Lying and Dying Watching a once-great party fall.

NRO ^ | January 12, 2006 | Michael Novak

[neverdem]

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January 12, 2006,

11:26 a.m.

Lying and Dying

Watching a once-great party fall.

Watching the Kate vs. Kate debate on Meet the Press this past Sunday — it was our own Kate O’Beirne vs. Kate Michelman, formerly of NARAL Pro-Choice America — how out-of-date the latter's rhetoric seemed, how diffuse and filibustering her language was, over against the precision, citation of telling facts, and self-confident argument of Kate O' Beirne.

Our Kate, author of Women Who Make the World Worse, talked quietly, as if she owned the future, as when she told the other Kate that, of course, the Left wanted to keep Roe in the courts. Why? Because if Roe were reversed, abortion would not be halted, but the arguments over it would move back into the political sphere of states and localities, where the pro-life forces would win more than half the arguments, for sure. The Left must avoid the democratic branches of government, lest they be badly embarrassed.

Much the same feeling arose from watching with fascination the Alito hearings. How old and out-of-date and empty of real ideas — not to say connection to reality — Kennedy, Biden, Leahy, Durbin, and, above all, Schumer seemed. They know they have to do what they are doing, but they know their efforts are for nothing, and their words are making hollow echoes. Even their indignation seems forced and falls swiftly flat.

The pompous rhetorical indignation of Kennedy has become merely pathetic. He was once a heroic figure, but he now seems like the lion of Alice in Wonderland — threadbare, tame, and roaring every so often only out of nostalgic habit. Chuck Schumer drones on like a little spoiled boy who becomes a schoolyard bully just by his superior tone of voice, boring in upon others, coercing them verbally, trying to make them feel as worthless as in his mind they are.

It is painful to watch the ruin of a great party. A great party has come to this.

And most of it happened because of commitment to a policy that cannot be maintained without lies and malicious euphemisms. That is, the killing of innocents in what is supposed to be the most welcoming, safest place on earth — a mother's womb. (Isn't the posture of wishing one were safe the fetal position?)

This radical lie — that what is destroyed in abortion is not a human individual, endowed with human rights — has poisoned a great party, induced a great rationalization in the place of constitutional reasoning in the Supreme Court, and divided a nation unnecessarily over an issue that ought at the very least to have been left to the consent of the people in diverse jurisdictions.

No lie so basic to one's own identity goes unpunished.

— Michael Novak is the winner of the 1994 Templeton Prize for progress in religion and the George Frederick Jewett Scholar in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute.

	http://www.nationalreview.com/novak/novak200601121126.asp

[Old Professer]

The issue is and will always be about the selfishness and callousness of a mechanical elimination of growing tissue destined to be a brand new human being, perfect or flawed, without regard to the damage done to the procsess itself; when a woman gets pregnant, the world itself is a little bit pregnant with the expectation of biological success and this is not a small thing, for the survival of any species depends upon the survival of its individual members.

Certainly, with current population numbers, individual births seem like grains of sand upon a vast beach but it takes little imagination to see a future rocky shore bereft of fineness and smooth form in place of that, all jagged and forlorn.

It was better, sociologically and traumatically, when it was a back alley secret.

[kublia khan]

The Abortion issue is secondary to their embracing Roosevelt's socialism lite. You are exactly right!

[Sense]

I wouldn't say that the abortion position is secondary to
socialist positions, but that they are cut from the same cloth. In both cases, they've used deception and dishonesty to advance their policy agenda, not relying on adherence to democratic ideals in an honest process as a means of ensuring legitimacy of governance, but relying on features of our democratic institutions and tactical maneuver, using institutions as tactical tools to help subvert legitimacy, while delaying and denying electoral tests of the public sentiment, and using radical leftist judges to impose minority policies on the majority. It has taken fifty years to overcome. The question now, really, is what happens looking forward as popular awareness builds that the logjam of fifty years of policy error, in spite of half a century of frenetic mortaring, is leaking badly from its foundations.

Of course, in spite of what the leftists believe, this current result was and is inevitable for no other reason than demographics. It is simply bad politics, on the basis of future numbers, to enable eliminating entire generations of your own most likely future supporters. This, of course, is also why after decades of liberal Democratic control of government we have no control over our borders: When you've enabled aborting entire crops of your own future voters, you have to try to import new ones who will replace them...

