Political Tuesdays: Pick a Scandal, Any Scandal

It's tough being a news junkie on a day like this, forced to sit in teacher inservice and not indulge in the schadenfreude that I freely admit would be my preference today.  I wasn't always a mild-mannered Latin teacher with a craft blog, you know.  I started out as a junior employee at the National Right to Life Committee in Washington D.C.  I guess you could say I was a "community organizer."  Steve's job moved us away after I had been there only 3 years, but I have remained a news junkie and political wonk ever since.  I've stayed in touch with my pro-life friends, and when Tertia was born, and had Down syndrome, I felt that at least part of God's purpose in giving her to us was so that I could raise awareness about these dear people, aborted at a rate somewhere around 90%.

For my new followers: I indulge my inner wonk some Tuesdays (and there is no way I could sit this Tuesday out).  If you have political persuasions strongly different from mine, the usual disclaimer is that you might want to skip today's entry and come back when it's just about knitting or quilting.  But I hope you won't be scared off.  My starting premise is that there is more that holds us together as Americans than most people give us credit for; and even though I am free with my historical allusions to the fall of the Roman Empire, I don't believe the barbarians have won just yet.

My long-time readers should brace themselves.  I'm about to post a complimentary reference to Ron Paul.  (Although I will say that I think the casting using the Mad Hatter was brilliant.)  Here is Obama as The Lord High Executioner, with "I've got a little list."


I was looking for a straight-up rendition of the song from the Mikado, but I couldn't find one single version that hadn't been altered with contemporary references... it seems to be a theatrical tradition. So why not use the one that is the closest to what Obama himself has actually done?  A tip of the hat to the Ron Paulites.  Wow, I can't believe I just said that.  I should probably clarify that I am much more hawkish on foreign policy than the mad doctor, and that I think the sparkly Liberace suit on the Obama doll is just plain tacky - Obama looks much better in a suit, give him his due.

So where to begin?  Here's the list of scandals to pick from:

• The IRS targets conservative groups for audits and harassment; Obama's enemies list? Now, I'm well aware of the intricacies of political action, the need to keep a 501-C3 organization separate from a PAC, and transparency in reporting, etc., etc... but this is way too much coincidence.
• In the hearings about the Benghazi attacks, it becomes ever clearer that Obama's administration doctored the truth to make himself look good before the election, and most probably failed to defend American diplomats in harm's way. No surprise to hear criticism from conservative columnists George Will and Peggy Noonan, but now even Maureen Dowd has joined the crowd: "unworthy of the greatest power on earth."  Well, I guess she better prepare for the IRS audit.
• The Justice Department has been covertly spying on the Associated Press.  I'm having a very hard time understanding why anyone, no matter how incompetent, thought this was a good idea.
• I think the Russians are sensing weakness.  Maybe this is what Obama meant by showing more flexibility towards Vladimir Putin after his reelection.
• Abortionist Kermit Gosnell was convicted of 3 counts of 1st degree murder for severing the spinal cords of babies who survived his late-term abortion process.  They become "babies" and not "fetuses" once they leave the mother's body, apparently. NARAL blames the pro-life movement, saying Gosnell was a back-alley abortionist and committed "atrocities", while ignoring the fact that for decades he operated as a member in good standing of the abortion providers' club.  Gosnell provided cheap, unsanitary abortions to poor and immigrant women; presumably the proper way to provide abortions is to make sure they are performed in a more exclusive, boutique-like setting?  I will probably have more to say on the subject of boutique vs. back-alley abortions in a future Tuesday post.  Gosnell is responsible for his own crimes; but it is worth noting that President Obama voted multiple times against Illinois legislation to offer protection to babies who survived abortions like some of Gosnell's victims.  And it is also worth noting that some babies who survived abortions are adults now.

It will be an interesting week.  Enough to make the President cry.

Political Tuesdays: April Horrors

On Political Tuesdays I let myself get more philosophical than most days on my blog, and range freely over the political and cultural landscape.  It's not my intent to give offense in such posts, just to record my interaction with current events.  But I reserve the right to think freely here, and if you are one who is easily offended by differing opinions you may be happier in a different corner of the internet, at least on Tuesdays.

I first learned to wonder, "What is it about April, anyway?" in 1995, the Oklahoma City bombing.  Waco, two years earlier, was just another mishandled aspect of the Clinton administration I tried not to pay attention to.  Then there were the school shootings; at Columbine, just down the street a few miles.  I remember pulling the little boys back inside for safety as helicopters circled until late in the night.  Little Elian Gonzales, stolen from his family at gunpoint, again a Clintonian blunder.  Then as a teacher myself, I became more aware of the rhythm of the school year, the "spring fever" phenomenon.  Yeah, kids do crazy and unpredictable things in the spring, just when you'd think they would see the light at the end of the school year tunnel.  The ancients called it "Naufragium in portu facere" - to make a shipwreck in harbor.  Why is that?  Why do kids drop out, run away from home, pick a fight with their families, or make a disastrously bad choice that will ruin their lives right before they reach a positive milestone?  I don't know more than anyone else.  But I've learned to cringe through April, both on the personal and the national scale.  Maybe national leaders are just overgrown children, making bad choices and doing random things in the spring just like so many schoolchildren.  And then there are the obvious bad guys.  They take random to a whole new level.

The carnage in Boston is clearly the work of a psychopath, and a very anti-American psychopath at that.  I would think an anti-government kook would target a federal building or an IRS convention; a deranged madman would stick with schools and movie theaters; but this attack on athletes and civic celebration has the feel of our terrorist enemies from the Middle East, and the methodology was designed to maim and terrorize more than kill.  Whether the criminals will be caught and brought to justice is uncertain.  Whether our current leadership is even competent to prosecute a campaign for justice, rather than a political campaign, is even more doubtful.  We know that the left is utterly opposed to using American military force to wage war on terrorist states, and the American public is at best flaky about supporting such efforts.  John Kerry would be the hard-headed negotiator in charge of any diplomatic solutions; I can just see him now, riding his swift boat to narcissism.  No, I don't have a lot of confidence in political solutions for the Boston attacks, any more than there are political solutions for school massacres.  I hope for justice nonetheless.

I do see a certain chilling parallelism in the terrorism of yesterday and the moral and cultural decline of the last 40 years. And before I am charged with saying that God is judging America for gay marriage and abortion, credit me with being a little more nuanced than that.  America is judging herself.  There is a retributive principle of justice here, one that has been ignored in this country for my whole generation.  We are simply reaping what we have sown.  For forty years the lives of millions of our youngest children have been snuffed out in the privacy of clinics and doctors' offices, if they were somehow inconvenient to us: the emanations and penumbras of the Constitution told us this was permissible.  Now we are surprised that we have enemies who want to kill our athletes in the flower of their youth and strength.  Kermit Gosnell collected severed baby feet in jars in his Philadelphia abortion clinic for years, never inspected by health authorities or questioned by journalists, who said they were too squeamish to deal properly with the subject.  "I am someone who cringes when I hear a description of a sprained ankle."  Now the severed limbs of adult victims scroll across our Facebook feeds for all of us to see.  C.S. Lewis had a profound observation about the moral bankruptcy of the 20th century: "We castrate, and bid the gelding be fruitful."  In the 21st century, we kill our children, and bid their surviving siblings build a just and enlightened society.