IMPOSSIBLE for libertarians to get ANY coverage on CBS when he was there, because he thought of them in much the same way as many writing here do, and he refused to give them air time, even for the sake of controversy or (God forbid) ratings. Instead, we were served demodonkey pap like a 4.5 minute segment on Amy Carter’s treehouse, which Cronkite and his allies considered to be more “newsworthy” than an exposure of the Federal Reserve’s paper-money fraud (which incidentally wars on most men and most women equally, to the benefit of socialist politicians looking to steal more money and vested banking interests of any stripe).
So, you tell me what is the real story here: Some child climbing a tree, or some gang of federal officials secretly picking the pockets of a third of a billion people while those officials’ bosses pompously declare that THEY’RE not for privilege; THEY’RE for “the people and ‘fairnaess’!”
Give me a break!
Fox News is a conservative network which at least allows liberals to appear, even if it’s for a little grilling. And, yes, many of the commentators serve up softballs to guests more aligned to the commentators’ views. Considering what was the demonstrated alternative of history, this is not the end of the world, and it is a “war on women” only in the fantasies of those who seek to impose impossible conditions under perverted definitions on anyone else offering real solutions. Not surprisingly, these are the same persons who will seek once more to make someone else pay for the inevitable failure and probable disaster those conditions will cause.
I got to “demodonkey” and figured the rest of it was a waste of time.
Not surprising (I told the truth, and Craig thought it was hëll).
Of course, had I written it solely for him, I would have been wasting my time.
Craig,
I read the whole thing for you. You didn’t miss much.
Jerry! How have you been?
(For anyone new, Jerry is another one of our regular contributors suffering from Obamaitis — at least in those moments when he’s not trying to impeach the poor Gefreiter.)
I read in the interim that you’re a cop (or at least claim to be), so I have to assume (contrary to at least some of the evidence) that you are smart enough to know when someone has been caught red-handed with his hand in the cookie jar.
I read the whole thing for you. You didn’t miss much.
Good to know, Jerry. 🙂
Robert –
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I don’t feel like I should justify myself, but just for your information, every contraceptive my girlfriend has ever used has been paid with her money or mine. Money that came from hard work, by the way. So I’m not sure what is the reason for your indignation. MY indignation is directed to people who want to stop women from getting contraceptives, not for any economic reasons, but for cultural ones.
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You know, I used to consider myself a Libertarian when I was younger. Some of that remains – I’m pro-gun, for instance. But mostly, I have to say you Libertarians have been a great disappointment.
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You are very similar to the Communists that also annoyed me so much in my youth. You have such a beautiful, perfect theory! The Free Market! All hail the Free Market! Everything will be perfect with the Free Market! The communists had their impending revolution and Marxism, that also was perfect and beautiful and could solve all problems. Everything would be perfect with Marxism!
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Such bûllšhìŧ. Reality is complex, incoherent, imperfect, and the mature man navigates a sea of compromises and gray areas, no single, tidy ideology can hold all the answers.
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While American Libertarianism has a lot to recommend it in regards to personal freedom, I also think that most people intuitively are correct to distrust it in economical grounds. You guys think it would lead to a Randian Utopia, I think you’d end with, at best, a new version of Dickens’s England, with people slaving away 12 hours a day for meager payment, once we abolish Unions, regulations, taxes, and all the other “socialist” trappings you despise.
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Another thing that is very disappointing about you guys? All political folks tend to demonize their opponents, but Libertarians are the worst. Worse than Liberals, worse than Conservatives. I get the sense that everyone who believes in big government is a sub-human degenerate, in your views.
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And what the hëll has happened to you guys in these past 10 years? It looks like Libertarians spend all their time whining and criticizing Liberals, while making excuses for Republicans that are very much anti-Libertarian, perhaps more anti-Libertarian that any “demodonkey”. Santorum said openly that he wants to destroy Libertarians. He is the guy you should be attacking, but no, you probably will come up with a way to defend the guy and his theocratic little dreams, just like lots of Libertarians found a way to stand by Bush’s side, of the most anti-Libertarian presidents I’ve ever seen.
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Sometimes it seems like Libertarians are simply Republicans who want to appear cooler and more literate than run-of-the-mill GOP supporters.
I don’t know you, Robert. Your contributions here are minimal. You’ve expressed no interest, to my knowledge, in any of my work. So when you show up and post a screed that launches with some oh-so-clever insult for my party…in this place, in my little corner of the Internet…
My immediate thought on getting a graf or so in is to say, “Screw you” and move on.
Which is what I did. Didn’t bother to read beyond it.
So you may want to consider the notion that, if you actually want people to take an interest in what you say, you don’t start out insulting them, you arrogant prìçk.
PAD
Ordinarily, I simply would ignore someone who blows up in childish indignation to something I said (that’s when one is supposed to shut up after declaring victory), but since this comes from the chairman of the board, so to speak, I will respond with a few comments around the edges:
1. You’re right, you don’t know me, and you guessed correctly: I don’t read comics. That’s not a personal insult (I’m an equal-opportunity ignoramus). I HAVE studied nuclear physics, which is how I know something about Shroedinger wave equations. And, I have a degree in history from the University of California (perhaps why I simply don’t have time to read comics, even in the local newspaper).
