Akin To Like Him

Mike Huckabee speaks up for the GOP's unmentionable man.

What Rush Didn't Say Was No Fluke

On Rush Limbaugh's radio program this morning, a caller accused Rep. Todd Akin of having been paid off for torpedoing the GOP's chances to win back the U.S. Senate and perhaps even the presidency. Referring to Akin's theories about rape and abortion, the caller said, "Nobody believes that." Limbaugh replied, "I'm not sure nobody believes it" -- and then stopped. He said he had to go to a top-of-the-hour break and mumbled that it was probably better that he was being interrupted.

According to news reports, Limbaugh calls Akin's comments stupid and says that he hopes the congressman will do the right thing and quit his Senate race against the Democratic incumbent, Claire McCaskill (D-MO). I didn't listen to any more of his show today -- while driving I sometimes flip around among talk shows on KFI, KRLA, and KPCC -- so I don't know if he finished his thought about the prevalence of Akin's views.

One can't help wondering what he might have said. Mitt Romney, for instance, has accepted the support of an anti-abortion activist who believes, just as Akin does, that women's bodies have the power to terminate pregnancies that result from what Rep. Paul Ryan, Romney's running mate, and others call "forcible rape" (Akin's term was "legitimate rape"). Akin, Ryan, the GOP platform committee, and 20% of the American people want to make all abortion illegal without exceptions for rape or incest. They fear that in the pre-1920 conditions they envision for American women, those wanting or needing an abortion would lie and claim to have been raped.

So Limbaugh's right: Some people do believe as Akin does, and they're pretty powerful. Expressing the rest of whatever had bubbled to his lips might well have contributed to what Akin's critics seem to fear most: Voters realizing he's not an outlier. As an opponent of women's reproductive rights, Akin actually stands neck-deep in the mainstream of his party's thinking.

It's not a debate the GOP wants to have before the election, since when it comes to women's rights, its mainstream doesn't conjoin with the national mainstream. They're not even in the same time zone. Many conservatives still have trouble understanding that women (and a considerable number of men) won't let government dictate to them about abortion. The hard work of reducing the number of abortions instead requires the broad availability of sex education and birth control, gently encouraging women (think tax breaks and free college tuition) to carry unwanted babies to term and give them up for adoption, and better teaching and preaching about sex's sanctity and awe-inspiring generative power. But as long as Republicans insist that the way to battle abortion is to put women back in chains (thanks for that image, Joe Biden), Todd Akin is the poster boy they deserve.

Orwell Lives (Or Laughs)

Writing in the American Spectator, an overheated Jeffrey Lord says that the KKK and Nazis were leftists and agrees with Bill O'Reilly that U.S. leftists are are fascists for using their free speech rights to organize an advertisers' boycott against Rush Limbaugh -- which wouldn't have gotten any traction if Limbaugh didn't have the potty mouth of a mean 12-year-old who's afraid of girls. I thought conservatives were all about individual accountability.

Lord's "left is right" logic gave me a headache. Go here to read about the meaninglessness of "fascist" as an epithet. When I was in college, campus radicals hurled it at university administrators because of their decisions about teaching assistant compensation. A couple of years ago, Roger Ailes called NPR executives Nazis. And so it goes -- name-calling in lieu of substance, what all too often goes for political discourse in the 21st century (a persuasive argument against evolution, which ought to please the ignorant right-wingers-- Oops!...sorry).

Well-Meaning Fools Rush In

Rush Limbaugh? Appalling. Using state power to silence him? Even worse.

More Examples Of Rush Delivery

Rod Dreher calls out the left-wing Limbaughs, especially notorious misogynist Bill Maher. (Adults only!)

Sandra Fluke Vs. Today's Biggest Loser

Hat tip to Bebe Bahnsen

Political Theater Of The Absurd

Neither Bishop Romney nor St. Santorum has the guts to speak truth to Rush.

No Fluke

The woman Rush Limbaugh viciously attacked got a call from the president.

Birth Control And The Dufus Vote

After weeks of conflict over the peripheral question of whether employees of Roman Catholic institutions should be offered free birth control, the New York Times finally gets to the nub of the the matter -- the Obama administration's requirement that all employers offer contraception to insured employees:

Over all, 63 percent of Americans said they supported the new federal requirement that private health insurance plans cover the cost of birth control, according to the survey of 1,519 Americans, conducted from Feb. 13 to Feb. 19 for the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. The poll has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.

While 8 in 10 Democrats said they supported requiring birth control coverage, only 4 in 10 Republicans did. Six in 10 people calling themselves independents voiced approval. Many Americans, in the survey and in independent interviews, expressed impatience with the focus on women’s reproductive issues in an era of economic distress.

