Category Archives: The Contrarian

Why You Should Hope Roe v. Wade Is Overturned. Today.

A rally in support of abortion rights in front of the Supreme Court last year.

 

Before you send me a mailbomb or drop an envelope laced with risin my way, hear me out. I am strongly in support of the right to choose. Shit, our president is the living argument that some births should be abandoned.Image result for trump infant

But it’s time for the Left to be aware of tidal shifts, including this last, desperate jag to the right that will see the reversal of  Roe v. Wade. And we should welcome it. Not for the actions it will take. But for the actions we will.

On January 22, 1973, the United States Supreme Court ruled 7 – 2 that the ability to terminate a pregnancy was a constitutional right. I’m old enough to remember a time when politicians thought it unthinkable that the legality would ever come into question.

Now, less than five decades later, with a number of lower-court abortion decisions advancing and the most conservative Supreme Court since the 1930s, abortion opponents are close to getting what they have wanted ever since Vose’ Roe v. Wade: the decision’s reversal.

And let’s be honest: RvW‘s death will come any moment now.

Consider:

  • This week, Trump vowed to stand with anti-abortion activists as he became the first sitting president to speak at the March for Life, an annual gathering that is one of the movement’s highest profile and most symbolic events.
  • More than 200 Republican members of Congress  asked the Supreme Court last week to consider overturning Roe v. Wade, in a brief urging the justices to uphold a Louisiana law that severely restricts access to the procedure.
  • As of 2014, five states had only only abortion provider, making access for minorities and the impoverished nearly impossible in Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming.

As a political issue, abortion isn’t technically dead. But the life support machine barely beeps. Currently, there are more than 20 cases in line at the Supreme Court that could fundamentally alter abortion rights as enshrined in  hotheadedly Roe. And some are tired of waiting: Last week, Texas’ 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, the most conservative in the country, appeared to try to force the Supreme Court to take up abortion rights next term by refusing to issue a decision on an abortion-related lawsuit until the Supreme Court resolved a different abortion case.

Given the inevitability of a reversal, why delay it? In fact, why not let loose the hounds of outrage as soon as possible? At its most reductive, the abortion issue is a matter of timing. Do we want to rail against a jerry-rigged system before the November elections, or after them?

Because nothing has jolted us awake yet. Somehow, we have yet to admit that we’ve got metastasizing political cancer. We’ve brushed by nuclear war; glossed over our ecological war crimes; even accepted Russians as valid political actors among the electorates. All while being spoon-fed Tweeted reassurances that the blood in our stool is nothing to worry about.Image result for russian meddling

But if Roe v. Wade’s fate really comes before the Supreme Court, then for the first time in decades, the abortion rights movement will understand that the threat it is facing is not theoretical, and supporters will stop fighting like it is. If Roe v. Wade is overturned, the decision will finally force the ideological zeal typical of a political opposition—the force that has long powered the anti-abortion movement — onto an abortion rights movement. And liberal complacency on the issue of abortion could end for good.

These are all pie-in-the-sky forecasts. But there’s a reason to invite adversity. Women showed what a galvanizing force they can be when they brought the #MeToo movement to state houses nationwide. The Blue Wave in 2018 came primarily thanks to women and minorities who said, en masse, enough.

Time for a similar mindset come November. While the process of choosing a Democratic presidential candidate still has months to go,  the race has yet to establish a Young (or Old) Turk who can scrap with Donnie Dimwit. Trump was borne of reality TV, so out-dancing him in the Minstrel Show of American Politics is no small ask.

We need something bigger. Like a cause.

You did it with #MeeToo. You did it in 2018.

Do it again. Take it from us.

How The New York Times Ate Its Young

amy-klobuchar-elizabeth-warren-rt-gt-img

 

Let’s get one thing straight, right out of the gate: I consider The New York Times the God of Journalism. Their numerous Pulitzers notwithstanding, their reporting of our world, writ large and small, is the standard by which all news outlets should aspire. Plus Trump hate them. So there’s that.

But the NYT did journalism a disservice this week with its co-endorsement of Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar for Democratic presidential nominee.

The Times editorial board acknowledged in its editorial, which appears in Monday’s paper, that there is a fight going on for the soul of the Democratic Party—a struggle they suggest pits a “radical” vision for taking on President Trump and the challenges facing the nation against a “realist” one. On that metric, the NYT opined, Warren would be its more leftist vote, Klobuchar its centrist.

Excuse me? Are we ordering a fucking pizza? With that as a template, you could cook-to-order any candidate. Socialist leanings with conservative fiscal policy? Try Bernie Sanders! In the mood for Obama -.5? Heeeeeeere’s Joey B!Image result for democratic candidates

Already, the paper has been taken to the woodshed; many of the critics charge that the Times’ placing Klobuchar in the “Moderate” camp was inaccurate — thus plunging the paper’s very process into the kind of liberal branding that already freights the party’s hopes in 2020. Why board that overweight liner anyway? A gutsy, straightforward   endorsement would have avoided the dickering. And yeah, an editorial can be ballsy, and someone with balls can endorse a woman. Stop being such bitches.

