12 thoughts on “Gumming Abortion To Death, Part II: Joke’s On You, Ladies”

1. Like I said yesterday, the fact that Udall screwed this message up doesn't make it false. Republicans are gunning for women's rights in a huge way. But the real problem, as Pols suggests, is the media. The Denver Post helped Gardner whitewash abortion, and wantonly lied to their readers by suggesting there is no threat to abortion rights. It is only progressive majorities in Colorado that have kept them at bay.

   We can't ever let the GOP do this to us again…

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2. BS. The Pro-Choice has no one to blame except Mark Udall himself.  He set us back years.  Since the early 1990's those of us pro-choice republicans and ex-republicans have been picking off just enough pro-choice Republicans to ensure pro-choice leadership in the legislature.  We had begun in 2008 with Udall's election to pick off these folks for higher level races.  Now all that work worthless.  Udall succeeded in making the Republicans go home.  I can tell you.  They're my friends and family.  They were done with abortion being shoved in their faces by a man who ran an obnoxious, insulting single issue campaign.  And frankly, they were done with Obama and anyone who supported him.  Unfortunately Mark Udall wouldn't listen to anyone except his idiot advisors (who by the way should be run out of the state on a rail – ask me I did this in the 80's with a bunch of republican no-nothing consultants).  And he got exactly what he deserved.  But we didn't we got screwed.  And furthermore, did anyone look at what his campaign did in Pueblo and Adams Counties?  Well, I'll tell you what he did, he turned the Reagan Democrats into Republicans.  Blame it on the media.  Blame it on anyone you want.  But the blame goes 100% to the Udall campaign.  I'm not sure I'll ever work in a Democratic campaign again.

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   1. It's not just Udall, it's the entire Democrat establishment who has no real agenda. The only thing Democrats have is personal vilification and scare tactics. The one "issue" they thought they had, abortion, they ran into the ground.

      I'm not disagreeing with you that Udall gets the blame for his defeat. All I'm saying is the Democrat lack of a message or agenda is bigger than Mark Udall.

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      1. Moddy, you were right from the start with your little man with the cane and the dead horse, meaning Udall should have talked about other issues in addition to reproductive choice.  

         But that doesn't turn Gardner into a feminist.  

          

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         1. Udall DID talk about other issues! Over half of his ads in fact. Once again, we are doing the right's job for them by repeating their propaganda.

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            1. Udall had 6 years to build a strong statewide brand and to be a solid Dem. He spent half of that time on CNBC promising Lawrence Kudlow he'd vote for that stupid Grand Bargain, come what may. 

               Well, it came. 

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            2. Don't know how many times the ads on other subjects ran as opposed to the abortion ones but it's not Republican propaganda that the perception, even among Dems, was of an over emphasis on that one issue. It's certainly what I heard Dem supporters grumbling about when we got together at events or to call and canvass as far back as September. Everyone was waiting to see some forceful positive ads about accomplishments and goals in other areas and wondering WTF the hold up was. 

               It's not Republican propaganda that for most of the time his ads were running his numbers were falling. It's not Republican propaganda that he lost decisively.

               Dems can complain about Republican lies and propaganda but they aren't going to go away. Dems need to stop making excuses about those mean Republicans and realize that when progressive policies in ballot initiatives win in the same states where Republicans who oppose those policies get elected and Republicans get elected by many of the same voters who support progressive policies in polls it's their own fault.

               They aren't standing by their apparently very popular policies so the majority doesn't know that their only chance of getting the policies they favor is by voting for Dems. Imagine the shoe on the other foot. You wouldn't see Rs afraid of their own popular policies. 

               There is no law of nature that says Republicans are the only ones who can succeed at messaging. Dems need to have the courage of their convictions and learn to compete in communicating them. It shouldn't be that hard, once they locate their guts and fire the old DLC ops who are clearly and entirely wrong on strategy, a bunch of stubborn old generals stills fighting the last war.  But people need to know those things they say they want in polls and vote for as ballot initiatives are all reasons to vote Dem.

                

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      2. No, the problem is it's the Democrats who have an agenda but refused to run on it, as opposed to the GOP who gleefully ran on no agenda while letting the Democrats flail about. 

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         1. In a nutshell.

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3. Cory Gardner…..because he's not as bad as ISIS or the Taliban of women's rights!

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4. Anyone who thinks that, if given the reigns of power, Republicans wouldn't criminalize abortion nationwide, needs to think again, and stop eating stupid pills for breakfast.

