on 4/13/00 9:02 PM, b at [log in to unmask] wrote:

> Maybe so,  but speaking of God's work... how do those members of the
> moralising 'right', who are both anti-abortion and pro-capital punishment,
> reconcile their arguments?
Probably the same way that anti-death penalty, pro-choice people reconcile
their arguments: by distinguishing the two situations as not analogous. I
frankly have never been terribly impressed by this attempt at skewering the
anti-choicers. I think one can get much, much farther by accepting that the
two situations are reconcilable and then using it against them. If they
really think abortion is murder, why don't they push for executing a woman
who has one? If the fetus is a person under the 14th Amendment (the clause
mandating equal protection of the laws), then treating the abortion of a
fetus differently under the criminal law from any other murder is legally
and morally indefensible. It would be like setting different penalties for
the murder of a white person and a black person.

Since no anti-choicer, not even the terrorist wing, advocates executing
women who have abortions (heck, they don't even advocate incarcerating
them), the conclusion is inescapable: they don't really believe, in their
heart of hearts, that a fetus is a person. And this makes them fucking
hypocrites, no matter how they try to wriggle out of it.

>
>> --
>> Tresy Kilbourne
>> Seattle WA
>> "The Clinton-haters and their friends in the media are like a cargo cult:
>> they keep expecting something to fall from the sky, and years of
>> disappointment never seem to awaken any doubt." - Joe Conason
>
> 'Disappointment'? Maybe what Joe doesn't get is that, regardless of the
> outcome of formal procedures - the vengeance that should 'fall from the
> sky', Clinton's blown it purely through his actions, and is known and will
> be remembered as a man of limited integrity and moral character. That, for
> the 'Clinton-haters', is quite possibly enough. Clinton and his apologists
> cannot claim any victory because the system he's part of treated him gently.
> Or so it would seem to me...

I've been all over the map on Clinton in the course of the last 8 years, but
I've come to believe that the guy is actually quite brilliant, if also
deeply flawed. Would it interest you to know that Gabriel Garcia Marquez,
after a dinner with him, pronounced Clinton the second most interesting,
well-read politician he'd ever known, after Castro?

As for integrity, the abandon with which many elements of the so-called Left
in this country leapt into bed with the fascist Right over the Clinton
pseudoscandals makes Clinton look like fucking Roosevelt. Alexander
Cockburn, scourge of prosecutors everywhere, was practically giving Kenneth
Starr blowjobs during Lewinskygate, relaying any and all slurs disseminated
by the OIC with no, I repeat no, skepticism whatsoever; Christopher Hitchens
still is giving him blowjobs. Maybe that's why he's such a sad drunk these
days. I would need to be seriously soused to live with myself, if I were
him.

There were honorable exceptions. The World Socialist Website was the locus
of surprisingly nuanced analyses of the whole sordid saga. But by and large,
the US Left demonstrated just how irrelevant it was as a force against
fascism over the course of its complicity in the Right's attempted silent
coup.

--
Tresy Kilbourne
Seattle WA