So, I don’t know your work, have neither time nor reason to be educated otherwise, and won’t miss it if the copyright pirates ever put you out of business.
That doesn’t mean nothing is lost.
2. I tripped over you as a result of your comments here re SOPA (believe it or not, they made it to Wikipedia). Perhaps it will gratify you to know that your remarks at the time did have an internal logic to them. So, I dropped in to check you out.
3. But, he who says “A” must say “B,” and people cannot protest the way you did about the invasion of their property rights, then be taken seriously when they make themselves a fountainhead for justifying invasion of the property rights of others. That has nothing to do with political parties. It does have something to do with integrity in a man and his reasoning.
4. The Constitution of the United States was created not by any one man (Madison only was the unofficial secretary of the Convention) but by blocks of men who came together, each with their own interests to protect and constituencies to defend. The final product represents that compromise and must be understood as such, as an integrated whole. That is why slavery (though it isn’t called that) is written into a document ostensibly designed to “preserve the blessings of liberty.” Recall: It took a very bloody war, in which a good number of my ancestors served and a few died, to get that little defect out. Needless to say, I’m in no hurry to see it slipped back in.
5. The Constitution was written to rectify certain of the deficiencies which experience had exposed in the workings of the first constitution (which was the Articles of Confederation). The new Congress was given the power to tax, not to socially engineer society but to pay the bills of the government, which was to be overall sovereign in its powers but limited in its functions to that “necessary” to integrate the whole. Phrases like “interstate commerce” or the power to issue copyrights or patents don’t have any meaning independent from that. The government’s power over interstate commerce is the power to supervise, and if necessary align, conflicting legislation among the several states as such applies to business and commercial intercourse. Neither “interstate commerce” nor the power of taxation exists, in a document designed to preserve liberty, as some open-ended, secret language for erection of a comic mimic of government by Benito Mussolini.
6. Despite this, for a very long time, the Democratic Party has been oriented toward just that. It wasn’t the libertarians who ordered people sterilized; it was Oliver Wendell Holmes (Herbert Spencer’s critic). It wasn’t the libertarians who fined people or threw them in jail for growing wheat on their own farm; it was FDR’s Secretary of Agriculture, Claude Wickard. It wasn’t the libertarians who locked people in concentration camps because of their race; it was President Roosevelt, himself. It wasn’t the libertarians who campaigned incessantly from the beginning of the last century for abandonment of the gold dollar and confiscation of all gold by the government; it was the Democratic Party (starting with William Jennings Bryan — who also helped give us Prohibition before he closed his career by serving as co-counsel for the prosecution in the Scopes monkey trial).
The National Industrial Recovery Act, declared unconstitutional in the Sick Chicken case (1935), was a prescription for the erection of domestic fascism in the United States and the closest we ever actually came to it. It probably didn’t start with FDR (the fasces at the time was on the back of the dime), but it was mirrored a decade later by the War Production Authority, which for the time of World War II made the United States almost as much a fascist country as the countries we were trying to defeat. That’s not a wanton insult to “demodonkeys”; it’s the lesson of history. It’s also the lesson of history that John Kennedy preferred to throw American citizens owning gold in jail rather than oppose the evils of fractional-reserve banking (which were well known by that time, even if ignored by such as John Kenneth Galbraith). And, it’s also the lesson of history that Lyndon Johnson, to hide the costs of a war he actually campaigned against, chose when the chips were down to defraud the American public by printing the money rather than raising taxes, allowing him, in effect, to burgle every savings-and-loan in the country (many of which as a consequence went broke).
7. All of this (and far more — I could write you a real book) obliges me to ask you, Peter: Why in the world are you a Democrat? (And, please don’t answer that becoming a Republican was so much worse — the lesser of two evils is evil.) You did not sound (at least in the beginning) like someone who could be befogged by a gang of corrupt politicians determined to bášŧárdìzë English as part of “doing the little side step” in the course of hiding what they’re truly about. Democrats have been notorious for taking idiotic positions (“Medical care is the right of every American”), denouncing anyone who opposes that as “warring” on somebody, then proposing solutions which inevitably will wreck for everyone the health-care system we have.
How is that NOT a “war on women,” especially all the women doctors who will be enslaved by the result?
And, there will be a result: To save itself from inevitable exploding costs, the government inevitably will have to order the doctors to charge less for their services than the market allows — no different in principle from making “ņìggërš” pick cotton for a bed out of the rain. I am pretty certain you are not a white supremecist; I’m yet to be convinced that you’re better.
What, seriously, do you think is the alternative, for example, to allowing the market (which is all of us) to apportion the dispersal of medical services? Please do not tell me that Obama and Congress can wave a magic wand that will make it possible for the supply of doctors to be decreased (since fewer will be able to afford going to school), the supply of patients to be increased by millions, and costs to come down — that gets an automatic “F” in my class, as sure as if you had told me that water is made of something other than two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen. So, what is going to happen? Instead of apportioning the care by price (whatever the “unfairness” of that), we’ll apportion it to whoever is licking the correct boot (the surest road to despotism I know).
Again: In what way is that NOT a “war on women” (and everyone else not part of the new dispensation)? You scorn Micelle Bachman for warning that there will be “death boards.” But, if you create a system where demand always must exceed supply, what other way is there to apportion the supply of care there is?
