Culture War: August 2008 Archives

Nancy Pelosi is now trying to justify her party's horrid stance on abortion by implying that the Catholic Church has been unsure about it for centuries:

That is a load of crap. There are people within the church who disagree, but the official position of the Catholic Church on abortion has never wavered. Then she goes on to say that Republicans are against contraception. That'll be news to the Republican women on the Pill.

Keep talkin', Rain Woman.

UPDATE: Hugh Hewitt has lots, lots more.

Barack Hussein Obama is an astonisingly bad liar.  Or maybe it's just that his arrogance has grown to such proportions that he's incapable of recognizing what a piss-poor prevaricator he has become.

Perhaps nowhere is this more overbearingly evident than in his increasingly forlorn "outreach" to evangelicals, a large portion of which is his gag-inducing claim to be a "moderate" on abortion.

Maybe delusions of Godhood include lexicographical legerdemain, but this doesn't sound all that "moderate" to me:

When Obama was running for the U.S. Senate in 2004, his Republican opponent criticized him for supporting “infanticide.” Obama countered this charge by claiming that he had opposed the state BAIPA because it lacked the pre-birth neutrality clause that had been added to the federal bill. As the Chicago Tribune reported on October 4, 2004, “Obama said that had he been in the U.S. Senate two years ago, he would have voted for the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, even though he voted against a state version of the proposal. The federal version was approved; the state version was not. . . . The difference between the state and federal versions, Obama explained, was that the state measure lacked the federal language clarifying that the act would not be used to undermine Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court opinion that legalized abortion.”

During Obama’s 2008 run for President, his campaign and his defenders have asserted repeatedly and forcefully that it is a distortion, or even a smear, to suggest that Obama opposed a state born-alive bill that was the same as the federal bill. See, for example, this June 30, 2008 “factcheck” issued by the Obama campaign, in the form that it still appeared on the Obama website on August 7, 2008. The Obama “cover story” has often been repeated as fact, or at least without challenge, in major organs of the news media. (Two recent examples: CNN reported on June 30, 2008, “Senator Obama says if he had been in the U.S. Senate in 2002, he, too, would have voted in favor of the Born Alive Infant Protection Act because unlike the Illinois bill, it included language protecting Roe v. Wade.” The New York Times reported in a story on August 7, 2008 that Obama “said he had opposed the bill because it was poorly drafted and would have threatened the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade that established abortion as a constitutional right. He said he would have voted for a similar bill that passed the United States Senate because it did not have the same constitutional flaw as the Illinois bill.”)

This excuse, tissue-flimsy even if it had been true, was, in fact, pure fiction:

For the moment we can set that debate aside, however, for this reason: Documents obtained by NRLC now demonstrate conclusively that Obama’s entire defense is based on a brazen factual misrepresentation.

The documents prove that in March 2003, state Senator Obama, then the chairman of the Illinois state Senate Health and Human Services Committee, presided over a committee meeting in which the “neutrality clause” (copied verbatim from the federal bill) was added to the state BAIPA, with Obama voting in support of adding the revision. Yet, immediately afterwards, Obama led the committee Democrats in voting against the amended bill, and it was killed, 6-4. [emphasis added]

So this isn't just a case of His Unholiness lying about a vote.  This was a case of his actions as committee chairman in going out of his way to make the state version of the Born Alive Infant Protection Act as identical to the federal version as he possibly could, then driving the stake through its heart - as big a dollop of contempt for the federal BAIPA as is imaginable - and then claiming that had he been in the U.S. Senate, he would have voted for it.

It is pure, genuine, 100% home-grown bullbleep.  A lie so pathetic it doesn't just insult Americans' intelligence, but insults Obama's own intelligence in thinking that he could put it over on us.  Ditto his belief that allowing Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr. - another supposedly "pro-life" Donk whose abortion bona fides don't live up to the hype - to speak at the convention will lend him some ass-covering karma from the Dems' refusal of that same gesture to former Pennsylvania Governor Bob Casey, Sr. sixteen years ago.

But the claim to have "tweaked the platform to let pro-lifers knows that their concerns are valid and appreciated"....again, does this look to you like "tweaking":?

A lot of anti-abortion activists — including the leadership of the group Democrats for Life, which has long tried to get their party to soften its stand on reproductive rights – weren’t buying it. “It would be really tragic if some young evangelicals unaware of history of civics would vote for a candidate that will guarantee that we will have abortion on demand for another 30 years,” Gary Bauer, president of American Values, told Bloomberg News.

And they were right. There is nothing new in the Democratic position. The abortion plank’s first sentence, “The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to choose a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay, and we oppose any and all efforts to weaken or undermine that right,” is, arguably, the most powerful statement in favor of abortion rights that the party has ever made. Some pro-choice activists find it less grating to the ear than the old Clintonian formulation, which promised in the 2004 party platform to make abortion “safe, legal, and rare.”

And yet the whole point of that rhetorical formulation was to maintain the Democrat Party's unconscionably heinous defense of legal infanticide inside and outside of the womb without going out of its way to rub pro-lifers' noses in it, and thus antagonize and motivate them to even stronger efforts against the Roe v. Wade regime.  The Obama version of the abortion plank is the pagan version of Bible-thumping, of "religious harassment."

