Posted on 11/08/2002 3:06:20 PM PST by Jean S
It was a stunning, record-breaking night. George Bush is the first President in 68 years to gain seats in his first midterm election. Historically, the party in the White House loses seats in the midterm election. This is true even in wartime: Franklin D. Roosevelt lost 50 House seats and eight Senate seats 10 months after Pearl Harbor.
Though Democrats gleefully cite the midterm election of 1998 when the Democrats picked up six House seats—and no Senate seats—that was Clinton’s second midterm election. Republicans had already realized all their midterm gains in Clinton’s first midterm election. In the very first election after people got a look at Clinton in 1994, Republicans picked up 52 seats in the House, eight seats in the Senate, 11 governorships and 12 state legislative chambers. Not a single Republican incumbent lost.
Thanks to Clinton, the ’94 Republican sweep marked the first time in half a century that Republicans had a majority in the House. (It was one of many historic moments in the Clinton Administration—another being "First President accused of rape within weeks of being impeached.") That sweep meant voters in about 50 congressional districts had done something they had never done before in their entire lives: Vote Republican in a congressional election. There was no reason to expect lifelong Democrats in those districts to keep voting Republican in every successive election.
To the contrary, Democrats should have won back a lot of the seats they lost in 1994. By the standard of historical averages, in the 1998 midterm election, the Democrats should have won back 22 House seats. Instead they won only six seats. The average midterm loss this past century is 30 seats in the House. Clinton’s average was 46.
The media billed the Democrats’ paltry gain in 1998 as a victory for Clinton and revulsion with impeachment for the same reason they say Bush "stole" the presidential election. Liberals love to lie. (Someone should write a book about that.)
By contrast, in Bush’s first midterm election last week, Republicans made spectacular gains all over the country. It was such a blowout that over on CBS, Dan Rather had to keep retelling viewers about Sen. Lautenberg’s victory in New Jersey. (Good thing Election Day finally came without another Democrat realizing the voters were on to him, or the Democrats might have had to unwrap Tutankhamen.)
All night, victories rolled in for Republicans, even shocking victories no one had expected. They picked up seats in the House and Senate. Republicans won a double whammy with Democrat-target Jeb Bush winning in Florida and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend losing in Maryland. Democratic bête noire Katherine Harris won her congressional election. In stunning upsets, Republicans won the governorships in Hawaii and Georgia. The Republican juggernaut could not be stopped.
Democrats may be forced to shut down operations as a party and re-enter politics under a different name. The party formerly known as "the Democratic Party" will henceforth be doing business under the name "the Abortion Party."
That would have the virtue of honesty. Love of abortion is the one irreducible minimum of the Democratic Party. Liberals don’t want to go to war with Saddam Hussein, but they do want to go to war to protect Roe v. Wade.
Inasmuch as George Bush rather than Barbra Streisand will be picking our federal judges, even now liberals are sharpening their character assassination techniques. People for the American Way—representing Americans up and down the Malibu beachfront—are already lining up lying Anita Hills to accuse Bush’s judicial nominees of lynching blacks and burning crosses.
This is precisely the sort of Clintonian viciousness that Americans indicated they were sick of on election night. The Democrats’ motorcycle rally-cum-funeral in Minnesota for Paul Wellstone exposed the party’s character in a pellucid, dramatic way. It was so revolting, people couldn’t avert their eyes from the spectacle. The only moral compass liberals have is their own will to power. Even the deaths of three members of a family could not slow them down.
If the party formerly known as "the Democrats" doesn’t like the factually correct "Abortion Party," how about "the Adultery Party"? Noticeably, the only incumbent Republican senator to lose was Tim Hutchinson of Arkansas, who left his wife for a staffer a few years ago. I’m proud to be a member of a party that still frowns on that sort of thing.
The end result of a Democratic President’s being caught in an adulterous affair with an intern was: Two Republicans resigned from Congress. Meanwhile, the felon in the White House was revered as a latter-day George Washington by the Adultery Party. And consider that Newt Gingrich and Bob Livingston were mere congressmen. Bill Clinton, Teddy Kennedy, Jesse Jackson and Gary Hart are deemed presidential material by the Adultery Party.
What a miserable party. I’m glad to see their power end, and I’m sure they’ll all be perfectly comfortable in their cells in Guantanamo. As Jesse Helms said on Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980: God has given America one more chance.
