No filter between that brain and that mouth - today's edition

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I am not moved by the binary-choice political argument - today's edition

 LTID readers who have been here any length of time know that I am unequivocally opposed to another Donald Trump presidency. I was opposed to the first one. I wrote in Evan McMullen when I voted in 2016, and Ben Sasse in 2020. Donald Trump had established himself as a solipsistic charlatan long before he descended the elevator in 2015. He has transformed the Republican Party into a cult and to a disgusting degree has defiled the worlds of conservative punditry and institutional Christianity.

But the Democratic Party is no alternative. It is too spiritually rotten for the nation to consider for governance.

Today's Exhibit A is the vice president's trip yesterday to Minnesota:

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday toured a health clinic that offers abortion services while she was in Minnesota, spotlighting growing restrictions on women's rights that Democrats believe will animate voters in November.

The visit, believed to be the first of a sitting president or vice president to such a clinic, comes as President Joe Biden highlights abortion rights as a key issue ahead of the November presidential election.

Harris arrived for a tour at Planned Parenthood's St. Paul Health Center-Vandalia facility as some two dozen anti-abortion protesters stood in the street outside holding signs that read, among other statements, "Abortion is not healthcare."

After completing a tour that was closed to the press, Harris said women in the country are undergoing "silent suffering" because of attacks on their health. The clinic in Minnesota's state capital provides a range of care, including birth control and preventive wellness services.

"Right now, in our country we are facing a very serious health crisis, and the crisis is affecting many, many people in our country," the vice president told reporters.

"I'm here at this healthcare clinic to uplift the work that is happening in Minnesota as an example of what true leadership looks like."

Democrats think personal freedoms could be a key issue for women, independents and other key voters after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade abortion rights in 2022. Harris has held more than 80 public meetings on the topic since then. 

This is not the occasion to revisit the entirety of what's happened to Western civilization since Rousseau and up through Shelly, Marx Freud, John Dewey, Hugh Hefner, Gloria Steneim et al. I've done so a few times at Precipice, and it's a subject of great importance. For our purposes here, let me say that what we've done over the last 400 years is jettison something key to human flourishing: acknowledgment of a transcendent order, of the fact that we are designed in certain ways and not others, that female human beings, like females of lower species, bear young. 

And I'm well aware of the very important debates going on within institutional Christianity regarding complimentarianism versus egalitarianism, which plays out in such ways as whether women can preach. I'm well aware of the boneheads such as John McArthur - he who infamously told Beth Moore to "go home" - and the damage they have done to the appeal of the Gospel to the unacquainted.

On a larger scope, I'm aware that there's no turning back regarding the leadership roles women have assumed in business and government. That ship has sailed, and civilization is the richer for it.

But the basic fact to which I allude two paragraphs above will not be disproved. The design of nature, and the fact of a designer who decreed it so, is impervious to the perverse trends by which we attempt to rebel.

To speak plainly, we can call a days-old embryo a pomegranate or a carburetor, but the fact remains that whatever term we use to deny his or her humanity, we each and all were one once.

Vice President Harris may couch her rebellion against the transcendent order in terms of women's health, or personal autonomy, but the Creator will not be mocked. 

Exhibit B is what Senator Chuck Schumer said yesterday:

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), the highest-ranking Jewish lawmaker, levied some of the harshest criticism yet of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from a top U.S. official, calling on Israel to hold elections for a new government to deal with the threat of Hamas.

Why it matters: Democrats have felt increasing pressure from their left to deal with the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and be tougher on Israel, while also standing with a key ally.

• Schumer had largely stayed away from criticizing the Israeli government and Netanyahu in recent months.
• His remarks come as President Biden and other Democrats are wary of alienating progressive voters who are concerned about Israel's attacks that have killed tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza.

Driving the news: Schumer said in prepared remarks that new elections are the "only way to allow for a healthy and open decision-making process about the future of Israel."

