TOBY PETZOLD

I’m pro-choice, but it doesn’t bother me in the least that Sarah Palin is not. A woman who would abort her unborn child is in absolute possession of the very prerogative that would allow her to. And it isn’t because a man must physically halt at that unknowable biological threshold and pass no judgement, but because a woman must know her own capacity for dealing with the consequence of that choice. Either choice is the right choice for that particular woman. Either a woman embraces her motherhood —or what it is she makes of her reproductive system is neither the best for herself nor society.

Still, the phrase “abortion on demand” suggests a kind of cartoonishly inhuman stereotype of the wanton libertine who regards her uterus as a garbage disposal which she can clear at any time with the flick of a switch. Do such women exist? Maybe. Do many women carry a baby to term and then instruct some doctor to perform a partial-birth abortion? I just can’t imagine that. But I don’t need to because I defend such a woman’s prerogative to do so. And it is because the very notion sickens me so that I say that such a wretched excuse for a woman benefits society by her choice to not successfully procreate.

In any event, the pro-choice movement needs the friction of the fight with women like Palin because it’s a fundraising thing. If you’re constantly arguing that Roe v. Wade is at death’s door and that this country will become an Evangelische Reich where the ranks of the Chimperorjungen must be swelled, then there must be a reason for making that case besides the usual liberal proclivity for lying, so what is it? Manufactured crisis fundraising.

No principles but power, baby.

I watched the Rick Warren interrogations of Obama and McCain last night and found it all very useful. I even DVR’d it and expect to look at it again.

My understanding is that they decided who Warren would interview first by coin flip and that the other guy would wait it out inauditio.

So Obama went first. I think, in terms of presentation, he succeeded. Which he usually does. Substantively, however, he made some mighty strange claims. Deciding when an unborn baby has human rights is “above [his] pay grade”? This is a man not even a decade older than me who presumes to run for the Presidency; I would not have guessed that Obama believed that anything is beyond his judgement or ken. And he wouldn’t have nominated Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court because of his inexperience? Then I guess Obama won’t mind if this country declines to elect him for the same reason. [CORRECTION: I watched again and Obama did not say “inexperienced.” But it is clear that he intended to because he got about half of that word out of his mouth before he said something else. Nevertheless, I erred in my recollection.]

As for defining traditional marriage as the only kind of marriage and elevating it to a Constitutional certainty, Obama stuck to the bipartisan party line: marriage is between a man and a woman and, no, it’s a state-level issue, so he wouldn’t advocate amending the Constitution. But that is a cowardly explanation. What good is a liberal for if he won’t stand and say that he isn’t about to amend the Constitution of the United States to restrict a civil right? Hiding behind this new kind of ”states’ rights” argument is an absurd thing for a Democrat to be doing.

When it came time for McCain to come on, Warren had them both on stage at once for a handshake and a hug and some smiles. But when the very same questions Warren had put to Obama he began putting to McCain, the contrast was quite pronounced. McCain’s answers were relatively short because they were unequivocal. But his demeanor, just as often as what he says, can come off as cut-and-paste. I suspect that this is a man who had to spend a lot of time reconstructing his psychic life and reintegrating himself into society at large after five-plus years as a tortured inmate. That John McCain can overcome that to become what he has is really the only advertisement he needs.

On balance, I think the crowd liked McCain’s answers better, but Obama certainly had his fans in attendance. We’re all fans of his when he starts flowing and showing that he knows better than to follow the libtard line every time. But he has no business running for the Presidency. That’s just the bottom line. And don’t call me a racist by falsely accusing me of suggesting this man’s “uppity,” either; that bullshit is y’alls invention, hippies. He is too inexperienced, too liberal, and far too narcissistic to merit the Presidency of the United States.

With McCain, on the other hand, you have a real patriot and hero with a real record of working for the greater American good. Voting for him will be an honor.