8. Absolutely none of this can be covered in any way with the disguise of tricky language — liberty either involves supporting the sovereignty of the will or it does not. As an aside to Rene: A free man (or woman) has the right to contract conditions of employment and the right to hire an agent to assist him; and, if that makes for a “union” then that is not government’s concern, for either side, other than to provide equal justice under law to both (so I really don’t understand much of your objection). I understand Governor Walker’s problem — when you get liberal union leaders negotiating with liberal politicians seeking liberal votes and not caring about costs, inevitably, it’s the taxpayers who get fleeced — but the flip side is that, without a union supporting public employees, whoever else is in office seeking the support of whoever else votes will ignore the laws and stiff the workers (what has been the pattern here in our public schools for almost as long as I’ve been alive).
The world is, indeed, complex Rene (which is why, to understand it, we need philosophy that holds water). The solution to any problem comes not from chanting mantras but by thinking.
9. Nothing in the initial post in any way claims that Walker is a saint or that Republicans (republicrats?) are faultless (I’m a Libertarian, not a Republican, except I switched my registration to vote for Ron Paul, and an atheist, not a Catholic, so I don’t care what Rick Santorum does in his private life). It does appear to be true that more Republicans are interested in personal liberty than Democrats, even if that’s only becasue Republicans want less government generally. So, it is not improper for me to come back at those who twist words to call theirs a “war on women,” especially when the only people really warring on women are people like Warren Buffett, who wants to allow the Democrats to steal more of Rene’s girlfriend’s money.
(I am, of course, assuming that she will become an engineer and will become successful in the highly inflated economy certain to come.)
9. In short, Peter, your objection is ill-spirited as well as juvenile. Yes, it’s your blog, but if with your own insults you’re going to invite opinion which cuts, you won’t be heard to complain at the first sight of yours or your own allies’ blood.
Besides, you need my support to defend your copyrights.
Robert –
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I suppose I will write more later, but for now here is something from wikipedia, from Rick Santorum’s own mouth.
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I think it is very reckless how you Libertarian dudes are supporting a party that is very much opposed to libertarianism in any way, shape, or form, except perhaps in the most narrow economic terms.
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At every opportunity, you guys minimize, apologize for, make excuses for the way Republicans constantly attack personal freedom.
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Almost like a battered woman that can’t be made to come to terms that her chosen husband is an abusive prìçk. Even if Democrats aren’t up to your definitions of liberty, Republicans aren’t any better.
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Here it is, from the rising star of the GOP, and note that Romney or whoever takes the nomination will have to bow to similar forces:
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In June 2011, Santorum said he would continue to “fight very strongly against libertarian influence within the Republican party and the conservative movement.”[155] In an NPR interview in the summer of 2005, Santorum discussed what he called the “libertarianish right,” saying “they have this idea that people should be left alone, be able to do whatever they want to do. Government should keep our taxes down and keep our regulation low and that we shouldn’t get involved in the bedroom, we shouldn’t get involved in cultural issues, you know, people should do whatever they want. Well, that is not how traditional conservatives view the world, and I think most conservatives understand that individuals can’t go it alone…”
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So, by own means, you should continue to undermine your own philosophy by supporting a party that – despite their protestations of believing in small government – are everything you should be opposing. THEY recognize this, but I suppose you’re still useful to them.
I have to go to work, so this can’t be that involved; however, the quickest response would be to point out that Santorum no more will be the nominee than Paul will be, so what he has said in the past at this point is irrelevant. If I switched parties officially to vote for Paul, the only thing you can glean from this is that, come November, I would have voted for Paul (and may vote for him anyway).
The unfortunate condition for libertarians always has been that the choice in November will not be a clear one between liberty and despotism. If people don’t follow my lead and write in a true preference, then the effective choice comes down to one of two flawed men, probably Obama or Romney. So, we have our d’ruthers re whom to put in the office, and not voting at all (especially in Florida) itself is a choice.
Since four more years of trillion-dollar deficits will destroy the country, I suppose in the end one puts a clothespin on ones nose and elects for someone else.
So, if anyone asks your girlfriend why she is running around with an aspirin between her knees and a clothespin on her nose, you’ll know whom to blame!
Actually, I’m surprised no one jumped on me for Wickard v. Filburn, since it’s only a Wikipedia click away. So-called “conservative” justices are more than willing to pull it out and dust it off when it can be used to overrule state “medical marijuana” laws, then ignore it completely when it is used to justify, e.g., regulating carrying firearms on the street.
It comes down to whatever a particular justice wants to do — but that’s just the opinion of an increasingly partisan Court, and the Constitution remains the law of the land, not the opinion of the Court.
The fact is that Wickard can be used to justify allowing the federal government to do anything (under Wickard, you affect “interstate commerce” if you die in a bed in the middle of Texas). If it remains a precedent, it is a precedent for unlimited federal power, which definitely is not what the body of the Constitution allows or ever even contemplated.
