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.

Sunday Blogging To The Choir

ROY spotlights a Derbyshire entry at The Corner which quotes "a reader" sounding off on Judge Sotomayor's taking unfair advantage of her gender, heritage, circumstances of birth, and Ivy League credentials, to the detriment of a hardworking white woman from a state school in the High Plains. For the record, on the question of whether she's a figment intended to hoodwink, or merely ten pounds of metaphor in a two-pound bag, I believe she was not intended to be taken as real. On the other hand, I suspect Derbyshire invented the emailer.

Here "she" is, for the record:

Show me a Montana girl of un-useful ethnicity who put herself through law school waiting tables, after being left with two young children when her Army husband was killed overseas, and I'll start oohing and aahing over her compelling story.

So my first response, as I said a Roy's, was fine, another example of how little these guys know about the "real people" they limn; alternately, it's a cautionary tale about packing your mythical heroes with every bunting-draped attribute in the Reagan Anecdote playbook in the belief that doing so makes the case Black and White, you should pardon the expression. The seam side goes down! If it's not the first rule of Rhetoric, it's certainly the one you need the most work on.

Of course, such a person would never ever end up on any President's short-list, no matter if she graduated first in her class at her non-Ivy institution, no matter how extreme the intelligence and dedication and hard work she displayed over the subsequent course of her career. That's simply how the world — and especially the legal world — is constructed today.

Let's pick at a few random loose threads. Our victimized jurist must be white--apparently the bootstrapping African-American judge considers Hispanics a sort of subset of Big Affirmative Action, and is assuaged, or has found her nest feathered sufficiently that her story cannot compel your Derbyshire correspondent--but also female, since we have to pretend we're not simply reheating the same old can of White Male entitlement. This, though, raises the question of why our WWF is not embittered by the pair of White Male Ivies George W. Bush appointed to the Court. Since Reagan appointed Sandra Day O'Connor to the Court (a campaign promise), Republican Presidents have named six Justices, all male (five white, one Clarence Thomas). Reagan had one rejection and one withdrawal, both white males; Bush II nominated Harriet Miers, who was immediately shot down by his own party. Democrats, in that period, have now nominated two women and one white male. So you're gonna resent the nomination of Sotomayor in those circumstances? Peculiar standard.

Part two of her Accumulated Grievance Index apparently requires single motherhood, which she shoulders with gritty self-reliance. Of course the Reagan playbook dictates that she can't be a single mom through popping out lil' responsibilities without benefit of clergy, nor can she be shortchanged by a deadbeat father (Baby Daddy being a dark-hued term, and alimony a form of nanny-state appropriation of one's Hard-Earned Money; this thing is taking a lot of work for a couple of simple paragraphs, unless it all comes naturally). So daddy went missing in the War. Which makes her triply-put upon, since dirty hippies probably spit on his flag-draped coffin on the tarmac, at the expense--as some wag noted at Roy's place--of making our college-educated wife almost singularly unaware of the military death gratuity, VA pension, extended medical and dental care for herself and her children, Defense Department-sponsored survivor benefits, low-cost student loans and grants, as well as work/study programs which would have allowed her to find a less menial job more in line with her career path.

If the conversation would then be turned by people claiming that still, Derbyshire might have a point! however odious, as they themselves had experienced doors closed due to preferences for women or minorities, Riley would have none of it. It's a curious feature of all those ersatz Reagan arguments about that ersatz America he claimed as their previous address and his followers seek to return us all to: each one is distinct and sharply-edged; I think the academics use the term sui generis. Welfare sapped the souls of poor folks, but welfare for multi-national conglomerates created jobs. Smaller government equalled Freedom, except for Defense budgets. Deficit spending robbed our children and grandchildren, except when Republicans did it, so long as they remained popular. It's interesting that the original, legal argument over affirmative action--My test scores were higher!--has now become axiomatic. Meaning it conveniently applies whenever anyone other than a white male is selected for anything, so long as the thing is perceived as having some political benefit. Since when is the Court a meritocracy? We might tout the Court as the nine best legal minds in the country, if we are explaining the thing to preschoolers or feeling particularly perverse that day--surely no one who's read one of Justice Thomas' opinions can really believe it, just to use the easiest example. Presidents aren't required to nominate the best legal mind in the country anytime an appointment comes up, even if that could be quantified somehow. (Jeff Sessions--Jeff Sessions!--now tells us that Court nominees ought to be neutral!) Presidents nominate someone who fits their view of jurisprudence, and, presumably, one with a chance of surviving the confirmation process. You'd suspect that if anyone understood this it would be the American right, which has spent forty years trying to find anyone it can convince with its argument over "Originalism", and is now apparently racing against time to assure the rest of us that it's incapable of understanding anything at all. All I can figure is they're working on some sort of insanity plea.