• Schumer criticized Netanyahu for aligning himself with far-right extremists in the Israeli government, saying he has turned away from a two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians. Biden supports such a plan.
• "Nobody expects Prime Minister Netanyahu to do the things that must be done to break the cycle of violence, preserve Israel's credibility on the world stage, and work toward a two-state solution," Schumer said.

The big picture: Schumer said the four obstacles to a two-state solution are Hamas, far-right extremists in the Israeli government, the Palestinian Authority and Netanyahu.

The other side: Israel's Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Herzog fired back, "Israel is a sovereign democracy. It is unhelpful, all the more so as Israel is at war against the genocidal terror organization Hamas, to comment on the domestic political scene of a democratic ally.

• Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) also rebuked Schumer for his remarks, labeling the Democrat's call for new Israeli elections as "unprecedented."
• "It is grotesque and hypocritical for Americans who hyperventilate about foreign interference in our own democracy to call for the removal of a democratically elected leader of Israel," McConnell said.

To reiterate some basics, Israel is the only Western nation in a region hostile to Western values, it has had war waged against it multiple times since the 1947 founding of its modern iteration, the October 7 Hamas attack unified Israeli public opinion, and, yes, the Jews were selected by God to show the world how He wishes humankind generally to relate to him.

For Schumer to speak of a two-state solution before Israel has ended Hamas's existence, and as Hezbollah intensifies hostilities on the northern border, calls into question his understanding of the fundamental dynamics of the Mideast. 

A party whose most prominent leaders are so very much on the wrong side of the truth is no more qualified to steward the United States of America than the one slavishly devoted to the least dignified person to ever enter American politics.

I'm staying home in November.

You should, too. 

 

 

A night on which everything that makes post-America "post" was on display

 I didn't watch the SOTU speech, but I've read a pretty comprehensive array of takes. It appears to have been "fiery" (a word that has shown up in several headlines), with some left-of-center partisans saying it dispels any notions that Biden is senile. 

From the LITD perspective (again, on what I've gleaned of the content by reading about it), it seems to have been a mixed bag.

He is - and perhaps the stopped-clock-being-right-twice-a-day framing has some applicability here - spot on about the stakes in Ukraine. In fact, his choosing the opportunity afforded by that topic to point out the quashing of a painstakingly hammered out bipartisan bill that would have provided Ukraine aid and Israel aid and Taiwan aid and border resources, with cameras panning to Senator Lankford - he whose noble efforts in crafting it fell short - was a moment of moral clarity.

But his picking on Israel and this business about a port for aid to get into Gaza - aid that will be surely be pilfered by the enemy Israel must obliterate - was definitely not such a moment.

He unsurprisingly displayed the ignorance of basic economics common to pretty much everyone left of center by saying corporations and "the rich" needs be taxed more.

And of course, in driving home his theme of freedom, he had to include this "right" he sees for people to exterminate fetal Americans. 

I have no problem with his going after Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. The Very Stable Genius and the party he now completely dominates are at least as spiritually rotten as the Democrats, so it stand to reason that Biden is going to point out that rottenness.

The general consensus, even among Republicans, is that Katie Britt's Republican response was just plain goofy. As observers are saying, it's ripe for a parody skit on Saturday Night Live.

Then there was the array of costumes, buttons and all such regalia that yay-hoos of various stripes decided to come attired in. Hecklers. Walkers-out. Marjorie Taylor-Greene. 

And note must be taken of the re-routing of the motorcade from a straight shot up Pennsylvania Avenue because pro-jihad protestors felt self-righteous preening was a higher priority than public order.

A little something for everybody on a March Thursday night as we stare over the precipice into the abyss where the echoes of Western civilization's architects fade into silence.

While I'm definitely not a Republican anymore, stunts like this confirm for me that the Left's intolerance is as big a post-American problem as Trumpsim

 Something I've noticed about progressivism for the forty years since I became a conservative is the satisfaction that preening, grandstanding and assuming the authority to arbitrate what's acceptable and what's not gives to its adherents.

The latest example is this:

Penguin Random House on Monday said it is committed to publishing a coming book by Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett despite a dissenting online open letter that has garnered more than 600 signatures, including many from the publishing world.