Is it really possible that Barack Hussein Obama authorized the dissemination of the handwritten prayer he stuck in a crack in the Western Wall in Jerusalem last week? When I first heard that the note had supposedly been plucked out by a bystander and published, I thought it was a pretty contemptible thing to do, regardless of my dislike for the non-Christian phony who stuck it there. But if these new rumors prove true —that Obama actually shared his prayer with reporters upon leaving the King David Hotel— then I will have to revise my list of his most egregious campaign moments thus far.

The reason the rumors ring true is that this is a man who abandoned his church because it had become a political liability for him. Making a press release of his prayer to the Almighty doesn’t sound like much of a stretch at all.

Dan Collins said I had to read this, so I did. Of Barack Hussein Obama, Michael Knox Beran writes:

His charisma is grounded in empathy rather than authority, confessional candor rather than muscular strength, metrosexual mildness rather than masculine testosterone. His power of sympathetic insight is said to be uncanny: “Everybody who’s dealt with him,” columnist David Brooks says, “has a story about a time when they felt Obama profoundly listened to them and understood them.” His two books are written in the empathetic-confessional mode that his most prominent benefactress, Oprah, favors; he is her political healer in roughly the same way that Dr. Phil was once her pop-psychology one. The collectivist dream, Obama instinctively understands, is less scary, more sympathetic, when served up by mama (or by mama in drag).

My greatest concern now is that the deconstructions of this unqualified liar will become so numerous and varied that they will merely add kindling to the fire of his fascination —and make Obama the indispensable man of the age. Are we Americans far enough removed from the sinister influences of Big Media? Can someone such as The One —as McCain is now said to be calling him— really wield that much power over the minds of enough people to seize the most powerful office in the world? The contempt of the Democratic Party for this country deeply alienates me when I can bear to think of it. Their choice strikes me as nothing short of anti-American.

It isn’t true to say I learned nothing from Mrs. Eddy. She taught me to reject mesmerism —even if only as a knock on the competition. But, truly, I despise a messianic pose. I can pick up on an ego-freak from across the planet —and the frequency I tune in on best is whether he knows what he’s talking about. And, often, he does not because the only thing he is truly expert at is deceiving people. Knowing what he’s talking about is merely a trick that the mesmerist must practice at enough to fool most of the people. And what a time-consumer! The mesmerist knows that he cannot know enough to be the master of the task at hand, so his energies are turned instead to practicing the art of distraction —all the while damning distractions as the enemy of his purpose, which is to get your panties off, madam, and to have your wallet, sirrah. The mesmerist is a hack with a talent for lying, but what are you gonna do?

Call him on it, I think. Just say no to the lie of post-partisanism and the shameful lie of a post-racial America. I think the Mayor of Newark said it best:

Well, I reject the term post-racial, it kind of scares me in the sense that I never want that to happen to America. Ah, let’s not sanitize, homogenize, deodorize our country, dear God we are not a homogenous country like Norway or Holland, nor do I want us to be, not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I want to be America. We are America, because we have strong Italian communities steeped in who they are, Irish communities with the pride of that community, Korean, Mexican, Haitian, Nigerian. We are the United States of America which is the wonderful collection of so many different races, ethnicities and religions and God forbid if we ever get to a point where we “transcend our race.”

In another few cycles, I wouldn’t mind voting for this man to be my President. In fact, I suspect I would be proud to. Because, by then, he will be ready. And because he knows what he is talking about.

When Al Gore accepted the Nobel Prize, he said that we human beings are the problem.

If that sort of self-loathing Leftist pessimism isn’t the direct descendant of the concepts of original sin and the unredeemed sinner, then it is their retarded nephew. Therefore, what Gore and the Gaiists are practicing is religion. Moreover, it is utterly derivative of Judeo-Christian morality, which must be just awful for these tweed jacketed and besandaled morans to finally recognize: “Wha-? We’re just as trapped by the oppressive orthodoxy of sin and redemption as mere Christianists and Neocons?!”

Just quit tripping and settle down, hippies. Come up with something slightly less insane than to promise a completely carbon-neutral America within ten years. Jesus, Gore! Put down that bong and be serious. 

An intellectual infatuation between a man and a woman is the beginning of lies. Big, throbbing, mind-wandering, 3-D rendering lies. Is such a dynamic tenable? Of course not. But it is a test of a man’s character to act on what is right in every respect and to abide by that standard at the moment of truth.

