Are all phony-baloney "pro-lifers" as deranged and violently women-hating as Erick Erickson? (At a guess, quite possibly)

by Ken

Daily Kos's Weatherdude passed the above tweet along with this note:

I know one-sentence diaries with a screenshot of a Tweet are frowned upon around here, but how could one possibly expand on the absolute class that is Erick Erickson? This man is walking proof that "pro-life" is a lie.

Fortunately we have no compunctions about one-sentence posts with screen shots of tweets; we just usually have trouble stopping talking after one sentence.

I know somebody somewhere will say, "Jeez, dude, catcha take a joke?" But of course to anyone with a working brain, the notion of this abomination as a joke is even more, well, abominable. Man oh man, talk about high-larious, what could be gut-bustinger than the image of sticking a coat hanger into the lady parts of a pregnant woman and with any luck killing the effing bitch along with her fetus? I could just laugh, and laugh, and then laugh some more. Whee!

I guess Erickson might say that this doesn't show a deep loathing for and wish for gruesome violence against women -- just the baby-killing ones. But in the absolute kindliest interpretation, this still tells us way more than the vile dirtbag seems can possibly have realized, unless he really is a moron as well as a sociopath. Because he has acknowledged what self-righteous fake-pro-lifers never do: that abortions will continue regardless of the legal status. True, access will be much more limited to those who can't afford quality care, which will include all the well-off right-wingers who preach that abortion is murder but always manage to get their knocked up wimmins taken care of quietly and safely.

And "safely" is the real point. Erickson makes clear his total awareness that women who can't afford safe abortions will be subjected to butchery. And that, he apparently thinks, is a real hoot.

It's a constant nuisance for brain-blockaded abortion foes, this constantly having to disown characters among their number who do the kinds of things that respectable people really can't allow themselves to be tied to, like the "pro-lifers" who murder doctors. They're always so quick to deny indignantly that they have any connection to such fanatics. Well, you have to hope for their sake that they're just as quick to disown a pile of garbage like Erick Erickson. Because otherwise they're telling us that they have no problem with desperate women being butchered.

(P.S.: It's just my opinion, of course, but I really don't think they do have a problem with women being butchered. Because they're not, after all, "our kind" of women, which is to say not the kind of women whose "pro-life" loved ones can afford to have their pregnancies terminated safely.)

#

For a "Sunday Classics" fix anytime, visit the stand-alone "Sunday Classics with Ken."

Do all the American Krap Kristians share Pope Cardinal Ratguts's bedrock immorality?

Sure, he always looks like he's dressed to party, in outfits like his pretty white dresses and chic little hats, but make no mistake, Pope Cardinal Ratguts is a ruthless enforcer of his primitive authoritarian ideology. Worse, he establishes himself by his own words and deeds as a profoundly and institutionally immoral savage.

"In August, 1984 Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger stated that liberation theology has a major flaw in that it attempts to apply Christ's teaching on the sermon on the mount regarding the poor to present social situations. Ratzinger believes that Christ's teaching on the poor means that we will be judged when we die, and at the final judgment, with particular attention to how we personally have treated the poor."

-- from the Wikipedia article on liberation theology

by Ken

A listserv colleague, one of the smartest people I know, was providing suggestions for countering the inevitable right-wing appeal to "morality" as a reason for allowing the wealthy elites to stomp the "undeserving" poor into the dust. Right-wingers not only believe that people who find themselves in need of life help are in that situation because of their own failing, but are apt to couch that belief in religious terms -- that it's God's will and doing, so that stomping on the poor is really doing the Lord's work.

No amount of reasoning, my colleague argued, will touch people who think they have God on their side, which is why she gathered a list of citations from that proto-socialist Jesus. I think we're all familiar with the desperate right-wing efforts of late to concoct a "macho Jesus" who magically believes all the anti-human proposition of the Crackpot Right, but as all those people who brandish their bibles like weapons would know if they ever actually read what's inside, Jesus would have been shocked and horrified by everything, all the predation, hatred, and bigotry they fetishize in his name. Jesus, of course, was a people kind of guy, and the god he fronted for was a people kind of god.

And then she wrote something that really warmed my heart:

"There's a reason liberation theology got squashed down so very, very hard. It was both a coherent and popular argument against the characterization of deity, the ultimate implied moral authority, as a bitter sadist."

The liberation theology movement was the last time the Catholic Church found itself on the side of ordinary people, and even that was an accident, a product of the new spirit of humanity breathed into it by the accidental pope, John XXIII, who was expected to twiddle his thumbs in the short time he had left to live, at which point the cardinals hoped they might be better able to reach agreement on a "serious" candidate. Instead that amazing man -- probably the last truly decent person to rise into the uppermost ranks of the Church -- aligned the institution with the needs and hopes of all its faithful.

Oh, old Pope Paul VI tried to get the toothpaste of liberation theology back in the tube, but he was way too wishy-woshy to do the job that the "sainted" John Paul II would roll up his sleeves and take on with such fanatical zeal. And he would no doubt have been thrilled to know that his tiara would be passed on to a man of whose ruthlessness and savagery and worship of the powerful he had made such generous use in his own papacy.

