Conservatives Gone Mad!

Apparently the pending electoral demise of  John McCain and fellow Republicans is driving the conservative blogosphere apeshit crazy.

First, let’s take a look at Fox News anchor Greta Van Susteren’s blog from this evening. This is some crazy stuff (no emphasis, or color, or underline, or bold, or caps, or italics added):

SENATOR OBAMA CAMPAIGN LAWYER: TRYING TO covertly INTIMIDATE COLLEGE JOURNALISTS?

If  you have been watching ON THE RECORD at 10pm eastern, you know about Palestra.net — the college news network.   But here is the BIG NEWS: the student journalists Tiffany Wilson and Shelby Holliday (not professionals) are AGGRESSIVE in pursuing voter fraud in Ohio and have uncovered ACTUAL voter fraud.  They are also not afraid.

As a result of their journalism, votes already cast for President have had to be withdrawn.

So what is the students’ reward for exposing crime???  An intimidating letter from the Senator Obama campaign lawyer to one of the students?? See below and then you tell me…

Next, here’s the current headline on Drudge:

ABCCBSNBCNYTLATWSJCNN
MSNBCAPREUTERSAFPPOLITCO
FTTIMEWASHPOSTNEWSWEEK:
CAN THEY ALL BE WRONG?

WTF mates?

Hat tip to Daniel De Groot at Open Left.

A Lesson From Canada

An Economist.com article entitled The Conservatives by a bigger head notes that a fragmented Canada gave Stephen Harper another term as Conservative Prime Minister when his party won the October 2008 federal election, achieving a bit more strength in a minority government. While the Conservatives increased their share of the popular vote by little more than a percentage point to 37.6%, this will likely only be translated into about 19 more seats.

Harper and the Conservatives did solidify their western base of Alberta oilmen and Saskatchewan farmers, and picked up seats in suburban Ontario and the Maritime provinces. However, Harper failed to increase his party’s ten seats in Quebec. For the most part in Quebec, the separatist Bloc Québécois blocked any Conservative advance, even though independence never surfaced as an issue during the campaign.

However, more than the Conservatives failing to get a majority, the main lesson to come out of the Canadian election is that Liberals were the ones that really lost it. Their share of the popular vote fell to 26%, their lowest since 1867. The Liberal leader, Stéphane Dion, a Quebecker, chose to fight the election on a bold plan for a carbon tax just when voters began to worry about the economy. (It didn’t help that Dion is not a good communicator in English.)

A broader lesson from the Canadian election is that a candidate should not impose a tax on all citizens, particularly on the middle class, when the economy is slowing. This is a lesson the McCain campaign has ignored with its proposed tax on employees for the value of employer-paid health care benefits. This tax has been one of Obama’s most effective campaign attacks and the focus of his prime literature drops over the past few weeks.

Wedge Colored Glasses

Let’s say that, sometime in the near future, the great dream of the pro-life movement comes true, and Roe v Wade is overturned in the Supreme Court. As a refresher, the biggest and most obvious repercussion of this would not be the outlawing of abortion as such, but it would simply set the legal precedent that the federal government cannot dictate to states what their practices and laws should be on abortion. So, Southern and Midwestern states, like Ohio, Missouri, Mississippi, Texas, etc., would most likely thoroughly restrict abortions and would not pay for them with taxpayers money, nor would they attempt to force religious hospitals or religious institutions to include abortions under their medical coverage. Let’s say even further (and I acknowledge that this last one is a stretch) that the Democrats take the Supreme Court decision relatively well and basically give up trying to make abortion a federally-mandated and protected right to all women. They drop the issue from their platform, as the Republicans probably would, too and focus instead on the coastal, liberal states, like California, New York, Massachusetts, etc., where abortion rights would probably still be upheld at the state level.

OK, now, with this scenario in mind, how many religiously conservative people out there would consider voting Democrat some of the time? Notice that I didn’t include the gay marriage debate here, as I believe that that is being sorted out at the state level, which doesn’t seem to be bothering people as much as the abortion issue does at the federal level. I also didn’t include the stem cell research controversy, seeing as more and more scientists are coming out and stating that they have found other ways to extract viable stem cells without having to “terminate” embryos. With all of these things in mind, I really wonder what kind of a platform the Republican Party would have left. Lower taxes? Less government? More aggressive foreign policy? NRA? I don’t know how it seems to you, but none of those positions carries nearly the moral weight that abortion does. I almost can’t help but wonder what this country’s politics would have been like over the past 40 years or so without the constant skirmishing brought on by Roe v Wade. Maybe the Democrats would have held more power over those years, and then the issues of alternative energy and the Iraq War would never have come up. I almost feel like the abortion issue is the trump card for the Republican Party. Whenever the Democrats come up with other, viable ideas for policy, the Republicans remind morally observant voters in a timely manner that a vote for the Democrats is a vote for abortion. Hell, I’m pretty sure that President Bush rode that fear tactic all the way to the White House in 2000 and 2004.

I’m not bringing up this conjecture to mock religious conservatives for voting their consciences about abortion. That’s not my place at all. But I am angry at the Republican Party for turning so many unrelated issues, like the environment and health care, into debates about abortion. It’s like an abortion “tag” has been permanently attached to the Democrats, so that even saving the environment from degradation has been tainted by the their take on abortion. I even sometimes wonder if I should be angry at the Democrats, as if their insistence on universal, federally-funded abortion rights has been driving a wedge into this country and crystallizing opposition against them. I almost want to ask the Dems: Why not give a little rhetorical ground on the whole abortion debate, thereby taking the wind right out of the sail of your opponents and allowing for a more even-keeled political debate to take place in this country? What’s so terrible about letting the states decide this issue?

Supreme Court 1.0

While The New York Times Magazine philosophizes about the importance of U.S. Supreme Court decisions vis-a-vis international law, the reality is that the international community is increasingly shying away from citing decisions from our supreme court.

Here’s a fact: the U.S. Supreme Court has moved further right over the last eight years, with the loss of Sandra Day O’Connor and the appointment of both John Roberts and Samuel Alito. Here’s another fact: other courts around the world use each other’s opinions, but the United States is loathe to do so. As the rest of the world becomes more liberal, the United States becomes more conservative and the court that used to lead the world in constitutional law is now being self-relegated to anachronism.