If the Republicans left in the Senate can mount a purely political challenge and persuade enough Democrats to join in they can block the nomination. If they believe the "reverse discrimation, reverse racism" routine will do that, they're perfectly free to try (and please do). So how is addressing our unspeakable history of racial and gender discrimination unfair even on the face of it? You get your chance to reply.

Well, I mean "unfair in other than in the Reagan Anecdotal sense?" of course. It's a standard which only applies in certain circumstances: academia, Democratic Presidential appointments, anecdotal blue-collar or middle-management hiring practices in unnamed organizations are all subject to charges of reverse racism when white men don't get their way. I don't recall anybody calling Meg Whitman (former eBay CEO and staunch Republican) an affirmative action hire, or the product of preferential treatment for Ivies. I don't remember that when George W. Bush named Ricardo Sanchez commander of ground forces in Iraq one of Jonah's emailers wrote that there must be some Scots-Irish general officer somewhere who'd worked his way through West Point baling hay and now must be crying himself to sleep. I don't remember any of 'em demanding Washington draft a slow white-guy running back. Okay, except for Limbaugh. What I do remember is the bizarro-world crowing that the first Bush II administration was the "most diverse in history" and that anyone who called Colin Powell a liar or Condimelda Rice an incompetent proved that liberals are the real racists.

Whazzat you say? That's different? Sports teams, like business concerns, look only to hire the very best performer at any position? Take it from somebody who watched the Colts try to decide between Payton Manning and Ryan Leaf: there's more to it than that. It's not a matter of who scored what on the Wonderlic, though god knows we're addicted to putting big numbers on un-quantifiable experiences and pretending we've ranked 'em objectively. It's a goddam cliché that teams look for chemistry, that the veteran player who's lost a step may be a better fit than the rookie flash. Why wouldn't a faculty, or a particular field, desire diversity? Supposing your new ("new"--we've been trying to correct four-hundred plus years of injustice for almost forty, now--) geology department head or law school prof is only 98% as good as some rejected white male candidate? Suppose that by showing women, or minority students, that the doors are open you wind up recruiting someone who's 10% better than her testosterone-wielding counterparts?

I'm not saying that we've found the key that unlocks the stall to the Magic Flying Rainbow-Tailed Pony of Reasonableness. I'm saying the opposing argument is a jury-rigged white-male-supremecist argument that succeeds only when it's allowed to set the rules for the debate, and rule on the admissibility of evidence. That side went too long without real scrutiny, and as a result it's gone from Can't Carry a Tune in a Basket to today's profound deafness. Short of photographs turning up of a naked Sotomayor spending a relaxing afternoon at Michael Vick's dog park, she's the next Supreme Court justice. Oppose her how you will. But maybe you could save some of that "creative" energy to come up with a more compelling tale for your party.

Congratulations

Kavya Shivashankar, 2009 National Spelling Bee champ

AND, okay, her little sister spelling along behind her through about the eighth round was a more compelling story, and she beat out Tim Ruiter, the home-schooled sci-fi nerd and fan of They Might Be Giants, who was the sentimental favorite Chez Riley, and third-place finisher Aishwarya Pastapur was the night's hero, handling xebec, Caerphilly, and Neufchâtel, all of which I happen to know, mostly because two of them are cheeses, but which bristle with lexical landmines. And yes, that reminds us there's too much emphasis on adjectives formed from proper nouns in the late rounds, particularly when two such decide things. And, no surprise, but won't someone please take the thing away from ABC? Thank god it runs long; otherwise one of the times it threatened to turn the thing into Dancin' With The Pubescent Stars would have taken off.