The letter, which asks Penguin Random House to re-evaluate its decision to publish the book, argues that Justice Barrett’s vote in June in favor of overturning Roe v. Wade represented an attack on human rights, including the rights to “privacy, self determination, and bodily autonomy along with the federal right to an abortion in the United States.”

By Monday afternoon, the letter had attracted more than 625 signatures from authors, translators and agents. The signatories included more than 75 who identified themselves as Penguin Random House employees. The publisher employs approximately 11,000 globally, including more than 5,000 in the U.S., according to the company. 

The book is being published by the Sentinel imprint of Bertelsmann SE’s Penguin Random House. “We remain fully committed to publishing authors who, like Justice Barrett, substantively shape today’s most important conversations,” said Adrian Zackheim, publisher of Sentinel, a leading conservative house, in the publisher’s first public comments on the situation.

Mr. Zackheim said Justice Barrett’s book is still being written and would likely be published in 2024. Although he declined to provide details about the work’s content, Politico in April 2021 described it as focused on why judges shouldn’t allow their decisions to be shaped by personal feelings. 

A Penguin Random House spokeswoman said Mr. Zackheim was speaking on behalf of Penguin Random House U.S. On Monday, PEN America issued a statement rejecting calls to cancel the book. Penguin Random House is the world’s largest consumer book publisher.  

Efforts to reach Justice Barrett were unsuccessful. 

Never mind Justice Barrett's remarkable career as a jurist, let alone her success in the other roles in her life, such as wife, mother and person of faith.  To the Left, the fact that she voted on Dobbs based on her understanding that the reasoning behind Roe was faulty renders anything else about her moot.

The you-will-get-your-mind-right determination of progressives to eradicate any dissenting perspective is every bit as poisonous as the lunacy that Trumpism has wrought. 

That's why, a week out, I'm still planning to sit out the midterm elections. 

Elizabeth Warren is pursuing two aims with her current crusade

 In the wake of the Dobbs, decision, she's zeroing in on a target that really sticks in her craw:

“With Roe gone, it’s more important than ever to crack down on so-called ‘crisis pregnancy centers’ that mislead and deceive patients seeking abortion care,” said Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, promoting her bill. “We need to crack down on the deceptive practices these centers use to prevent people from getting abortion care, and I’ve got a bill to do just that,” she added.

Under Warren’s bill, charities could be fined $100,000 or “50 percent of the revenues earned by the ultimate parent entity” of the charity for violating the act’s “prohibition on disinformation” related to abortion. But the legislation itself does not define prohibited speech. Warren’s bill directs the Federal Trade Commission to “promulgate rules to prohibit a person from advertising with the use of misleading statements related to the provision of abortion services.” Warren’s bill would thus turn the Federal Trade Commission into a national abortion disinformation board. Perhaps the task of determining what counts as a prohibited “misleading” statement would fall to the recently unemployed Nina Jankowicz for the remainder of the Biden administration. Warren does not seem to have considered who might do this job in a future Republican administration.

This advances two of the dearest aspects of the progressive vision.

Obviously, it puts on full display the Left's dark, nihilistic vision of the value of human life. To have women considering options other than ending their children's lives is anathema to those who harbor rage against the universe's inherent and divinely designed architecture. 

But it also furthers progressives' belief that an administrative state - that is, an executive branch of the federal government bloated with bureaucratic "experts" supplanting law with regulation - is necessary for effective governance in modern times.

The murkiness surrounding the tern "misleading" in this case is of a piece with the problematic nature of the use of the term "reasonable" as applied to gasoline prices by the likes of Joe Biden and others who speak of "price gouging." 

It also gets at the heart of what the Supreme Court struck down in West Virginia v EPA: an executive-branch agency telling private organizations how to conduct their affairs without being authorized to do so by Congress.

That this gets an airing as a reasonable public-policy position is just the latest example of how shattered, bitter and in need of prayer this society is.   

