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Category: Elections

More presidential elections

India’s presidential elections are a couple of weeks away (on the 18th of this month), and a woman, Pratibha Patel, is contesting. This is, of course far less interesting than the U.S presidential elections and Hilary Clinton, since the Indian president a) isn’t elected by the public and b) has very little power to do anything anyway. Our current president has spent much of his time writing execrable poetry and motivational texts.

Since they don’t actually have much of a role to play, the choice of president is often an exercise in tokenism. We have had presidents from minority/disempowered castes, religions, etc before, and though they have been quite good ones, one suspects that their real function was to prove what an equal society we are. I have heard people say smugly of India that the fact that we have a Muslim president, a Sikh Prime Minister and Christian power-behind-the-prime minister proves that we are a diverse and egalitarian country (it also gives the Hindu right wing something to feel oppressed about) regardless of what normal Sikhs, Muslims and women may experience in day-to-day, nonpolitical life.*

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Shocker: Sam Brownback supports forced pregnancy for rape and incest survivors

From an anti-choice site:

Sam Brownback, the Kansas senator, is widely considered by many in the pro-life community to be one of the strongest pro-life candidates seeking the Republican nomination for president. He proved his pro-life bona fides again over the weekend when he said he opposed abortion in cases of rape or incest.

Brownback’s comments came during the National Catholic Men’s Conference.

An appropriate venue if ever there was one.

He said that encouraging a woman who has been a victim of sexual abuse to have an abortion doesn’t address the problems she faces as a result of the rape and does nothing to prosecute the rapist.

“Rape is terrible. Rape is awful. Is it made any better by killing an innocent child? Does it solve the problem for the woman that’s been raped?” Brownback said, according to an AP report.

Well, if the woman has a problem with being impregnated by her rapist, then yeah, it kind of does solve that problem.

No one argues that abortion will solve all the emotional and physical problems that come with rape and incest. But legal abortion does give pregnant women the right to exercise control over their own bodies — something that is taken away from women and girls who survive sexual assault. Abortion is not the choice that every rape or incest survivor makes, but forcing a woman who has already had her sexual agency stripped from her to give birth against her will seems particularly cruel — just as it would be horribly cruel to force her to undergo an abortion against her will after having her body sexually violated.*

At least Brownback is consistent in his forced-birth views, though. Rape and incest exceptions sound nice and they’re certainly better than nothing (they’re also a good bridge from full illegal abortion into limited legality), but they essentially turn pregnancy into a punishment for women who chose to have sex — if you were forced to have sex then you can have access to this medical procedure, but if you had any sexual agency then you need to be punished for your slutitude.

At least Sam thinks that all women should be punished for their slutitude, agency or not. Score one for consistency.

*To be clear: I think it’s horribly cruel to force any woman to have an abortion or to continue a pregnancy against her will.

And The Lord Smited Rudy

Did you hear? God struck down lightning on Rudy Giuliani, just as Rudy was about to discuss his stance on abortion. It’s amazing. God has again demonstrated his hatred of abortion rights, just as He did in the Bible, when he never mentioned abortion at all.

You want to know what else God hates?

The home at 831 Cascade Drive, in the Beechwood subdivision near Denbigh.
Little girls who sell school coupon books.
Strawberry festivals.
English mid-fielders.
iPods (or perhaps just Metallica).
People who pray.

Repent now, sinners.

Giuliani: Worse than George Bush?

rudy

Matt Taibbi does not like Rudy Giuliani. And since I don’t either, I’ll reproduce this gem from his Rolling Stone article:

Rudy Giuliani is a true American hero, and we know this because he does all the things we expect of heroes these days — like make $16 million a year, and lobby for Hugo Chávez and Rupert Murdoch, and promote wars without ever having served in the military, and hire a lawyer to call his second wife a “stuck pig,” and organize absurd, grandstanding pogroms against minor foreign artists, and generally drift through life being a shameless opportunist with an outsize ego who doesn’t even bother to conceal the fact that he’s had a hard-on for the presidency since he was in diapers. In the media age, we can’t have a hero humble enough to actually be one; what is needed is a tireless scoundrel, a cad willing to pose all day long for photos, who’ll accept $100,000 to talk about heroism for an hour, who has the balls to take a $2.7 million advance to write a book about himself called Leadership. That’s Rudy Giuliani. Our hero. And a perfect choice to uphold the legacy of George W. Bush.