Still, delightful as always, because of the kids, though I have no idea how my Poor Wife, or anyone else, has ever survived teaching that age group. And the Hoosier State will have to content itself with Kennyi Kwaku Aouad being the star of the show, since we realize we can't win every year (2004, 2008). And Kavya--four top ten finishes in four years, and now the trophy--job well done. Now go kiss some boys. Or girls. Or both.

Summiting Indiana

WE'VE spoken several times, you and I, about the effect the American Right's decision to talk only to itself for thirty-some-odd years has had on its rhetorical abilities, on recognizing or parsing opposing arguments, let alone responding to one. And there must be a chapter in there somewhere about naming conventions designed to hoodwink, not their exclusive province but one they've taken to enthusiastically enough. Y'know, like how The Safe and Clean Eco-Friendly Institute for a Greener America is actually a consortium of offshore drillers, or The Fresh and Wholesome Food Council lobbies for pesticide producers, and how the code names of our military operations--which used to be "code names" we gave to "military operations", but now serve as cover stories for wars we're too chickenshit to declare--all sound like Operation Righteously Justifiable Homicide an' such. Obviously, the only way these things fool any objective observer is by the addition of the shell-corporation game designed to prevent one from finding the boilerplate; once you realize that Americans for Fair Wages is funded by manufacturing groups the duvet is off the bloodstained mattress.

So I'm watching local "news" last night, wondering if I can get a bet down on when someone first discovers a kerning problem with Sonia Sotomayor's birth certificate--by the way, they unveiled a new--to me, anyway--graphic entitled "Bright Spot" while trudging out the exciting news of a couple hundred telemarketing jobs opening up in the state, which made me want to ask whether "Dark Stain" would be a regular feature of economic reporting if things got better, features spotlighting the Asshole Boss of the Week, or Wal*Mart's latest timecard-doctoring scheme--when one of the telepromter readers fluffs me for a report on that afternoon's "Energy Summit" in Indianapolis which was "looking into" the effect "President Obama's Cap and Trade Plan" would have on "Midwestern states like Indiana", by which I understood her to mean "such as" Indiana, since there's no place like it, although there may be other Midwestern states where remaining representatives of the thoroughly disgraced Republican party can still draw camera time to pathetic mass photo-ops revolving around their swapping lies just like the Good Ole Days.

No, I wasn't at all surprised that the American Energy Solutions Group would turn out to be a group of Republican Congressmen seeking Solutions to impending Socialist regulation of law abiding, campaign-war-chest-filling industrial polluters. I wasn't surprised to learn the panel consisted of Mike "Holy of Holies" Pence, Dan "Watermelon Man" Burton, Steve "Leave of Absence" Buyer, and some freshman from Ohio where most days they actually have to breathe in the shit Indiana hurls into the air. It was no surprise that one of the featured expert speakers was the Bonzai Governor himself, Mitch "The Spork" Daniels (h/t: dg), now entering the second week of his whirlwind My Restatements of Repudiated Claims Are Better than Other People's Facts Because of My Huge Brain (Not A) Presidential Campaign Tour, which began in the Wall Street Journal, where he not only lied through his teeth (both a redundancy and a requirement for inclusion in the Journal Opinion section) about the cost of Cap and Trade, but managed somehow to get away with calling himself "humble", which is the lexical equivalent of giving the unsuspecting rider in front of you an amateur proctological exam, without warning, while your elevator is between floors.

Rather, I was wondering exactly how it was that a collection of reliable, lockstep-marching business mouthpieces, who could have met in D.C., where most of them are actually being paid to work, * or at any of the area's fine golf courses, if they really needed Burton's keen insight for some reason, comes to be called a Summit. Isn't summit what we call a meeting of heads of state, or, at least, heads of various concerned departments? These guys are more like the dregs of state. And it's bad enough that local "news" saw fit to parrot the term; did they have to fluff the "solutions" angle? Last year at this time Hoosiers were all breathless an' shit about our (Democratic) primary "meaning something". I guess that did not include the idea of "meaning" meaning something, or else it didn't survive the winter.

This is, by the way, the same Mitch the Spork who, when he was busy raffling off state property and high-handing counties which had the audacity to try to set their own clocks, was sold as A Man of Forward-Looking Vision and New Solutions You Bumpkins Are Too Backward To Grasp. Three years later he's apparently determined to be Horatio at the Smokestack.