Holiday weekend kickoff Saturday roundup

 We have a three-day respite from routine and toil stretched out before us. It's going to be sweltering. You'll no doubt want to be at a pool, or a beach, or at least in an air-conditioned environment. Herewith some reading recommendations to add some enrichment to your state of leisure. 

Lee Trepanier has a piece at Public Discourse entitled "An Aristotelian Defense of Ownership in the Age of the Sharing Economy." His premise is that private property - a clear understanding of what is yours and what is mine - hones our character and also better suits us for membership in a community.

Take, for example, the modern attitude toward popular culture, and what it has done to that realm:

Of course, companies like Netflix or Apple are not representatives of the political community since they are private entities. In fact, a good case could be made that the streaming service industry itself is an oligopoly. However, the ability to stream implicitly asks whether private property is necessary for one’s entertainment. Except for the hipsters who collect LPs, many consumers in this new world of streaming would say no. Socrates, I suspect, would be smiling at this, while Aristotle would recoil.

When popular culture is distributed as private property, it creates the possibility for voluntary sharing from one person to another. In Aristotle’s world of private property, when I want to share my experience of watching a television show, I must decide whether I want to give that DVD in the first place; and if so, to whom. This creates the opportunity for me to practice the virtue of generosity. By contrast, in Socrates’ world of common property, I just have to tell the person the name of the show and let him stream it. Since there is no transaction between us, there is no virtue.

As Aristotle correctly observed, the scarcity of something makes it more valuable, leading people to take care of the item and to share it, if they wish. This makes possible the virtues of moderation and generosity, and the maintenance of civil society itself.

At The Daily Beast, Bonnie Kristian invites us to take a view of what Ron DeSantis represents within the Republican Party - namely, per the title of her article, the rise of incoherent folk libertarianism.

At Religion News Service, Karen Swallow Prior deals with a subject about which I've written here at LITD: the report on sexual corruption within the Southern Baptist Conference. She says that any needle-moving response to it is going to require a hefty dose of humility:

Humility is obedience — obedience to the point of death.

Just as true humility is rare, false humility is common. False humility seeks to manipulate and control in service to self rather than others.

With declining numbers not only in the SBC but in the church in America as a whole, with more and more people deconstructing their faith and even deconverting, we who remain must cling to obedience and humble ourselves. In so doing, we get ourselves out of the way in order to fully reveal the mercy and justice of a holy God.

On the Wall Street Journal opinion page, Phil Gramm and Mike Solon call student loan forgiveness what it is: a bribe:

Advocates for student-debt forgiveness are open about their political motivation. “It is actually delusional to believe Dems can get re-elected without acting on filibuster or student debt,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted in December. Rep. Ayanna Pressley said in May: “Democrats win when we deliver, and we have to deliver in ways that are impactful, tangible and transformative, like canceling student debt.” A headline on an April column in the Los Angeles Times read “Elizabeth Warren knows how Democrats can win the midterms. It starts with canceling student loan debt.” The New Republic signaled its agreement: “Biden’s Only Good Pre-Midterm Play: Cancel Student Debt.” 

The debate has centered on how debt forgiveness will play politically because no other justification exists. The average student loan borrower leaves college with a debt of $28,400. What do students get for that debt? Over the course of their earning lives, those with only some college gained a lifetime earnings increase relative to someone who only completed high school that is 10 times the average debt incurred. On average a graduate with a bachelor’s degree earns 40 times as much; a graduate with a master’s earns 53 times; and a doctoral graduate earns 80 times as much as the debt. Law and medical degree holders earn almost 100 times as much. Even as the share of the population with a college degree has tripled to 30.7% from 10.5% in 1967, the value of that degree has grown. The wage premium for having a college degree has grown to 96.2% today from 55.9% in 1967.

Brian Gitt, a former advocate for play-like energy forms, details at Real Clear Energy his growth into an understanding of what is really required for human advancement:

I went to work in construction to build energy-efficient homes, and I started a company that built composting systems for cities and businesses. I became executive director of an organization that championed green building policies and became CEO of a consulting firm that commercialized clean energy technologies and ran energy-efficiency programs. I then founded a software startup to help promote green home upgrades, and I led business development for a company making wireless power technology.

