To all contributors, I'm not quite sure how or why it happened, but I seem to have zapped all comments on recent posts. I know that you put a great deal of thought into the opinions you voice on my blog, and I deeply regret whatever I did that expunged the fruits of your labor. To my critics in particular: Believe me this was not by design!
Hang in there with me and I'll try not to do it again.
Re the whole repugnant Kermit Gosnell mess and its implications: We need a workable, sustainable definition of life—a valid medical definition of when it begins and when it ends—that can be applied across the board in deciding whether or not to legally terminate a pregnancy or, at the far end, an adult existence that has devolved into intractable pain and utter meaninglessness. Once that definition of life is in place, then any action that breaches the established parameters is murder, period.
In any case, a 6-month-old incipient human being is not merely a "fetus," despite The New York Times' leftist, Feminist and, one suspects, petulant determination to characterize it as such in its coverage of the Gosnell trial. We're talking about a baby, folks, not a fetus. Furthermore, hair-splitting (or, in this case, head-splitting) debates over whether Gosnell's patients were or weren't beyond Pennsylvania's 24-week limit miss the forest in the trees. I would ask, how can a civilized society condone the "abortion" of even a 5-month-old "fetus"? I would abide by whatever definition is produced by any august panel convened to study the matter proposed in my first graph above—Lord knows we need to come up with something—but personally I just don't see it. Many babies in recent years have been spontaneously delivered by mothers at 5 months and, with appropriate incubation and other medical intervention, have survived to become full-fledged children. If it is alive, and you kill it, you have ended a life.
Bottom line, I don't know where the line is (or ought be) drawn, but there must be a valid line somewhere that separates life from its absence. A medical line, not a political one. We need to find it and honor it.
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'Insurrectionists in Waiting'?
Like, I suppose, many sane Americans, I am disturbed by the NRA's near-secessionist appeal to gun owners...by the attempt of same to foment a spirit of open revolt against the alleged tyranny brewing in Washington. This theme has been picked up and is most shamelessly trumpeted by the likes of radio talker Glenn Beck, beyond-the-pale right-winger and conspiracy theorist extraordinaire. Beck has been "out there" for a while now, but whereas once he was mostly a harmless curiosity, providing ample fodder for the satirical barbs of a Jon Stewart or a Bill Maher, nowadays Beck's rants have taken a much darker, more dangerous turn. These days he muses openly and euphorically about the undoing of the Obama Administration in rhetoric that, at its worst, is hard to interpret as anything less than a call for armed insurrection. He fans the flames of discontent among his audience of so-called "real Americans" and constantly exhorts them to do whatever they must to assure the survival of "our America." In pretty much this same category is the slightly more cerebral but no less acrid Mark Levin.
Do these guys really believe what they're saying? Or are they just "entertaining" (pandering to) their sizable wing-nut audience? I sure hope it's the latter, though it's troubling either way.
And it's interesting, isn't it, that whenever conservatives talk about the greatest figures in American history, they feel compelled to reach all the way back to Washington and Jefferson. They laud the ideology and the documents the Founders produced, conveniently overlooking (or maybe not?) that these same Great and Wise Men were a slave-owning, misogynist bunch who, in effect, also created a national religion ("endowed by their Creator") in the guise of freeing us from religious orthodoxy. Levin is now touting a book written by his octogenarian father that celebrates Washington's crossing of the Delaware. Sure, that's a sacred part of American history. But let's face it, the Founders aren't our best role models. Like the Second Amendment itself, they have been revealed as superannuated and deeply flawed. We need a revisionist lens on what they brought to the table.
Were the Founders great men in their time? Of course. We no longer live in their time, however. Ptolemy was a great man in his time as well, but by today's standards he's a loony and a rank amateur, with his Geocentric model of the universe.
In fairness, I confess to being dismayed by some of what's going on lately in the White House and its extended domain; of late there is a a certain "asleep at the switch" quality to the Obama presidency that I find surprising and disappointing, given the strong leadership that I felt he evinced in his first term. But I don't see this as willful and I certainly don't see it as tyrannical. In fact, let me propose an apolitical explanation for our present IRS scandal, in which agents apparently (and systematically) targeted the Tea Party and related groups. I don't think Obama and his minions had a thing to do with this; though subsequent revelations may prove me wrong, I don't think the scandal will lead us anywhere near 1600 Penn, except in the febrile minds of Beck, Levin and Sean (DMoTV) Hannity.
Look, what does the Tea Party stand for? Lower taxes. What does the IRS collect? Taxes. Why does the Tea Party oppose high taxes? Because those taxes fund big government. What is the IRS the collection arm of? Our big government. So, to me, it stands to reason that IRS types would be philosophically aligned with the concept of big government and would naturally tend to suspect groups that opposed taxation and urged Americans to avoid it if at all possible. Similarly, the IRS would be skeptical of groups that took a more anarchical approach to the citizen-government relationship as a whole (hence the IRS' targeting of other groups out on the right-wing fringe).
Does that not make sense? Maybe this will indeed turn out to be Obama's Watergate (Waterloo?), but I don't think so. And I think the longer conservatives argue the point, the better it looks for the Left in 2016.
...once Real Life begins. Also highly topical/pertinent, since it's final-grade week at the college...
Click to see cartoon.
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*as well as several readers who were nice enough to send to me.
Vindication is fun, but it seldom comes as fast as it did for me with Roy Halladay. The kind of vindication to which I refer is the kind you get when that asshole who was driving on your tail at 88 mph swerves past you (almost clipping your rear bumper), gives you the finger...then a mile or so ahead gets pulled over by the state police. You can't help but smile, and maybe even wave, as you drive by the scene moments later. I had an analogous drive-by moment this morning, courtesy of Mr. Halladay.
For the benefit of Islamic terrorists and other non-baseball fans, Roy Halladay has long been one of the best pitchers of our time, and probably any time. But he's getting up in years now (for a ballplayer), and he got off to a horrific start this season. Then suddenly he threw a few solid games in a row, so naturally this had to be turned into an inspirational moment, a teachable moment, by someone. (If you're new to the blog, we call such phenomena Sportsthink.) That someone was MLB.com, which on Monday ran a feature about how Halladay rediscovered his old indomitable self by making a mental visit to the thinking of the late, supposedly great sports psychologist Harvey Dorfman. In fairness, this was not the first time Halladay lauded Dorfman; in fact, he once credited the psychologist with turning his entire career around, back when he was a much younger man...a much younger man who could still throw a mid-90s fastball, I might add.
Dorfman died in 2011, but, observes MLB.com, "Fortunately for Halladay, he saved nearly every email exchange with Dorfman over the last five years of his life." So the pitcher went back and reread those pearls of wisdom just prior to his start of April 14, which, as it happens, became Halladay's first good performance of the year. He followed it up with two more good games.
Then last night—which, need I remind you, is just 24 hours after the piece ran—Halladay, with his newfound mental toughness presumably intact, went out and took a historic drubbing at the hands of the Cleveland Indians. The Indians bombed him for eight runs on nine hits in under four innings. Three of those nine hits became souvenirs for outfield fans. (Again, for the jihadists, that means they were home runs.)
Hey Roy...maybe you need to go back and read those emails again? (Or maybe the Cleveland hitters somehow got hold of Halladay's notes? Should this be investigated!?)
Bullshit piled atop bullshit, day after day, week after week.
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*That's positive mental attitude, folks.
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