Kyl and Trump.
“If you want an abortion, you go to Planned Parenthood, and that’s well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does.” — Jon Kyl
“His remark was not intended to be a factual statement, but rather to illustrate that Planned Parenthood, a organization that receives millions of dollars in taxpayer funding, does subsidize abortions.” — the office of Jon Kyl, upon media asking him with respect to statistics showing that Abortion is actually about 3 percent of what Planned Parenthood does.
I don’t know what to say anymore about things like this. There are statements politicians may make in a spirit of, say, sarcasm — or slip up in making a misstatement. There are disagreements of cause and effect in our world of multiple contradictory policies. Then there’s the bald-faced line, “I didn’t mean what I said there. Not literally.”
As per Donald Trump. I would have to scour Bloom Countys to figure out if he was actually running, or “running”, for president in 1988. Also, how close was he to running for the Reform Party ticket in the aftermath of Jesse Ventura’s gubernatorial victory and before it became clear Pat Buchanan had successfully taken over the party apparatus? He is now, I guess, a perennial presidential candidate. On closer inspection, his engagement with “birther”ism is the one gambit he has available for polling success — I gather he will pull the plug before electoral success becomes an issue — as he has no other peg with which to meet the portion of nuts in the Republican base. I imagine past runs through the last half of the twentieth century would meet with runs against Fluoridation, Communist Infiltration, and for Creationism.
It’s probably too damned late in the game for Jon Kyl’s abortion rhetoric.
This article, byGarrett Epps, brings me back first to the historical context of the WND claim that Ayers ghost-wrote Obama’s Dreams of My Father — which has historical roots in claims that slave narratives were not written by their authors — and then this smacked me with something:
During my years in the Pacific Northwest, I used frequently to meet people who assured me that they were “sovereign citizens,” white males who were at the center of the “organic Constitution”; outsiders–Native Americans, black people, Asian Americans, women–were citizens, true, but only “Fourteenth-Amendment citizens,” in a separate, lesser category under the law.
I ran into a man, online, who threw around the phrase “Fourteenth Amendment citizens”. I don’t think this was his definition — I gather he had a conception that the Federal Government took over with the Fourteenth Amendment and we all became slaves. (Given that the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century Supreme Court used the Fourteenth Amendment to expand the rights of Corporations and backed away from protecting freed slaves, maybe he had a skittle of a point.) But given this man’s full ideology, I think his conception is related and at points interchangeable.
There is something ringing false on all these scores. We’ve arrived at the two political sides setting up for a budgetary battle to compromise between two “Cat Food Commission”s. Simpsons — Bowles is “Centrist”, by definition somehow, and that’s where Obama wants to be. Ryan’s is Conservative “Bold” — and the Libertarians and tea party believe it to be a “good start”. It appears his speech has won over a good deal of liberals who’ve soured on him — which is, I guess, the routine of these things. We’ll see where lines in the sand are drawn and how everyone pulls it out. Remember the budget sucks that blew the deficit out of proportion in the first place.