The correct analysis is to recognize that Wickard, decided shortly after the 1937 court crisis and at the height of a world war during which the power of a non-elected branch inevitably is at its nadir, simply was wrongly decided and is a sure prescription for fascism some day, even when the alternative is to put up with a bunch of people in California who are stoned out of their minds. I don’t think we are better off with people smoking marijuana, and I don’t think I would support a “medical marijuana” law, but I no longer live in California, and what they do there really is none of my business. Ignore for the moment that California is one of the United States. Standing alone, it’s still the fifth largest economy in the world! I have to presume that its legislature is competent to the state’s needs, and that if it isn’t, sooner or later the people will change it. The federal government should not be involved, and it is a dangerous perversion of “interstate commerce” to say that it can be. If the purpose of the provision were to allow the federal government to align conflicting state laws re commercial endeavor, then the reasonable interpretation of “interstate commerce” requires that there be some actual commerce which actually crosses a state line. The opinions to the contrary from the Thirties and Forties are another of these linguistic perversions.
But, I wander from the primary focus of this post, which (ignoring the insults to Fox News) I grant was more concerned with civil liberties than economic ones. So, I’ll close for now simply by observing that. without economic liberty, there is no civil liberty. If the federal government can regulate you for dying in your bed in the middle of Texas, it can regulate everything else in your house not specifically proscribed by the Bill of Rights.
That’s not the kind of country I want to live in.
N.B.: I’ll be gone a couple of days minimum (think before you write).
Silly me, I thought issues like education, safe neighborhoods and available jobs – just to name three off the top of my head – might be important issues to women as well.
See, here’s the thing: women could concentrate on these issues if they didn’t have to spend so much time defending themselves against Republicans.
And it’s pretty evident that the GOP isn’t interesting in any of those three issues you mentioned, whether by long-standing policy, or by their spending so much time fighting their war on women.
No, Craig. You may disagree with the way they go about it, but the GOP is interested in all of those issues.
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Just a few examples:
A.) Bush signed No Child Left Behind, which Ted Kennedy helped craft, so we could overcome the “soft bigotry of low expectations”
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B.) Look at New York City Before Rudy and After Rudy. The lawlessness that existed seems as far in the past as phone booths
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To be fair, Mayor Michael Nutter has been trying to solve the same problem in Philadelphia, which has seen violent crime explode recently. He has had to take decisive measures, which of course has some accusing him of being everything from a fascist to “acting white”, never mind the fact that a huge majority of those being killed are black, as is Nutter, who apparently realizes that the most basic civil right is the right to stay alive.
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Jobs? Well, Dubya had unemployment at below five percent for much of his tenure, despite the dot com bubble bursting and 9/11.
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And while we’re at it, I may as well include health care. Dubya bucked many on thew Right when he pushed for the now popular Prescription Drug Benefit. His father (and Bob Dole) also infuriated hard-core conservatives with his signing of the Americans With Disabilities Act.
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Heck, as much of a bášŧárd as Nixon could be, he made the “war on Cancer” a national priority, created OSHA, the EPA, signed the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act and put forth a plan for universal health care, which was rejected.
I don’t doubt that SOME Republicans are interested in those things, but it certainly doesn’t come across as part of the national platform of the Republican Party.
I don’t really have a well informed view of No Child Left Behind. I don’t have kids, and it’s never come up in discussions with my mom regarding my youngest two siblings’ educations, as they were still in school when it went into effect.
However, the struggle over education has become completely political. The GOP often rails against higher education: that’s it’s too liberal, that if you can’t afford it too dámņ bad, and that apparently education is just just plain bad for you. This doesn’t even get into curriculum with religion vs science.
But I really see it here at the local level with the University of Colorado in Boulder, where there’s long been a struggle between conservatives who get appointed as regents to the university and what is often viewed as a very liberal university and town.
Violent crime has generally been trending downward in the US for the last 20 years. So, while Rudy deserves credit for taking it head on, it’s been a very positive trend across the country, regardless.
Some cities, particularly Philadelphia and Detroit, you have to wonder if they’re just hopeless. Just as well, we’ve also seen an *apparent* increase in police brutality, lack of regard for one’s rights, and so on. I say apparent because the internet and cell phones certainly make it easier to catch such incidents and report on them.
Also, there’s the South. Higher rates of crime, poorer, lower in education, and often more Republican. Now, I’m not blaming Republicans per se, but again, there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of real effort to improve things in some parts of the country.
As for jobs, the national bubble burst on Bush’s watch. As much as Bush gets credit for the economy, some of that happened under Clinton. So as much as many want to blame the economy (and, well, everything else) on Obama, some of that falls under Bush, too.
The country didn’t do an overnight back flip into the tank as soon as Obama was sworn in. It was already well on its way to the bottom well before the actual presidential election was held. McCain called the economy “fundamentally sound” 2 months before the election, and it was certainly far from it at that point.
But it’s as much philosophical as anything else. The GOP platform seems to think it’s perfectly OK if somebody has to hold two jobs and still can’t make ends meet. If flipping burgers is a career, and not just a job. Sorry, GOP, but not every one can contribute to the ruination of this country by getting a 6-figure job in the financial industry.
And in the end, the GOP thrives on convincing people that all of this is actually good for them. That you too can be part of the privileged if only you believe in pipe dreams.
I forgot about health care. Jerome, if universal health care was such a great idea under Nixon, under Clinton when the Republicans brought it up then, and of course with Romney in Massachusetts, why is it so loathed whenever a Democrat brings it up now?
Apparently it’s good enough of an idea that Republicans have also put it forth at times, yet they treat it like the plague whenever Democrats bring it up.
