You raise up your head
And you ask, “Is this where it is?”
And somebody points to you and says
“It’s his“
And you say, “What’s mine?”
And somebody else says, “Well what is?”
And you say, “Oh my God
Am I here all alone?”
But something is happening
And you don’t know what it is…
Do you.. Mister Jones?
-Bob Dylan, “Ballad of a Thin Man”
June 24 ad from Evan McMullin in Utah, Mormon and recovering Republican:
“Following today’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, some states are enacting extreme laws — total bans on abortion, onerous limits on birth control, and criminalization of women in desperate situations. I oppose such extreme laws.
“My opponent, Senator Mike Lee, continues to weaponize this issue to divide the country for political gain. I’m running for Senate to accomplish the opposite.
“When we do more to help women and children, abortions decline. Making contraception more available and otherwise doing much more to support families is what truly protects life — not extremist laws that target women in their most vulnerable moments.
“Our commitment to life must be more comprehensive, and start with judging less and doing more to help those in difficult circumstances who need our compassion. “
Of course Mormons were one of the denominations promoting the so-called “three exceptions”, allowing abortions in cases of rape, incest or threat to a mother’s health. But then what we’re dealing with here isn’t even Catholic. Catholic dogma IS pro-life in all cases (as opposed to the pro-gun, pro-death penalty Supreme Court). What we’ve got here is an agenda that makes The Handmaid’s Tale look like Woodstock.
What does a “pro-life” government mean? Well, let’s look at an ACTUAL Catholic country: Ireland. Ireland is (or was) more damn Catholic than Italy, and from its founding as a republic retained a strict abortion ban from British times, saying that the woman (not the doctor) who induced an abortion was “to be kept in penal servitude for life”. There was some support for abortion rights but while it built up steadily over decades, support for abortion bans remained fairly strong. What really changed things was a 2012 case in which an Indian national suffered an unsuccessful pregnancy at 17 weeks’ gestation. Her water broke but this did not expel the fetus. Her hospital refused to remove (abort) the pregnancy and she ended up dying of maternal sepsis. The national outcry led to the country re-writing the laws by 2018 so that abortion is allowed in some cases under 12 weeks’ pregnancy or in cases where medical examiners have determined a threat to the life of the mother or a medical issue indicating the fetus could not survive. Again, the terms “Irish” and “Catholic” used to be nearly synonymous. Not that this issue was the only reason for the steep decline of the Church institution in Ireland, but it sure didn’t help.
Yet the anti-Democratic party that appointed six of our nine justices looks at other people’s history and instead of learning from it, does what it always does and doubles down on stupid. Clearly they don’t care that “maternal sepsis” is a thing, that late-period abortions are only performed in cases of medical necessity precisely because the parents wanted a child and are in an unexpected medical emergency, and it doesn’t matter to them that their dogmatic ban will result in the deaths of pregnant women and probably their children too. Any sacrifice, even in the hundreds or thousands, is justified for the sake of PROTECTING HUMAN LIFE.
PRAISE Trump! Uh, ah mean Jesus.
And if one thought that Thomas E. Dobbs et al v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was the endgame, think again. In his concurring opinion, Justice Thomas (who apparently was not allowed to write Friday’s opinion because it would have been too extreme) said that the court needs to “reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold v. Connecticut, Lawrence V. Texas, Loving v. Virginia – I’m sorry, what?”
Yet Andrew Sullivan, who was on Bill Maher’s show same day, said in his Friday column: “”Has my previous confidence that the end Roe was unrelated to these precedents waned? Not really. … Abortion has long been controversial — and is still furiously contested. Marriage equality reached a record consensus just this month: 71 percent approval, with 55 percent approval among Republicans last year. Thomas was trolling.”
This was my response to dish.andrewsullivan.com:
“Of course Thomas was trolling. He always has been. He and Alito have been trolling for quite some time. They’ve made their positions clear a long time before today, but they needed three Trump SCOTUS nominees before their trolling on abortion became “settled law.” Of course now there is no such thing as settled law, and really, there never was. It’s just that prior to now the Court saw itself as above political bias and wanted to not make it so obvious.
“Here are several other words besides abortion that are mentioned nowhere in the main Constitution or the Bill of Rights: Homosexual. Heterosexual. Machine gun. Semi-automatic. Internet.
“By Alito’s Solomonic approach to “strict constructionism”, some liberal justice could at some point assert that the Constitution does not protect a citizen’s right to semi-automatic weaponry or certain types of ammunition, because the Constitution doesn’t specifically protect them, and smirkingly cite Alito’s opinion in their reasoning, just as Alito smirkingly refers to Ginsburg and Blackmun in his reasoning.
“One only takes such a position, knowing it could be reversed by an equally biased leftist court, on the assumption that one is either immortal, or that the executive branch will keep appointing equally reactionary justices in perpetuity, and largely thanks to Thomas’ gutting of the Voting Rights Act, that will be a lot more likely. And since Republican Party politics are that much more subject to escalating reactionary sentiment than the Court is, future presidents will most likely appoint Justices who make Thomas look like Blackmun.”
I mean yes, the purpose of a court system is to make sure it isn’t subject to the vicissitudes of public opinion, but there’s a difference between not being overly solicitous of public opinion and saying “Fuck public opinion right up the ass with a six-foot cactus attached to a Harley-Davidson engine.” Frankly, that is the stuff of which revolutions are made.
