For some of us here, the Big Question these days is “WTF, Obama?”
I don’t know whether it’s rookie mistakes (sixteen months down and four to go, having beaten Team Clinton, “rookie”?), or the influx of Clintonistas into his campaign (why listen to them?), or just confirmation of my original impression that of the ‘08 Dems, except for Clinton, he was the farthest right (with Edwards and Dodd available, why settle for him?). Whatever it is, as I mentioned yesterday, by now Barack Obama’s repositioning is turning my stomach more by the day.
Oh, I knew to expect some post-primary moves rightward. But the things he’s said over the last week or so have exceeded those expectations by miles. NMC found a passage that sums up the trend:
In much the way that Ulysses had to bind himself to the masts of his ship in order not to succumb to the Sirens’ call and remain on course, sensible voters in 2004 had to force themselves not to listen to what John Kerry said and did in order to remain steadfast in their determination to vote for him against George W. Bush. It is fast becoming that way in 2008 with Barack Obama. If his public appearances these past few days are any indication, not paying attention to the content of Obama’s ‘inspiring’ muttering will be necessary not only for voting for the lesser evil, but even for keeping down one’s lunch.
Apparently he quickly pulled back some from the red line of mine he crossed yesterday on abortion and women’s health — maybe; we’ll see. But the red line he crossed last week, caving to Bushian telecom immunity in the reauthorization of FISA — that one I’m not over at all.
Glenn Greenwald, a better thinker than writer (often he runs long and repetitive), yesterday made the essential point as well as I’ve seen it made; emphases his:
Nancy Soderberg was deputy national security advisor and an ambassador to the United Nations in the Clinton administration. Today, she has an Op-Ed in the Los Angeles Times defending the FISA bill and telecom amnesty. … [I]t’s the language that she uses — and the brazenness of the lying (and that’s what it is) to justify this bill — that’s notable here.
It’s notable because the political establishment is not only about to pass a patently corrupt bill, but worse, are spouting — on a very bipartisan basis — completely deceitful claims to obscure what they’re really doing. This is what Soderberg says is what happened:
The Senate is dragging its feet because the compromise bill’s opponents — mostly Democrats — want also to punish the telecommunications companies that answered President Bush’s order for help with his illegal, warrantless wiretapping program. That is the wrong target. In the aftermath of Sept. 11, the White House directed telecommunications carriers to cooperate with its efforts to bolster intelligence gathering and surveillance — the administration’s effort to do a better job of “connecting the dots” to prevent terrorist attacks. In its review of the effort, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that the administration’s written requests and directives indicated that such assistance “had been authorized by the president” and that the “activities had been determined to be lawful.”
We now know that they were not lawful. But the companies that followed those directives are not the ones to blame for that abuse of presidential power.
I would really like to know where people like Soderberg get the idea that the U.S. President has the power to “order” private citizens to do anything, let alone to break the law, as even she admits happened here. I’m asking this literally: how did this warped and distinctly un-American mentality get implanted into our public discourse — that the President can give “orders” to private citizens that must be complied with? Soderberg views the President as a monarch — someone who can issue “orders” that must be obeyed, even when, as she acknowledges, the “orders” are illegal.
That just isn’t how our country works and it never was. We don’t have a King who can order people to break the law. …
Too long for my tastes or not, the rest of Greenwald’s post is worth a read. But its main point is already visible: America’s monarch is the law.
If Barack Obama has as much trouble with that one as he’s been playing like he does — if he has as much trouble with it as the craven Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Silvestre Reyes, and Jay Rockefeller have – well then, some of us certainly face more years of nausea, don’t we? And here I’d hoped we were on the road to recovery. Damn.
Ok, I’ll bite. We’re talking late term abortion here. We’re talking a baby 6-9 months old who would almost certainly be viable outside the womb. If being pregrant is making the mother depressed, then I say take a Prozac, suck it up, and let the baby live. And I say that as someone who supports legalized abortion, at least in the first 3-4 months of pregnancy. I’m more disturbed by Obama’s backtracking than by his original statement.
Law427, the question is “How viable?” Because pro-lifers have seen to it that the statutes on late-term abortion don’t mention fetal deformities, “mental health of the mother” is the hook allowing abortions of grossly-deformed fetuses. Such cases aren’t all that rare.
Not only do I not want fetal deformities discovered late forced to live birth, I don’t want the state’s (and the preachers’) grubby hands on women’s bodies and reproductive choices whatsoever.
Right now, though, I’m particularly disgusted at Obama for reinforcing the right-wing myth that women choose late-term abortions merely because they feel temporarily "blue," and that doctors perform them rather than prescribing antidepressants. That’s utter bullshit, and if you don’t know it, you should.
