Deeply Fried

MY Poor Wife watches CBS Sunday Morning, which is where the old movie house newsreels went to die, and which, incidentally, as CBS's abiding legacy of Charles Kuralt, is the second greatest monument to polygamy in the country. She does this because there is usually a fine arts segment which she tapes to show her classes. I mean she would, if doing so didn't violate copyright laws. (Seriously. She's scrupulous about that; I think you're permitted something like a one-week time-shift, and that's it.) She still tapes 'em.

And it's not like I'm a young man, or like I don't enjoy croquet, word games, and naps, but CBS Sunday Morning is seriously, pointedly, self-consciously wizened. And one of their regular vaudevillians is a guy named BIll Geist, who's like Andy Rooney without the good material. He's the author of several best-selling books, including The Big Five-Oh! Facing, Fearing, And Fighting Fifty. They are the sort of best-selling book which features the author on the cover pulling a face which indicates his basic, decent, regular guy confusion over one or more of life's little foibles. Perhaps you've read one, on a bet.

It's not like I walk down the street purposely destroying any whimsical yard ornament I see. Live, let live, and give terminal suburbanites whose IQs barely exceed their golf handicaps a wide berth, I always say. But then my Poor Wife watches this show, and it's on in the blasted AM of a Sunday, when going outdoors to escape it is frequently out of the question. And this week, apparently under the impression that Injury requires Insult to achieve what they call on Oprah "closure", Bill Geist went to a Politically Incorrect burger joint.

Yeah, a politically-incorrect burger joint, the Heart Attack Grill in Chandler, AZ, which specializes in the, let's say, massive, theatrically-presented dosages of fat and grease, lard-dipped, fried, and topped with sufficient cheeselike substance to physically camouflage two-to-four pounds of meat underneath shown above. This is known, in the Business, as schtick. When it is done to the exclusion of, or likely, for want of, actual good ideas the practitioner is known as "Carrot Top".

It is, in other words, the business concept of some guy who figured that the joke was good enough that you'd laugh just as hard the fiftieth time you heard it, and that furthermore there were enough people in, or passing through, the vicinity of Chandler, AZ so dedicated to striking a blow against Health Naziism that they'd spend money on this stuff. In this, the latter, we agree that the evidence suggests he's onto something; we are currently in the twenty-seventh year of the notion that saying something--anything, practically--which "violates" the "rules" of the "PC police" is as high as one need reach on the comedy or punditry scale. Although, for good measure, there's the hydraulically-enhanced waitresses in the Hooker Nurse outfits.

So we are not questioning the business acumen on display here; nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the public, as P.T. Barnum, or H. L. Mencken, or Milton Friedman once said. It is, from all appearances, just good old-fashioned hucksterism, and harmless, unless you actually eat the stuff, or care about the aesthetics of the plate, or have reached adulthood. No, rather, we walked into the room just as some culinary yahoo was stuffing parts of one of those treats directly into his gizzard, and were immediately struck with two questions. The first was, "What th' hell happened that the former haunt of Charles "Warm and Fuzzy Americana" Kuralt, the man who drove around the country for twenty-five years, looking for authentic feature stories of the 'Real America', as well as any wives or children he might have stashed somewhere and forgotten?" Do we really find that authentic America in strip malls now, or is it just that they're easier to get to? (The camera work, by the way, and Geist's leering old man knee-slappers, suggested it was, in fact, the nurse outfits.) The second--you may have tumbled onto this--was "How long is pre-packaged 'political incorrectness' going to amuse the easily amused and profoundly shallow?" Hasn't Political Incorrectness pretty much reached the point where it, too, is a series of someone else's strictures imposed on a powerless public at large? If one endures a quarter-century of any and every act which does not further the cause of White Guys Continuing To Run Everything being condemned as "PC", hasn't the mere passage of time set that in stone, too? Unless I eat a stick of bacon-wrapped lard, on a bun, extra cheese, I'm spoiling someone else's fun?

There was one other thing we wondered, namely, "Is Bill Geist gonna say 'You can almost feel your arteries clogging' six more times, or seven?"

Of course the point about "Political Correctness" was always the political; the correctness was pure construct, born of the spurious notion that the nation's colleges and universities were "censoring" "conservative" thought, which, of course, will remain nonsense so long as there are business schools and economics programs, and which, in the particular, was akin to complaining that the nation's symphony orchestras unfairly blacklist the works of Lynnerd Skynnerd. It managed to thrive for some reason, like aerosol cheese, Objectivism, and Chevy Chase, among people who are too lethargic to think things through. It collected petty grievances about warning labels, child-proof caps, and handicapped parking like a serge suit collects lint, and to much the same effect. The Politically Incorrect universe demands you share in the offense of the white male forced to think before he speaks. It has never asked you to share the offense of the people he used to offend with impunity.

Because, of course, it's bullshit. It's a collection of the chips from various right-wing establishment shoulders which happened to click at a time when the Democrats were running around pissing themselves because Ronald Reagan had been named King of America in perpetuity. And because, in all this time, it's those same wingers who are really PC. They're the ones who've talked around what they really wanted to say. Which is why I was amused by the reaction to the Letterman business which accused the Right of "adopting" Political Correctness when it suits them. The fact is that they've been its main practitioners all along, and it's only in the recent, dark days (dark clouds, dim prospects, dusky First Family) they've been driven to abandon it.

But not on a plate.

And Look, If You Kids Haven't Seen Patty McCormack in The Bad Seed You Really Owe It To Yourselves

IN a frankly uncharacteristic bit of schadenfreude, Scott C. sends along two of NatRev's finest--Rich Lowry and Reihan Salam, which is what passes for finery in those parts--jumping on the Daniels 2012 bandwagon.

I have to admit that, when I was a younger man, this is the sort of thing that would threaten to ruin my breakfast. I honestly feel--have grown to feel--the same visceral revulsion to Indiana's Bonzai governor I once felt towards Ronald Reagan, and for many of the same reasons. They're both professional phonies and calculating little public liars, right down to their hairdos. They're both the beneficiaries of blatant, and shameless, rewrites of the public record by their political supporters. They both married Marie Antoinette.

There are distinctions. Reagan, reputedly, had charm, had a sense of humor (not that we all shared it), and probably was able to have sex with women before he amassed a personal fortune. Reagan, almost alone among 20th century Presidents, appeared to love the Pomp, Circumstance, and glad-handing more than he cared for the actual job; Daniels, if he can be said to enjoy anything beyond full-time ego husbandry, seems to prefer the part about telling other people what to do. Reagan was a fabulist; we cannot really be certain what, in his political persona, was genuine, what manufactured, and what a half-remembered movie he might or might not have appeared in. Daniels is a huckster. If you turned off the money spigot he'd go limp, which is pretty much what he was doing before all this Presidential nonsense started. I've had to watch the man for five years now, and aside from Keeping America A Place Where Rich People Can Get Over, I can't tell you a single thing he stands for. He has the soul of a fucking Account Manager. (The man has a two-day jail stint over marihuana possession in his jacket, and there's no indication whatsoever that he saw Reefer as anything other than a high-mark-up commodity with low advertising costs. At least Clinton acted like he felt he should be embarrassed. Daniels--while playing the Youthful Indiscretion Card--yet gives the impression of a man who thinks he was tripped up by some obscure accounting regulation. I'm telling you, kids, you hear a lot of bullshit about the Sixties, but there is one hard, fast rule: never trust anyone who sold weed just for the money. They're the juvenile animal-torturers of Hippiedom.) There are plenty enough Republican economic ideologues who'd be willing to pave over the state park system if there was money in it; Daniels gives the impression he's anxious to do so, and on spec. If you ever hear Daniels pitching Morning in America you can be pretty sure he just got a big donation from Kellogg's.

