But ultimately, Knepper’s a punk of limited significance. More importantly, this post should be the final proof that David Frum has hit rock-bottom, that he doesn’t care about the degeneracy of those who prove useful to him, and is therefore as unprincipled as they come and deserves to be ejected from the few remaining corners of the conservative movement in which he somehow isn’t seen as a disgrace. Frum apologists and lapdogs like John Guardiano – at least, the ones who still claim to have scruples – can no longer ignore the evidence of Frum’s indecency. Those who refuse to abandon this sinking moral ship deserve to go down with it.
UPDATE: Predictably, the pro-dishonesty Guardiano has chosen the sinking ship. That he accuses David Swindle – a socially-liberal blogger with a clear record of supporting not only gay rights, but also (some) gay political causes – of homophobia should be all the proof we need that Guardiano simply does not believe in holding himself to any meaningful standards of honesty and ethics.
On September 11, I was still in middle school. Around the middle of an otherwise-unremarkable school day, we began to hear unsettling murmurs of a plane hitting a skyscraper somewhere. Near the end of the day, our English teacher told us that it was the World Trade Center, and two planes had been deliberately rammed into it, causing the towers to collapse and kill God knows how many people.
It was a sickening wake-up call. Such monstrosities simply didn’t happen on American soil outside of the movies. I had been starting to develop a mild interest in politics prior to 9/11 (due in large part to abortion), but the sudden death of 3,000 civilians for nothing more than getting on a plane or showing up to work in the morning drove home the urgency of political involvement. It wasn’t just far-away bickering; what our country did or didn’t do could have serious real-world implications. I was no soldier, but if I could use the skills I did have to prevent this from happening to anyone else again, I was in.
Nine years later, the political landscape isn’t as neatly divided between right and wrong, problem and solution as it once seemed – as admirably steadfast as he was in the beginning, George W. Bush’s execution of the Iraq War and his failure to root out political correctness in the military may have disastrous long-term ramifications for the war, and the libertarian trends in the Tea Party movement are threatening to take the Right’s eye off the ball entirely. Even so, the broad strokes are still there:
Either we believe in fighting those who wish us harm, or we don’t.
Either we believe in denying them the means to cause mass destruction, or we don’t.
Either we believe in honestly examining their motives – including religious – or we don’t.
Either we understand that endlessly talking to the irrational is itself irrational, or we don’t.
Either we understand that those who want us dead will accept no concession other than our death, or we don’t.
Either we see 9/11 for what it was – pure, unadulterated evil – and understand the ramifications for our future, or we don’t.
I recently came across an old essay by Judith Thomson, which offers a defense of abortion that basically boils down to: yes it’s a person, but it’s still okay to kill him/her in most cases anyway, since the mother never gave him/her express permission to use her body.
During the 2008 Republican National Convention, Ron Paul held a counter-event, & the campaign invited crackpot Jesse Ventura to speak there. Ventura’s tirade about what “really happened” on 9/11 was met with wild applause by Paul’s audience.
On 9/11 Truther Alex Jones’ show in 2007, Paul claimed, “if you have a 9/11 incident or something like that, they use that to do the things that they had planned all along.”
In January 2008, Paul’s Midland County, MI, campaign coordinator was one Randy Gray, who happened to moonlight as “a longstanding active and vocal organizer for the Knight’s Party faction of the Ku Klux Klan.” The campaign did not comment on the controversy, but did scrub all traces of Gray from their websites. Continue reading →
It’s debatable whether or not author & poet Maya Angelou was ever much of a role model – her autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, holds powerful lessons about overcoming childhood racism and being raped by her mother’s boyfriend, but it also concludes with her having a child out of wedlock in her teens, after having sex with a near-total stranger for the express purpose of figuring out whether or not she’s a lesbian, with (as I recall) no commentary on the morality, maturity, wisdom, or responsibility of her actions. Heckuva message!
Whatever the answer to that question may be, she’s certainly not someone to look up to any more. Via ALL, Angelou recently spoke at a big Planned Parenthood luncheon. Lending your support to the cause of murdering innocents in the name of personal gratification is nothing to emulate.
His “reasoning” was—you’re gonna love this—pro-lifers don’t really see abortion as a human rights issue, because if they did, they’d all oppose abortion in rape/incest/life-of-mother cases, too, and they’d also support the sex-ed and condom distribution policies Scott likes; but because they don’t, it’s really all about controlling people’s sex lives.
Of course, Scott was confronted (by me and others) with credible arguments against all of this (by the way, here’s the latest counter-example to his anti-abstinence studies), but remained “skeptical.” Mind you, he couldn’t offer any good reasons for his skepticism, but proceeded to flaunt the nonsense anyway, as if he’d done…well, something to prove any of it or refute his opponents’ objections. As Allahpundit once said of Dingy Harry Reid, “like a two-year-old who’s just crapped on the carpet, he’s curiously proud of it.”
(Oh, and he also demanded to know what Planned Parenthood lied about, then when I told him exactly what Planned Parenthood lied about in painstaking detail, he ignored it for a hundred-something comments. ‘Cuz he’s such a stickler for the truth.)