I hear you, Lotus. I’ll vote for Obama, but my nose will be held (again). His right turn after the primaries surprised even an old cynic like me.
As for abortion, it ain’t an easy decision at any stage. It’s hard, it’s personal, and nobody can tell a woman how she should feel or react to her own very unique situation.
Me, I just want Mississippi’s poor, single welfare mother to have a choice whether she births her sixth child that she cannot properly clothe, feed or educate. Also, I want the government–state or federal, take your pick, to pay for it. Does she need to be more responsible? Of course. Do accidents happen? Certainly. And yes, that means my tax dollars would be supporting abortion and I know Obama would never be able to get this done, but there, I’ve at least said it.
You’re so right, Underdog. That decision must be agony.
Even this last month of trying to help a kitten born, I discovered too late, with some internal deformity, and finally having to make the decision to let her go, was/is extremely hard on me. I can’t imagine how much worse it is for someone dealing with a pregnancy gone wrong.
The state has absolutely NO business there.
not all agree with either position Obama has taken. There are some of us who are the ultimate liberals and believe protection provided endangered species should be allowed the unborn.
Abortion is certainly a difficult issue. My personal feeling is that in a perfect world, no woman would ever need an abortion. However, we live in a world that is very far from perfect – a world in which women have been having abortions for as long as women have been getting pregnant. And no law, no matter how sincere or well-intentioned, will ever prevent abortion; it will only guarantee that women have unsafe abortions.
Furthermore, there are serious problems with the whole concept of abortion laws, problems so deeply rooted in our history that they can be difficult to even recognize for what they are.
Consider: a law prohibiting abortion is the same, in principle, as a law mandating abortion. In both cases, the state makes two arguments: 1) women’s bodies, and their reproductive functions, are not their own – they belong to the state; 2) the state has a compelling interest in manipulating and controlling women’s bodies and reproductive functions for its own ends.
Underlying these two arguments is another, ultimate argument: the state has the right to take this choice away from women, because it knows better. In other words, women aren’t competent to decide for themselves what to do about pregnancy, planned or unplanned.
This argument, this attitude, is the legacy of a patriarchal, misogynistic, and sexist history that considered women morally inferior, tainted by their descent from Eve, the tempter. No matter what the sincere reasons are for someone opposing abortion, they are supporting laws that are based on, and continue the codification of, female inferiority and incompetence.
Consider: can you imagine a government passing (or even proposing) laws that were similarly restrictive of men’s rights to control their own reproductive functions and make their own decisions? Suppose a bunch of us very sincerely believed that men under a certain age aren’t responsible enough to be fathers, and tried to get a law passed mandating that all such men have to take the “male pill” to prevent them from impregnating anyone. (Suppose the people proposing the law were entirely, or predominantly, women?) Would we have the right to do that, because our intentions were good? Can you imagine the outcry if we tried?
Would men, en masse, accept the premise that they should give up control of their bodies for some greater good of society posited by the (matriarchal) state? Or that they weren’t competent to make their own decisions? Of course not.
Unplanned pregnancies, regardless of the outcome, are almost always fraught with complications and painful emotions. It’s insulting to assert, as these laws intrinsically do, that women don’t realize that, and the seriousness of the decision they face. I know women who’ve had abortions, at ages from their teens on up, and it’s nonsense to say that there’s such a thing as a woman who takes that decision lightly.
Of course we all hope that a woman facing an unplanned pregnancy would be able to discuss her decision with the prospective father, with other family members, with her parents if she’s a minor, etc. But in the non-abstract, very real world in which these decisions have to be made, there are many circumstances in which that’s not possible. Because that’s true, none of those other people has an absolute right to demand a seat at the table. And if they don’t have that right, the state certainly doesn’t.
And to reiterate what I said at the beginning, even if you don’t care about any of that and just think abortions shouldn’t be happening, anti-abortion laws don’t work. The countries with the highest abortion rates are those with the strictest laws forbidding it. All outlawing abortion does is force desperate women to have unsafe procedures, greatly increasing the chance that they will be injured, maimed, sterilized, or killed.
Want fewer abortions? Support mandatory sex education, universal health care that covers birth control and comprehensive prenatal care, and social and economic justice that will make it easier for people to support the babies they do have.
BRAVA, neffable! And welcome back — we been missing you around here!
“The countries with the highest abortion rates are those with the strictest laws forbidding it.” Neffable, what’s the theory on why this occurs? That seems like an odd statistic to me.