Of course the big difference is the era: Reagan benefitted from a sixteen-year campaign that finally caught the Nation's biorhythms at a triple low, while Daniels, absent some major Obama fuckup, will be sailing uphill, against a strong breeze, while dragging anchor. This is the principal reason I'm not running from car to car along the highway like Kevin McCarthy in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

And before we delve into The Case for Mitch '12, let's note that his utter cupidity extends to the Republican base. He's got a few wingnut positions down pat, but in large part he's looked at Non-banking Republicans in the state the same way the Big Three Corn Beer Producers look at the average home brewer: as slightly annoying impediments to Profit, with a vaguely suspicious tendency to think and feel things. Rich "Kiss of Death" Lowry:

...more than any other Republican officeholder, Daniels points the way ahead for his bedraggled party. He’s a Reaganite who is not trapped in 1980s nostalgia; he’s a fiscal conservative who believes not just in limiting government, but in reforming it to address people’s everyday concerns; he’s a politician of principle who refuses to sell his program in off-puttingly partisan or ideological terms.

Absolutely right, except for the parts that are completely wrong. I doubt Mitch is "trapped in Reagan nostalgia", since that would require something approaching human sentiment, but he did give that inspiring commencement speech at Butler where he sniped at Baby Boomers like Reagan had his cops do at People's Park; his "reforms", mostly a matter of his first two years in office, have worked wonders, if your "everyday concerns" involve running your television station, finding someone's toll road to operate, or harvesting blocks of state-owned timber. If your everyday concerns involve food, water, shelter, and education for your children, well, not so much.

Finally, a word about Mitch's non-partisan salesmanship, and that word is "Fuckwits". He's a nasty little shit with a four-foot chip on his shoulder, and he's only five feet tall. During his first legislative session, in 2005, at the height of Iraqi insurgency, he called dilatory minority Democrats "car bombers". Honestly, if there's any truth to be found here at all--not that Truth has ever slowed down the GOP--it is, again, that Daniels has no real use for the red meat wing of the party, except as a reliable impediment to sensible environmental regulation. And I certainly understand the wishful thinking there, among the crowd at the Hudson Institute, for a candidate who can win without 'em, but please. If you think that's going to continue two weeks into the actual pre-campaign campaign you're farther gone than even I imagined.

When Daniels took office, the state had an $800-million deficit. He turned that into a $1.3-billion surplus (although it will be eaten into in the current downturn). Since 2005, he has saved roughly $450 million in the state’s budget and reduced the state’s rate of spending growth from 5.9 percent to 2.8 percent. “I tell you with certainty,” Daniels told his Washington audience, “concern about the debt and deficit has not gone out of style.”

Shades of Ronald Reagan. Now, budgets are complicated things, and I'm simple, but here goes: One, that deficit has been growing like the fish tale i' the adage; it was $500 million at the time, now it's $800-900. That deficit was not commonly so described before Mitch started running for Governor. It was the result of shifting accounts and obligations around to make the year-end look better, something which the state had been doing, with Democratic and Republican majorities in the Statehouse, for a couple of decades. We might also mention here that Indiana was particularly hard-hit by the first Bush II recession, the one where Mitch Daniels was director of the White House OMB. That is, then, that he returned to Indiana and campaigned as just the man to clean up the mess he'd helped create. It was the beginning of a theme.

Let us note, too, that we are talking about Indiana, not the Miraculous De-Stalinization of Eastern Europe, although Indiana Republicans tend to view fence-squatters like Evan Bayh as raving Bolshies. State spending is rarely luxurious or wanton, except for the parts you don't like. In 2005, with Republicans in control of both Houses and Daniels' campaign promises in their ears, the GOP froze state spending for two years across the board. They set about defunding state programs, leaving them the responsibility of local governments. In other words, when it came, say, to education, the state said, "Instead of working from a projection of how much money we need to accomplish our goals, we will simply freeze budgets, leave school districts to either make up the difference (in property taxes) or make cuts, both of will which occur at some remove, and then we trumpet our budget balancing." And it's a great accomplishment, assuming that's what you think governments ought to accomplish.

If you happen to differ, though, it's about as much of an accomplishment as leveling a tablespoon of flour is. Daniels sold off operation of the Toll Road for 75 years. Maybe a good deal, maybe not; in the absence of any extreme occurrence either way we'll have to leave that one to the distant future. An entire generation of Hoosiers yet unborn will grow up, learn to drive, grow old and die without ever getting to vote on the thing; we think they ought to decide on its success, after the money is accounted for. So far, part of it went into the slush fund that rewarded Wealthy Whitestan for its permanent Republican majority, and let it inflict roundabouts no one else wants on what was once a state highway, and a big chunk of it will go to building I-69, which environmentalists have fought my entire adult life, and which'll be great if you're a Canadian eagerly awaiting completion of the NAFTA highway, or if you're one of the nearly dozen people who've been complaining that the drive from Evansville to Indianapolis takes too long. You live in the smallest state west of New England!

Again, I'm no economics expert, but I know a thing or three about Indiana. It's not like our Democrats are chomping at the bit to run up the sort of debt Mitch oversaw at OMB. Hell, in most parts of the country it's not like they'd even be considered Democrats. No President is walking into Washington with a bag of flour, a measuring spoon and a ruler. God knows none of the Republicans we mistakenly elected over the last quarter century did so, or even made a halfway decent pantomime of it. Salam, brother:

One thing I find interesting about Daniels is that he was not very effective in the Bush White House, where his deficit-hating impulses were apparently checked by more powerful voices, he's really come into his own as governor. When he first came into office, he called for a tax hike on the most affluent Indianans. Though the surcharge was never passed, Daniels played against type and demonstrated his seriousness.

Okay, one, this is your second time touting Miracle Mitch; perhaps if you were actually doing the work you'd have learned by now that we're Hoosiers.

My god, how well the habits of Reagan hagiography have passed to a new generation! Daniels' spent thirty months at OMB, which were marked by the opposite of deficit reduction. In fact, they were marked by a new definition of The Opposite of Deficit Reduction. He wasn't there as an economist. He's not an economist. He was there as a manager. If his fiscal principles were being trampled by higher-ups he should have resigned earlier.

In fact, his budget-cuttin' persona as Indiana governor can be seen as an attempt to ameliorate his real record of service to his country. That "surcharge on the wealthy" business--please, get the news directly from an Indianan!--was practically the first thing out of his mouth, shocked the hell out of me, and lasted maybe all of two weeks while, predictably, his own party went ballistic. It is notable as the first, and practically the only time Mitch Daniels ever backed away from something his Enormous Brain had come up with (he did, with every other privatization scheme underperforming and/or mired in scandal, eventually give up on his hopes of selling off the Lottery, but that was never actually proposed; it stands in the same relation to the Toll Road sell-off and the Family and Social Services scam as On To Damascus! did to the neo-cons' war, namely, proof positive that all this is mostly just magical thinking).

It's possible he miscalculated; his very early tenure as governor betrayed an almost total innocence of the legislative process, though, as it turns out, this was just his ongoing belief that he could just point at things and cause them to burst into flames. It's also possible that the whole thing was calculated (as I suspected at the time) to present the image of Mitch Daniels, man with Demonstrated Seriousness! Jeez, taking a Brave but Doomed Stand in favor of something you know will never happen, thereby eliminating any chance you'll be shown up, is in the fucking libertarian-economic Republican DNA. Of course it also gave him an out on cutting programs, the Only Other Way to reduce the "deficit". And it's also notable as the last time he Seriously! proposed raising any sort of tax except the ones that have other people's fingerprints on them.

