June 29, 2010
Nat Hentoff, c.1958
In this world turned upside down, the “compassionate”, the “caring”, the “good guys” on the left of the political spectrum have succeeded in twisting the abortion issue, and exiling all dissenting opinion from pro-abortion orthodoxy. In this fascinating piece from 1992 I came across today (thank you to a mysterious MIT-based web site for keeping it alive), Manhattan-born atheist-Jew Jazz-loving left-leaning civil libertarian and legendary Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff reminds us, among other things, that both Jesse Jackson and Bill Clinton were once staunchly pro-life. A taste from “Pro-Choice Bigots: a View from the Pro-Life Left”:
Not too long ago, (Jesse Jackson) was a pro-lifer. He wrote and spoke about the right to life and attacked advocates of abortion rights. “There are those who argue that the right to privacy is of a higher order than the right to life,” he would say. “That was the premise to slavery. You could not protest the existence or treatment of slaves on the plantation, because that was private and therefore outside of your right to be concerned.” He told the story of how he himself had almost been aborted. A physician had advised his mother to let him go, but she wouldn’t. Don’t let the pro-choicers convince you that a fetus isn’t a human being, he warned: “That’s how the whites dehumanized us, by calling us niggers. The first step was to distort the image of us as human beings in order to justify that which they wanted to do–and not even feel like they’d done anything wrong.”
…
Yet being without theology isn’t the slightest hindrance to being pro-life. As any obstetrics manual–Williams Obstetrics, for example–points out, there are two patients involved, and the one not yet born “should be given the same meticulous care by the physician that we long have given the pregnant woman.” Nor, biologically, does it make any sense to draw life-or-death lines at viability. Once implantation takes place, this being has all the genetic information within that makes each human being unique. And he or she embodies continually developing human life from that point on. It missses a crucial point to say that the extermination can take place because the brain has not yet functioned or because that thing is not yet a “person.” Whether the life is cut off in the fourth week or the fourteenth, the victim is one of our species, and has been from the start.
Yet rational arguments like these are met with undiluted hostility by otherwise clear-thinking liberals.
A very smart man. And, oh yeah – he’s got Obama pegged, too.
April 10, 2010
Few things have bothered me as much in the past couple of years more than the Canadian commentariat’s reaction to former Alaska Governor and Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s emergence as a political force. The left’s vitriol is completely expected, as disgusting as it is (the true face of the left emerges, as the supposed champions of feminism savagely rape the reputation of a successful woman). But nasty attacks from the likes of David Frum, Margaret Wente, Diane Francis, and many in the National Post’s roster of otherwise sensible young libertarian commentators, had been mystifying and depressing.
Well, it took nearly two years, but finally – finally! – an intelligent Canadian pundit has figured out that the Sarah Palin phenomenon is a wonderful thing, and that her detractors’ primary source of animus comes down to the fact that she is an outsider working in an elite insider’s culture. In today’s National Post, Rex Murphy breaks it down in Understanding the Sarah Palin Effect. First, he explains why she is an attractive person and politician:
She is a cheerful human being, with a large family, an apparently easy-going and normal husband. She has a personality that would sell corn flakes — if not grow them. What career she had in Alaska, she earned. She’s at home indoors and out, radiates human warmth, seems to have some balance about herself, and has displayed over the last year or so a considerable fortitude under an avalanche of mockery and hatred. For the final stroke of this cameo I should note she is smart — smarter than 90% of the people who make a point of how rock-stupid they know she is.
She, by rights, should be queen of the feminists. All that self-reliance, her takeover of Alaska politics, the rocket ride to a Vice-Presidential ticket, a public career she blends with her family life– these seem gold-standard credentials for a real feminist. But official feminism derides herewith an unspeakable intensity. Her early critics were not beyond the inane claim that she was somehow not really a woman.
Then, perhaps using insight gleaned throughout his career, as a Newfoundland-born-and-raised outsider with a funny accent who was likely often treated like the “House Newfie” by many elitist colleagues at the CBC and Globe & Mail, he nails what may well be the #1 reason why the political and cultural elite of both left and right hate Sarah Palin so much:
I side with those who venture that the nerves Palin hits have more to do with class — where she’s from, how she speaks, where she was educated, what she likes (the moose-hunting), than her politics or her gender. She’s rural, she came into national politics from (ugh) Alaska. She and her husband have the unerasable stigmata of the modern working class. She would not be embarrassed to be seen walking into Wal-Mart.