Either it’s a good idea or it isn’t. I happen to think it’s a dámņ good idea, and I really don’t give a crap which party gets it done. And FWIW, I have problems with Obamacare, as my biggest beef with health insurance is generally with the insurance companies more than anything else. No, we often do not get the best care in the world, and the care we do get we pay too dámņ much for.
Well, a woman’s education would be seriously hampered by an unexpected pregancy. An unexpected kid would be also a finantial burden that could force a family to move to a cheaper neighbourhood., particularly if the woman is forced to give up her job to take care of the zillion kids she could have without birth control. Not all of us are as well-off as Santorum, that can support 9 kids.
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Family planning is vitally important for women, because it’s tied to everything else.
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And that without mention to the health issues that Jerry’s wife alluded to. My girlfriend also took pills for health reasons, even before she met me and sex entered the picture.
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It’s not just the matter of free contraceptives. It’s that modern conservatives have been consistent at opposing family planning as immoral, from preaching abstinence as the only sort of sexual education, to demonizing single mothers, and more.
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And they don’t want to be called anti-women? Okay, how about anti-independent women, then?
I typically call them anti-choice, but it turns out they are in fact pro-choice if it’s a choice of which they approve. For instance, a woman deciding to be a stay at home mom is a choice they absolutely will defend. They just won’t defend the choice to not be a mother.
PAD
Jerome, the problem with the line of thought here is comparing what happens in third world countries to what happens here. It’s not a solid argument to make.
What you’re doing is about the same as someone on the Left piping up and telling someone on the Right to shut the hëll up about high taxes because they could be paying a lot higher taxes if they lived in X country or nation instead of the U.S. When you complain about the high price of a gallon of gas and how much of your paycheck is going to fill up at the pumps, I doubt that you find it very relevant when someone says that you should stop complaining because you’d be paying a higher per-gallon cost in some other countries.
For that matter, I doubt you would find it a fairly intelligent reply by some here if you were talking about what you felt were attacks on the church or Christianity in this country by some groups on the Left and someone were to post that you should consider yourself lucky to live here since in some countries, some of the very same countries that you reference by mentioning stoning a women to death as a matter of fact, you wouldn’t be able to openly practice your faith, let alone complain openly in a public forum about it. Hëll, it might even be pointed out that you wouldn’t be able to access a site like this on the web thanks to government blocks on “subversive” sites.
Sorry, Jerry. You are absolutely correct. My argument was not as well though-out or reasoned as I would like.
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There are times when I reach a point where I’ve just had it and that post was on just such a day.
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It gets frustrating dealing with people who make broad sweeping statements and want to attack me personally or by association.
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I have been called everything from a “ņìggër lover” to a racist to my face recently, because I choose to deal with things on a case by case basis rather than buying into fear from both sides that minorities – especially blacks and Hispanics – are the reason my hometown area has been struggling economically for a while now.
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At the same time, there are issues that need to be addressed both locally and when talking about Trayvon Martin or even that that I don’t like the job Obama is doing. That’s when I’m called the “r-word”.
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It gets tiresome being called a racist, homophobe, misogynist, etc. While I ma somewhat used to it and people being unable to exchange ideas and being more comfortable with name-calling, the constant “War on Women” meme pushed by the Democrats ever since the declaration that Catholic institutions would be required to provide benefits against their beliefs, then the presentation by Sandra Fluke and then her ascension to yet another liberal those who disagree with aren’t allowed to respond to because Rush was admittedly an áššhølë.
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Everyone from DNC’c Debbie Wasserman-Schultz to Juan Williams who works for (gasp!) Fox have staed the “War on Women” as if it is a fact.
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If you disagree, the opinion by a depressingly large segment of the population is that you are therefore part of the war and hate women.
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That is beyond frustrating, so I actually did take particular glee in the fact that Rosen’s statements were used to turn the tables, since it is the Left who has been inflaming people with this “war” in the first place.
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And it is beyond ridiculous that people want to ghettoize my opinions by acting as if I’m a robot who just spews talking points when you know from here and elsewhere that that just isn’t so.
Republican politicians in New Hampshire wanted to roll back domestic violence laws.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/18/new-hampshire-planned-parenthood-funding-domestic-violence-arrests_n_1213208.html
Making it so that a cop will not be able to “immediately arrest” a domestic abuser if they didn’t catch them in the act. The cop would have to go get a warrant in order to make the arrest. And if the domestic abuser violated a restraining order, the three NH Republicans wanted to make it more difficult to arrest the abuser for that violation.
Fortunately, the NH Republican bills were defeated (HB 1581 and HB 1608).
Then there is also what they are trying to do to rape victims.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/04/georgia-lawmaker-redefine-rape-victims-accusers_n_818718.html
http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/01/republican-plan-redefine-rape-abortion
Republicans have a long history of making weird comments about domestic abuse and rape and such in modern times. One of my (for lack of a better term) favorites for quite some time now has been this one –
“Ðámņ it, when you get married, you kind of expect you’re going to get a little sex.” – Senator Jeremiah Denton, Republican, Alabama, speaking out against tougher spousal rape laws in 1981.
It seems to be a mindset carried over from “the good old days” that so many elected Republican officials tell us about.