Burn.

The article is a pretty good take-down of Mr. Giuliani. For a longer and more thorough expose, I highly recommend Rudy! by Wayne Barrett. And, since I know Zuzu is even more of a Rudy-hater than I am, I’m especially curious to hear her take.

via Gawker.

At least he’s honest.

Bill O’Reilly:

But do you understand what the New York Times wants, and the far-left want? They want to break down the white, Christian, male power structure, which you’re a part, and so am I, and they want to bring in millions of foreign nationals to basically break down the structure that we have. In that regard, Pat Buchanan is right. So I say you’ve got to cap with a number.

I’ll at least give him some credit for admitting that white Christian dudes run things around here, and that his conservative political beliefs stem from pure self-interest in maintaining a power structure that allows him to walk all over everyone else. Some of us would call this belief system “white supremacy,” but I’m sure such a term would have Mr. O’Reilly howling about how we’re anti-white-male bigots, and besides he’s not racist or sexist, he just thinks that white Christian men run the country because they’re generally superior, and so their power should be maintained by systematically oppressing people of color, non-Christians, and women.

What’s white supremacist about that?

via Feministing.

Credit Where Credit is Due

I don’t like Rudy, but good for him for bucking Evangelical pressure and stating his support for some public funding of abortion. This isn’t exactly a giant pro-choice victory, since of course he re-emphasized his personal opposition to abortion and state’s rights and blah blah blah, but in supporting public funding he’s taken a stronger pro-choice position than a lot of Democrats. And he’s a front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination. This doesn’t mean that we can rest on our laurels and consider the culture war won, but I think it does bode well for the decreasing influence of the religious right on the Republican party.

And the guy is sticking to his guns, even in the face of enormous pressure to pose as a social conservative in order to rally the GOP base. I still think he’s scum (see here), but good on him for taking this position.

Barack Obama is a smelly Black. No, a scary Arab. No, an uppity Negro.

Burt Prelutsky needs to pick a racial attack and stick to it.

Is it that, contrary to Joe Biden’s characterization of him as “clean,” Barack Obama is actually smelly?

B.O. for President?

Or is it that Obama has a scary Arab-sounding middle name and therefore supports the terrorists?

So the question that begs asking is whether Barack Hussein Obama would ever be in favor of taking any action, no matter the provocation to America, that would put Muslim lives at risk.

Or is he an uppity Negro, trying to pass as white in order to get votes and then shamelessly pandering to his own people at the same time?

Down deep, he’s just another megalomaniac who thinks he should be running the world. He’ll be black for black voters, white for white voters, and beige for Michael Jackson.

No, Obama’s problem is that he’s crazy enough to suggest that we should try and get along.

The cuckoo getting most of the media attention at the moment is Barack Obama. With all of his high-sounding blather about building bridges and bringing people together, you might get the idea that he wants to be America’s pastor, rather than its president.

Doesn’t that building bridges nonsense sound something like what President Bush said in his inaugural speech? But that wasn’t “high-sound blather,” I’m guessing because President Bush can barely string two words together, let alone multi-clause sentences. Plus, with his Andover-to-Yale education, he’s an Average American, not like Obama, who looks like a damn foreigner.

There is nothing liberals can do to please the far-right nutbags. Hillary is too aggressive and divisive. Obama is too nice. Edwards is too smarmy. While it’s understandable that Democratic presidential candidates would be trying to capture the middle, it doesn’t make any sense for them to cater to an out-of-touch right who will find fault in anything they do. And in the meantime, I hope conservatives do keep up their cheap, thinly-veiled racist and sexist attacks. Because I do have enough faith in the American people* that we won’t be swayed by “He’s too nice! And his middle name is HUSSEIN!”

*A lot of us, anyway.