At this point, all I can hope for is that hubris will destroy Obama Soter:

Senator John McCain’s trip to Iraq last March was a low-key affair: With a small retinue of reporters chasing him abroad, the NBC News anchor Brian Williams reported on Mr. McCain’s visit there from New York, including it in the “in other political news” portion of his newscast.

But when Senator Barack Obama heads for Iraq and other places overseas this summer, Mr. Williams is planning to catch up with him in person, as are the other two network evening news anchors, Charles Gibson of ABC and Katie Couric of CBS, who, like Mr. Williams, are far along in discussions to interview Mr. Obama on successive nights.

And while the anchors are jockeying for interviews with Mr. Obama at stops along his route, the regulars on the Obama campaign plane will have new seatmates: star political reporters from the major newspapers and magazines who are flocking to catch Mr. Obama’s first overseas trip since becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee. A “Meet the Press” interview is also being planned.

Mind you, this is the New York Times, so don’t laugh too much at this:

But the coverage also feeds into concerns in Mr. McCain’s campaign, and among Republicans in general, that the news media are imbalanced in their coverage of the candidates, just as aides to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton felt during the primary season.

There are many quick and simple tests to know if you’re dealing with a goddamned idiot. The surest of them is this: if the person arguing with you claims that there’s no pro-Democrat bias in Big Media, then you’ll know that the person you’re arguing with is a goddamned idiot.

By saying that the now-infamous New Yorker magazine cover depicting him and his wife as Muslim terrorists is offensive to Muslims, isn’t Barack Obama basically calling for a jihad against the infidel? Muslim terrorists and their Leftist sympathizers have a difficult time with ironic cartoons, so what he is doing is reckless.

I still don’t understand how people can say Obama is any more a Christian than a Muslim. He obviously had no real connection to Christianity prior to making the purely political choice of joining the ultra-racist Trinity United Church of Christ, so how is it wrong to doubt his word? His word has become worthless on dozens of major issues, so what is the deal here? Because he was baptized? So what? I was baptized, too, but I would never lie to the people around me and claim to be something I am not.

Obama should never have reminded Muslim nutjobs that they should be offended because now they —and the stupid hippies who support this absurd campaign of his— will turn to violence.

I caught the last few minutes of Sean Hannity’s radio interview today with James Dobson, a well-known fundamentalist Christian preacher. Dobson has picked a fight with Obama over some passages from the Bible, and was wondering aloud to Hannity about Obama’s bona fides. I neither know nor care about the merits of the argument since I don’t believe in hyperliteralism as a philosophy, but what I do care about is whether this is the way Dobson will take to opposing Obama in November. Because, if it is, I think it’s a valuable rationalization that Dobson can make that will ultimately benefit McCain. Dobson doesn’t have to like McCain, but if he can make the kinds of theological arguments that will draw out Obama’s many weaknesses on the issue of The Church, it will help the others who think like him (i.e., dislike McCain) to vote against Obama, anyway. Surely they won’t stand idly by while someone with Obama’s potential for causing such great and lasting harm moves ever closer to the Presidency. These people need to scrounge up enough Biblical anger to paint this man as something malevolent and beyond the pale. The Christian Right needs to supernaturalize Obama in a way his acolytes haven’t even considered yet. 

I don’t think Obama is a Christian in any meaningful sense. Any man who would abandon his spiritual adviser and mentor —and then the only church he ever knew— for such obviously false reasons isn’t really a Christian, but a user of his ecclesiastical community and a hypocrite. When I left my mother’s church as a young boy and professed my atheism, you may be sure that I damned well had a reason.

So why is Obama getting a pass on this? Maybe America is too secular to care. Maybe Obama’s allies in Big Media don’t want to scrutinize his religious associations. Maybe the church Obama belonged to is not amenable to race-neutral deconstructions. But, as Dobson and other unapologetically Christian Christians continue building an alternative —theological— basis for rallying the reluctant fundamentalist base to McCain’s side, I simply smile and hope for the best.