“The husband cannot be guilty of a rape committed by himself upon his lawful wife, for by their mutual matrimonial consent and contract,the wife hath given up herself in this kind unto her husband, which she cannot retract.” — Sir Matthew Hale, Chief Justice, during the mid-17th century in Merry Old England
Oh yes. Such fine wonderful men. Men of worth, of admiration, and the envy of their fellow humans. No, really … I can’t say enough good things about them. Look at them …
what a picture they make.
Faced with a growing realization that modern women actually have options available to them ~ options that don’t require their presence and leave them out of the equation entirely ~ and, that thought scares the hëll out of these men. Such brave men!
So, they scurry about passing all sorts of laws and what-not to limit or deny altogether pursuit of those avenues of growth for women. All in the name of re-assuring their obsolete selves of some imagined self-worth. Such fine upstanding men!
Elsewhere, these men actively seek to limit the objectives and goals for the female population for fear that they might be upstaged by them and leave the way clear for themselves only. How honorable!
In short, they wanna make sure that the only voice that matters in any discussion is their own. For them, the only way to do that is to make it impossible for anyone to point out to them that they’re wrong from the get-go. How deviously logical of them.
Of course, they don’t want to held responsible for any of their actions ~ blame the other guy! The way they figure it ~ if they say it loud enough and, often enough, they might drown out any objections. Turn the volume up would you please? Methinks, I hear some noise out there.
Seriously, folks ~ look at the right hand … see what it’s doing! Never mind, what the left hand’s doing. Focus on the right hand.
It’s called sleight-of-hand … an old trick to be sure but, apparently, one that still has some use for those adept at finding new uses for the the art. Works quite frequently.
Yeah, women are a big threat all right.
Almost as big a threat as Christmas. Liberals are at war with that, too.
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And kudos to THE DAILY SHOW for assembling a collection of clips from Fox News that have Fox anchors and guests claiming the Democrats promote a “phony war on women” — and follow it with Fox anchors and guests claiming a “liberal war on…” for just about any cause where liberals disagree with conservatives. (TDS has also done a good job showing how Fox News claims liberals whine about being victims or treated unfairly — and then has clips where Fox News plays the victim and claims unfair attacks.)
Yeah, that talking point about how it’s somehow out of line or insulting to label something a “war” while a real conflict is ongoing coming from the conservatives in general and Fox News hosts and guests specifically is hilarious. These are the same nimrods who, during the height of the Iraq war and while things were sliding badly in Afghanistan, ramped up their noise machine every November to fight against the (make believe) evil, liberal “War on Christmas.”
I’d probably laugh more at the stupidity of it, but the stupidity of it is getting too old and worn out to be all that funny anymore.
What would you expect. Both sides are more interested in scoring cheap shots than fairness, but the Conservatives take the cake.
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What I find hilarious is that, really, does anyone not already a diehard Conservative actually believes that Liberals look down at stay-at-home-moms?
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I never met any Liberal that sneers when meeting a housewife. I don’t think such people exist. That sort of hysterical feminist had its heyday in the frikking seventies, for god’s sake.
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Are they that clueless or actually malicious? Do they believe we still smoke dope while listening to John Lennon albums and preaching free love or something?
“I never met any Liberal that sneers when meeting a housewife. I don’t think such people exist. That sort of hysterical feminist had its heyday in the frikking seventies, for god’s sake.”
What’s even dumber about this entire Hilary Rosen/Ann Romney/Stay at Home Moms flap is that it’s completely fabricated in every way by the Republicans. You could only believe that Rosen, let alone Democrats, are heaping scorn on the contributions of stay at home moms if you ignore all facts and context around what Rosen said and accept the Republican narrative as fact.
Mitt Romney was telling crowds on the stump that he knew what women really wanted and were concerned about because his wife reported to him on the matter and told him that they were concerned about unemployment, jobs and other such economic matters and not the stuff the Democrats were discussing, Rosen, in a less than classy way but honest nonetheless, pointed out that Ann Romney has barely had to work a day in her adult life. Work – As in held a paying job outside of the home and would thus worry about being unemployed or having a tight budget on a small paycheck. This gets turned into Romney defending stay at home moms from Rosen’s “attack” on them and trotting his wife out as a stage prop to talk about how she worked so hard to raise their kids.
Except that the fact is that Rosen never mentioned stay at home moms and the discussion on CNN where she made her comments had nothing to do with stay at home moms. The entire “attack on stay at home moms” here is a complete work of fiction by the conservative talkers and the Romney Campaign with absolutely zero basis in reality at all. But, man, are they working it hard for their base.
Throw in the fact that Democrats from the President on down have denounce the idea of attacking stay at home moms (and in Obama’s case, even commenting on a candidate’s family at all) in far stronger and clearer terms than most the Republicans and Conservative pundits denounce the nuts on their side (wonder how Mitt feels about chasing Ted for an endorsement now) and the idea should be totally laughable, Yet I know conservatives that have swallowed it hook, line and sinker and are all on board with denouncing the Dems as haters of the sweet, wonderful stay at home moms like the ones they grew up with.
Of course, if you’re poor, you can only have dignity by putting your kid in daycare and getting a real job.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UySVgRqFE_8
“I never met any Liberal that sneers when meeting a housewife. I don’t think such people exist. That sort of hysterical feminist had its heyday in the frikking seventies, for god’s sake.”