Neffable, you make cogent points about abortion. The government tells us we are incapable of making decisions about our spending, education, religion and culture, all choices our founding fathers fought to protect. Yet, it not only refrains from the ultimate protection but also promotes the opposite.
In rural Mississippi, I have seen the so-called parents that certain politicians want to play a role in the abortion decision: 1) make a 12 year old have the child “to teach her a lesson” and 2) make a 14 year old have the child and then called it her sister and raised it themselves. (Didn’t Jack Nickolson find out in his late 30’s that his sister was really his mother?) Of course, those kinds of secrets, no matter how Southern they may be, always come out.
ceegee, this is what we might call the “Larry Craig (or “Chip Pickering”) Paradox”: The more controlling a culture, the more it’ll generate exactly what it thinks it needs to control. Have you noticed that the most spectacular cases of “sexual perversion” tend to befall the most fundamentalist people — Oral Roberts’ son and his wife, a few months ago, say?
If you compared Mississippi’s and Massachusetts’ divorce rates, I bet you’d be in for another surprise . . .
Actually it’s not that surprising. This article, http://tinyurl.com/3k7cx, defines it pretty well. “Protestantism” plays itself out in a lot of daily life experiences. And politics. And child rearing. And meals. And let’s not forget the sex angle. The “sexual perversion” theme is covered by that whole rage against the theological/religious machine mentality too. Don’t forget, “good” Catholics don’t have sex for fun. (smile) Do I need to surmise some Protestants are getting out of their marriages just so they can have better sex. LOL
curious georgette, states with strict anti-abortion laws are also usually strongly religious countries – frequently, Catholic ones. So there are generally social mores frowning on the use of contraception, and more difficulty in obtaining it and understanding how to use it properly. As has been seen in this country with so-called abstinence-only education, a lack of access to birth control and instruction on its use leads to significantly higher rates of unplanned pregnancy, and therefore much higher rates of abortion.
oldfaithful, perhaps you could be specific about the governmental restrictions you reference? What you call the “ultimate protection” is problematic, because it “protects” potential/future life at the expense of actual/present life – that is, the life of the mother. It is not true that enforced-birth policies are neutral or positive in their effect on women.
Some anti-abortion activists (I’m don’t know whether this is true of you) posit that the “innocence” of the zygote/embryo/fetus overrides every other consideration, a formulation that is also problematic, for both scientific and theological reasons. This argument frequently contains an underlying attitude like the ones that OWIL illustrates above, namely, that women who have unplanned pregnancies are “bad” and “deserve” to have the continued pregnancy forced on them as some sort of justice, punishment, lesson, etc.
Once again, this is a simplistic view that does not acknowledge the complex realities of women facing unplanned pregnancies, many of whom are, for example, married. (And if they aren’t married, are they therefore sluts? And what about the men? For some reason, there never seem to be arguments from legislators that they should also be taught a lesson or held responsible. How about a law mandating DNA tests to establish unknown paternity? Followed by mandatory marriage to give the “unborn child” two parents? Where does our interference end?) A position that says “birth good, abortion bad” regardless of the circumstances, no matter how sincerely held, is simply inadequate.
There will always be abortions. Always have been, always will be, and no amount of wishing or law-passing will make it otherwise. Demonizing women who have abortions only makes things worse (again, I’m not ascribing this to you). The most we can do is reduce their frequency, by doing everything possible to reduce and eliminate the circumstances that lead to unplanned pregnancies: lack of birth control and sex education, lack of health care, lack of adequate financial and emotional support.
I hate being right most of the time. Its a blessing and a curse. Obama shifting to the center? The hell you say. Of course he is. And the beat goes on. LOL.
IF he is elected, I’ll say it again, we will not see any significantly different policy in Iraq, and could indeed to headed to more military involvement in Afghanistan (which would be a major mistake IMO), as well as possibly against Pakistan (which Obama has threatened). And I also see the strong possibility of a “humanitarian” conflict involving the US in Darfur and other areas on the continent of Africa.
AFOTL. Which one are you speaking of being a blessing and a curse? Your being right most of the time or Obama shifting to the center? (smile)
Maybe both.
Interesting article Shaves. When I read Neffable’s original comment and asked my question, I was thinking about Muslim countries in particular, which I would assume have very restrictive abortion laws if not outright bans. I would have guessed that abortion rates in those countries would be very, very low.
Oldfaithful:
There are some of us who are the ultimate liberals and believe protection provided endangered species should be allowed the unborn.
Tell that to God. He allows eggs to be fertilized but not implanted in the uterus, and miscarriages in the billions over the course of human history.
God doesn’t seem to ascribe all that much importance to “the unborn.” Why should the state?