ADDENDUM: The political folks at the Racist Star, normally surefire consumers of whatever animal waste product the state GOP puts in front of them, started balking at further helpings of Dan Burton during the last election cycle, and actually excoriate the gang in an editorial this morning. But they manage to leave Burton's name off the list altogether. Like he might give rank Republicanism a bad name.

___________

*officially

The Petri Dish Of Moranity

INDIANAPOLIS is a city with a long-standing inferiority complex, and some damn fine reasons behind that. It's the Hollow Center of Manifest Destiny, the cardboard sleeve than convinces the unwary shopper that his candy bar is 33% larger than it actually is; it's the temporary acclamation accorded the inspired pairing of Smoke with Mirrors. It's not a little clearing in the Eastern Woodlands that grew up big and strong. It's the geographic center of a sort of palsied rhombus scribbled when the Powers that Were Being in the early 19th century decided the Old Northwest would look better on maps in several colors, not just one big splotch, a pinhole in a map poked by later 19th century regional wise men who decided, from the state's one real White enclave on the Ohio, that a new, alabaster city should serve as the State Capital, one that was equally inaccessible to everyone at the time, because we used to be much better at compromise. It turned out to be a malarial swamp. I suppose you were ahead of me on that.

At least we got a damned regular grid out of the deal. And don't get me wrong. I live here. I spent my carefree childhood roaming her pastures, rills, and unguarded commercial properties; I've spent most of my adult life here, occasionally glimpsing the outdoors. I'm home here, consarn it, and scarcely ever troubled by thoughts of arson. Any more.

Indianapolis used to be the largest city in America not on a navigable waterway, but that was back when trees were an occasional impediment to overland traffic; I haven't checked recently. Some typical American visionary once managed to get a sternwheeler all the way here up the mighty White River one presumably monsoonish summer, but the thing pegged in the shallows and never made the trip back. It was, one supposes, dismantled and used to build a Chili's.

Because my fellow citizens loooove the chain restaurant, something which induces that sense of inferiority in the rest of us while leaving them almost magically untouched. One of several current politically-assisted financial crises of the moment involves the City Market, a venerable old space that was part of the original plat, a collection of food and produce vending stalls which has suffered through hard times ever since the suburbanization of the 1950s made getting the hell out of Indianapolis an even better idea, and cheaper. This has been seriously compounded by the fact that politicians--that would be "the same people who jumped at the chance to convert farmland to interstates, tract houses, and convenient Chili's locations in the first place"--have sought to solve the problem, guaranteeing that it would eventually get much worse, except at an exorbitant cost befitting our compensatory levels of civic boosterism. A series of politically-connected idiots chased out long-time tenants, herded any who remained into a dark, dank corner for two years while they spent millions redecorating the place to bring it more in line with the contemporary Mall aesthetic, and managed, somehow, to go broke while alienating all the remaining tenants. (I am not making either of these up: the actual, proximate cause of the wipeout was losing a suit to a former tenant they'd high-handed and then refused to talk with despite the threat of legal action; posting bond to appeal the judgement would now empty the checking account, so the City's stepping in to help out. And one of the reasons given for construction cost overruns was that "the plumbing was in much worse shape than we imagined". In a hundred and thirty year-old building. Why didn't you just go with the assumption that there wasn't any?)

And the crisis came to light recently, and Mayor Gomer took time from his busy schedule of planning Chinatowns and trying to land the lucrative North American Cricket franchise to do his usual thorough job of assessing the situation, asking his handlers what he should say, and getting back to the Golf Channel. And his solution, essentially, was (hold on!):

Let's turn it into one big Chili's!

Because every challenge is an Opportunity, dammit. An opportunity to rebuild what went before with substandard materials and pocket the difference.

The news engendered a little discussion at the Racist Star that I was foolish enough to look in on. And some sensible person, apparently an out-of-towner, said something to the effect that, Gee, the market is this traditional collection of small vendors, and maybe this city has enough Chain Restaurants already, what with the six we have on every corner, and the Farmer's Market in Broad Ripple is thriving an' all, like all around the rest of the country, so maybe there's a more creative solution. And this person was then told to leave town if he didn't like it here, at least fifteen times consecutively, before I gave up counting.

Chicago, of course, is a great restaurant town. Cincinnati is a great restaurant town. Louisville is the gateway to Bluegrass culture, and Northern Kentucky stands with KC and Virginia as the great regional centers of barbecue. And in Indianapolis they'll fight you for dissing the Whopper.