So look, kiddies; we understand your wish to be on top, your need to operate without oversight, and your desire that your clothing never go out of style. We are not concern trolls here, so we'll save the lectures about the difference between real change and finding someone who apes it, especially seeing as how the latter worked for you for so long. There's almost nothing we'd enjoy more than seeing The Mighty Atom out on the national hustings, calculating how much he needs to pander to the base without going Full Metal Mitt. One never says never, but my fellow Indianans and I have seen Daniels in action, and the way he suddenly lit up when the spotlight turned on him ought to clue you. This is not a Presidential campaign. It's another one of Cher's retirement tours.

Funny Thing Is, Come Here, Boy Is Said To Have Been Her Best Trick, Too

Caption: First Lady Nancy Reagan with First Dog Rex, a Cavalier King Charles spaniel, on the South Lawn of the White House, 1986. Courtesy of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.

A Cavalier King Charles spaniel. Wow, that's unexpected. What were they originally bred for, rounding up dissidents?

Fun With Matrimony, Television, and Heroin, Vol. VIII

SO the Poor Wife and I were watching the idiot box, and one of those Deeply Caring Pharmaceutical Giant commercials comes on, this one for Alzheimer's, which is, in a way, the Cigarette of illness plugging, since they've got to get to you while you're still young, though of course the scale has slid. And so the suitably grey-haired but not superannuated woman is missing her keys, and just can't remember where she might have put them. The matter obviously troubles her deeply. Husband is informed. Husband opens the refrigerator. Keys are inside. Knowing look at helpmeet, still addled. Cue piano.

DR: So that's where I left 'em!

PW: Well, at least there'll be a light on when you go looking for them.

(And look: I rarely lose my keys, anymore, because for the first twenty years of my driving career they could be anywhere. My glasses are a little different story (though still much better than my youth) since I occasionally take 'em off outside for close-up work--I'll never get the hang of bifocals--or put 'em on the wrong shelf when I take a shower, and they'll stay lost until I retrace my steps. If only I would lose things in the fridge! At least you're guaranteed to look in there six or seven times before bed.)

Local news returns, with a story warning parents that their children could be on the smack! It's illustrated with a still of a twisted-off corner of a baggie, filled with white powder, beside a shiny Roosevelt dime.

PW: What's that dime doing there?

DR: It's for scale.

PW: What scale? You mean if you found an ounce and a half of white powder in your kid's pocket you'd decide it was nothing, because the bag was too big?

DR: Okay. Then it's metaphoric. It was a dime bag.

PW: So, what? they couldn't work a horse into the picture too?

(Which reminds me: the news hairdos also notified us this week that Bayer, once a proud member of the fine IG Farben family, was sending samples of its new powdered headache reliever through the mails, so listeners were instructed to relax their steady Homeland vigilance for the nonce, as it is trumped by the Profit Motive. Besides, being so tense all the time can lead to headaches and muscle tension, and where would you turn? These are the same people who went full metal apeshit over shampoo bombs a couple years back.)

Olio

• I Knew He Was Going To Say That: Surprising, no? that the nets didn't bother to invite any spokesmen for the nation's White Supremacist or Holocaust Denying organizations on air to renounce the Museum murders? To declare themselves Dedicated to Peaceful Change? What a difference one little week can make. Instant Karma, dudes. Check the recent history of the Republican party. You didn't think that was possible either, did you?

Of course it isn't all that recent, is it? The Reagan Miracle collapsed about as quickly as it was enacted, and it didn't take long before David Stockman had to admit the whole thing had been a conjurer's trick, something which came as an enormous surprise (not the conjuring bit, but the fact that there were some people out there who needed to be told). How many times--and how severely--were you burned by the Bush administration? I'm not asking when the accumulated levels of Obvious Bullshit will reach the point at which you feel desperate enough to start telling the truth, rather than shaping it, because we already know the answer is "Never". I'm just asking how you do it, personally, and how you still manage to look in the mirror, which for some of you must be eighty times a day. I do not believe, at the upper levels of network news, e.g., that everyone is that stupid. Nor do I believe that, in 2009, you're still afraid of right-wing emails, or still believe Zombie Dick Nixon will slink out in the middle of the night and revoke your Press privileges.

Then again, what was absolutely identical was the announcement that police think We've got a Lone Nut here! which, again, ran what must have been concurrently with them going through his pockets for the first time. It's incredible, and I mean that literally. I happen to live in a city where the murder rate exceeds the national average by a sizable fraction, and I never hear that about local snuffs. The cops haul in anyone in the general vicinity of a suspect, and when it's a Red Ball it's arrest 'em in time for the local news, then kick 'em in the early AM when you hope no one's looking. People are arrested for driving a vehicle that half-matches a partial description the cops got from an eighty-year-old glaucoma sufferer down the block. In the big feticide case last year (pregnant bank teller shot during robbery) they had about fifteen people in custody at one point, none of whom turned out to be involved, and the news hairdos were still spinning out everyone's alleged roles after they'd been cut loose. They nabbed two high school students because they were trying to sneak back into the nearby school which had been locked-down while they were off larking. It may very well be that these were Lone Nut cases, but instantaneously is not the time frame when that should be decided.

• All This Blather about the Consequences of Gay Marriage, Not a Word about the Nineteen Years and Counting of Public Cock Sniffing: Terry McAuliffe loses a Virginia primary. "Thank God. The Clinton era really is over, innit?" sez Sully. "One big loser was Bill Clinton, as the McAuliffe loss will be seen (rightly, mostly) as an echo of the Clinton loss and another blow to the Clinton brand," sez Ben Smith. "McAuliffe Loss Wraps Clinton Era," shouts the National Journal. These are your professional political pundits, folks, and welcome to 'em. Although this did provide a moment's merriment, when my googling took me to the Booman Tribune, where a similar-themed rant prompted AliceDem to ask, "Which didn't you like, was it the peace or the prosperity?"

Here's HuffPo columnist and Obama anal protuberance Jacob Heilbrunn:

McAuliffe epitomizes an earlier era, when political success translated into quick financial gain. He is redolent of the sleaze that permeated the Clinton presidency without any of its redeeming aspirations. Somehow McAuliffe parlayed a $100,000 investment in Atlantic Crossing, the forerunner to Global Crossing, into $18 million. As chairman of the Democratic National Committee, his only mission was to raise funds rather than devise a new political mission for the party. It has fallen to President Obama to stake out a new course that combines electoral savvy with genuine idealism.

Good Lord; Terry McAuliffe made money on the internets in the 1990s? How is it he's not still in prison?

Fer chrissakes. Is Terry McAuliffe a sleezy operator? Sure. Would I vote for him for governor of my state? Depends on whether he was running against Mitch Daniels or not. Would I throw him out of the Democratic party? Well, it's neither my party nor my problem, but if it were I'd damn sure be more circumspect about whom I called "redolent".

Krishna H. Vishnu, do you fucking whippersnappers think the Democratic party was lily-white before Bad Billy Clinton came along? It wasn't. It was dirty and mired in a national losing streak--to, may I remind you, the Fucking Psychopaths of the Republican party--that gave no signs of letting up. Was he my choice for President? Only in that I voted for him twice. Only in that he was preferable to four more years of the hind end of the Reagan administration, followed by eight years of J. Danforth Quayle. Get a pre-paid phone card and call somebody who knows. You fuckin' fucks trot out "sleeze" and "NAFTA" and "welfare reform" because you heard somebody else say it. We're not yet six months into the Genuine Electoral Savvy and Idealism regime. Has President Obama done nothing you've disagreed with? If so, you're an idiot. You think it took "electoral savvy" to defeat the Republicans in 2008? Really? What do you think it took to defeat the ass end of Reaganism, at a time when the Repugs threatened to regain Congress with every election? Pah. Bill Clinton wasn't my Dream Chief Executive, either, but then neither did I think he was the one-eyed snake of America's Fall from Grace. Then, or especially, now.

Just out of curiosity, any of youse guys remember who Sully supported for President in 2000?