Take a look at the rest of the plank, in its entirety:

The Democratic Party also strongly supports access to affordable family planning services and comprehensive age-appropriate sex education which empower people to make informed choices and live healthy lives. We also recognize that such health care and education help reduce the number of unintended pregnancies and thereby also reduce the need for abortions. The Democratic Party also strongly supports a woman’s decision to have a child by ensuring access to and availability of programs for pre and post natal health care, parenting skills, income support, and caring adoption programs.

It's not enough that "a woman's right to choose" to murder her defenseless progeny be defended as absolute and unassailable; that "right" is now to include forcing the rest of us to pay for it, regardless of our own moral conscience, and compelling us to allow our children to be indoctrinated in left-wing cultural propaganda doubtless to include hostility to traditional religious values of chastity and pre-marital abstinence and fealty to the gay lobby and its anti-marriage jihad.

That there are so-called "pastors" like Joel Hunter and Tony Campolo who are aiding and abetting their idol's flagrant false-witness-bearing cannot help but remind me of I John 2:19:

They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us; but their going showed that none of them belonged to us.

Talk about rotten "fruit".

It is against that made-to-order background that the RINO nominee, the Dark Lord of the Sith, Senator John McCain, is actually giving strong consideration to choosing [better sit down for this one, gentles] a pro-abortion running mate:

John McCain said that he is open to choosing a pro-choice running mate and named former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge as someone who merits serious consideration despite his support for abortion rights....

“I think that the pro-life position is one of the important aspects or fundamentals of the Republican Party,” McCain said. “And I also feel that – and I’m not trying to equivocate here –that Americans want us to work together. You know, Tom Ridge is one of the great leaders and he happens to be pro-choice. And I don’t think that that would necessarily rule Tom Ridge out.”

McCain’s comments came in response to a question about comments he made to several reporters during the Republican primary season. During that exchange, McCain was asked whether New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg would make a good running mate. McCain offered strong words of praise for Bloomberg but said that Bloomberg’s position on abortion – he is also pro-choice – would make it difficult to choose him as a vice presidential candidate. …

“I think it’s a fundamental tenet of our party to be pro-life but that does not mean we exclude people from our party that are pro-choice. We just have a – albeit strong – but just it’s a disagreement. And I think Ridge is a great example of that. Far moreso than Bloomberg, because Bloomberg is pro-gay rights, pro, you know, a number of other issues.”

Nobody is suggesting that morally obtuse 'Pubbies be thrown out of the GOP.  But striving for a "big tent" does not require that sneering social issues dissidents be handed the keys to the party kingdom, either.  Recall as well that Tom Ridge's divergence from conservative orthodoxy has not been limited to abortion; when in Congress in the 1980s he was a loud opponent of the Reagan defense buildup in general and the Strategic Defense Initiative in particular.  That's more than just a single, "albeit strong," disagreement.

More to the point is that John McCain is the least trusted - and least trustworthy - individual in the Republican Party.  He has done more than any Democrat could ever have dreamed to sabotage the GOP agenda from within over the past decade and crow about it to his cultivated Enemy Media buddies to rub our noses in it afterwards.  Political speech restrictions, opposition to tax cuts, his "torture" fetish, the "gang of fourteen/memo of understanding" betrayal, embracing the global warming hoax, his profane and absolutist hostility to border control, cultural integrity, and homeland security - it's a dismal litany that to this day has me baffled that this man could possibly still have captured the Republican presidential nomination.  It is part & parcel of why I have been so dismissive of his chances of avoiding a Goldwater/McGovern-esque electoral massacre in November.  A man with no party, no base of support, would have zero chance against The Second Coming and a party that would, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, vote for the devil himself if it would get them the White House back.

Yet somehow, some way, Darth Queeg is in this race.  Mostly in that he has been blessed with a most helpful opponent whose extremism, incompetence, and garishly misplaced arrogance is doing most of his campaigning for him.  For the most part, Sailor has been wise enough to hang back and let the Chosen One self-destruct.

But the GOP base is still less sold on putting their noses in a vice and backing their archenemy than they are terrified of a Hussein presidency.  Selecting a staunch conservative is imperative for McCain to "seal the deal," as it were, if in fact that deal is actually sealable.

Yet now, with actual victory an actual possibility, with Obama burying himself with the Christian Right in his abortion mendacities and teetering on the edge of a Democrat civil war with La Clinton Nostra, NOW Maverick is letting his worst "mavericky" instincts reemerge?

Bah.  I still say it'll be Huckles.  All the same Rockefellerism without the "pro-choice" baggage.  And he's so goooooood with the media, too....

From their home base in Oregon, the Kiladas reach out to the Arab world through Middle Eastern Missionary Organization.

In Spain, Arabic Gospel radio programs reach Moroccan immigrants.  They provide written materials for training and discipleship in Egypt.  Through an Arabic/English website, they share the good news of Christ as well as offer leadership training.  Kameel makes frequent trips to Egypt to encourage national workers, provide tools for ministry, and give oversight.