Atlas Shrugged: The Mocking

Monday, February 16, 2009

A Little Authoritarianism, Some Family Trauma

Kathryn Jean Lopez advertises her article on Glamour and abortion, offering up her own delusional take on the article. Needless to say she gets it quite, quite wrong, and needless to say she doesn't have the wits to pretend to be open-minded.

We live in times when “choice” often means death. But even with a president
who supports the most radical pro-choice legislation, the pro-life crowd that
recently thronged the Mall in Washington, D.C., did not seem in despair.

Some clues as to why this might be so are found in the current Glamour
magazine, of all places. An article
near the very back of the March issue treats abortion with a level of honesty
rarely found in such venues. “I am still filled with regret . . . that I will
never meet [my] child,” one Virginia woman announces. Hers is one of many
similar stories of regret and pain featured in the article. Abortion is not a
clean choice; it’s a life-changing (and -ending) decision with traumatic
repercussions, a wrenching and frequently lonely ordeal that one can never be
adequately prepared for — and our culture and our clinics often don’t try to
help much at all. The writers and editors at Glamour will never be mistaken for
pro-life propagandists, but they didn’t shy away from these truths. This is
refreshing.

Lopez does not notice that the only women who underwent serious emotional pain at their abortions were the ones indoctrinated with religious beliefs. Nor does she mention the women who was enraged when she was roped in by a dishonest conservative clinic. Instead she culls what little seemingly critical material she can find and slaps it together with more pleas to obey her pope and give up having sex. What does this women know of sex? She doesn't even seem to realize that people have sex because they like it.

Somehow Lopez and absolutely everyone else at the Corner also didn't notice that their boy Bush, their Leader, oversaw sexual torture at Guantanamo. Not one mention. Maybe it's just too much for their sensitive natures. Or maybe they have squashed their ability to feel horror and pain, empathy and grief, from childhood, and therefore are able to shrug and go back to calling Obama a fascist.

Case in point. Michael Leeden crows that Jonah Goldberg owes him big time, for propagating the "Obama is fascist" meme.

Since you were away, I thought I'd try to sell some more Liberal
Fascism
, and by my count you owe me several cases of, uh, RED ITALIAN
wine. "We are all fascists now" has now grown, the second installment is here.
Part One says that Newsweek was mistaken, that the economic "porkulus bill" is
plain vanilla "fascism," and will produce the inevitable expansion of state
power that all such bills do.

That's the part for which you owe me bigtime.

Part TWO comes largely from Tocqueville, and deals with his nightmare
vision of an American Tyranny. A soft, gentle sort, certainly nothing like
the classic twentieth-century fascist states, but you should probably pay for
that one, too, since it's a lot like what you call "smiley face fascism."

We can/should discuss the wine. You've been traveling, I've been
studying the wine sales...we'll provide the spicy pasta, you bring the
vino. Deal?


It's a two-fer for them; Jonah sells books and Leeden grabs indignant attention. Leeden scratches Goldberg's back and Goldberg scratches Leeden back*, and they chuckle at all the easy money they make by fomenting hatred.

And let's not forget the Two Ds, that Daring Duo of Devotion, God's little foot soldiers, Ross Douthat and Rod Dreher. From Rod:

As writer Ross Douthat astutely observed, "In reality, what makes Obama
promising to liberals isn't his potential to 'end' culture-war battles; it's his
potential ability to win them, by dressing up the policies that Planned
Parenthood or the Human Rights Campaign of the ACLU or whomever would like to
see in the kind of religious language and fuzzy talk about consensus that swing
voters like to hear."

In other words, Obama has learned that the smarter way to pursue liberal
cultural ends is to refrain from rubbing conservatives' collective nose in what
he's doing. He's winning the culture war by diplomatically disarming the
opposition.


Dear Douthat astutely agrees with Dreher, and dear Dreher gets another link and an acknowledgement that he is, indeed, one of the guys. It's mutually stimulating and no doubt will help them maintain their status as men who know how to stand erect and firm for God.


*Sorry for that.

4 comments:

CMike said...

You can copy and paste text into that Accessories Program, Windows Notepad. Click on Format, un-check word wrap, and then copy the same text again. When you next paste, the right hand margins of the text you're transferring will show up as reconciled in your post.

[I assume you're using Windows but Apple must allow the same trick in one of its programs.]

Susan of Texas said...

Ah, thanks. I often ignore improvements I should make because of time constraints.

A blogger's life is full of compromises.

By the way, I'm still trying to find time to finish listening to that Blogginheads link you gave me. It's great so far--thanks!.

Anonymous said...

Drehrer writes, "He's [Obama's} winning the culture war by diplomatically disarming the opposition." This level of dishonesty is what shows Rod to be such a hack, such a tool. They aren't losing the culture war to Obama; they're losing it to their own hypocrisy.

Larry Craig, and all the furtive GOP closet cases, and David Vitter; Rick Santorum and his corrupt crew at the K Street Project, Duke Cunningham, Ted Stevens, and so on (I'm not afraid of mentioning the Dem crooks like Blago, etc... I'm talking here about hypocrisy, of holding one's party above the other party, ethically, morally, fiscally, etc.... And think of all the "odd" rightbloggers like Matt Sanchez, Drudge, and J-Lo, who defines love and marriage and has never known either.

It's not Obama that's winning the culture wards, Rod. You are losing them to reality.

Susan of Texas said...

Right. Very often people can't see something in front of them until it becomes too big and bad to ignore.