So it's really not that surprising that the other source of major cultural influence is the fucking yammering radio (you happen to get the Bob and Tom Show, now also in convenient video form? That's us.), and that any and every drive-show hyped, commerical-tie-in, gawker-and/or public-urinator-generating Event--raft race, public beer bust, simulcast Lame Playlist synced to Yet Another Excuse To Make Shit Explode Overhead--becomes, not Somewhere to Go and Something to Do, but a sort of instant Tradition. Yesterday came word that the big Labor Day Celebration of Loud Noise and Flashing Lights would go Silent and Dark this year, due to the economic difficulties of Jeff Smulyan's Massive Communications Empire Founded on Buying Shit Then Having To Sell It Back, and the local news hairdo pool commenting on it acted as though vandals had melted the Liberty Bell.

This same weird combination of poshlust taste, the personal restraint of a shirtless Libertarian, and suburban lawncare fascism attends The Monon Trail, an abandoned stretch of railbed which has been converted into an asphalt greenway for Walkers, Bikers, Roller Skaters, and the occasional mugger. Y'know, I'm all for such things politically; I just don't want to be anywhere around them myself. It's like being on the first quarter-mile of the trail in one of our jewels of a state park; it doesn't matter what the scenery is like, the total effect is that of being in a crowded Mall with all the stores closed and the children all coming off massive sugarbuzzes Cold Turkey. I hike occasionally in the second-largest city-owned nature preserve. Miles of trails that come within shouting distance of the Monon, with which it shares a parking lot, but there's a constant stream of exercisers on the asphalt runway, and the only people besides myself who venture into the woods are the ones who find leash laws unfairly restrict the Constitutional rights of their dogs.

Not that I'm complaining about their absence. But, as I suggested, the Monon is occasionally visited by felons, rapscallions, and ne'er-do-wells, and when this occurs on the stretch south of 38th Street, which is either a sketchy area or Darkest Africa, depending on who's telling, you can be sure the Racist Star's commenters will remind you Just Who Lives Down There Anyway. And yesterday brought news that some guy my age had been on the Trail when a gang of Yoots rode past him and one shot him in the belly with a pellet gun. Which generated these, among others:

"Too bad he wasn't carrying a gun! Those pellet guns look realistic. He could have shot his attacker in self-defense by mistake. And wouldn't that be too bad?"

and:

"...of course, after they 9mm a couple of thugs the preachers and the ACLU will cry foul."

Neither of which, mind you, comes as a revelation, or even begins to snake the clogged sewer line that is the Racist Star's typical comments section. It's just that I read this the day after hearing the nets react exactly the same way to news of another North Korean "A-bomb" test, and Rush Limbaugh--also courtesy the nets--react pretty much the same way to the announcement of a nominee for the Supreme Court. And it occurs to me: we're all Indianapoli now. I suppose I always suspected it.

Dear Lord

Ross Douthat, "Liberated and Unhappy". May 25

FIRST, housekeeping: Reader TM was kind enough to suggest I replace Allstate with State Farm. Two things: it was State Farm which dropped my Poor Wife twenty-five years ago after she had two accidents. The first occurred when she was rear-ended while stopped at a red light. The second when some dead drunk slammed into her car, another car, a light pole, and an enormous oak on the neighbor's property, and then ran off. I, foolhardy peri-youth, ran the man down and dragged him the mile-and-a-half back to face the music, which earned me two trips to court where I was never called.

Friday I received a call from a very nice woman in the Resolutions dept. at Allstate, which pissed me off no end since I was hoping for a surly white guy I could tee off on. She listened, said she thought she understood what had happened but begged the holiday weekend before she got back to read the files, and promised to call me tomorrow. The floating turds of that unflushed john of a collection agency they sicked on us have not been heard from again. There's no way I'm dropping Allstate while I still need the Customer in Good Standing Buttfucked by Your Incompetent Goon Squad status, because they may not know it yet, but they're paying for the requisite credit checks to make sure those assholes didn't get within hailing distance of our Credit, and if they did they're crawling to get the opportunity to correct every last misplaced jot. Then they're gone, after being reported to the BBB, the Indiana AG, the state insurance board, the Fire Marshal, and any warez revenge freeks I can drum up.

