Yes ... as much as the Republicans can accuse Democrats of creating a nanny state with their social welfare policies, as Dorian Warren of Columbia University points out in the clip below, the Republicans are into Big Daddy Politics - from Daddy issues to playing Big Daddy to all girls and women in the United States, especially regarding the rights they have over their own reproduction issues and their bodies.
(Pssst ... take a gander at Willard's daddy, talking about war, civil rights and the poor below). As well as the ensuing conversation about the Republicans' desire to be a daddy to us poor, misguided, sexually-dangerous and irresponsible women.
At the seven-minute mark, Dorian Warren puts into words something I've been screaming for the past two years - that what we're seeing today in the Republican Party is the result of a forty-year propaganda campaign.
Melissa Harris-Perry, child of Charlottesville, debuted her new weekly television show this morning on MSNBC. She began with a history lesson and a pretty spirited debate with Nixon son-in-law, Ed Cox, who heads the Republican Party in New York (and who also looks oddly like Poppy Bush, somewhat):-
Professor Harris-Perry is right. We should have a strong Opposition, and that Opposition should be capable of offering viable alternative ideas to those espoused by the party in power. The problem with the current state of affairs is simply that this incarnation of the Republican Party has no ideas about how to tackle the actual problems that matter to day-to-day living, but plenty of whacko ideas about how to deal with social issues - the sort of mores which change from generation to generation and scare those who cling to what's familiar from fear of anything remotely new or different.
But that's by-the-by ... Ed Cox was a big disappointment. All he could serve up to Melissa Harris-Perry's questions and comments were snide Republican talking points. His father-in-law would have been greatly disappointed. In other words, it's all the President's fault.
No change there then.
And just for fun, Ed's joined by Dorian Warren of Columbia University and Peter Edelman of Georgetown University, who show just how far out of touch with reality aristocratic Ed is ...
Kudos to Professor Harris-Perry for reminding the world and those too young to remember of the time when Nelson Rockefeller, as patrician as Ed Cox, was easily identifiable as one of the stalward liberals of the Republican Party. Seems to me that I recall another stalwart Republican liberal was the guy who told the 1968 Republican National Convention that the US had been brainwashed on Viet Nam and that we should leave ... now that was a fellow by the name of George Romney.
Good show, Melissa ... you did the Commonwealth proud.
Bill Moyers weighs in with the final word on the contraceptive brouhaha ... What do you know? He's right. It's not about the government imposing itself on religion in any way. And the Catholic Church is making itself look silly, petty and redundant.
However, contraceptive issue aside, the Virginia State Legislature has passed a bill mandating any woman seeking an abortion to be required by law to undergo a penetrative vaginal examination using a transvaginal ultrasound transducer.
That's right ... penetrative. Considering the fact that most women seeking abortions won't want this procedure, and considering that any sort of unwanted vaginal penetration is ... well, rape ... it appears as if the Catholic Carpetbagger from Philadelphia, Lil'Bob McDonnell is about to sign a law mandating legislative rape.
Of course, it's all a tactic to scare the piss (pun intended)out of those wicked, evil women who have sex, get up the duff and then want to get rid of that pesky, little zygote. Of course, that includes all those wicked, evil women and girls who happen to get raped or are victims of incest. And most of those wicked, evil women are poor - and, in Bob McDonnell's world, that's wicked and evil too.
And just to make matters even more interesting, there's the ubiquitous Personhood Bill for Bob to sign as well.
Bob McDonnell personifies every reason why I left the Catholic Church. Bob McDonnell personifies every reason why anyone of sane mind and all women ought to run screaming from the clutches of the Republican Party.
Common sense is this: If we have a responsible (and free) contraceptive program and it's taught responsibly in schools as well, then the need for abortions will be greatly reduced. No woman considers having an abortion lightly; very often, that's the last and most desperate resort. Bob McDonnell has daughters. I don't know what their sexual history is, and I don't want to know; but any woman at anytime can be raped. I cannot imagine Bob McDonnell would force his adult daughters to bear a child conceived in such a way; and if his adult daughters decided to abort the foetus, I cannot imagine him subjecting them to another act that is just a legislative euphemism for rape.
Nobody sums up what I feel for my home state, Virginia, like this great Virginian, Robbin Thompson. This song always makes me homesick, because it just describes so much of what the Commonwealth is too.
You can take the girl out of Virginia, but you can't take Virginia out of the girl. So this one's from me and the spirits of Lady Astor and Pocahontas ...
Please allow me, just once, to speak for all those people in the South who were born Democrats, raised Democrats by Democrats and remain Democrats to this day. Not just Democrats, but LIBERAL Democrats. (Forgive me, I prefer liberal to Progressive. It's more courageous.)
Anyway, fellow Southern liberal, Matt Osborne, gifted me with this; and although it's about Alabama in particular, as Matt's Alabaman, it does a mighty good job speaking for the majority of politically blue folk South of the Mason-Dixon Line in pushing back against how we, as a people, in general are categorised and castigated by our more sophisticated brethren in the North, specifically those along the self-styled "Left Coast," who still persist in promoting the belief that most of us are not only racists, but bigots as well.
I'll let the Drive By Truckers do the talking, but I'd just like to add as well, that, at the height of his infamy as a segregationalist, George Wallace had a peculiar knack of going into a Northern city or suburb and bringing home the raw truth to the people who criticised him that segregation and racial discrimination also existed in the North.
I would direct anyone who says otherwise to Rick Perlstein's seminal work, Nixonland, which illustrates the Wallace phenomenon perfectly. He was actually garnering larger crowds at his rallies than Saint Ronald Reagan ever did, and that was in the North.
So, for all the Left Coast Limousine Progressives, this history lesson is for you - and that means you, Bill Maher, Joan Walsh Matt Damon etc.
I barely remember when Kennedy ran for President. Mostly, I remember that my parents and aunts and uncles, all Catholics (some just in name only, like my father), were pleased that a member of the "club" had won the ultimate prize.
Years later, as a high school student, I learned about the speech Kennedy was forced to give during his campaign to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, a group of Protestant ministers who had serious questions about the feasibility of a Catholic becoming President of the United States.
My mother remembered the occasion well, but, she told me, what Kennedy faced was nothing like what Al Smith faced in his campaign against Herbert Hoover in 1928. My late mother was a child then. She remembered the open invective against Catholics in general, the snide political cartoons. And the Klan.
Now, Rick Santorum is looking like the frontrunner in the GOP contest. This is a man who thinks that victims of rape and incest should bear the fruits of these crimes as "broken gifts." Here is a man who wants contraceptives made illegal, because contraceptives encourage the idea that sex might be fun, when it's really for procreative purposes. Here is a man who thinks that United States citizens have no right to privacy, that same sex marriage is akin to man-on-dog relationships. Here is a man who not only believes that religion shouldn't be separated from state, but that his religious values should be imposed on everyone.
Did I mention his race issue? Check out "blah" people.
But, according to Joe Scarborough, Rick Santorum is just a regular guy.
I say that Rick Santorum is the Catholic Americans were afraid of not just in John Kennedy's time, but also Al Smith's.
He reeks of Opus Dei. If he's elected, expect to see a resident Exorcist-in-Chief.