• Oh, and sorry we missed that Legislative deadline: Despite crossing paths twice last week with Bonzai Mitch we never could quite work in the Final Solution to Indianapolis' little negative $45 million problem with the Capital Improvements Board (Motto: "Public Funding for the Private Good"), which was a real corker. At that Daniels 2012 photo-op last week the Mighty Atom stood next to Mayor Gomer Pyle, USMC, and depantsed him without anyone in the audience noticing. After prefacing the thing with a "The mess this man (Gomer) inherited..."--delivered, with a straight face, by the man most responsible for said mess--he proceeded to announce the (proposed) elimination of the Board and the gentle folding of its portfolio into the Marion County Building Authority, creating a new entity which would now have a minority of its members appointed by the mayor, as opposed to the old CIB, which was pure local hog fat.

The real treat--it's no trick for Mayor Pyle to act like he doesn't understand what's going on--was how suddenly two consulting firms which looked at the CIB operations noticed that it seemed to cost an order of magnitude more per revenue dollar generated to operate these facilities in Indianapolis than anyplace else the consultants could locate on earth. You didn't see this before? The recommendation now is for $27 million dollars in expense reductions for an operation which was only $30-some-odd-million in the red before the Pacers demanded $15 million in concessions, or else they're gonna go shoot up some other town's strip clubs.

No word yet on whether the discrepancy will trigger an investigation by the Inspector General young Mitch required the Republican legislature to create for him in 2005, the better to root out corruption in previous Democratic administrations. In fact, there's been no word on the Inspector General, well, ever, since the office was used to knock off a couple of skimming State Police officials the week after it was created. For all we know the man may be dead in there. And the other thing was that, if anyone happened to notice that the solution to the CIB problem bore a distinct resemblance to the Daniels-orchestrated takeover of the Football Barn Construction Program, itself a major cause of the red ink, they were too polite to mention it. This is Indiana.

• The Last Extra Mile: Can't leave without mentioning how truly moving the coverage of weepy ex-Chrysler dealers was, particularly coming from the same fucking people who were demanding massive restructuring and union give-backs what seems like thirty minutes ago. Indiana, of course, was smack-dab in the center of all this, being the claimant seeking a Court stay, as well as having Chrysler plants and associated businesses idled, and dealerships closed, so it was interesting watching local news use national feeds to cover the story, rather than, y'know, putting their choppers to use flying over to a closing car lot and talking to someone themselves. The single exception was the face-time given state treasurer Richard Mourdock, the suit behind the suit. Now that the state has gotten, predictably, nothing out of the deal but the $million-dollar price tag for legal fees, Mourdock's making the rounds saying he was legally obligated to file the suit--maybe; I dunno--and how he was never overruled on a single point of Law! The operation was a failure, and the patient died, but damn!, Dick, nice shiny set of scalpels.

Onion

BING! Finally there's a search engine for the Zune Age!

Olio

• When Ross Douthat makes more sense than you do, on a social issue, no less, it's either time to give it up, or time to keep your job at Slate: The Gray Lady's youngest columnist evah [caution: face mullet] pens a column on abortion which actually, sorta, kinda, a bit backhandedly, sure, manages to approach the issue as it is (a matter of Constitutional law), acknowledges that there is some counter-argument out there to the idea that Abortion is One Big Contraceptive Lark for procrastinators (which is to say Ross simply tries to pawn an Ace or two, as opposed to Saletan stacking the deck before dealing them to his straw adversaries), and goes the whole 750 words without referencing that Gallup poll. Someone once noted that Patience was that virtue we admire in the driver behind us, but not the one ahead, and if so, Douthat is still a tailgater, but he's not swerving madly from side to side while blowing his horn incessantly while caught behind a half-mile of traffic. Then again, he doesn't write for Slate.

Still, the Right's legal mythos apparently cannot be cast down the stairs if it still clings by age 25 or so; it's interesting how often people who claim that whenever the courts expand (personal) rights they are acting in loco senatorium yet believe the solution to this is achieving a legislative majority on the Court:

If anything, by enshrining a near-absolute right to abortion in the Constitution, the pro-choice side has ensured that the hard cases are more controversial than they otherwise would be.

Standing Truth on its head does have the advantage of allowing weasels to see it eye-to-eye, but, alas, this never has the desired effect. Let's try this again: had laws criminalizing abortion been properly, i.e., Constitutionally, formulated in the first place there would have been no Roe, because access to abortion was a fundamental (i.e. Constitutional) right unjustly taken away without the bother of the amendment process. By rights it would have been your side, Ross, which was agitating for judicial legislation. Go argue with the 19th century.

One reason there’s so much fierce argument about the latest of late-term abortions — Should there be a health exemption? A fetal deformity exemption? How broad should those exemptions be? — is that Americans aren’t permitted to debate anything else.

Oh bosh. The reason we argue over late-term abortions is that in forty years it's the only place where your side gained enough traction to assert some measure of (judicially sanctioned) legislative control. The anti-choice movement may be conflicted, confused, and/or dishonest about much of the issue, but it is not notably constrained by considerations of the trimester in which the Murder takes place. In fact, it is constrained only by internal political considerations from adding Contraception to its list of felonies.

The result would be laws with more respect for human life, a culture less inflamed by a small number of tragic cases — and a political debate, God willing, unmarred by crimes like George Tiller’s murder.

Know what, Ross? You broke it, you bought it. The GOP had a quarter century to make abortions illegal, it had twenty-five years to limit the debate to the third Trimester, and it had two-and-a-half decades to put anti-abortion terror organizations in prison. No middle ground will stop those people. Your people.

• I'm sorry, but must coverage of the sentencing of Eula Lee and Laura Ling make the debate over Who Lost China sound rational? Brutal regime? Check. International ploy, ulterior motives, bad actors on the world stage? Okay. But does applying all this by the trowelful make it more truthy or something? Is impotent railing supposed to make people feel better? I surely don't mind, but it does ring hollowing coming from the same bunch that peddled the rationale for the Iraq war, pushed paid Pentagon shills as non-partisan experts, and, to this day, presents Dick Cheney's continually-shifting liefest as one side of a national debate. One-way skepticism is the mark of religious conviction, not accurate reporting.

• Then there's what they are good at, which, locally, means shilling for Miley Cyrus appearances. I am too old to give a fuck, of course, except for a few philosophical questions: Is that what you went to college for? Given that it's the worst imaginable sort of commercial ipecac, and at the service of the soul-destroying Disney Corporation, which could survive very well without your free plugs (ABC is gettin' paid, sure), and, given that the average American likely believes in Jebus, angels, astrology, UFOs, Biblical cryptograms, Oprah, or psychology, making it odds-on that at least some of you imagine there's some psychic payment for all this to be collected by someone somewhere down the road, is there any shit you wouldn't eat off a plate, on air, for a dollar? And since you do this sort of thing day-in, day-out, with no recently recorded suicides, do you have someone else shave you, or do you still trust yourself with a razor? This last applies just to the men, plus one of the women.

The worst, though, was opening up the virtual front page of that virtual newspaper, The Indianapolis Racist Star and Shopping Guide to see the following headline hanging over the byline of the guy who occupies what used to be the pop music critic's chair:

Miley tickets will cut out the middle man.

Which, of course, one reads just to find out what sort of distortion is taking place, since the idea that "Miley Cyrus" would go to war with Ticketmaster is about as likely as "Johnnie Walker" turning Prohibitionist. Turns out, of course, that in the universe of Six Helpings of Turd Each Day! Ticketmaster is not a middle man. Ticket brokers are the middle man, and Ticketmaster is God's Own Sword of Just and Equitable Concert Prices for the parental ATMs of consumer-goods addled tweens.