Second, that NatRev cover pic was too small, so it took me until this morning to notice that Mitch's combover is gone. No wonder he looked like Todd Luiso. And whoever's got the rights to The Fifteen Minute Hamlet bring it out on DVD already, or you're next.

Finally, I'd like to suggest that, should the Times re-up Douthat for some unfathomable reason, he get someone else to pose for his picture next time.

It is yet too soon to tell if Ross has settled into his Times rhythm or whether we'll see some sort of sporadic Wither Republicanism? dropped like a chintzy amount of artificial chocolate chips into the viscous weekly batter of Jesus and I Think Alike, but at this point those first two columns are beginning to look like a pathetic sop to that imaginary subset of Times readers who take their "conservatism" with a twist of weasel, an opening joke or two before he dove headlong into the straight religious material.

Lousy Feminists! They've made Baby Jesus and Baby Momma cry! (And no, really; Ross will eventually uncork a "serial baby daddies". The wonder is that it took him five weeks.) And did you know there's a new study out which proves it? It's by two economists! And if you like, Ross'll provide the link to where you can buy a copy for just five bucks.

New Study by Economists! is the opinionated cabbie for the html age.

This is “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness,” the subject of a provocative paper from the economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers. The paper is fascinating not only because of what it shows, but because the authors deliberately avoid floating an easy explanation for their data.

Tell me how it is that every time these guys quote some New Study or other they inevitably manage to betray the fact that they have not the slightest idea how to approach a professional paper? The authors deliberately avoid floating easy answers! Could be we've spotted a new academic trend here. Or it could be that, unlike the Vapor Cabbie, studies tend not to agree with one's tiniest presuppositions in ways that are easily dispelled.

But all the achievements of the feminist era may have delivered women to greater unhappiness. In the 1960s, when Betty Friedan diagnosed her fellow wives and daughters as the victims of “the problem with no name,” American women reported themselves happier, on average, than did men. Today, that gender gap has reversed. Male happiness has inched up, and female happiness has dropped. In postfeminist America, men are happier than women.

Shit, dude. There's 280 channels on th' teevee now, and twelve of 'em are ESPN; porn's a mouse click away; and the Coors Light can tells you when it's cold. Is Manhattan the farthest West you've ever been?

Why--and to whom--is this supposed to be a fucking paradox? Thanks to a generation of Republican economics the vast majority of households in this country need two incomes to stay afloat; meanwhile, the Distaff half of that equation still finds itself married to inconsiderate slobs, raising 2.4 bratty, consumer-goods-and-junk-food addicted children, doing most of the household work, and dealing with some shitheel boss who now imagines himself to be some sort of Entrepreneurial Hero. How's that the fault of Feminism?

Feminists and traditionalists should be able to agree, for instance, that the structures of American society don’t make enough allowances for the particular challenges of motherhood.

Yes, whatever our political beliefs, we can all agree that Pope John Paul II said it best when...

We can squabble forever about the choices that mothers ought to make, but the difficult work-parenthood juggle is here to stay. (Just ask Sarah and Todd Palin.)

Ask 'em what? If they know seventeen words for snow? Where they got their clothes? The Palins have fourteen children (Snap, Trigger, Bumpkin, Aspen, Neiman, Marcus, Slope, Polysci, Port, Starboard, Placenta, Nivea, Carmex, and Oopsie) by choice. They've got a six-figure income before Mom bilks the taxpayers. Are we supposed to ask them about the "difficulties" involved because they're proven experts on Failing to Impart Your Public Moralisms to Your Own Children? Is that an accomplishment? Or am I supposed to be feeling sorry for them because they've struggled so?

Christ, you should pardon the expression. It's one thing for you to think inside your little Bronze Age box; I don't care. It's irritating when you pretend you don't, but, again, if the Times wouldn't waste valuable space on this tenth-rate, utterly predictable, stuck-in-the-Sixties-backlash crap I'd never even mention it. But the feeble attempts of a not-yet-thirty child of privilege, Hahvahd-fucking-educated, to even produce a reasonable facsimile of an opposing argument when that's what he ostensibly is up to is just unforgivable.