Oh, you should have a talk with my wife. She was a stay at home mom until my kids hit their teens. She was talked down to, criticized, and insulted. At the minimum, the typical liberal response was “oh, I guess that’s ok too” when they asked what she did. There were people that lectured her, and were flat out offended that she chose to stay home. She was told she set back women’s rights, and “the movement”. And of course, I was a villain as well, because I obviously forced her to stay at home with the kids. (When the truth was, I had worked out with my job to be able to work from home, so she could work – it was just that after our first was born she decided she wanted to be at home.)
yeah, but, Jerry, I think you may be also backing Rene’s point to a degree. The way you’re talking about this, it sounds like you’re talking about things that happened a while back. That would still fall under older ideas that are fading out.
My wife is a stay at home mom for our two kids and has been since our the day she first got pregnant with our now five-year-old son. She’s never run into that kind of thing and we occasionally travel in some circles that have a lot of people in them who make me look like a hard right, women hating conservative by comparison. You still saw a lot of it in the 80s and early 90s. You saw a lot less of it as the 90s closed out. You rarely see it now at all.
I’m not that old. This was just over the past 10 years. And in Oklahoma of all places.
I must have been a very lucky guy. I never met these mythical frontline fighter femininists in real life.
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I also never met those women Republicans are always whining about, the ones that supposedly are proud to have had abortions and smugly tell that to everybody they just met in the same tone they’d discuss their last plastic surgery.
“I must have been a very lucky guy. I never met these mythical frontline fighter femininists in real life.”
Well, is/was your wife a stay at home mom? If not, then that may be the reason. It’s a pretty strong sore point with my wife. And as someone who’s been married to her for 17 years, don’t pìšš øff the short, redheaded, Irish woman. She doesn’t tend to forgive anything.
No, my girlfriend is an engineering student, and we’re not married yet. She wants to work after getting her degree.
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It’s good to know she is not with me for my money, she will probably earn more than I do. That was a joke, by the way. If she wanted to stay at home, I’d support her decision.
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To use a cliche, I think people should follow their own dreams. My Mom was a stay at home mom, but bitter about it, like many women of her generation, she felt powerless and stunted in her marriage.
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But, if a woman actually wants to be a housewife, then more power to her.
I’m imagining a political comic where an elephant and a donkey are standing next to an attractive woman, and the elephant reaches out and grabs the woman’s bum, then when she whirls on the pair, the elephant points innocently at the donkey, who’s standing there utterly confused. That’s the level our national politics have descended to.
I live in Arizona, where in the past week, bills were passed that:
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1) Essentially made it so that every menstruating women is considered pregnant.
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2) Made it so that doctors are allowed to lie to pregnant women so that they don’t have an abortion, even if it means that the mother or baby’s health is at risk. (This includes things like ectopic pregnancies.)
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3) Made it so that in sex education classes, teachers can only tell girls that birth the only option if they are pregnant. (Well, birth and adoption. But since adoption requires birth…)
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There was another bill here that was going to make it so that birth control would only be available to women if it were deemed medically necessary. That bill has been pushed to the side for now, but it hasn’t disappeared. None of these bills were proposed by Democrats.
Yeah, I was reading up on some of that the other day. They passed a bill into law that put the date of conception at a date that can only be described as insane; it would have to be almost two weeks before the actual act of sex that gets a woman pregnant. So, yeah, a bit how you put it, any woman walking down the street who is of childbearing age and physically capable to have a child is by definition “pregnant” in the state of Arizona right now. And I’m sorry, but these laws being pushed by Republicans in multiple states that let doctors legally lie to women are disgusting; almost as disgusting as the lawmakers pushing for them.
I live in Arizona, where in the past week, bills were passed that:
Rene, to answer your question above: when you look at what states like Arizona are doing, there’s really no doubt it’s malicious.
I wonder what would have happened had Rosen managed to phrase her statement slightly differently, and said Anne Romney had never worked outside of the home a day in her life.
I’m sure there still would be uproar and stuff, but it would have cut the main legs of the argument being made.
By the way, there’s a spin-off war here. In response to Hilary Rosen’s comments, the official Twitter page of the Catholic League had this to say.
The Catholic League: “Lesbian Dem Hilary Rosen tells Ann Romney she never worked a day in her life. Unlike Rosen, who had to adopt kids, Ann raised 5 of her own.”
So now a branch of conservatives are re-declaring war on homosexuals and now declaring was on adoption? Way to go CL, slag on adoption, adopted children and the parents that adopt them and imply that they’re somehow second class when compared to “real” families that don’t need to adopt kids.
Úšhølëš.
I’ll second that. What a bunch of bull.
That’s no surprise, Jerry. After all, this occurred recently as well:
http://www.startribune.com/local/minneapolis/146031865.html
Yep, a representative put forth by a Catholic school called adopted kids “sociologically unstable”.
And this is along with the other recent stories about how we’re now finding out that the Catholic church pushed for countless women over decades to give up their babies at birth.
Force ’em to be born, then shove ’em aside. That’s the Catholic way!
And another Catholic bishop makes a complete ášš of himself:
Peoria bishop compares Obama’s actions to Stalin, Hitler
http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/04/19/11288862-peoria-bishop-compares-obamas-actions-to-stalin-hitler?lite
I’m also thinking it’s high time that the Catholic Church is forced out of our schools and hospitals and so on until they get their own house – which should probably be condemned – in order.