And Pope Cardinal Ratguts has done nothing to disappoint. Even with the forced diversion of having to deal with the monumental mess of the Church's wretched history of institutionally coddling and even encouraging the pedophile priests (an effort that Ratguts had largely overseen while still a cardinal, in his role as John Paul's designated keeper of the faith), he has been a resolute force for the subjugation of normal human aspirations with the yoke of uncompromising doctrinal orthodoxy, ensuring that there's a Rich Folks' Catholic Church and an Everyone Else's.

And so a surprising amount of common ground has been found between the Church and the non-Catholic Krap Kristian sects that have spread like cancer in this country.

"Pro-life" they call themselves, based solely on the difficult question of abortion, being themselves way too whacked-out to appreciate the difficulty of the question, while remaining resolutely pro-death on all manner of issues that aren't difficult. Even savage old Pope John Paul, after all, took his opposition to the death penalty as seriously as his opposition to abortion -- at least rhetorically. (The hierarchy over which he maintained such tight control seemed always to be on 24/7 guard when it came to standing up to blasphemy on abortion and creepily silent on . . . that other matter.)

And where Jesus seems to have had nothing at all to say on the subject of homosexuality, at least nothing preserved among his teachings or anywhere else in the New Testament, the self-appointed guardians of "morality" of both the Mother Church and the United Krap Kristians ride that famous single citation in Leviticus -- buried among a host of other (sensibly unenforced and indeed unmentioned) prohibitions, of which they appear to be utterly ignorant -- as an excuse to throw the full weight of their orthodoxy at it, pretending as usual to do so in the name of Jesus.

They don't know anything important about Jesus's life, work, beliefs, or teachings, and they're defiantly, militantly proud of their ignorance. They hate Jesus with every fiber of their malignant -- or merely plug-ignorant -- carcasses.

I've mentioned a number of times that, for all the evil that has been done, and all the important work in need of doing that has been left undone, by these Jesus-hating "Christians," there are also a lot of people I've known or known about who have been inspired by their faith to attempt to do those good works. The single most important example in the Catholic realm was the liberation theology movement, spearheaded by all those humane activist priests who believed their calling required them to devote their energies to improving the conditions of the downtrodden among their worshippers. Their actions made, as my colleague put it, "a coherent and popular argument against the characterization of deity, the ultimate implied moral authority, as a bitter sadist." And it was only natural that liberation theology "got squashed down so very, very hard." (I love that phrase!)

And then I stumbled across the pre-papal Cardinal Ratguts's principled position on the subject, that -- as the Wikipedia writer puts it -- "Christ's teaching on the poor means that we will be judged when we die, and at the final judgment, with particular attention to how we personally have treated the poor," and has no bearing on how people lead their lives in the here-and-now? It's just a hurdle to overcome at judgment time!

It occurred to me suddenly that I hadn't felt it necessary to spell out the connection, in my Sunday Classics piece ("Verdi blows the lid off the whole Krap Kristian hypocrisy") focusing on the agonizing unawareness of sinful unworthiness expressed by the mezzo-soprano in the "Liber scriptus" and by the tenor in the "Ingemisco" of the Day of Wrath depicted in Verdi's Requiem. It seemed grotesquely obvious, too much so to even warrant mention, that the only point of such depictions is as a cautionary lesson to influence real-world, real-life behavior.

I hadn't counted, though, on the depth of the ruthless savagery and total immorality of the man who considers himself personally charged with enforcing the morality of his subjects -- who not only doesn't see the connection but insists that there isn't one. In a reasonable, principled world, an argument like this would have caused Cardinal Ratguts to be carted off to the nearest loony bin, or at least voted off the island. Instead his career as a pitiless enforcer of primitive orthodoxy continued to flourish until his fellow cardinals seized the opportunity to promote him to the top job.

What a bunch!

#

Why is it so hard for "Poor Old Pat" Buchanan to believe that pro-choice people might really hope to see fewer abortions?

It wasn't till this morning that I noticed the comments added to my post yesterday about Christopher Buckley's departure -- a slight step ahead of the wingnut lynch mob -- from National Review, the magazine created by his father, the late William F. Buckley Jr.

It was impossible for me to resist leading with the "sighful" quote Christopher recalled from "dear Pup" ("after a right-winger who fancied himself a WFB protégé had said something transcendently and provocatively cretinous"): 'You know, I’ve spent my entire life time separating the Right from the kooks.'” To which our old friend "Me" responded: "That was wasted effort. It can't be done."

Then commenter Matthew ventured: "His father was actually a horrible human being who is rotting in hell. If he likes his dad, he's probably a bad dude." And in fact Bill Buckley seemed to me quite a horrible human being. (One of my particular problems with Bill Buckley was his steadfast championing of classical music. Jeepers, that's not the kind of ally I'm looking for.) While it seems to me a bit strong to declare someone a bad dude for liking his dad, if we changed that to "If he's like his dad," I could hardly complain. And Christopher Buckley indeed seems quite a lot like old Bill -- even apart from the increasingly creepy physical resemblance.