   The pro-choice position also needs to be more forcefully argued

   Katha Pollitt, an old friend of this magazine (and of this writer) has written a bracing, unapologetic polemic in favor of abortion rights. “Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights” has two major originalities. First is its lack of bowing or scraping for its pro-woman position. Abortion, in Pollitt’s view, must be seen not as a moral compromise requested by poor, weak women—we’re sorry, and we promise we’ll make it rare, but please, forgive us, we’ll still need it in extremis— but as a positive doctrine of women’s control over their own bodies, and of their own lives and destinies. Abortion, she insists, is a right integral to women’s own autonomy, not a privilege to be used as infrequently as possible. The Clintons’ shrewd formula—“Safe, legal, and rare”—may have been born of political necessity, but it misstates the truth. Abortion need not promise to be rare to be secured as safe and legal. One of the greatest moral achievements of human history—the full emancipation of women—should not be seconded to a metaphysical intuition, one with no scientific support or even coherent meaning: that a fertilized egg makes the same moral claims as an entire person. In a memorable moment in the book, Pollitt points out that the use of sonograms of embryos and fetuses to promote the anti-abortion case—with good reason, since any parent can recall their excitement at first seeing them—is intrinsically misleading:

   Sonograms distort reality in another, more subtle way: you can only take a picture of the embryo/fetus if you erase the body of the pregnant woman. As with the famous optical illusion of the duck-rabbit, you can’t see them both at the same time: either you see a rabbit or you see a duck. In a sonogram the fetus is the subject, the woman is the background; the case for its personhood is made by turning her into gray-and-white wallpaper.

   The second virtue of Pollitt’s book is that—with the help of some arguments from the late Ronald Dworkin, in particular—it takes seriously, and seriously refutes, the metaphysical arguments that claim some ethical seriousness in the view that a fertilized egg is equivalent to a human being. First, Pollitt sees, and insists, that for a “pro-life” argument to make sense it has to make sense; that it follows from a spiritual instinct, or from religious dogma, however deeply held, is not something that rational people have to pretend to respect. It is easy to cite the source of moral ideas in religious vision. Don’t you know that Dr. King was a Christian minister? Didn’t the ideas of the Abolitionists rise from the Northern churches? It’s perfectly true that many good and noble and necessary ideas have come from churches and chapels—as many others have come from temples, universities, Masonic lodges, and presumably one or two from a Satanic cult. But their relevance and plausibility have nothing at all to do with their source; they have to do with the moral and practical sense they make to those who don’t have any special respect for their origins..

   The moral intuition that abortion is in any way like murder is one that can be tested in the only way we can test such things, by looking at the actual evidence and by observing the actual conduct of the people who claim to hold it. Pollitt calmly reviews it all. No person actually imagines that a zygote is a person. If they did, they would actually equate murder and abortion, and their conduct—only the tiniest fringe is willing to advertise comparable penalties for both—shows that they know perfectly well that they aren’t the same. 

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   1. The problem with slippery-slope arguments (“Allow abortion in the first trimester, and it will end in infanticide!”) is not that they are inadmissible but that they are always true. All of biological life exists on a slippery slope, where we walk with ice picks called rules and moral decisions. We may allow abortion without restriction in the first and in the third trimester, and still not permit infanticide. The distinctions, as always, are our own.

      This does not make them arbitrary. We have always before us the Enlightenment choice between empty authority and rational argument—between divine rules made by an authority we know for certain to be nonexistent and rational ethical argument we know in advance will be ongoing and inconclusive. This uncertainty causes an enormous strain, huge social anxiety—what Karl Popper rightly called the strain of civilization. But that some people can’t bear the strain is no reason for the rest of us not to go on trying to make sane rules. Accepting moral complexity is a sign of moral maturity…

      There is no conflict between abortion rights and religious liberty. There is a conflict between women’s rights and religious intolerance. No one is proposing—no one will ever seriously propose—banning or discouraging those who passionately believe in their metaphysical intuitions about life from proselytizing and promulgating for them wherever they will, as best they can, within the normal rules of civil argument. What is not tolerable is trying to impose irrational intuitions on people who don’t just fail to accept them but who feel that the removal of women’s freedom is itself a moral crime…

       

      Surrendering moral certainties in order to promote social peace is exactly what humanists ought to do, and what theocrats won’t do, because humanists know their certainties aren’t. For the time being, though, Pollitt is surely right to be unapologetically “Pro.” The choice—the only actual choice, in the world as it really is—is between safe, legal abortion and dangerous, illegal abortion. Everything else is just misogyny, cruelty, and superstition.

      p.s.  This editor SUCKS!!!

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