Ticket scalping is legal in Indiana, except when the NCAAs or some other supra-legal organization comes to town to rent one of the stadia we maintain for 'em. Then it's suddenly illegal within whatever radius the city decides to enforce. Similarly, the point of this exercise has nothing whatever to do with fairness, and everything to do with PR; it's all about unleashing hordes of zombielike consumerettes on hapless parents, then tossing a few crumbs for them to fight the pigeons over. You think Ticketmaster's gonna thwart brokers from buying up the first six rows for Creed, or Crue Fest 2, if they want 'em?

And I fuggin' love ticket brokers, since there's about one event every three years that catches my attention, and I know that if I'm willing to pay 2/3 of face value for a single fucking Eagles ducat the Poor Wife an' I'll be sitting right up front. Surely now is an excellent time to teach mindless tweens a little something about Supply and Demand? Even if it's too late to teach their parents the value of contraception, or boarding school?

Common Ground On Abortion, Achieved! Invite Only People Who Agree With William Saletan!

William Saletan, "Let's Make an Abortion Deal: Four recommendations for Obama's common-ground talks". June 4

THE biggest problem with Applied Hyperreality in politics isn't people who operate on their concepts as though the concepts were the reality. The biggest problem is people who do so without recognizing, or acknowledging, the difference.

And the entire debate over "Abortion" in this country--even that rubric it is subsumed under, courtesy its opponents--seems an exercise in mass dismissal of hyperreality at work.

Exhibit A is this from Meganjane McArdlegalt last week (and yes, I realize that proving a point about hyperreality by using Meganjane is like winning a bass contest with a store-bought fish):

To change the outcome, a pro-life political coalition would have to gain a supermajority in Congress for twenty years--long enough for a few liberal justices to die in office.

In other words, whatever else is responsible for the Brownian motion inside that woman's head, she appears to have come within shouting distance of middle age believing that reproductive rights have the same relation to the Law as wide lapels have to men's fashions. (That was just one sentence in a 1300-word piece, all of which competed for that same place of honor. ) We leave the Reader to figure out the implied theory of US government, or how she came by it.

Is there an issue so mischaracterized, so (willfully) misperceived, in domestic political life? Our Galtette's notion that it's a question of "Congressional supermajorities" being just one example. Roe is the godmother of right-wing issue shaping. It wasn't the first (New Deal, Cold War, Civil Rights, Vietnam); it wasn't even the first to be successful (the fight against the International Communist Conspiracy, actually started, and continually refueled, by Democrats and other centrist middlers; the right-wing version, with Commies under every bed and in every local water treatment plant, had its successes, but was on the whole a tougher sell). The political advantages the GOP achieved by becoming the party of Overturning Roe Now (Whenever Democrats are in Power)! have informed a generation's worth of message management by misdirection and judicious applications of raw meat.

Opposition to Roe, with its ready-made constituency of the self-appointed morally superior, the guardians of a Truth that surpasseth understanding and frankly, gets a little pissed off at having to bother with explaining things to the rest of us, was in many ways the template for a "conservative" resurgence: the tyranny of the Elites, with their snobby rejection of everything the Real America stood for, especially Jesus; the Golden Age of America, located somewhere between the end of Reconstruction and the election of 1960, now Lost, thanks to misguided liberalism; and especially the notion that the government had been hijacked by liberal jurists "writing the law instead of interpreting it." This was wildly successful, in terms of winning elections, of altering the debate over the nature of the relationship between the citizen and his government, and largely eradicating the troubling tendency of the domestic economy to aid citizens across all economic strata. The two things it did not accomplish, for some reason ("Congress strategically blocks change," sniffs McArdlegalt, ever mindful of the danger a high-school civics-level understanding of how government works would pose to her libertoonian cred), were the alteration of Roe or the discovery of a philosophical foundation for that "Originalist"/"Textualist" structure they'd already erected.

And so again we turn to the Saletan Crusade, and again we note that he somehow seems to imagine that the debate is not between opponents of reproductive freedom and Constitutional law, but, rather, between supporters of reproductive freedom and The Controversy Over Abortion, which they must answer. (Again, the why of this is never explained; it's either because we are honor bound to cede the high moral ground to the defenders of Life, or because of a single answer on a recent Gallup poll--contradicted by an explicit support for abortion rights left unmentioned--or else because Saletan thinks so.) Note also that abortion opponents needn't argue the Law. They just have to argue with Saletan's more reasonable position.

Meanwhile, at the White House, Obama aides have convened meetings between pro-choicers and pro-lifers to seek "common ground" in the abortion debate. Already, the two sides are sniping in the press and refusing the simplest concessions.

Surprising, and a tad disappointing, since this President's post-partisanship has already resulted in as many as three national Republican figures admitting that he may not be Satan incarnate after all. Of course, none of them is a current office holder.

It's an interesting concept, innit, that the search for common ground begins with both sides granting concessions? Then again, this is Slate.

1. Abortion reduction.

Here Saletan launches into the tale of Wendy Wright, president of Concerned Ladies Against Women, enduring the ignominy of attending a meeting at the White House which was--the gall!--chaired by a member of the President's own party:

Melody [Barnes] testily interrupted to state that she had to correct me. "It is not our goal to reduce the number of abortions." The room was silent. The goal, she insisted, is to "reduce the need for abortions."

Good Lord. Suppose this notion of the party that wins elections setting the agenda takes hold! And here's Saletan:

No ordinary person sees a difference between reducing abortions and reducing the need for abortions....Yes, in theory, "reducing abortions" can be used as a rallying cry for restrictions you oppose, whereas "reducing the need for abortions" can't. I see your point, and I've argued it before. But most Americans and the politicians who represent them have been simultaneously uncomfortable with abortion and with government interference in abortion for a long time. A semantic concession won't change that.

Now, let's see if I've got that straight: unlike you, Bill Saletan, most Americans, who apparently appointed you their spokesman when 635 of their fellows answered a pollster's question last month, don't see the distinction; therefore, the side which actually wishes to uphold the distinction should abjure it, the better to reach an agreement which benefits the other side. An agreement which, might we add, it doesn't need and which would have no practical effect, other than, in this instance, to make one side of the argument out to be disingenuous because of the language some group at a seminar accepted in its name. Have I got that right? 'Cause I seem to be experiencing some trouble with my inner ear at the moment.

So lemme ask this: if you're so convinced that "right-to-lifers" don't actually believe their own rhetoric, wouldn't this be a good time to insist they drop the word games they've been playing since 1972? Are they talking about reducing abortions, or are they talking about making contraception a crime? Frankly, that's the side that could use a lesson in the value of straight talk.

2. Contraception. Dear Dr. Land and other pro-life participants: You say that life begins at conception and that millions of unborn lives are stake. Back up those statements. Decide whether you're going to be anti-abortion or anti-contraception.

Okay, so, again, it seems to me that #1 was an ideal place to clear this up. Let's talk instead about your own "majority", Mr. Saletan. Where, exactly, do you stand? You keep referring to abortion as morally repugnant, without giving us any clue as to what, other than your own squeamishness and a gratuitous reading of some poll, that's based on. When the time comes to pin that down you cower behind "government interference". Both sides do your grunt work so that you can stand in the middle and berate them for refusing to join you. Where, exactly, is the line drawn and what, exactly, is it supposed to be dividing? If you really do wish to reduce the number of abortions performed in this country, what's stopping you? Surely not the Law. Surely not a lack of consensus or a poor choice of terms. The fact is that this is precisely what's gone on for forty years on your side, not something New: charades. Lip service to Life, no long lines waiting to adopt minority children with two heads. Lots of tears for defrosted embryos, nothing but opposition to welfare, food stamps, public education, universal healthcare, or living wage legislation. Cough up, Saletan. How many unwanted children share your condo and eat out of your fridge?

