Dr. George R. Tiller
August 8, 1941 – May 31, 2009
I DON'T fucking want to hear Operation Rescue denounce the murder, or the killer, or assert its devotion to peaceable public expression. It's a big-money concern with a big PR problem; it should pay to distance itself from its own rhetoric, not wait for the phone call from the Timesman. (And what, exactly, do we expect them to say? I do not know this man of whom you speak!) Nobody's accused them of anything. At most some have noted nothing more than the public record, that a man they publicly hounded as a murderer for decades because he provided Constitutionally-protected medical services winds up shot to death inside his own church in an apparently politically-motivated act. Two entirely separate things.
I don't fucking want to hear the Wichita PD saying "it looks like the act of an isolated individual" while the victim's on a slab at the morgue and his body temp's still 94.5º. Even if it proves to be true, I want to hear that there is, at long last, some awareness that the federal government turned a blind eye to an interstate terror campaign in the 1980s, and some determination that it not happen again. Else let's just sever the remaining threads the Global War on Terror still swings from, and admit the whole thing was just for kicks. And votes.
And don't get me wrong; I'm not saying that extremist rhetoric=complicity in whatever violence is done in its name, or its vicinity. Quite the contrary. That was the Bush administration, as approved by large numbers of our fellow citizens. What I am saying is that if your rhetoric softens at the first real application of heat and light, then maybe it's not exactly made of stone to begin with.
And let's say this again, and say it like it's the first time: the best thing we can do for the Right, and its Multiple Identity Crises, and for the religious one-issue agitators who can't seem to grasp, let alone engage, the legal issues involved, is to begin demanding they answer the hard questions about their own positions, and stop giving them space to throw the same old shit at everyone else. You know what the man said about the Borgias, the Swiss, the Renaissance, and the cuckoo clock.
10 comments:
OK, OK, you're far better read than I. Please, O wise benevolent one, what DID the man say about the Borgias, the Swiss, the Renaissance, and the cuckoo clock?
--LittlePig
No reading involved. It's Orson Welles' speech from The Third Man.
HARRY LIME: Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
Perhaps the wickedest truth on screen.
I don't want to have a dialogue with these doctor murdering bastards. I want police protection for doctors, clinics, employees and women. I want the sons of bitches to understand that a constitutional right is just that. Equal rights for women means birth control for women and sometimes that means abortion. And when a woman needs a late term abortion to save her life so she can live and may be live and raiser her other children, she gets one. Or she can deposit her children on the steps of the Supreme Court and let those living the "intellectual feast" of the law raise them.
Watching Randall Terry be oh so concerned for the cameras while denying involvement but doing the dog whistle code implying approval is beyond disgusting.
Keep talking Terry; the more people see you on TV, the more people will associate you with this crime. Which is as it should be, you complicit hatebag.
the federal government turned a blind eye to an interstate terror campaign in the 1980sYes, but surely they made up for it with their vigorous pursuit of Operation Pipe Dreams in 2003. Credit where due, eh?
So, it's ok to maim and kill babies (actual ones, not Unborn Children, so shut up about that) so long as somebody in the family paints really, really well.
(The line was Welles's interpolation, not Graham Greene's text, and ISTR that Welles preferred for people not to identify him with the opinions of the vile character he was portraying.)
Now I understand Operation Rescue's PR problem, which fortunately one that Scaife money can fix: they are just plain damn lousy at art!
Oh, BTW, Harry was also factually wrong, of course. They also produced Calvinism as part of their program of sweet peaceable niceness, which involved burning people at the stake for heretical views. Harry's teachers probably thought only Catholics did that, and basically approved of it.
in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the RenaissanceIf you're only going to credit the Swiss with a modern invention yet go way back in the mists of time to credit the Italians, that's half the story.
We should include Fascism, Mussolini, crappy cars (Ferrari exempted), crappier planes, a history of unstable governance, as well as cheap wine.
For the Swiss, Harry forgets chocolate, banking, privacy, and while he wouldn't know this, Army knives and Swatch.
Oh...and there's that little thing...when the Pope needed a bodyguard, he didn't pick the Italian army, did he?
As sometimes happens, Mr. Riley has gotten a few steps ahead of me. Is Conservative Ascendancy Since Reagan being equated with the Swiss or the Italians? I don't associate them and their philosophy with either stable order or with free-swingin' artistic creativity. It's more like they oversaw the worst of both of Lime's alternatives: the murder and bloodshed and the lousy organization on the one hand, and on the other, a pinch-anused determination to sit on any form of non-standardized expression.
Or am I wandering around the wrong block altogether?
Li'l Innocent
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