Republican Slime, Democratic Scum. Rudolph Giuliani has, scandalously, asserted that if a Democrat is elected President, the United States will suffer another devastating terrorist attack, because only a Republican can protect us. Mind you, the 9/11 attack that raised that piddling nobody to the ranks of Presidential contenders occurred on a Republican's watch!
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It amazes me that Republicans dare to say that they alone can keep us safe, when the worst terrorist attack on our territory in the entire history of the Republic happened on a Republican President's watch! It just goes to show how absolutely right Adolf Hitler was when he said that "The great masses of the people will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one."*
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That is so because the reasoning of the people who hear an outrageous lie is that no one would dare say something so seemingly preposterous if it weren't true. Even if most people who hear a brazen lie should discount part of what they hear, most will nonetheless believe some of it. (That's why, for instance, a cloud may hang over the three Duke lacrosse players accused of rape, even tho they did nothing.)
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So even if the claim is wholly false, some of it will be believed. And partial belief is almost as good as total belief.
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Mitt Romney joined in Giuliani's attack, agreeing that only a Republican can protect us against terrorism. Romney has now consigned himself to the trash heap of history, a footnote as the first Mormon candidate for President.** He has revealed himself as a person — I won't use the honorific "man" for him — of absolutely no decency. He had earlier revealed himself as a person of no integrity, in recasting himself as something he has never been, be it a Radical Rightwinger or a "lifelong hunter".
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Beauty is indeed only skin deep. Mitt Romney is a strikingly handsome man, but the mask of skin that appears on the front of his head hides a devious, evil mind. He cannot be trusted by anyone, Right or Left.
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At least Giuliani is, for the most part, a consistent beast, tho he has tried to downplay his socially liberal stances for conservative audiences. I had the misfortune of living in New York City during most of Giuliani's tenure, tho I escaped to New Jersey in June 2000, well before that petty tyrant became a national hero for simply doing his job when his city was hit by terrorism. Outsiders don't know about Giuliani's dictatorial tendencies. Perhaps they now have a clue as to his totalitarian mindset, which represents anyone who opposes him as a danger to society. Giuliani presents himself as The Man on the White Horse who will save us. From what? From everything, including the need to vote.
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I came to call him "Mussoliani". As Mayor of the City of New York, he could do only so much harm, because the Government of the State of New York and the Federal Government were in place to restrain him. But if he were, by some monstrous misstep of the Nation's electorate, to become President? Who then would stop him from becoming dictator? Bush, a nothing as against Giuliani intellectually and as regards force of personality, went very far toward abolishing American democracy and imposing dictatorship, with high-handed measures he managed to entrench in law and custom. He instituted the so-called "Patriot Act" and Guantanamo, to which at least one U.S. citizen was sent after seizure here at home. Mussoliani would need far more than one Guantanamo. GUantanamo, GUlag. What an interesting linGUistic coincidence.
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Alas, American voters may have no one better to vote for on the Democratic side than the odious Giuliani and perfidious Romney on the Republican side.
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I saw part of the Democratic candidates' debate on MSNBC last nite. I turned off when the subject turned to abortion and the Democrats turned into a baby-lynch mob. Another handsome man, John Edwards (more like beautiful, indeed, than even "handsome" would cover), spouted kill-the-kid bile to pander to the feminist vote, so I shut the TV off in indignation and disgust.
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The Democratic Party has got to stop being the party of childslaughter.
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Democrats are supposed to watch out for the little guy. Who is littler than an unborn baby? Who is more powerless, more voiceless, more helpless against the mighty? No one, that's who.
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I am a homosexual man. I automatically, as a necessary first impulse, side with the powerless. Nowadays we hear 'conservatives' at once acknowledging that homosexuality may have a biological base AND suggesting that maybe 'intervention' while a child is in the womb can 'fix' (defective) gay babies — or society can save itself from rampant homosexuality by aborting gay babies.
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I am well more than 62 years beyond the point where I could be aborted to 'save' my parents the 'shame' and 'tragedy' of having a gay son, but that does not for an instant make me callous to the danger that future gay men face in the first months of life. In a contest between a 'mother' who does not deserve that honorific and an unborn baby who cannot appeal for mercy or even scream for help, let there be no mistake: the woman is the powerful one, the baby the helpless one. Women are not entitled to play the 'damsel in distress' card to kill a child on the theory that they are somehow 'victims'. No, women who seek to kill their baby are victimizers, not victims. The baby is the victim, or potential victim, and to protect the baby from murder, society has the moral right and indeed imperative to intervene.
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There is no biological ambiguity in abortion. A child is a child, whether it has been born or has just been conceived. It is biologically distinct from both of its parents, sharing only half its DNA with either. It is not part of the mother — and we have never needed any fancy proofs of that, inasmuch as more than half of all babies are boys, and no boy could be part of a woman's body — so control over "her own body" has absolutely no relevance. "Controlling one's own body" is a fatuously phony issue. The time to control your own body is before you let a ... how can we put this delicately? d*k into it.
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Even before that, if a woman doesn't want to risk pregnancy, be it from consensual sex or rape, she can perfectly well have her tubes tied. Indeed, this planet is so overcrowded that Government should volunteer to pay the costs of tubal ligation (an operation to tie the fallopian tubes to prevent pregnancy) for any woman who does not want to become pregnant. Many such operations are reversible, so if a woman who has been voluntarily sterilized should decide later that she wants to have a child after all, she can pay for reversal surgery herself, and repay the Government for the money it spent to tie her tubes in the first place.
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But no! Modern women want the right to screw around AND assert virginal purity. We all know what it takes to get pregnant. For women to at once go out and get themselves f*kt AND pretend to be innocents is bullsh*t. You get f*kt, you're not innocent, so don't pretend to be daddy's little girl who needs to be protected from the fully foreseeable consequences of her own lascivious acts.
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Let us also stop pretending that murder is not murder. When a person's life is taken without moral justification, that person's killing is murder, period. No fetus has ever attacked anyone, so killing it is not justifiable homicide. Justification is the distinction between murder, a crime, and happenstantial homicide, a tragedy.
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Life begins at conception. How do we know that? Because we can create embryos in a petrie dish thousands of miles from either parent, from frozen sperm and/or a frozen egg. That embryo can then be implanted in a woman who has absolutely no genetic connection to the embryo whatsoever. It might even be implantable into another species, closely related or not, be it monkey, chimp, cow, or sow.
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Every single one of us was once an embryo, then a fetus. Would you gladly consent to have been killed by your mother/parents before birth? I wouldn't. I'm glad I was born. I'm glad I was conceived. I'm glad my parents didn't feel that a fifth child was 'not opportune', so they would just kill that one and let a different fifth child be born at some later, more convenient time.
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It is, sadly, fitting, that the major parties of the United States are controlled by slime and scum, because the human race is a miserable excuse for a "human" race. I cannot say whether the evil among us are the majority or just a very large minority, nor whether the evil that people do is a function of innate evil or just stupidity: they just don't know any better.
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The premise behind democracy is that even if most individuals aren't very smart, collectively they can make wise choices as to who should control government, and even, as in ballot questions, make wise policy decisions by majority vote. It's almost as tho we believe that a collective mind, a sort of electoral "Borg",*** can, by combining the minuscule computing capacity of each of millions of individuals, produce a mental giant. It's the theory behind supercomputers formed from many not-so-super computers linked together.
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But moral questions are not mathematical problems or weather simulations. They entail a moral dimension and moral standards that confuse the issue.