3. Extremism.

Dear Ms. Page and other pro-choicers: Imagine some lunatic going to Kansas and murdering the head of a pro-life pregnancy center. Imagine reading in the newspaper that the pro-lifers you've been meeting with are now reluctant to "make nice" with you because, they say, the murderer is part of your "family." You would go ballistic, and rightly so. Please show the other side the same fairness you would expect.

Funny thing about that hypothetical: it's never happened. Meanwhile, anti-abortion violence is commonplace. If Dr. Tiller was the first physician murdered in the name of Life, or even the first "collateral" casualty, and if you could demonstrate that the Right to Life movement's extremist rhetoric and forty year history of shrugging its shoulders in response had nothing whatsoever to do with it, you might have a point. But you don't.

Lemme ask a question: have we ever seen the Lone Nut Theory so quickly deployed or so cynically applied? Is there an Official Timekeeper somewhere ("Lone Nut? Sure, go ahead. 56.4% of Americans will think it's the first time it's ever been used.") ? Telling people to shut up about systematic violence aimed at accomplishing what you can't by legal means is morally reprehensible. And the easy dismissal of Right-to-"Life"'s ugly track record in this regard is a prime example of why no one should trust you in the first place.

4. Financial purism.

ban on funding reproductive health groups that perform abortions is too much to demand. If you want to fight direct funding of abortions, fine. But the indirect funding Obama restored is hardly radical.

And again, cough up. You're the majority, after all. All you have to do now is get everyone in that majority on your side.

Mitch "The Shovel" Daniels, 2012

“A lot of upper-income people that I saw vote for him, it was a luxury purchase in the sense that it didn’t seem a threat economically, there was the history of it, there was the natural desire for change after a period of poor results,” Daniels said.

“Quite honestly, it was a fashion-statement vote for some people. I’m not disparaging that. People wanted to demonstrate enthusiasm for a society that could elect an African-American president.

“Not sure how that holds up over time,” he said.

---Mitch Daniels, speech to the Hudson Institute, June 2, 2009

quoted by Syliva A. Smith, Ft. Wayne Journal Gazette

SEVERAL indomitable observers of Hoosier politics have begun to suspect that Indiana's Bonzai Governor Mitch Daniels is either seriously considering a run for the Republican Presidential nomination, or has already begun one, now that he's solved all of Indiana's economic woes.

It is, of course, what used to be Hot Stove League time in politics, when you could blather about such things without fear of anyone remembering what you'd said when the time came. But with this new internet thing an' all, it's a 24-hour/ day news cycle, and the campaign never really ends, or even hibernates. Still, opinions are tempered with the knowledge that the first requirement is raising money, and that The Candidate has to decide to run, something that used to involve considerations of the national media looking into your actual record, but now is mostly a matter of checking for dead hookers or live catamites that might be lying around loose. Daniels' team has pretty much been vacuuming up his record as he went along, like one a' them fancy woodworking tools that hoovers the sawdust right off the working edge. This is what they learned from the Nixon scandals, and how they spent the first seven years of the Reagan administration, before they had to drop all offensive operations and concentrate on keeping everyone who wasn't in prison already out.

(Here, by the way [caution: it's that Salon "Ask a Wingnut" column, penned by "a former Bush official" who, fittingly, refuses to use his real name. As is only sensible. Evidently, Camille Paglia can't keep up with their demands for copy. And hell, I'm not sure even Camille could top this for egregiousness] is a prime aged example:)

...Reagan was, to borrow a phrase from Lady Margaret Thatcher, "a conviction politician." He operated out of a set of deeply held beliefs that governed his view of the world, of morality and the presidency. Unlike Nixon or Clinton, Reagan's concerns about public opinion were addressed in the way he dealt with issues and crises, not whether he dealt with them at all.

I'll give you a couple minutes if you want to catch a quick shower.

Anyway, no speculator claims certitude, not at this point, but there are a few curiously-timed co-inkydinks. Mitch went Whack-a-Mole immediately after the election. He kept his head down while his former employer bailed out Wall Street criminials, and he stayed down when the question turned to the Big Three automakers, despite their prominence in Indiana's economy. The only thing he had to say about the Obama stimulus package was, "We'll take their money," signally a) that he's not joining the Silly Secession Movement, not if it means denting his own carefully-crafted record, and b) he's still as indifferent to Federal deficit spending as he was when he headed the OMB. He's AWOL for Indiana's legislative session, despite the fact that it must pass a two-year budget, and he turns up at the very end to torpedo the one that might pass with a veto threat, so he gets to call a Special Session and blame the legislature for its "failure to get its work done". Then a "special request" revenue projection through 2011 (that request was, um, I've got it here somewhere--oh, yeah, Mitch Daniels') shows the state $1 billion in the hole, instead of the mere $750 million down predicted in January. This is supposed to trigger sticker shock, and total acquiescence to The Shovel's recipe of budget cuts, despite the fact that, a mere 25% ago, he could barely be bothered to look at the thing.

And it's just about this time, just when he's as far out of the woods as the tangled underbrush of Indiana's economy will allow, that the remnants of the once-proud Right Wing Noise Machine start touting him as Presidential timber, and he winds up as the cover boy for "Conservative" Tiger Beat. And suddenly he's everywhere, like in the first two years of his first term, when you couldn't remodel a J.C. Penney's without budgeting in a ribbon for him to cut. And suddenly he allows as how maybe, just maybe, he'll let the legislature take a peek at a quarter of the state's Rainy Day Fund, which just a couple months ago he was calling untouchable on the grounds that Things Could Always Get Worse. (This, to my knowledge, was Daniels' first foray into epistemology, or at least the first where he didn't happen to have The Answer handy.) And 25% of the Rainy Day Fund just happens to roughly equal $250 million, or roughly the additional amount his second audit turned in the deficit. Problem solved!

[It suddenly occurs to me that "Because Things Could Always Get Worse" would make a great Daniels campaign slogan.]

And Daniels also, suddenly, became Horatio at the Bridge over a 2% increase in education spending (he's for it), despite the fact that that increase was practically the only one in the budget he torpedoed a month ago. And yesterday (majority) Democrats walked out of a budget hearing because Daniels is trying to claim credit for that 2% increase by adding in $400 million in Federal stimulus money.

And this, really, is our point: politicians spin the truth. Politicians say things that aren't quite so. Politicians lie. But few of them, in my experience, lie so boldly, so gleefully, with such dedication to self-aggrandizement, nor with such depressingly predictable regularity. This is the template for practically everything Mitch Daniels has done as Indiana's Bonzai Governor. He lied about the budget "deficit" he "inherited". He lied to local governments about Time Zone changes in order to pass Daylight Savings Time. He withheld feasibility studies on the sale of the Indiana Toll Road. He accused Democrats of having balanced the budget with accounting tricks, before he balanced the budget with different accounting tricks. He abdicated responsibility for the looming Property Tax explosion scheduled for 2005, then lied about whose responsibility it was. And the man who uncorked this one, at the Hudson Institute this week:

He recalled Ronald Reagan’s caution that “we have no enemies, only opponents. We are all Americans, after all.”

Is the same little man who called Statehouse Democrats "car bombers". For that matter, he's the same guy who said in that very same Hudson Institute speech:

“The meanest people in American politics are on the left, bar none. No conservative I know can hold a candle to sheer outright meanness. Of course, that comes from believing that power is everything and winning is the only thing that matters, which we do not believe."

And of course we should remember that Ronald Wilson "Bloodbath" Reagan wasn't much troubled by the obligation listen to his own advice, either.