But by 2008, I started to see cracks in my beliefs. The Obama administration had earmarked billions of dollars in federal funding to create jobs in the energy sector, and my company won multi-year contracts valued at over $60 million. Creating jobs and making buildings more energy-efficient were worthy goals. But the project was an utter failure. It didn’t get anywhere close to achieving the goals that the government had set. But what was really shocking to me was how the government refused to admit the project had failed. All of its public communications about the project boasted about its effectiveness. 

I started to realize that I had accepted as true certain claims about energy and our environment. Now I began to see those claims were false. For example:

• I used to think solar and wind power were the best ways to reduce CO2 emissions. But the biggest reduction in CO2 emissions during the past 15 years (over 60%) has come from switching from coal to natural gas. 

• I used to think that the world was transitioning to solar, wind, and batteries. This, too, was false. Trillions of dollars were spent on wind and solar projects over the last 20 years, yet the world’s dependence on fossil fuels declined only 3 percentage points, from 87% to 84%. 

• I used to believe nuclear energy was dangerous and nuclear waste was a big problem. In fact, nuclear is the safest and most reliable way to generate low-emission electricity, and it provides the best chance of reducing CO2 emissions.

It’s now clear I was chasing utopian energy. I was using green energy myths as moral camouflage, and I was able to believe those myths as long as I remained ignorant about the real costs and benefits of different energy sources. 

At National Affairs, Andy Smarick explains the importance of subsidiarity to family policy:

. . . if some American families need support — and they do — what is the right way for public leaders to engage on the issue?

The principle of subsidiarity can be of enormous help on this question. It recognizes the family as the cornerstone of society while offering a coherent vision of the duties and authorities of the government and other institutions. This includes the aid that different social bodies owe to one another as well as the limits on such support. From subsidiarity, we can derive six governing rules of thumb that will enable us to appreciate such things as what the New Deal and the Great Society got wrong, why the welfare reforms of 1996 were so valuable, why state family-focused policies that operate through non-profits are sound, and why today's proposals for child allowances and a universal basic income are misguided.

He specifies three ways in which subsidiarity can meet family needs:

Limiting the state doesn't mean that important needs must go unmet, however. Subsidiarity ensures this in three ways. First, it asserts that all entities have non-transferable duties they are obligated to carry out. Individuals, for example, are expected to behave ethically and to participate in family and public life. Such participation — which is "inherent in the dignity of the human person" — begins by "taking charge of the areas for which one assumes personal responsibility." John XXIII observed that the individual is "primarily responsible for his own upkeep and that of his family." By obliging people to work and care for themselves and their families, subsidiarity situates some social responsibilities at the individual level.

Second, subsidiarity requires individuals and other lower-order entities to resist interference by higher-order ones. As Hochschild puts it, lower-order associations have the "burden of responsibility...to keep proper functions from being taken over by higher associations." By limiting the need for state intervention, subsidiarity keeps social arrangements in balance.

Third, subsidiarity recognizes that all entities occasionally need help. But instead of directing them to turn to the state for assistance, subsidiarity obligates these entities to help one another, and explains how this web of support should operate.

In her piece "Against Pro-Life Triumphalism" at Plough, Jane Clark Scharl points to the humane and humble way Christians should proceed in the wake of the Dobbs decision:

In the wake of the Dobbs decision, I have been praying over the scriptural mandate to “rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep.” The rejoicing here is clear: I can rejoice with everyone who has worked to overturn an unjust law that denied the sanctity of all human life. The weeping is less obvious, but clear enough: most women – and men too – who choose abortion do so in tears, out of a sense of desperation. Hardly anyone delights in abortion. Almost invariably men and women (I include men here because conception, pregnancy, abortion, and birth are not only women’s issues; the illusion that they are is a large part of the catastrophe we are in today) choose abortion in grief, confusion, or dismay. They choose it because they feel alone and ill-equipped; because they cannot imagine juggling a baby and full-time work; because their parents or partners give them an ultimatum.