The NYT call is troubling on two fronts. One, the other half of the job — the one the NYT forgot — in endorsing a candidate is to explain why the country needs said candidate. Do we need a centrist right now? Is a leftist the corrective steering? The Times is steeped in institutional political memory. To name a double ticket (Should voters check both boxes if they’re uncertain where they fall on the spectrum?) is to flush that collective knowledge down the crapper.

More troubling, this is how the Left eats its young in ravenous Wokeness. We are so afraid of being exclusive of any offendable reader/voter demographic we’ve forgotten how to take a stand. Be guided by an apolitical compass here, and stand behind your choice. But do we really doubt that this editorial didn’t suffer from the very same in-fighting that clearly compromised the process?

Leave the waffling to IHOP. In just a year, we’ll be offered a more binary choice. Hopefully, my esteemed colleagues, you will have chosen a path a more clear path, worthy of the fight.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWtn4Kt05_Y

Ernest Goes to Impreachment

I awoke today to the above headline from U.S. News & World Report, which asserted that Donald Trump had assembled a legal impeachment team that resembled “Made-For-TV” entertainment, including Alan Dershowitz and Ken Starr, the feckless prosecutor who considered a blowjob high crimes and misdemeanors two decades ago.

At first, the team surprised me. Didn’t Trump spend, literally, months eviscerating Starr publicly for being as incompetent as, well, Trump (just without using the name)?Image result for ken starr clown

Then I punched myself in the nose for being surprised. I should be lobotomized for expecting a modicum of consistency from Trump. Perhaps I have been. Maybe that’s why Trump sniffles so much; he’s trying to breathe in the fumes from the evaporated brains of those who hear him speak.

As is often the case with a slackwit like the president, I often find myself questioning whether there is intent hidden within the idiocy. And while Trump himself likely doesn’t know how a hat works, his GOP overlords may have subtly shifted political tactics on the American populace — particularly the under-educated and over-churched.

After all, does it not seem reasonable that the vanguards of the Republican Party (McConnell, Graham, Murdoch, the Koch Bros., etc.) would take a political pathway that’s been effective for decades, the “Southern Strategy,” and morph it into an easily digested Flintstones chewable for an American sub-strata that still holds to those principles — namely, Trumptards and Evangelicals?Image result for koch brothers mcconnell

Of course, it isn’t politically expedient to brazenly play on race-baiting. So this isn’t The Southern Strategy. Say hello to the GOP’s Simpleton Strategy. It’s like the Southern Strategy, only with way more better.

Consider, for a moment, GOP presidential tickets going back four decades. In 1980, Ronald Reagan won consecutive terms decisively, despite popular ridicule of our president co-starring with a chimp in Bedtime for Bonzo. The notion of that as a deal-breaker now seems quaint.Image result for reagan bonzo

Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush, took the Simpleton Strategy a step further, with dimwit Dannie Quayle as vice-president. Remember when Quayle tried to spell potato on a chalkboard? Again, in the context of today, with a president who spells “smoke” “smock,” the error seems cute. Back then, though, we must have demanded some level of intelligence, because Bush-Quayle lasted one term.Image result for dan quayle potato

It was in 1996 that the GOP made its last attempt to scaffold a respectably intelligent ticket: Bob Dole and Jack Kemp. Dole was a Senator, Kemp the former Secretary of Housing. Easily the highest combined IQ on the GOP ticket in decades. They were trounced by Clinton-Gore, winning just 159 Electoral votes, the lowest since Goldwater in 1964.Image result for dole kemp

And with that went the last double-sanity ticket.

Since then, the GOP has seamlessly blended the Southern Strategy of the 50’s and 60’s into the Simpleton Strategy we see today. After the Dole-Kemp fiasco, we got Mensa shoo-in George W. Bush — twice. (“There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.”)Image result for bush fool me once

That was followed by John McCain and Sarah Palin, a VP pick McCain later admitted regretting in an HBO documentary shortly before his death. You remember Sarah. The everywoman,  a workaday mom who just liked to hunt wolves from helicopters after soccer practice.Image result for sarah palin helicopter hunting

Then there was old Mitt Romney. Here’s what the GOP offered: A president who, among other things, believes that God lives near a planet called “Kolob,” that the Garden of Eden was in Missouri, that we should baptize dead people, that drinking caffeine is a sin, and that it is sacrilege to wear underwear created by anyone other than Mormons. And Republicans were stunned he and Paul Ryan lost to a black man.Image result for mitt romney religion

So they have returned with their Simpletonest Strategy yet: Prop up a game show host and Evangelical afraid of women to the nation’s highest pulpit, and have them sing “Witch Hunt” in acapella.

And it may work in 2020. Simple is easier than smart. Keep in mind, as the 24/7s lament unenlightened districts, as the House asks voters to look up facts, as Democratic contenders bathe in a miasma of name-calling and Wokeness, this simple math question: Which is more likely to turn out voters — Playing to the lowest-common denominator, or praying for the highest?

Careful you don’t pass out holding your breath in solemn reflection.