Here's Meddle More Attractive

Indianapolis Racist Star:

Police kill dogs after attacking woman on the Far Southside

MY recollection is that the flashbacks started Saturday, and followed close on the heels of my watching a two-minute snippet of Woodstock, which I probably ought to mention right off the bat is a movie I've never seen more than two-or-three minutes of at a time, partly because there was one idiot in high school used to drive us nuts playing Hendrix' "Star Spangled Banner" over and over, and mostly because I didn't give a shit (not that I wasn't a teenaged concert-going freak). Plus, even before I could drive, was pretty well convinced that the bombing jet planes were never going to turn into butterflies above our nation, or any of the nations they were then bombing the shit out of, with bombs, not Love droppings. My chronology might be a little confused, but only because I wasn't really paying attention to either the flashbacks or the movie.

The half of the screen I was half-watching featured a Hippie girl. We have dealt with the etymology before, and might just again, but for now suffice it to say she was wearing a headband, which, unless you can demonstrate a tendency to perspire at clinical levels, or an imminent, or recently concluded, athletic endeavor in which you participated, makes you a Hippie. And she's being interviewed about nothing, which is what you would interview such people about, although it's theoretically possible they were discussing something important and I was just watching the other half of the screen at the time.

Any road, at one point the interviewer said something to her about "taking it on blind faith", to which she replied, "Blind Faith? I know they're a groovy group."

Now, sure, there was a sort of deer-in-the-headlights thing going on all along, but the distinct impression I got was that she was attempting to blow off the interviewer and his, like, linear, L-7, 15th century theological constructs. Which would have been entirely sensible (though it would have been even more sensible to tell him to Fuck Off in the first place), except for the attendant problem, which is that you just fucking called Blind Faith "groovy".

Okay, for you kiddies, Blind Faith was the "first supergroup", which was a concept looking for someone to give a shit, and that someone wasn't me, any more than it will turn out to be you. Steve Winwood (ex-Traffic and one the the world's great soul singers) sang and played keyboards; Ric Gretch (who quit Family for a chance to be a log in this crap pile) played bass; Ginger Baker, ex-Cream, continued banging on percussive instruments and my nerves; and Eric Clapton played God. It was, in essence, not the transference of the aesthetically successful All-Star concept from professional sports to music, but the first Giant Rock Star wank, and it survived for one bad album which merely proved that Winwood could sing, Ginger Baker banged on things, and that tremendous, even occasionally transcendent guitar technique did not mean you had musical taste, something Clapton would go on re-proving for the next quarter century. Oh, and that the public had no taste, either, since the thing went to #1. Plus, Americans had never heard of Family. Nor would they.

Now god knows bad taste is common enough; what was odd about that exchange is that I don't recall ever hearing someone use "groovy" in everyday speech, and I knew people who said "Far out" often enough to make your ears bleed, which is more than once. The only people who ever said "groovy", to my knowledge, were extras on Dragnet '67, and, for some reason, songwriters; the fact that Paul Simon was able to continue earning a living after "The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy)" is a testament to just how long a culture can sail without a rudder.

And then I was in the garden, and the disembodied but still bow-tied head of George Eff Will was spiraling around me saying something like, "the inarticulate tribalistic lowing of the most cosseted generation in history, clad in its workman's denim, the uniform of non-conformity", and then his face melted into snakes an' skulls an' shit.

Or maybe it was just that half-week spent arguing Abortion with the men's choir from the Cathedral of Whomever the Patron Saint of Profound Disingenuousness Is. I know it was a fool's errand, but Doug Masson had quoted me on the fact that abortion was everywhere legal in this country from the days of English settlement until after the Civil War, and by the time I dropped by two or three commenters had replied that that was "based on 150-year-old science" and that as we now knew, scientifically, that Life begins at Conception, the whole concept was officially debunked. Really. Imagine arguing in that crowd that, seeing as how 19th century German theologians had shown the Bible to be an error-filled collection of Bronze Age folktales, all that First Amendment Free Exercise stuff was moot. Instead, I did what you might have done, had you a similar degree of poor impulse control: I demanded one example from the scientific literature. One guy in the back coughed up a series of pull quotes from junior-high biology texts.

(There are Wheels within Wheels, and Sideshows within Sideshows; a comment I'd made about the question belonging to Metaphysics, not Science, returned the comment that I "was projecting my personal confusion" on the issue, as though if I'd said something about Quantum physics it would have proven I knew less about the matter than Aristotle did. "It's a Metaphysical question," says I. "Fine. Just tell us when you think Life begins," came one reply.)

And then, of course, the next morning someone guns down Dr. George Tiller in his church, and the first I hear of it (local news, playing incontinently in the living room) Dr. Tiller is described three times as "the controversial abortion doctor", and coverage devolves from there: the Kabuki of rabid anti-rights groups denouncing both the murder and the victim, the former proving their complete lack of involvement for all time, and the latter just how "controversial" the issue is; the practically instantaneous announcement of Welp, Another Lone Nut from the Wichita PD, which had to take place while they were still searching his belongings; and the 100% disinterest of the White House Press Corps, which, to be fair, did have an entire evening's worth of entertainment vouchers from the President's night out in New York to pore over. All accompanied by Archbishops, Slate columnists, and other professional prestidigitators lying about a public opinion poll to the effect that, well, you gotta admit, the Public clearly thinks he had it comin'.

And...curtain. End of Act one.

I haven't seen Will again, and I'm pretty sure those voices saying, "Hell, if George Tiller, MD, had just been a cute young blond girl the Teleprompter readers would be demanding to know why the WPD hadn't hauled in half the state for questioning" were, in fact, my own. And sure, I'm just a cockeyed optimist, but I believe that you can't close the books on such things with impunity any more, or pretend that these people aren't terrorists, or that the murder of a real live person is justified because somebody shouted "Murder" through a bullhorn somewhere. Just bear in mind that the days of dog-killing cops assaulting women are rapidly drawing to a close. It's a brave new world that has such people in it.

Blind Pig Finds Shit-Covered Acorn. Oh, And More Shit. Lots More Shit.

William Saletan, "Tiller's Killer: Is it wrong to murder an abortionist?" June 1

"TILLER'S Killer"! I swear to god. I'm not a prudish man, nor a decorous one. I'm not even particularly housebroken. But a gratuitous playground witticism as the headline of a piece about a murdered man who is yet on the same side of the grass as his wife, children, and grandchildren? Whose habit of breathing regularly he shared until sometime after he got to church Sunday morning? Booth's Truths! Ray's Days! Heydrich's Old Tricks! Christ, the piece isn't even about Tiller's (alleged) killer, not that that would be any excuse. Tiller's Killers we would accept, provided that was the actual point of the thing, and provided you considered, at least, an indictment of yourself.

Exhale! O Reader, for no such indictment is contemplated. In fact, one thing one learns, or at least receives a refresher course in, during a week's breath-wasting with proponents of state ownership of fecund uteri--few, by the way, seem to imagine the state need take any interest in the welfare of any other lady parts, or shoulder any responsibility for the Withered or the Sere--say, at brave Indiana blogger Doug Masson's place--or in reading Saletan himself last week, for that matter--is that self-styled anti-abortionists operate from the purest motives in the history of disputation. Even those, like Saletan, who are willing to compromise their principles in the dim hope they won't have to see any more icky protest posters:

If abortion is murder, the most efficient thing you could have done to prevent such murders this month was to kill George Tiller.

Well, like the old saw has it, Kill an abortion provider, and he won't provide any more abortions. Teach a man to kill abortion providers and he might be able to keep going until the Republicans get control of the FBI again.