And while we’re on the subject of revolutions, or Justice Clarence Thomas, let’s not forget that his wife, Ginni Thomas, was one of the people pushing Trump Organization Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to “stop the steal” by putting Democrats and establishment Republicans in Guantanamo Bay, and for some reason Justice Thomas was the sole dissent in the post-election case the Trump Organization brought to SCOTUS, which confirmed that Trump had no right to block the release of documents to the January 6 congressional investigation.
I am reminded of one of those Facebook memes I saw recently. This is one of those jokes where they show a few panels from a movie everybody’s seen, with the dialogue changed to show the characters being perceptive and reasonable rather than reacting as dictated by the plot. Thus the last panel of the meme is the final credits of the movie, cause if everyone did the intelligent thing and cut through the plot contrivance the whole thing would be over.
In this case, the movie was Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones. Specifically the scene where Anakin, Padme and Obi-Wan are chained up in the Geonosis arena. Obi-Wan points out the Clone Troopers to Anakin, then says that he’d discovered that they were part of a secret project by Chancellor Palpatine, then tells him that Count Dooku imprisoned him and told him that Darth Sidious is in control of the Senate. Anakin deduces that if the clone army is Palpatine’s project and Palpatine is Sidious, then Dooku and Palpatine are working together. And then the next panel is “Written and Directed by George Lucas” because if they made the obvious deduction and took the obvious next steps, Palpatine’s whole plot would be over.
I saw that meme and thought, “Wow, it’s like the Jedi in these movies were all Democrats.”
It should be obvious by now that a literally anti-democratic party, enabled by the Alito court, has declared war against the rest of the country and is trying to eliminate not just political opposition to its opinions but legal opposition as well. And yet the institutional Democratic Party refuses to make the obvious deduction and take the obvious next steps, perhaps realizing that such legitimacy as they have depends on entertaining the increasingly unsupported idea that this is a multi-party democracy and that the Republican Party is a legitimate part of it, even as that party seeks to destroy that system from within.
A cartel system is no more healthy for a government than it is for a free market. If the cartel partners eliminate all competition to their establishment, then there is no recourse if one or more of the partners becomes dysfunctional and less able to hold on to its gains. The weaker party eventually goes defunct and the last survivor becomes a monopoly. And that stage is even less healthy for government than it is for capitalism.
We’re screwed either way. If you hate woke socialism and political correctness, your only choice is the Republican Party, which means submitting to the even more smothering political correctness of their made-up theocracy and Trump worship. If you don’t want to be ruled by Trump and his wannabe fascists, your only choice is the Democratic Party, which on one hand advocates for woke socialism and political correctness and on the other hand does a piss-poor job of implementing them.
Because Republicans are largely responsible for America’s political dysfunction, and are its main beneficiaries, the serious change America’s political system needs has to first come through the Democrats, and that is unlikely because one, they have their own ulterior motives, two, the system resists change, and three, more than that, the American people resist change.
I mean, I personally think that were it not for COVID, aka Trump Virus (TM) that Donald Trump might have gotten re-elected. Prior to 2020, things were good enough, or at least okay, for the majority of Americans that they would have ignored the negative aspects of his agenda and not gone out to the polls to stop him. But then Trump Virus happened, and it became clear that Trump only cared about dealing with it to the extent that it hurt his chances for re-election, and in fact let it run wild on the assumption that it would most hurt the communities he and his Party didn’t like. At that point the country as a whole started to grasp the extent of Trump’s callous disregard for human life. Or rather, callous disregard for human life was half the reason to vote for Trump, and it only became an issue when that disregard started affecting his voters.
Even then, Trump still got more votes than he did in 2016, which goes to show what kind of cult we’re dealing with. What made the difference was the rest of the country getting that much more motivated to go out and vote for Biden. Now this year is a midterm election, which rarely goes well for the party in the White House, cause enemies blame them for everything that goes wrong, and allies aren’t as motivated by state elections as the national election. But you’d think that if anything could change that, it’s the prospect of Trump state governments agitating for a Fugitive Uterus Act.
I am not really sure that that is enough to light a fire under the notRepublican majority in this country, but it may be the only thing that could. But even if Democrats buck the trend and keep their technical majority in Congress, that’s not enough.
I will have much, much more to say on this in the future, but for now I look at something else that happened this week, which seems to be an unrelated subject but is ultimately the same matter.
Even as the January 6 committee held a Thursday June 23 hearing on how Viceroy Trump tried to foist his election coup by getting an inexperienced attorney named Jeffrey Clark to be his Attorney General (he would have been the third in two weeks after William Barr resigned), they found out along with the rest of the country that Clark’s home had been raided by federal investigators overnight just hours before the hearing focusing on his actions. After which, Clark went on Tucker Carlson’s show and whined that the government acted like the East German secret police. I believe this is what Freudians call “projecting.”
Apparently Attorney General Merrick Garland actually was paying attention to the proceedings and he, or someone under him, acted on what they already knew. As I just said, that’s not enough, but it’s a start, and some of us were beginning to wonder if we’d even have that.
I mean, if one side declares a civil war, the truly civil thing to do is to return the gesture.