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Problem: Planet Earth is much too crowded with human beings. The behavior of this vast human population is wreaking havoc on other species and the environment.
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Solution: Reduce the population.
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Means: Kill X number of people.

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Elegant in its simplicity, but utterly wrong morally.
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Morality requires a more nuanced solution, or multiple solutions. For instance, kill off the criminal class but protect the decent; sterilize people who would be happy not to be bothered with children; sterilize as well people who are unfit to reproduce as would litter the future with mental defectives, cripples, dwarfs, and the like. Limit extraordinary medical measures to people whose lives have extraordinary significance, or save lesser specimens only on the condition that they consent to be sterilized. Genetically select for smaller rather than larger individuals, as to reduce food requirements. And on, and on.
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We have done no such computations in lite of moral and public-policy considerations. We have leaped to take the bizarre stance that it is better to kill innocent babies than murderers and other career criminals. We have selected for (in favor of) criminality and against decency. We have announced a moral preference for murderers over babies, and militantly marched to save killers and kill babies. Astounding. What a feeble-minded bunch of evil losers the human race is.
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So who will be the next President? Who will dominate the next Congress? Good people? Or bad? I don't like the odds.
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* Wikipedia's article on the Big Lie technique provides this interesting information worth comparing to the behavior of our present Republican leadership:

[Hitler's] primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.

And as for whether a counterattack from Islamists we have attacked would be terrorism, consider this:

As the brilliant humanist Sir Peter Ustinov so succinctly put it, "Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich."

** Yesterday I was approached on the street by two Mormon missionaries walking thru my neighborhood (Vailsburg, in western Newark). The one who spoke to me (I was standing still while taking pictures for my Newark fotoblog at the time) asked if I was familiar with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I said, sure. He pressed a bit, and I said it was founded by Joseph Smith; Brigham Young moved the church to Utah; I have been to Salt Lake City and taken pictures of the Tabernacle. (I did not mention that while I was at Temple Square, someone asked me for directions.) He persisted in trying to interest me in the Book of Mormon. I said I had considered getting a copy but don't have time to read. He persisted. I said I'm not religious and not interested. Then he accepted defeat, and said something like 'have a good day'. He and his cohort moved on, walking toward East Orange on Sanford Avenue. I didn't think to ask to take a picture of the two itinerant missionaries when they were close, but got this picture of them receding into the distance.

*** A reference to an intergalactic villain in later generations of the Star Trek sci-fi dynasty.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,335 — for Israel.)

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 9:10 AM