I was happy to have these correctives, in case I may have been seen to be sentimentalizing Bill Buckley. My point, rather, is that his brand of conservatism, which was at least firmly attached to the real world, serves as a benchmark for how far into the loonosphere the present-day variant has traveled.

Which brings me to Pat Buchanan. I don't mean to link Poor Old Pat to the present-day conservative lunacy, but then, he never quite fit into the old Buckley-style lunacy. Our Pat has always been his own loon. Unless you want to count his even loonier sister, Bay. Myself, I try not to even think about Bay Buchanan.

Poor Old Pat has become especially important to one of his part-time employers, MSNBC, as MSNBC has cast its prime-time lot with two unabashedly liberal hosts, Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow. Pat, of course, provides "balance."

One of the, er, surprising features of Rachel's show, which continues to shine, has been the semiregular feature "It's Pat," in which Rachel's "fake uncle" moans and whines about some issue of importance to the Right. (More often than not this has so far involved defending the Republican vice presidential candidate, Gov. Danger Moose.) Rachel to her credit fights back. Indeed, as AP television writer David Bauder notes in a really good piece that's ostensibly about the "odd couple" of Rachel and Pat, but in fact is more about Rachel and the show itself, with lots of excellent background material, including Rachel talking about how the show has developed and will continue to develop:

Maddow is something of a happy warrior compared to Olbermann's increasingly dark prince. The Rhodes Scholar can lap almost anyone intellectually without making you hate her for doing it.

"She's likeable," Griffin said. "She smiles, she has fun. She's interesting."

If Olbermann's show has a drumbeat that drives it, Maddow's "got a little bit of a symphony," he said.

She also doesn't back down from a fight. Olbermann's "Countdown" is well-written and meticulous, but he relies on guests who rarely disagree with him.

Maddow frequently brings on guests to argue with her, none more so than Buchanan.

He can exasperate her, and vice versa. To date, it hasn't become nasty.

Of course we understand why Rachel is saddled with Pat. Apart from the fact that MSNBC has him on the payroll, the network is surely conscious of the risk it's taking in turning its whole prime time over to Keith and her. Poor Old Pat is there to provide balance -- and to give him credit, even in his dotage he does a better job of it than, say, the "liberals" who supposedly provide "balance" on Fox News.

Nevertheless, our Pat -- with that whine that's amplified into a roar, one of the odder modes of vocal delivery I've heard -- drives me nuts in a way that not many TV talking heads have since, well, old Bill Buckley, with his exaggeratedly patrician drawl.

But sure enough, on the special post-debate wrap-up edition of Countdown last night, there were Rachel and Uncle Pat squaring off. Pat was arguing that Obama has gone so cautious that he has failed to seal the deal, even with voters who may have decided to vote for him -- and I certainly can't say I entirely disagree with this. If it weren't said in that screechy roar-whine, I might even want to ponder his claim that Obama isn't going to win any kind of "mandate" in this election. (Yes, yes, we know that Tiny George Bush didn't have any electoral mandate in his stolen election "victories" and that didn't stop him from ruling like an emperor. But that doesn't make it right!)

But Poor Old Pat said something that gave me pause. He was talking about Obama's practice in the debate of reining in his positions, "moving to the center." Again, this is something that generally speaking we liberals have been bitching about throughout the campaign. On the question of abortion, though, when Rachel pointed out that Obama had tried to find some area of accomodation by pointing out that he would like to see fewer abortions, Poor Old Pat dismissed this as "standard boilerplate."

Which stuck with me. Why is it so difficult for Poor Old Pat to believe? Has he been roped in by Young Johnny McCranky's characteristically lying rhetoric? Young Johnny loves to pretend that there's a "pro-abortion" faction, people who want to promote abortions until everybody's had one, or more. There may in fact be people who like abortion, but they keep themselves well hidden. What many of us are is pro-choice, believing that there are cases where abortion is the least objectionable solution and therefore ought to be available as a free choice.

I suppose it's important to the Right to believe that it has some kind of high moral ground. They're the ones who should be calling themselves "anti-abortion," which accurately states their position. Instead they call themselves "pro-life," which is one of the vilest lies in the history of the human race. With the single exception of fetuses, the anti-abortion crowd is, for the most part, as bloody-minded a party of death as has ever existed.

Is it because of all the lies the anti-abortion movement is built on that it's so hard for someone like Poor Old Pat to believe that, really and truly, Barack Obama -- and a lot of the rest of us -- would like to see as few abortions as possible? We would just like that decision to rest where we think it properly belongs: with the woman.

And of course any woman, or any man for that matter, who saw young Johnny put those "air quotes" around "the health" of a woman who seeks an abortion as a medical necessity -- perhaps the most shameful moment of the most shameful national political campaign I've witnessed -- it should be perfectly and permanently clear that the Crankyman ought never to be permitted any say of any kind at any time in any matter in any way relating to any woman's health.