SPEAKING OF RU 486 [Ramesh Ponnuru]
Judicial Watch's report on the topic has a lot of eye-opening information, but the letter from Ron Weddington, the co-counsel on Roe v. Wade , to President-elect Bill Clinton is especially worth checking out. It's on pages 61-64.
A sampling:
[Y]ou can start immediately to eliminate the barely educated, unhealthy and poor segment of our country. No, I'm not advocating some sort of mass extinction (sic) of these unfortunate people. Crime, drugs and disease are already doing that. The problem is that their numbers are not only replaced but increased by the birth of millions of babies to people who can't afford to have babies. There, I've said it. It's what we all know is true. . . .
I am not proposing that you send federal agents armed with Depo-Provera dart guns to the ghetto. You should use persuasion rather than coercion. . . . You made a good start when you appointed Dr. Elders, but she will need a lot of help. . . .
[G]overnment is also going to have to provide vasectomies, tubal ligations and abortions. . . . There have been about 30 million abortions in this country since Roe v. Wade. Think of all the poverty, crime and misery. . . and then add 30 million unwanted babies to the scenario. We lost a lot of ground during the Reagan-Bush religious orgy. We don't have a lot of time left.
We don't need more cannon fodder. We don't need more parishioners. We don't need more cheap labor. We don't need more poor babies
Now of course these sorts of sentiments aren't shared by all or even most supporters of legal abortion, but I suspect they are more widely thought than voiced.
Posted at 9:02 PM
Not shared by all or even most supporters of legal abortion. I guess that's the sort of keen insight and knowledge of your subject that gets you a book deal, huh?
Twit.
Y'know, you could walk outside the NRO offices and interview the first 100 people you see, and I betcha the most sophisticated psychological trap wouldn't catch too many people even thinking about eugenics, crackpot or otherwise, and it it did I'd put it at even money those thoughts were thunk by an abortion opponent, as their political commitment to life begins at conception and ends at birth.
Really, Ramesh, go pleasure yourself repeatedly with a thatch rake in a hot airless room. And that's an idea I voice more than think, and I suggest others join me.
But first...
Maybe the party of Obscure Kerning Samples could learn not to jump quite so far so fast. (In case you're interested, you can download the .pdf file here.) The letter from Mr. Weddington, which Judicial Watch apparently considers a "relevant document" fills the last four pages.
I wrote Mr. Weddington at his law office last evening asking whether he claims authorship. So perhaps we'll learn, and in the meantime, well, you read the "sampling". Only a low-grade commerical liar would try to pass that thing off as representative of anything other than some insane ramblings someone sent to the President. Maybe that's what they are. But at the risk of sounding like the Powerline boys on a corndog and Super Squishee bender, there's at least a few reasons to think for a moment:
1) It's a photocopy.
2) It's undated and without an inside address.
3) It addresses the President-elect as "Dear President-To-Be Clinton" (comma).
4) There are no typist initials.
5) The attitude ("hey, just between us liberals, we know we need to use RU-486 to decrease the number of poor people") looks suspiciously like it came from the same book of templates as the Anthrax Letters and the Jon Benet Ramsey kidnapping note.
6) Both Judicial Watch and Ramesh Ponnuru are trying to make hay out of it.
Is it a fake? I have no way of knowing one way or another, and that's just to debate which sort of meaninglessness it belongs under. I'm only suggesting that it gave me pause, and I wouldn't be staking a whole lot on its authenticity--unless I had no reputation to lose anyway.
I wouldn't be surprised if the document is authentic—there are quite a few folks who harbor these sentiments about the "barely educated, unhealthy, and poor segment of our country." They are usually called conservative and they only differ in proposed solutions to the problem. Hell, this is the kind of thing that a Bill Bennett or Dick Armey or a David Duke could wing in public without breaking a sweat. Remember all the right-wing talk about how welfare only encouraged black baby machines to just churn them out one after another in order to collect a bigger check? Or the loud disdain voiced by Reaganites about the innate immorality of the poor. Cutting state welfare payments to below subsistence was the only Christian thing to do to stop them from having more babies, or at least starve the hell out of them once they arrived. Thank god the Party of Death didn't get their hands on them.
ReplyDeleteOf course, now that the fundies advocate making birth control illegal, the "problem" will only require more drastic solutions. Thank the lord that we still have folks like Bill Bennett around.