They should also be able to agree that the steady advance of single motherhood threatens the interests and happiness of women. Here the public-policy options are limited; some kind of social stigma is a necessity. But a new-model stigma shouldn’t (and couldn’t) look like the old sexism. There’s no necessary reason why feminists and cultural conservatives can’t join forces — in the same way that they made common cause during the pornography wars of the 1980s — behind a social revolution that ostracizes serial baby-daddies and trophy-wife collectors as thoroughly as the “fallen women” of a more patriarchal age.

Forget Hahvahd and Hamden Hall; there was a time in your young life when you would have said--presumably, at least--that it was defined primarily by your Pentacostalism; today you would say the same thing, substituting Roman Catholicism. How in hell do you come through that and still imagine that the whole world basically agrees with you? It's beyond even faith-based Belief. It's the punditaster version of imagining foreigners will understand you if you speak English slowly enough and at twice normal volume.

You Mean It's Behind The NRO Paywall? Well I Hope You're Happy; You've Ruined My Weekend.

(h/t Brave Indiana blogger Doug Masson)

OKAY, first, if you don't know--and there's no reason you should--Mitch "The Bonzai Governor" Daniels is called "The Blade"--when he is, which is never except during fawning, deceptive, and delusional demi-decadal profiles in NatRev or The Wall Street Journal--only because it's the "nickname" George W. Bush bestowed upon him, apparently without knowing who th' fuck he was, and certainly with his usual firm grasp on hyperreality. Mitch Daniels was Bush's first OMB director, meaning he's the guy who personally oversaw the Most Disastrous Administration in US History's reduction of an inherited $236 B surplus to a $400 B deficit in just two years. He is, in other words, "The Blade" the way some 350-pound slob is "Tiny". After that striking success he turned his expertise on the unsuspecting citizens of his putative home state, the half-infomed denizens of which had given him his first taxpayer-funded sinecure; we do not know, for certain, why Mitch Daniels decided to Get Out Of Dodge and into The Indiana Governor's Mansion an RV combing over the backroads of the Hoosier State, but we wouldn't be surprised if it involved revenging himself on whomever had stuffed his ass in a locker in North Central High School ("Home of the Panthers"), no doubt repeatedly, between 1963 and 1967.

What we do know is this: no one who's paid the slightest bit of attention to Daniels' public "service" career would portray him as any sort of Cutlery, at least not if they intended to make the case to the general public rather than the Internet Boys' Choir they dunned for the privilege. Daniels' economic record as governor may be debatable, in that it is nowhere near as bad as his record at the OMB (which would have required the state to its previous status as the floor of the vast Cretaceous inland sea), but even that debatability is the result of a clear PR effort to paint everything the man has done as a Bold Economic Triumph sprung Athena-like from his massive brain, not something resembling tangible results. The difference here being that, unlike with Zeus, in this case the gestation gave everyone else a headache.

And if we're actually interested in governance, and not simply finding a Republican we hope might turn out to be the next Mitt Romney, fake history included, we might tap the brakes a few times before touting Indiana's Economic Miracle full throttle; The Blade suddenly turned into The Shrinking Violet when things turned unequivocally to shit after last year's elections. By 2011 he's likely to have morphed into The Self-Inflicted Wound.

And sure, sure; the yawning chasm between Republican gubernatorial hagiography and what is sometimes known as "reality" has been my near-constant companion since California gave us Ronald Reagan, meaning before this current crop of NatRev geniuses ever drew enough breath to complain that poor people were getting their oxygen for free, meaning I don't really need to read that article any more than I want to read the article. What I would like to know is how anyone would imagine that portraying their man as Todd Luiso in American Ninja VI was a good idea?

Good Hands

"A MAN is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone" says Hank Thoreau. I've never been part of the Thoreau cult; after the enforced high school experience of Civil Disobedience, accompanied by a certain subset of my yahoo friends using it as license to egg Mr. Bower's house, I more-or-less abandoned reading him. I recall enjoying On Walking several years ago, but that's the highlight.

I was a callow youth when I ran into that quote, and it was only the second part I considered. Hey, you're rewarded for leaving things alone! Man, I was already rich and didn't know it.

The unexamined first part didn't strike me until much later--I don't think it's supposed to, anyhow--when it occurred to me, too late to make a practical difference in a life dedicated to indolence, that actual gelt could exponentially increase the number of things you could let alone. Insurance companies, for one.