This is where pro-life activists must begin the difficult work of addressing the root causes of abortion, cultural, moral, or economic. This last may be where we can have the greatest impact in the lives of others, but that will require acknowledging how intractably entangled those roots are with capitalism.

And I always like an essay that steers me to a book I'd been unacquainted with but that now goes on my must-read list. Such is the case with one she mentions in the next paragraph;

I use the word “capitalism” with trepidation, for there are few flags of brighter red than this one, few totems of greater mystic value in the West. When I say “capitalism,” I mean the undergirding ideology of a society that values humans primarily in terms of productivity and consumption. In his 2015 book The Burnout Society philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes, “Twenty-first-century society is no longer a disciplinary society, but rather an achievement society.” Within such a world, only achievement is valued. And the lower one is in the social hierarchy, the greater the marginalizing effect of “lack of achievement.”

What I mean by that jargony sentence is quite simple: it is harder for a lower-class woman to take time off for maternity leave than for a higher-class woman. The “lost achievement” is greater, and its ripple effect is wider. It is also harder for a woman who already has children and has clawed her way back into a career to step out again for maternity leave, or even barring leave, for the inevitable mental and physical fatigue that comes with the first eighteen months of caring for a new human. Then there are the expenses of paying for childcare, or the lost earning potential while caring for one’s own children. And there are few financial benefits to having children to compensate for all this – because in an achievement society, children are a detriment.

"My Morality," a recent post at Daren Jonescu's blog, sums up what strikes me as the proper way to go about establishing a criterion for a system of values:

The voices of the modern world tell us every day that we should “live for our desires,” but they really mean we should live to satisfy our desires, which means to end them or erase them through pleasure and comfort. As much pleasure and comfort as possible, as easily gained as possible. This, they think, will reduce the pain of lack and need, and therefore make us “happy.” (That is the progressive formula which Nietzsche identified as “the last man,” and which Huxley encapsulated, in Brave New World, with his apt descriptive phrase “twenty piddling little fountains.”)

When they say “happy,” they merely mean comfortable, free of the pains and struggles associated with desire and deficiency. But the painful experience of desire and deficiency is life, understood in the sense of one ascending from profound depths — the sense which has been judged antithetical, even offensive, to our age of surfaces without depths. Thus, when modern voices tell us to “live for our desires,” they are really telling us to stop living.

I refuse to stop living. I refuse to be modern in their way. I refuse to mistake satisfaction for meaning. I refuse the easy escape from the pain and need of purposeful living into the pleasure and comfort of insensitive existence. I choose to suffer with the pain and need, struggle with them, dig deep into them to find the beautiful, although it sometimes hurts — or rather because it sometimes hurts, inasmuch as some forms of pain may be the surest signs of life in an incomplete being.

I want to find the ultimately desirable, to observe it, to study all its surprising levels of being, to suffer through struggling to attain it, and (to borrow the great Platonic metaphor) to give birth to ideas and understanding through these labor pains. Thus, everything that helps me find the object I seek, or that reminds me of it, or that keeps me focused on the search, is good. Everything that merely relieves this discomfort, or helps me “forget,” is evil. That is my morality. All proper morality, in the end, is about living without the perfection we seek. The plausible differences between moral frameworks come down to whether, in that definitional phrase, one places one’s emotional emphasis on the word “without” or the word “seek.”

Anyone who would deprive me of my form of spiritual agitation, or try to weaken it, is aligned with evil, in the sense of being harmful to me. Today, the human world taken as a whole contrives and conspires to divest me of my beneficial and enriching pain, “for my own good” as they say in their more progressive moments. This makes the human world, in its current form, a particular existential threat, a nemesis, to be resisted at all costs. 

And, finally, I've been busy over at Precipice. 

There's my piece on turning 13 in the year 1968.

And one entitled "In Pursuit of a Conservatism That's not Spiritually Ugly."

And my latest, "Spirituality Without a Lodestar Inevitably Comes Up Empty."