As I've argued to conservative friends, the religious freedom issue is relatively trivial compared to the federal government deciding in its great wisdom that of all the procedures and medications that could be free of charge, including hay fever pills, Lipitor, and prostate cancer screening, the nod now goes to birth control and other women's health services.

What are the feds up to, anyway? One motive is equity. If women seem to be unduly advantaged under the Obama health care reform, perhaps it's because in the past they've been charged higher premiums than men and had to endure pregnancy being defined as a preexisting condition. Providing free birth control is in the insurance companies' interests as well, since contraception is cheaper than prenatal and obstetrics care during an unplanned pregnancy.

Far more important, the policy will reduce the number of abortions. The more birth control, the fewer abortions. Nothing could be more obvious, except to two powerful constituencies. The first is the Roman Catholic church, which in its absolutism equates never-pregnant with getting an abortion. In doing so, it facilitates more abortions, especially in the developing world. (The Protestant view of contraception runs the gamut.) A theologically sound way out of the thicket of Humanae Vitae, the 1968 papal encyclical on reproduction, is to compare the emotional condition of the parents when an abortion occurs vs. the moment of contraception. God can tell the difference between a fetus and a sperm and egg that are never formally introduced, and so can almost everyone else. Catholic women in the U.S. have figured it out for themselves, thereby writing smarter theology than the pope.

But understanding women's perspectives is not the Vatican's specialty, nor indeed Rush Limbaugh's, who viciously attacked a Georgetown law student, Sandra Fluke, who testified before Congress about a friend who lost an ovary because she couldn't get birth control. I'd like to think he'll get spanked for his 13-year-old's potty mouth -- at least a few lost advertisers. Critics are demanding that Republicans denounce him, but they probably won't*. He's powerful, because some people like what he says. On this issue, he's channeling the creepy vein of misogyny that lingers in our culture and crops up during debates over women's reproductive rights. Remember that women didn't even get the vote in the U.S. until 1920. Even today, some smile inwardly when Rush calls Sandra Fluke a whore.

So the second powerful constituency preventing a rational discussion of contraception is composed of ignoramuses and dufuses. That's why on this issue, which is all about reducing the number of unplanned pregnancies and abortions, I'm sorry to say that Big Brother knows best.

*After posting this, I learned that this morning Speaker of the House John Boehner released a statement saying that Limbaugh's comments about Sandra Fluke were "inappropriate." Carly Fiorina, last year's GOP candidate for the Senate in California, said they were "incendiary" and "distracting."

Bum Rush

Taunting the Japanese? No class, Limbaugh.

You Stay Classy, Rush

HuffPo:

Rush Limbaugh called Michelle Obama a hypocrite on his Monday show, saying that, while the First Lady advocates healthy eating, she "doesn't look like [she] follows her own...dietary advice" and would never be put on the cover of Sports Illustrated's swimsuit issue.

Obama Is The New Kissinger

Ross Douthat on our realist president:

Obama’s response to the Egyptian crisis has crystallized [Barack Obama's] entire foreign policy vision. Switch on Rush Limbaugh or Fox News, and you would assume that there’s a terrible left-wing naïveté — or worse, a sneaking anticolonial sympathy for the Muslim Brotherhood — at work in the White House’s attempts to usher Hosni Mubarak out the door. But look closer, and it’s clear that the administration’s real goal has been to dispense with Mubarak while keeping the dictator’s military subordinates very much in charge. If the Obama White House has its way, any opening to democracy will be carefully stage-managed by an insider like Omar Suleiman, the former general and Egyptian intelligence chief who’s best known in Washington for his cooperation with the C.I.A.’s rendition program. This isn’t softheaded peacenik dithering. It’s cold-blooded realpolitik.

Rush Bums

A conservative and a liberal progressive both dislike the way Rush Limbaugh was done out of his bid to be an owner of the St. Louis Rams. I agree.

Rush Limbaugh Isn't The Leader Of The GOP

It looks like it's John McCain.

And Girls, He's A Great Dancer

In an otherwise useful article about the future of the conservative movement, former Bush speechwriter David Frum veers briefly off course:

[Obama] is physically honed and disciplined, his worst vice an occasional cigarette. He is at the same time an apparently devoted husband and father. Unsurprisingly, women voters trust and admire him.

And for the leader of the Republicans?... With his private plane and his cigars, his history of drug dependency and his personal bulk, not to mention his tangled marital history, Rush is a walking stereotype of self-indulgence...

Physically honed? Women dig him? Limbaugh is fat? Am I reading this? What would be the relevance in such an essay of Bella Abzug's dimensions or those of any number of buffed-out sociopaths? Several women I know do not trust Obama because he is going to raise their taxes, the cut of his jib notwithstanding. So let's rebuild the GOP without resorting to demeaning and irrelevant physical descriptions and veiled misogyny.