That's almost up there with the idea that pro-lifers should really want to tie women up and keep them pregnant (to be "consistent" in ravinson-logic). These pro-choice women you talk about want to have had the option to do otherwise, and not by keeping it zipped up or by contraceptives, but by abortion. Choice is a code word for legalized baby-killing, and you know it.
No, I wasn't. Stop attacking straw men. It's a waste of your time.
In point of fact, it ought to be required of the one preparing to do an abortion to prove there is not an individual human about to be terminated (and in too many cases, dissected for tissue to be shipped to research labs). As of this date, such a proof does not exist, so I propose we realign the debate along lines of life support for individual human life since science supports the truth of that assertion of the life in the human womb being human life.
If you were to stick a long knife into a cadaver, or shoot a cadaver, would you be prosecuted for murder? No. How would your defense attorney approach your case? By showing that the cadaver was not alive of course.
Why is it that the abortionist is not required to prove the 'thing' he/she is about to assault is NOT ALIVE?... I ask, specifically, because many of the little ones being assault are then dissected for tissue transfers to research labs, and if a whole little one were to be sent along to the lab and be found alive upon arrival, could the lab go ahead and harvest tissue anyway? [I'm sure the paradoxes are by now glaring, but here's one further point: the abortion clinics harvesting tissues and whole bodies of the aborted little ones NEVER HAVE TO PROVE THE LITTLE ONE WAS DEAD BEFORE HARVESTING. Think about it. The fetal tissue industry is now a billion dollar plus enterprise!]
a) This remains the most ignorant f*cking argument I have ever heard. What exactly sets them apart from you?
b) The reverse is also true; thus, why should we err on the side of killing the little being before it can decide that for itself?
You forgot to include the word "human" to modify life, and proving that a fetus is a "human life" is a hurdle no one on earth can clear -- regardless of what the Constitution does or does not provide. (Incidentally, the Constitution does not explicitly protect people who commit adultery from being imprisoned or stoned to death for it.)
Abortion has yet to be proven void of taking human life, so the assertion that what the woman is doing is not affecting another's life, cannot be made.
So you are asserting that everyone has the burden of proving that nothing they have done has "affected another's life" and/or has not resulted in the "taking of human life"? OK, prove to me that your decision not to have as much sexual intercourse as you possibly could has not "affected another's life" or resulted in the "taking of human life"?
I must be forced to pay for state schools that do not allow one to chose freely to worship God...
You shouldn't be forced to pay for state schools at all, but by promoting governmental interference with the family life of pregnant women, you are also promoting governmental interference with mothers and their children.
You tried to assert that both parties accept each other's morality, which is simply not true.
I never stated that at all. I just asserted that Republicans aren't as squeaky clean when it comes to adultery as Ann Coulter claims that they are.
which party champions paying for both multiple children out of wedlock and abortion?
I would have no problem with Coulter (or you) calling Democrats the party of subsidized abortions and subsidized poor single motherhood -- but of course that wouldn't get her much publicity would it?
Conservative Republicans tend to want to see the mother take responsibility and care for the baby rather than live a lifestyle of adulterous affairs.
Don't a lot of Conservative Republicans support the giving up of babies of unwed mothers to adoptive parents? That's not encouraging mothers to take responsibility for their babies, is it? Moreover, single mothers cannot by definition be guilty of adultery, can they? Isn't it true that what most of the so called "social conservatives" really want is for no one to have sex unless they're doing it with their spouses for the sole purpose of making a baby?
Are you trying to assert that no moral differences exist between Republican and Democrat idealologies?
There are certainly moral differences between those two parties, but neither gets very close to the high moral ground -- while not hesitating to push innocent people around in the process.
You missed my obvious point again, so I'll restate it: If you fail to intervene in order to prevent or punish someone for a murder, that doesn't mean you were in favor of that murder, it doesn't mean that you committed murder, and it doesn't mean that you are generally "pro-murder", does it? Were Americans pro-Hitler before we entered WWII? Of course not. Why anti-abortion zealots cannot understand the ridiculousness of their implication that no one can maintain a position of neutrality on the issue of abortion is beyond me.
With regard to the issue of whether murder should be illegal, the answer is obvious: yes, because murder is provably wrong and civilization cannot be maintained unless it is forcibly deterred/remedied. Abortion choice, on the other hand, is not provably wrong and civilization can be maintained without it being forcibly deterred/remedied.
