Iowa Caucus running thread

[Dick Whitman]

Again: I'm interested to go back and look at how lightly everyone treaded when it came to the Edwardses' divorce.

 

[LongTimeListener]

The Santorums didn't put themselves into this debate. They wrote about a terrible situation and a response that was well understood by people in that line of work or who have had similar experiences. It was not a stance or a controversial opinion. It was an anecdote and one that fits well within anecdotes of similar situations. And the situation is far from the abortion debate by an unfathomable degree.

This just isn't true. The anecdote was used to advance the pro-life agenda. At the margins? Sure. But make no mistake, that was what it was used for.

That can be your interpretation of it.

 

[LongTimeListener]

Again: I'm interested to go back and look at how lightly everyone treaded when it came to the Edwardses' divorce.

Sometimes you are just terrible at analogies.

I can see where this thread is going. Creosote, thanks for sharing all. Most of us learned a lot.

 

[Dick Whitman]

Ross Douthat today:

"In a country that cannot agree whether fetuses are human beings, even questions like how to mourn and bury a miscarried child are inevitably freighted with ideological significance.

"... (B)y turning their personal choices to political ends, politicians lose the right to complain when those same personal lives are subject to partisan critiques. They can and should contest these critiques, but they can't complain about them. In a culture as divided about fundamental issues as our own, the kind of weird attacks that Rick Santorum is enduring come with the vocation he has chosen."

 

[Dick Whitman]

The Santorums didn't put themselves into this debate. They wrote about a terrible situation and a response that was well understood by people in that line of work or who have had similar experiences. It was not a stance or a controversial opinion. It was an anecdote and one that fits well within anecdotes of similar situations. And the situation is far from the abortion debate by an unfathomable degree.

This just isn't true. The anecdote was used to advance the pro-life agenda. At the margins? Sure. But make no mistake, that was what it was used for.

A "pro-life agenda" was brought on by the death of your own child? Surely you jest.

You are clueless in this debate.

So pro-life hyper-crusaders the Santorums wrote a book about how their non-viable fetus was alive, and you don't think that there is a political aspect to telling that tale? Just a coincidence?

That seems awfully naive.

 

[Boom_70]

Well he is a Pro Life candidate.

It's simple deck, just don't vote for Santorum if he turns out to be the Republican candidate.

I'm not a big fan of his but one thing I admire is that he is consistent in his beliefs and puts them out there, unlike many politicians.

 

[Dick Whitman]

Well he is a Pro Life candidate.

It's simple deck, just don't vote for Santorum if he turns out to be the Republican candidate.

I'm not a big fan of his but one thing I admire is that he is consistent in his beliefs and puts them out there, unlike many politicians.

I'm not criticizing Santorum's pro-life stance.

I'm not criticizing his wife's book. Or his decision to talk about their experience on the stump.

No value judgments here on the underlying issues.

I'm merely saying that they began the discussion, so my tolerance for discussion about it by others, in a political context, is pretty damned high.

 

[Starman]

Everyone who knows our family thinks I'm the oldest of five children.

I'm not. A year and a half before I was born, my mother had a son at about five months who died at birth. Today, he might make it. In 1957, he didn't.

She insisted, although at the time the Catholic Church was indifferent and even somewhat resistant on the subject, on a funeral (she had to have a great-uncle who was an auxilliary bishop of a major archdiocese make a few calls to make it happen). He's buried in the same cemetery as my parents, about 100 yards away, in the "infants section." His gravestone just says "(Family Name) Infant," but we know what his full name was. Whenever I go visit the cemetery, I stop by his grave, too.

She always made sure the rest of us always knew about the brother we would never know. But she didn't pose for pictures with his corpse. She said he had all the dignity of any human being -- she didn't pose for pictures with the corpse of her father, either -- and would never have subjected him to public degradation like that.

She would have been horrified and probably enraged at the suggestion she should have done so. She never wanted us to think of John Charles as a tiny blood-smeared crumpled little lifeless body, but as the smart and funny and strong big brother he could have grown up to be. The guy who would have been giving me bloody lips and handing me beers as we grew up.

Later on, she became involved in activities with the anti-abortion movement. She believed in the principle with all her heart, but "the movement" was made up of the most cynical, exploitative, pompous, sanctimonious, hypocritical, vicious, transparent and parasitic motherforkers I've ever come in contact with in my whole gosh darn life.

The forkers running that "movement" don't believe in the principle any more than they believe in the superiority of a particular brand of toilet paper. They look at the actual people in the movement as sheep to be sheared, gullible and malleable simple-minded simps to be milked for political (mainly for the rest of their astonishingly ANTI-life-affirmingly reactionary repressive agenda) and most importantly, financial support (when my mother expressed some pungent reservations with some of their loonier tangential sociopolitical and economic issues, she was firmly shoved to the margins of the organization, but also firmly informed she should keep sending money). As soon as the cash runs out, they move on and sink their fangs into the next bunch of suckers.

fork 'em all with a blazing white-hot cast-iron poker. You wanna play patty-cake with fetal corpses, knock yourself out. Just don't expect everybody else to applaud you for it.