But it gets better, my friends. Oh, does it get better.
This week, abortion came up once more on Boots & Sabers. Allow me to quote verbatim, so we can all revel in the majesty that is Scott’s madness:
If you believe—as you say you do—that a 3 month fetus is the legal and moral equivalent of a toddler, then you would either a) be storming the abortion clinic like Rambo to kill the murderous individuals who work there, or b) you’re a pathetic coward who wouldn’t risk his life to save roomfuls of innocent children from death. Of course there is a third explanation: You do know that 3 month old fetuses are not the moral and legal equivalent of you and me.
So, lemme get this straight: unless you also believe in abandoning the political process and the rule of law and killing abortion doctors, you don’t really believe in an unborn baby’s right to life.
There’s really only one way to respond to that:
Make no mistake: These aren’t sincere questions that Scott would stop asking if only someone would give him a good answer. He’s simply displaying a common tactic of left-wing hyper-partisanship: the need to attribute the beliefs of one’s opponents, no matter how sincere or well-argued, to any sort of ulterior motive other than the stated motivation, no matter how specious the evidence.
If Scott truly believes what he’s saying, then his ideology has so fully warped his mind that his capacity for rational, objective thought is completely gone. But I suspect he does know better. I think it’s all propaganda: he’s supporting a heinous practice, recognizes somewhat the odiousness of his position, and will throw out whatever he can to deflect moral judgment and make the other side the villains. Indeed, he deployed this gem of a point as a way of not answering The Family Guy, who noticed he described abortion as “sad and distasteful,” and asked the obvious follow-up: “If it’s nothing more than a lump of tissue, then why is it sad? Are you sad when you have a wart removed? It too was alive.”
Either way…pitiful.
UPDATE: As if we needed another indicator of how messed up the left-wing, pro-abortion mind is, consider the following: Scott says that because humans develop incrementally, meaning that in the period between just-conceived zygote and just-delivered newborn, increasing moral consideration should go along with increasing complexity (he also voted for a guy who had a a problem with those just-delivered newborns, but I digress). He also says that “a 12 week pregnancy can be terminated for any reason at all.”
Okay, so at 12 weeks, it must not be very developed or person-like, huh? I mean, it’s not like it would have any of the biggies, like a heartbeat, a fully-formed brain, or the capacity to feel pain.
Something seems to have failed rather significantly in Scott’s efforts at drawing “reasonable” distinctions. How do you think he’d respond to that? If you guessed “dodge & deflect,” give yourself a cookie.
It’ll come as little surprise that John Doe of Smash Mouth Politics ain’t exactly the sharpest knife in the rack. But, it turns out, he’s also a lying demagogue. Nobody who would equate same-sex marriage support with PEDOPHILIA deserves the respect of anybody who claims to be a conservative or a Christian. The crap he spews is neither.
UPDATE: A new standard in discourse: “do you wear a skirt when you whine like that?” Truly, my friends, we are witnessing a master of his craft at work. Never before has such compelling logic and piercing insight been so succinctly packaged in such clarity!
On Friday, a lunatic named Harlan James Drake allegedly shot and killed two people, including a pro-life activist named Jim Pouillon, who was protesting abortion outside a school in Owosso, Michigan (the other murder, of Michael Fuoss, was apparently personal). The suspect was reportedly offended by Pouillon’s graphic signs depicting aborted babies.
Is Barack Obama, Kate Michelman, Andrew Sullivan, NARAL, Planned Parenthood, Barbara Boxer, or the broader pro-choice movement responsible for this crime? Of course not, and presently, pro-lifers are not suggesting otherwise. In fact, American Life League’s statement on the killing (issued prior to the establishment of a motive) urges only caution against hasty conclusions. I have yet to see any politicization of this tragedy, aside from observing the obvious left-wing and media hypocrisy, which is legitimate.
After George Tiller’s death, liberal after liberal wasted no time in slandering the entire pro-life movement as culpable for the actions of one man (yet the abortion movement is never responsible for violence committed by its adherents). Unlike the numerous pro-life organizations who promptly condemned the murder of Tiller, NARAL and Planned Parenthood have said nothing about Pouillon’s murder as of this morning. President Obama evidently doesn’t think Pouillon’s death is as statement-worthy as Tiller’s.
This is simply the Left’s long-standing totalitarian impulse at work yet again, from the same playbook as what we’re seeing with the healthcare townhalls—don’t address substantive arguments honestly, don’t foster real discussion, just use whatever you can to intimidate your opposition into silence. It’s all about control, by any means necessary.
Hat tip to the Other McCain for alerting me to this piece by Phyllis Chesler, which smacks down a recent article in which Naomi Wolfe hails the burqa—yes, the burqa—as a symbol of feminist independence.
If you’d like to pause now to toss your cookies, go right ahead. I’ll wait.
…back? Good. Let’s continue.
Since 9/11, many have noted how conspicuously little to say liberal feminism seems to have about the rights of women in the Middle East (and within Muslim culture in Western nations), where a teenage girl’s legal inability to get an abortion without a parent’s consent is the least of her worries. Wolfe takes that double-standard to a whole new level.
Conservative Standards 