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why post-America can't have nice things - today's edition

 Well, just dandy. Not 48 hours after the Supreme Court rectifies a mistake it made 49 years ago and asserts, correctly, that no right to abortion can be found in the Constitution, this bonehead - bonehead elected to Congress, no less (what kind of constituents comprise her district?) - has to provide fodder to the enraged mob:

U.S. Rep. Mary Miller immediately drew fierce backlash on social media and elsewhere at a Saturday night rally with former President Donald Trump when she credited him for the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade calling it a “victory for white life.”

“I want to thank you for the historic victory for white life in the Supreme Court yesterday,” Miller said, then raised her arms in an animated clap amid cheers from the crowd, which numbered in the thousands on a sweltering day in West Central Illinois.

Her campaign's attempt at a walk-back strikes me as pretty damn lame:

But Miller’s campaign said Saturday night that the congresswoman misread prepared remarks at a rally that Trump held for her in the village of Mendon.

"You can clearly see she is reading off a piece of paper, she meant to say ‘right to life,'" Miller spokesman Isaiah Wartman said.

Miller, R-Illinois, later tweeted: “I will always defend the RIGHT TO LIFE!”

Now, I'm always willing to cut anybody some slack when it's justified, slack being at a premium in this grace-starved world. But you listen to the video and see if there's any chance she was merely garbling the phrase "right to life."

It doesn't help that back in January, she said Hitler was right about one thing, namely, that a political movement that gets the youth on board will be a success. You don't ascribe correctness of viewpoint to Adolf Hitler, about anything, any time.

So now the venom-hearted hordes have just what they need to portray those who champion the rights of people who aren't born yet as racists. 

Thanks for nothin', bonehead. 

 

 

a few thoughts . . .

 . . . about you-know-what:

1.) News stories are circulating about how Clarence Thomas now wants to revisit Obergefell v Hodges and Griswold v Connecticut. He wishes to, not because he's a repressed, stodgy old fuddy-duddy who desires to oppress various groups of people, but because he's deeply concerned by the concept of substantive due process. Substantive due process uses the Fourteenth Amendment to ascribe to court cases outcomes never envisioned by the amendment's authors. 

2.) This is why John Hart Ely objected to Roe v Wade:

"What is frightening about Roe," noted the eminent constitutional scholar and Yale law professor John Hart Ely (who personally supported legalized abortion), "is that this super-protected right is not inferable from the language of the Constitution, the framers' thinking respecting the specific problem in issue, any general value derivable from the provisions they included, or the nation's governmental structure. … It is bad because it is bad constitutional law, or rather because it is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be."

3.) I'm seeing a number of memes with the basic message that if opposition to Roe v Wade were really about babies and children, "we'd" have free prenatal care, more generous family leave policies, universal pre-K and such. A number of questions arise. I presume this "we" refers to society at large, but how do "we" accomplish these things? Does it not require bills to be put forth in local and/or state legislatures and/or the federal legislature, voted on and passed? Does that not require getting majorities of candidates favorable to such initiatives elected to these bodies? Perhaps we could go the Rexford Tugwell route and have unelected bureaucrats in executive-branch agencies impose these things, but I would wager that there's a great swath of the public that wouldn't go for that, me included. And wouldn't much of a policy like that require curtailing the free market? There's another aspect of it that I for one would vehemently oppose.

4.) All laws, pretty much by definition, set limits on what a citizen can do with his or her body. You are not allowed to point a gun at someone and exert pressure on the trigger with your finger. You are not allowed to depress the gas pedal of your automobile with your foot beyond the extent needed to drive the posted speed limit. You are not allowed to clutch an item of merchandise in a store, lift it with your arm and walk out without paying for it.

"Don't look down" is the advice always given to the precariously positioned

 A frequent theme of my essays over at Precipice is the ever-shrinking sliver of terrain I inhabit as a post-American trying to maneuver through this world guided by a set of consistent principles. A few examples are here, here and here.

While I still consider myself a conservative, I've developed a keen sense for what I know to stay away from. I've become quite attuned to the odor wafting from opinion sites whose posts bear look-what-that-awful-Left-is-up-to-now themes. Let's name names: Townhall, The Federalist, American Greatness, The American Thinker. 