This is ordinarily the sort of thing I'd at least wait for resolution before committing to the Internets, but the resolution--a foregone conclusion--is not the point. Our vehicle and homeowner's policies are with Allstate, and have been for better than a decade, maybe more than two. Never an accident claim. One weather-induced homeowner's claim which did not involve our jumping on the 2006 Hail Storm Let's Get A New Roof bandwagon like a dozen of our neighbors. All bills paid on time.

Last winter we decided it'd be a good idea to reduce our car insurance premiums. I called the agent and we worked out a new deal, but when she called back with the quote she noted that our policy was a type which was no longer being written, so she would write a new one, effective at the end of the current paid period, and we'd get the new one in the mail.

So the first thing that happens is the next billing period rolls around, and we get dunned for two separate policies. And I call her, and it's oh, sorry, I see what happened, don't worry about it. How it is that "don't worry about it" failed to serve as a klaxon for impending compound stupidity I don't know. I'm fifty-five.

So the original policy gets cancelled--I really ought to add "apparently" to any such statement at this point--and all seems right when we receive another dunning notice a few days later for some piddling amount--sixty bucks something--said to be due on the old account. And the notice has both the false ring of an account closed, business terminated, balance still owing--like they thought we might skip the country with our ill-gotten Hamiltons--and a vaguely nasty tone. My wife opened it and handed it to me. I call the agent. She seems distracted. She calls up the file, says, "Oh. Okay, I'll take care of it." I have ample reason not to believe anything this woman tells me by now, but on the other hand it seems like part of a clerical error she made, and has partly fixed already, so one imagines she'll now know how to locate the problem and get the baby hummin' again. We part, with luck never to speak again. Fade to black.

It is perhaps not vital, but certainly of interest, that all this concerns a policy which was "terminated" April first of 2009 C.E.

Yesterday was May 21, or 51 days later; roughly the time between report cards back when I was a barefoot boy in fields of dairy cows. And I get a weird prerecorded call in the afternoon, for my wife, which I chalked up to the current terrorist testing of the state's new Attorney General. Indiana has a pretty good No-Call law, and thugs, criminals, grifters, and other business types have been challenging it, in the form of flagrantly ignoring it, all year; one particular asshole with a car warranty scheme, already indicted in North Dakota, North Idaho, or South Oioway or one of those places, recently came to local prominence when his robots called the new Attorney General's cell phone, twice, thereby winning himself the indictment that had not been engendered by the hundreds of complaint calls the AG had received to that point, all of which had apparently been misfiled under L for Lanquish, instead of P for Peons. And then a couple hours later my Poor Wife mentions to me--too casually, I thought--that we'd "gotten a collection notice on that insurance thing".

I was up like a one-kneed bolt of lightning, straight to her desk to find, not just a "collection notice", but a collection notice from an actual collection of human cess known collectively as Credit Collection Services, demanding to know where The Widow Allstate's sixty bucks was. Reader, fellow or potential Allstate customer, bruder! we have barely compressed the actual timeframe. We would not leave out intervening correspondence just to make out case. Close account. Receive one erroneous notice of money owing. Contact agent. Six weeks later find professional scofflaw telephone goons on your doorstep, who, in their very first, blind groping towards the unknown you and wherever you've stashed your sixty measly fucking bucks, (which would, were it a legitimate and overlooked debt, allow them under Indiana law to charge you, currently, an additional ninety cents!) simply choose to ignore, presumably with impunity, the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. Upon first contact! I could be a legless Gulf War veteran, a first-responder with a pelvis crushed in the rescue of a beloved family pet, or at the bottom of the stairs surviving by drinking my own urine and feebly scratching the concrete in hopes of attracting help for all they know. Or care. And they cannot be bothered with making a recorded message that identifies themselves as the caller in accordance with Federal law. Any regulation, no matter how tiny, is unreasonable to these people. Excepting the regulations that dissuade me from going over there and kicking their miserable asses. Can't quite figure out why they aren't headquartered in Indiana. Mitch'd love 'em.

And Allstate, y'know, maybe "And we'll crush you like the fucking bug you are if we so much as suspect you're into us for a sawbuck" goes by with the rest of the boilerplate at the bottom of their ads. Or maybe you need to wait for one of their screwups to find out for yourself.