Let's start here--no, amend that; Let's start here, you lying schmuck. Doctor George Tiller was medical director of a Women's clinic, one of the few in the country willing to provide Constitutionally-protected abortions after the second trimester. Such services are rare and difficult to obtain precisely because of the forty-year terror campaign conducted by people who, just like yourself, are convinced that their metaphysical notions trump the law, and who imagine they are thus justified in preventing their fellow citizens from coming to the opposite conclusion. Their methods of persuasion include harassment, deception, fraud, high explosives, and the ever-popular shooting and running. Dr. Tiller faced these people down his entire professional career, until an agent of Jesus' will on Earth ended it. He did not deserve the sneering, cowardly suggestion, from the likes of you, or even people in honorable professions, that he ran a late-term abortion mill because he had a defective moral sense compared to the average online journalist or other raging psychotic.

To me, Tiller was brave. His work makes me want to puke. But so does combat, the kind where guts are spilled and people choke on their own blood. I like to think I love my country and would fight for it. But I doubt I have the stomach to pull the trigger, much less put my life on the line.

Bill, that question has already been answered. A better one is how you manage the guts required to urge your government to send other people to do it.

The people who do late-term abortions are the ones who don't flinch. They're like the veterans you sometimes see in war documentaries, quietly recounting what they faced and did. You think you're pro-choice. You think marching or phone-banking makes you an activist. You know nothing. There's you, and then there are the people who work in the clinics. And then there are the people who use the forceps. And then there are the people who use the forceps nobody else will use. At the end of the line, there's George Tiller.

Look: no one who behaves like a 9-year-old suburban princess confronted by an older brother with a handful of earthworms is ever gonna make it through the first year of med school, so perhaps having one assess the mettle of those who do is a pointless exercise. "But that would make William Saletan puke!" is an argument against treating gangrene, too, or the massive head trauma suffered by people you helped send to Iraq. I mean, to the extent it's an argument at all, which is to say, none.

Tiller's murder is different from all previous murders of abortion providers. If you kill an ordinary abortionist, somebody else will step in. But if you kill the guy at the end of the line, some of his patients won't be able to find an alternative. You will have directly prevented abortions.

That seems to be what Tiller's alleged assassin, Scott Roeder, had in mind. According to the Washington Post, Roeder told other pro-lifers that he condoned deadly violence to stop abortions. He admired the Army of God's "Defensive Action Statement," which endorses the murder of abortion providers on the grounds that "whatever force is legitimate to defend the life of a born child is legitimate to defend the life of an unborn child."

It's a funny thing about that argument: the first paragraph posits a special position held by the late Dr. Tiller as a late-term abortion provider, but the second--the one that contains, oh, the actual comments of the alleged killer, I guess you could say--makes no such distinction. I suppose we can reject as out of hand the suggestion that Saletan's distinction is designed to reinforce his own position, seeing as how the other eight confirmed "anti-abortion" murders in the past sixteen years, plus the seventeen instances of attempted murder, targeted anyone from physicians to security guards to escorts. But those were different.

Of course, hanging the wrong man will deter crime just as certainly as hanging the right one will, as ol' Doc Shaw once noted.

Is that statement wrong? Is it wrong to defend the life of an unborn child as you would defend the life of a born child? Because that's the question this murder poses.

Really? 'Cos to me, that's the question the "Right to Life" movement has been posing, via bullhorn, since around your third birthday. And they've got the answer, too, Bill (surprising, I know). Differs slightly from yours, there, as we noted, in that they're willing to absolve all such murders, no matter who catches the shrapnel, while you hide like Hamlet in the arras, waiting for one more to your liking.

Peaceful pro-lifers have already tried to prosecute Tiller for doing late-term abortions they claimed were against the law. They failed to convict him.

Which in other circumstances--frequently those not involving legal proceedings involving people we want to harass--is known as being found "not guilty". It just never occurs to you people that taking the law unto yourself is a terrible idea, does it? Even when you're cosmologically certain.

If unborn children are morally equal to born children, then Tiller's assassin has just succeeded where the legal system failed: He has stopped a mass murderer from killing again.

Gee, what a remarkably fair and dispassionate way to frame the "argument".

Of course, Saletan does so in order to present his own position as the reasonable compromise. But without ever explaining to us how not murdering people who "take Life" via abortion is any more consistent.

Let me tell you something else I was reminded of at Doug Masson's place: the remarkable number of presumably white, presumably "conservative", presumably-Middle-Americans who vehemently opposed the Dred Scott decision, and who vehemently objected to Plessy. And I was but a lad during Dr. King's career, but it's funny; I seem to remember the struggle taking a lot longer, and costing the blood of brave men and women--and innocents--just to get to Court decisions and Federal legislation which were then routinely ignored or skirted. You'd think with all that native, deeply-felt support it would have gone a lot smoother.

So is Roeder getting support from the nation's leading pro-life groups? Not a bit. They have roundly denounced the murder.

Right. Which proves they're all Simon Pure in motive and in deed. Also that they refrain from hiring public spokesmen who tend to blurt out things. At least most of 'em do (see Terry, Randall).

I applaud these statements. They affirm the value of life and nonviolence, two principles that should unite us. But they don't square with what these organizations purport to espouse: a strict moral equation between the unborn and the born.

Okay, fine. We're agreed.

The reason these pro-life groups have held their fire, both rhetorically and literally, is that they don't really equate fetuses with old or disabled people.

Yeah, I knew it couldn't last. Tell you what: let's look for those missing keys under the streetlamp. Because, for one, the light's better, and for another, this time that's where they're lying.

Now maybe, just maybe, these groups, and by extension your political party, Mr. Saletan, earned a tidy income in money and votes for forty years with this one issue which public and philosophical consistency would have threatened. Contraception is precisely the same as abortion to the Catholic who confirms this century's Church teaching, but Condoms are Murder! would have split the movement in twain. You never heard contraception raised as a national issue until well into the Bush II administration, when the powers that control such things figured they had a permanent majority in hand and could start restricting access. The minute you nailed down movement leaders on charging doctors, or expectant mothers, with Murder, and anyone else remotely involved as accessories, you'd'a uncovered some remarkably, oh, nuanced views of Life. When did a Roman Catholic bishop ever threaten to excommunicate a politician for insufficient dedication to banning contraceptives?

So let's suggest an alternative: these people believe something which is, at best, beyond rescuing, logically or philosophically, and many of them believe precisely as you suggest they don't, or cannot: they believe a blastocyst is indistinguishable from a middle-aged woman, save that it has rights they seek to protect, and they're willing to use deceit in the interim if they think it furthers the cause. And more than a few accept that argument about justifiable murder, too (but wouldn't accept it as an excuse for gunning down an executioner, a warden, or the cop doing traffic control). Which, yes indeedy, does abnegate their "moral" arguments, but not accidentally or without recognition. Not at the top, anyway. It just underlines the scam.

They oppose abortion, as most of us do.

The only thing worse than a liar is a liar armed with a poll. Most people agree.

The people who kill abortion providers are the ones who don't flinch.

Really? 'Cos they seem, almost uniformly, to run for the hills afterwards, assuming they weren't already in the hills when the bomb went off, and threaten anyone who stands in their way, as Tiller's killer did the fellow Christians who stood between him and escape. These people aren't John Brown. They're self-righteous criminals who've appended themselves to Christianity. If it were Wiccans or astrologers who were ambushing physicians we'd see how quickly reproductive freedom "became" a civil right.

If you don't accept what he did, then maybe it's time to ask yourself what you really believe. Is abortion murder? Or is it something less, a tragedy that would be better avoided? Most of us think it's the latter. We're looking for ways to prevent abortions—not just a few this month, but millions down the line—without killing or prosecuting people. Come and join us.

S'funny; I could have sworn you just found a surefire way to prevent abortions, aside from that squeamishness of yours. Oh well, the internal consistency of the law muddles through, somewhat, despite people like you. Such is Life. Meanwhile, remember to ship your unwanted children to Bill Saletan, c/o Slate. He knows just what to do with 'em.

(Typo fixed, with thanks.)

" You're Either With Us, Or With The Terrorists." --George W. Bush, former-Something-or-Other

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.