Picture i found online that shows an answering volley against the right fired by a woman.
(Warning, may be considered mildly offensive as it uses a term for the female genitalia – not one of the common, cruder ones..)
Oddly enough, Mike, I just saw that image myself, and it was attached to the following article:
Reporter Megan Carpentier undergoes ‘unnecessary’ transvaginal ultrasound to frame abortion debate
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/cutline/reporter-megan-carpentier-undergoes-unnecessary-transvaginal-ultrasound-frame-155926605.html
I’d have no qualms with any man who votes in favor of these laws to be forced to endure a penile probe before being able to have sex.
Nah. But i’d definitely require a colonoscopy for viagra prescriptions.
Meanwhile, Jennie Breeden’s take on parts of this controversy.
I like it.
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Jennie Breeden is an extremely intelligent and creative person. One of the highlights when I go to conventions is chatting with her.
You know, as always, I expect this sort of thing from the Repubs. It’s the uninformed masses gobbling it all up like it’s science – and maybe science isn’t the best analogy for that demographic – that drives me nuts.
One of the major reasons I am a liberal, is that the major conflict of our times is pretty clear to me: a free society has religious freedom, but a free society can’t have religious hegemony. And the problem is that what some Christians and a LOT of the Christian leadership really want is hegemony.
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I don’t expect them to lower their heads and just accept that their faith don’t have the kind of power they used to have in the early 20th century and earlier. They will keep hugging to themselves any remnants of power they have.
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And to those who think “secular” institutions rule the world, consider this: if any secular organization had a huge pedophilia cover-up scandal, they’d be history, period. The big churches are the only ones that are so powerful that they can survive this kind of šhìŧ.
So… Penn State isn’t secular?
Define “huge”, John. Penn State was a disaster, but it was one guy doing the abuse, that could have been solved by punishing all of the involved. Compare that to the Catholic Church, with several abusive priests that had no relation to each other, and it appears to me that the problems with the Catholic Church are far more systemic.
There are any number of issues with Penn State, and having rambled on enough in my reply to Jerome, I’m not sure I want to do it again already this morning. 🙂
Penn State is a public research university.
That said, Paterno was Catholic (I’m not sure about anybody else involved), so the comparisons can certainly be drawn there to the priests and how this entire situation was covered up. He was occasionally referred to as Pope Joe, and you can see why.
But obviously it went far, far beyond that. State College itself is a pretty insular community, several hours removed from other major cities. On top of that you also have the culture of athletics – this kind of cover up happened some 30 years ago with the Boston Red Sox, and it’s happened in youth hockey in Canada.
But more specifically, it’s college athletics, where coaches like Paterno are treated as gods. Where it’s protect and defend the program and/or the coach at all costs, truth and facts be dámņëd.
All of these factors contributed in varying degrees.
There is something that connects sports to religion. Both are very tribal and territorial. Both have a sort of “us versus them” mentality.
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Any crime that a member of the team may commit is not really important, and must be covered up by other members of the team. Doing otherwise will only make the team as a whole weaker, and be a gift to their enemies.
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That was the reason Church documents mentioned to cover up pedophile priests. They didn’t want to give ammunition to enemies of the Church. The kids be dámņëd.
Who’s waging war on women again?
http://www.mediaite.com/online/explicit-image-of-s-e-cupp-its-a-fake-in-hustler-magazine-sparks-outrage/
Please link me a site/newspaper that has a comparable image such as this.
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At least Cupp came across well during the interview with Beck.
Would a symptom of a “war on women” be beating the šhìŧ out of a pinata with the face of one of the most powerful women in the country taped to it? And those surrounding the “leader” inciting violence cheering it on?
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Here it is..it actually happened:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DZq2jOscBU
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Oh wait, that’s South Carolina AFL-CIO President Donna Dewitt laying the smackdown to the image of SC Governor Nikki Haley. And the crowd cheers her on for doing so and encourages her to keep it up.
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Haley, in addition to being a woman is of Indian descent, which in today’s political climate would make her “protected” and special> Yet Dewitt’s wielding the bat comes just days after Phil Bailey of the South Carolina Democratic Party called Haley a “Sikh Jesus” on Twitter.
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I tend to think we’ve become a bit too easily offended as a society, but what really pìššëš me off is that you know dámņ well if Nikki Haley had a D next to her name, the media would make this a front page, above-the-fold, lead the broadcast story nationwide. The narrative would be “racist Tea Partiers beating up the female, conservative governor in effigy.
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But nope, Nikki Haley is a REPUBLICAN MINORITY, which to many on the Left makes her less than human and self-loathing. In stories like these, the media likes to cast a victim and a victimizer. In their view and that of many on the Left – same thing! – a woman and minority and who has signed on with the Republicans has automatically chosen to be a victimizer and therefore can’t be thought of as a victim.
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In fact, when she should be seen as a victim, many on the Left see it as mere payback!
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It is almost depressing that this is the case but this has been the m.o. of many on the Left/in the media for decades. What would be front page news for days in a row on the “New York Times” if Nikki Haley were a Democrat will be barely covered.
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Thankfully, this will allow Mitt Romney another day to focus on Obama’s handling of the economy.
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Given all this, no wonder he’s closing his “gender gap” with women:
http://www.redstate.com/california_yankee/2012/05/23/romney-closes-the-gender-gap/