Those characteristics and attitudes, in themselves, are not objectionable. In fact, hymns to working class habits and virtues are the very songbook of most elite American politicians and journalists. That crowd sings lustily what it does not feel. Remember the aphorism ascribed to Lincoln: “God must have loved the common man. He made so many of them.”
But America’s professional public class, and the commentariat who still have some (though declining) power to police it, like to view Lincoln’s common man, or woman, as an object in the distance, as an object of their supercilious care and concern, but not as a player in the game. Palin is simply not supposed to be a player. She’s not only from the wrong side of the tracks, she’s so far over on the wrong side she can’t see the railway station.
But there she is, in all her roughness and candour, and her spiky wit and ability to irritate her self-nominated betters. She also happens to be the most naturally charismatic politician at the moment in the United States. She is the one major figure who can claim authenticity without morally choking on the word. That makes her the populist rallying point of a nascent rejection of the fervid partisanship and Washington insiderism that is eroding the consent on which American politics is founded.
No wonder Obama claims he won’t respond when she tweets. The Hope and Change President still owns Hope, but real Change in current American politics is on Palin’s side of the ledger.
By Jove, he’s got it: the elites (moneyed, educated, urban, effete) may claim to be “for the common man” – but their policies, almost universally, effect to keep the common man at arm’s length. Whether it’s “universal health care” (public hospitals for thee, private American clinics for me), public transportation (get these peons and their beat-up Hyundais off my roads!), or the false promise of sustainable public pension plans (we’ll pay you out if we can…we’ve still got our investments), the Marie Antoinettes of both parties wish for the good things in life to be reserved for them, without having to bear the indignity of rubbing shoulders with the great unwashed. For bringing this insight to the minds of Canada’s group-thinkers – thank God for House Newfies! And God Bless Sarah Palin, who understands that the world without a strong America is a very frightening place.
March 2, 2010
A taxpayer listens to John Tory’s drive-time radio show on 1010am, and is encouraged to attend a public budget consultation meeting at Toronto City Hall. After asking a question about rising property tax rates, Toronto Ward 30 City Councillor Paula Fletcher does us all a great favour, and shows us off the true face of the leftist crew that currently runs Toronto council: utter contempt, absolute condescension, and pure venomous hatred for the middle class. Her public denunciation of the taxpayer is indistinguishable from the tactics used in Maoist and Stalinist purges. Listen and be amazed at the treatment afforded to a man who, like us all, pays her salary!
Toronto City Councillor Paula Fletcher Freaks Out on Constituent, Radio Host, Political Enemies.
UPDATE: Did I say “Marxist Hatred”? I didn’t even know how right I was! For, alas, this is the same Paula Fletcher that led the Communist Party of Canada – Manitoba from 1981-86, standing as a candidate for the legislature under that party’s banner twice.
February 26, 2010
Now this is “climate-change” science based in fact, subjected to rigorous peer-review, and funded without the interference of Big Left. (via Zombie @ Pyjamas)
February 19, 2010
As the great Prorogue disaster of 2010 winds down, I’d like to ask you, my dear readers, to submit your best Prorogue horror stories of this lamentable gap in Canadian Parliamentary life.
For me, it had to be that night when I woke up at 3:30 am in a cold sweat and foaming at the mouth from a nightmare: I was being chased through the center block in Ottawa by my Liberal MP Ken Dryden (wearing his original 1970 goalie mask) in nothing but my underwear, clutching a proclamation of congratulations for the Boys and Girls Club of Timmins on their successful fundraising bingo for seniors, and not being able to stop and ask Mr. Speaker for the floor, before running straight into Libby Davies.
Or was that reality??? Whoo-ha-ha-ha-ha! In any case, it took me 11 minutes to fall back asleep, and I spent an entire minute the next day tortured by the thought of Libby Davies being in my dreams. Can it get any worse than that?
I know, it’s been hard on everyone. Please, share: how did the prorogue make your life a living hell for the past few weeks? Best story wins a collector’s-edition Patrick Chan Cheerios box. Second place gets an invitation to run through the streets of my neighborhood displaying the hysteria that this period has provoked in us all.