Some very highly esteemed scientists have proved that some young children have knowledge of things that happened to people who died shortly before the children were born. That, combined with other things, is strong evidence that the "soul" (or some would say "spirit") of a person goes from death to a soon-to-be-born fetus (i.e they are reincarnated).
Of course, unlike people who are in favor of the prohibition of abortion based on their religious faith, I wouldn't demand under penalty of law that anyone accept such a theory of reincarnated human life, but certainly there is no more evidence that "souls" are created at conception -- and arguably far less, if any.
You don't have to be a conservative to dispute the false assertions in her raticle that I pointed out. In fact, you'd almost certainly be much more aware of her fallacies if you were a libertarian (as am I).
I guess you are unware of the fact that some women become pregnant without intending to do so. I suggest you do a little reading in the field of human biology.
The "product of conception" is a human being. To deny that is to deny scientific fact.
Feel free to try to prove that a fertilized egg has all of the essential human attributes of someone who has been born alive. You cannot do it.
If you are "pro-choice" to kill unborn babies then, to be consistent, you must be "pro-choice" to kill other children as well.
Not if you believe that a baby has a soul or is capable of surviving without any help from, or interference with its mother, but a recently formed fetus may not.
On the other hand, if you believe that the government is entitled to intervene in a dispute between a woman and her fetus, then you should have no compunction at all about the government intervening in any dispute between a born child and its parents (eg. whether the child should be forced to go to its parents' church).
No, because born children can survive without cooperation from their parents, but young fetuses cannot be born without cooperation (forcibly compelled by the state or otherwise) from the woman bearing them. In other words, you don't need to enslave anyone to raise a child, but you do need to enslave a woman to force her to bear a child.
Oh I know that you're only referring to the nine months that kids spend in their mother's womb, but I don't see much of difference. It certainly wouldn't make any difference to the life you snuff out.
Once again you're assuming without any proof that there is no essential difference between a fetus and a born child.
Most slaveholders did not feel that their actions were morally wrong.
I'm not sure that was the case. Many enlightened slaveholders (egs. Jefferson, Robert E. Lee) seemed to think that slavery was wrong but they and/or their society were dependent on it (sort of like heroin addicts who consider themselves hopeless junkies). The "God supports slavery" theory seems to have become more popular as the abolitionists rose to prominence, and who knows how many slaveholders actually believed that or were just propagandizing.
Consider the two following statements: 1.All men are created equal 2.Life begins at conception Both are moral statements and neither can be proven.
Actually, I can prove that all men should be treated as equals in terms of applying ethical rules and laws, which is what the somewhat poorly phrased shorthand expression "All men are created equal" was intended to mean. You cannot prove, though, that life begins at conception. In fact, I can prove that conception is just a point on the continuum of life at which two sets of genes merge and nothing is provably gained and nothing is provably lost. Of course, you cannot prove that that newly conceived life is essentially the same as a new born baby. Moreover, I can prove that men and women who allow their sperm and egg cells to perish are causing the end of a form of human life no different (in their genetic makeup and in their potential) from that present in their fertilized egg.
The zealots in the battle over slavery were the abolitionists who tried to impose that first statement on all people regardless of their moral beliefs - and thank God they won.
Since the Confederates seceded and started a Civil War against a much larger group of people in order to preserve slavery, it was the slaveholders who were acting with greater zealotry, though I would agree that abolitionist John Brown was just as much of a zealot -- so if you would like to equate anti-abortion conservatives with John Brown's approach to abolition then I think you would have a somewhat valid comparison. In other words, a laudible goal does not excuse unsound means to achieve that goal, whether you're talking about ending slavery or ending abortion.
I hope for your sake that you're not equating the size of one's bank account with their goodness, intelligence, or anything else that is laudable. Demagoguery can be very profitable -- just ask Slick Willie.
To which you replied:
Michelle Malkin and Virginia Postrel leap to mind.
Yes, I agree, and I'd add Laura Ingraham and several of the Liberty Belles.
This year wasn't really a contest between social conservatives and leftist feminists. It was more of a contest between anti-terrorists and tired rebels without a cause.
And there were slaves who regretted abolition too, but that didn't justify a continuation of slavery.
I've never met a woman who decided to let their baby live and regretted that
Then you've probably never met any women whose children ended up in prison, because that's where most of the unwanted offspring end up.
How can motherhood really be compared with slavery?
I didn't compare motherhood to slavery, I compared forced motherhood to slavery. Similarly, I wouldn't compare sexual intercourse to slavery, but I would compare rape to slavery.
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