[kublia khan]

"It is simply bad politics, on the basis of future numbers, to enable eliminating entire generations of your own most likely future supporters"

I wonder if anyone has ever studied the relationship between upward wage pressure and abortion. You have to think that eliminating that many potential employees would cause some fluctuations in the labor market.

[FierceDraka]

They hate their own culture. It is just that simple.

They hate their culture, and they mix it with a strong double-shot of guilt.

But then we're stuck with one-party rule - by RINO's and their internationalist sycophants.

And what fun is that? ;-D

[FierceDraka]

Yep. I guess the more interesting question, then, would be WHY do they (did they) hate their own culture? What philosophical/logical progression leads you to think, "I suck."

Yeah! No s**t!

I LOVE American culture. It's vibrant, irreverant, infectuous, and most of all, ALIVE. Contrast that with the dying cultures our cousins in over in Old Europe are failing to uphold.

[operation clinton cleanup]

It is painful to watch the ruin of a great party. A great party has come to this.

It's not that painful for us gen-xers who never knew a Democrat party that was not vindictive and anti-American.

[GOPJ]

The pompous rhetorical indignation of Kennedy...

Pompous, rhetorical and pathetic are the proper adjectives for someone who got kicked out of Harvard for cheating and graduated last in his class at law school. His lectures to Alito are a joke.

Good one...

[neverdem]

Schumer doing his best to make NY look like a state of fools.

The would-be president is messing with ire (NY fans-turned-critics wash their hands of Hillary) Maybe we'll get lucky, and she won't go for the Senate in 2006. Otherwise, NY might be stuck with her for decades.

GOP FEELS OUT DEM SUOZZI FOR GOV RUN (tapping into groups who want Spitzer defeated)

U.S. Threatens to Sue Albany Over Voting

FReepmail me if you want on or off my New York ping list.

[infowarrior]

It is painful to watch the ruin of a great party. A great party has come to this.

The Democratic Party, historically, has *always* been on the wrong (immoral) side. They were the champions of slavery (Dred Scott), racial segregation (Plessy v. Ferguson), and abortion on demand (Roe v. Wade). As my parentehtical appendices demonstrate, they likewise *always* relied on the US Supreme Court to "legalize" their morally abhorrent platforms.

For anyone to aver that the Democratic Party has ever been anything more than an American scandal, throughout it's history, betrays a stunning lack of knowledge about both the history of our nation, and of that "Party" in particular...

the infowarrior

[LS]

Recently, (as a former rocker) I've gotten into reading bios of the rock stars of teh 1970s. I finished a Hendrix bio that was amazing (I used some of the comments in my new book). JH was VERY pro-Vietnam War until after 1970. Then there is a book on Frank Zappa. As weird as he was, he was in some ways very conservative: his home arranements were in some ways quite traditional (his wife "raised" the children) and he didn't do drugs. He viewed his social commentary as being equally directed at EVERYONE, which burned the butts of the libs, whom he disliked as much as Nixon. He hated the radical feminists.

In short, it's only an America that would permit a Zappa, or a "Team America."

[metesky]

At Bud's Country Lounge in Hyannis, when after snorting a line the size of a highway center line and banging his head on the bar, he heroically took to the road and drove himself home.

[jalisco555]

The scariest thing to contemplate is the probability that, if Chappaquidick had never happened, Kennedy would have been elected President in 1976.

[linda_22003]

Actually, one year and one month - June of '68 to July of '69. I remember it was right around the time of the moon landing.

[linda_22003]

"I finished a Hendrix bio that was amazing (I used some of the comments in my new book). JH was VERY pro-Vietnam War until after 1970."

Actually, Jimi Hendrix wasn't ANYthing after 1970. :(

[N. Theknow]

When was Ted Kennedy ever a heroic figure?

He is a hero to nephew Skakel. Killed a woman and got away with it.

[UnbelievingScumOnTheOtherSide]

When were Democrats a "great party? Slavery? Jim Crow? Tammany Hall? Keeping us out of WWI? Getting us out of the Great Depression? Preparing for WWII? The Cold War? The Welfare State? Roe v Wade? Stopping terrorism? MSM lies? When?

[LS]

Sorry, I meant 1969. His comments were made in early 1969.