What the awful Left is up to hasn't been the whole story for some time now. At the risk of sounding snobbish, I'm going to say that it's clear that such sites are targeting their appeal to ordinary, well-meaning citizens with jobs and other life obligations that limit the amount of time they have to avail themselves of perspective and analysis on the events of the day. This is the kind of person who concludes that the binary-choice argument regarding elections is the last word, the kind who, when presented with the powerful testimony coming out of the January 6 hearings, respond with something along the lines of "Well, we sure didn't have gas prices this high when Trump was president."

But there's a swath of the nation's populace beyond the above-described type of citizen that doesn't just support Trump in the hope of more desirable economic circumstances, but that lives in a fever swamp where anything remotely resembling tolerance can't be found.

It's the piece of real estate on which events such as the recent Texas Republican Party convention take place, an event that sees John Cornyn get booed for trying to find some kind of bipartisan crafting of gun legislation that's consistent with the Second Amendment yet moves the needle on the proliferation of spree killings, and Dan Crenshaw and his staff get physically assaulted, the assailants shouting "Eyepatch McCain!" It's the piece of real estate from which emanates a handwritten letter to Adam Kinzinger threatening the life of his wife and five-month-old son.

It's the terrain that spawns the new video from Missouri candidate for Senator Eric Greitens, showing him leading a commando raid and saying that there's no bag limit when hunting RINOS.  That would be the same Eric Greitens who, his former hairstylist alleges, blackmailed her into secrecy about their affair with a photo of her nude, and whose second wife's sworn affidavit says that part of the reason she divorced him was abuse "such as cuffing our then-3-year-old son across the face at the dinner table." And it would be the same Eric Greitens who leads the field among his fellow Republican candidates in the runup to Missouri's August primary.

And on the world stage, calls for Ukraine and the West to accept compromise regarding the Russian invasion, from voices up to and including the dean of the "realist" foreign-policy school, Henry Kissinger, increase, even as Putin says a new world order of Russia's building is supplanting Western primacy, and Russia threatens Poland with a nuclear strike. 

But the point that the Left continues to become more monstrous is absolutely valid, the disgusting nature of those most vocal in making it notwithstanding. 

LITD readers are surely familiar with my position on abortion. For those who may be new here, I wrote, in a post about the subject the other day that

You can choose to call a zygote, embryo or fetus a clump of cells, or an unviable tissue mass. Hell, you can call it a 3/16-inch Allen wrench. (There's probably a grown adult out there somewhere identifying as such.) But the fact is, that what ever you call it (actually, him or her), you were one once.

In that post, I include this link to a rundown of recent attacks on, and threats against, Catholic pregnancy care centers. And let us not forget the recent arrest of the man who'd traveled across the country and got arrested outside Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh's home, carting on his person

. . .  a firearm, magazines loaded with 10 rounds of ammunition, 17 rounds of ammunition in a plastic bag, and other items authorities believe he intended to use to assassinate the justice. 

Or the more recent demonstration outside SCOTUS Justice Amy Coney Barrett's home by pro-abortion activists who had blood-covered baby dolls taped to their crotches. 

And while I mentioned high gas prices above in the context of their being employed as a distraction from the January 6 hearings, inflation is a very real crisis. Americans' increasing reluctance to go anywhere by motor vehicle that they don't have to is having and will have even more broad economic ramifications. 

He continues to try to deflect from the real causes with hackneyed leftist phrases such as "corporate greed" and "price gouging," but he's also floating concrete steps that would not only be ineffective but destructive of the free market such as invoking "emergency powers" or issuing some kind of "gas cards."

The idea of the federal government taking over the refining industry is being discussed by some who share the president's hatred of dense, reliable and readily available energy forms. 

My overall point is that I increasingly have no use for anyone whose main interest is in going after some kind of other side. This is not a call for kumbaya. I understand that our national polarization is extreme, and perhaps even intractable. But we get nowhere in acting on the hope that it isn't if we ignore half or more of the problem.