No Male Heterosupremacy Outrage in Octuplets Case?

When I first saw the story of Nadya Suleman I was just fascinated by the medical science of multiple birth pregancies. Also particularly interesting was the mother's adamant prior refusal to "reduce" the number of fetuses during pregancy. Eight was enough, and she wasn't going to settle for less.

But then the Los Angeles Times ran some stories on the background of of the mother and the reproductive ethics of the case, and it's all turned out to be something of a tragedy of social commentary. Ms. Suleman is by no means a typical candidate for the aggressive fertilization she received, and her personal life - including six children already - has raised all kinds of questions of impropriety, to say the least.

I wasn't hip on the feminist angle, however. Via Robert Stacy McCain, it turns out the radical feminists have been silent on the ethics of Ms. Suleman's case, what Darleen Click calls "an unethical abdication of responsibility."

On Jan 26 when Kaiser Permanente announced the arrival of surviving octuplets the story has run from increasingly creepy details and outrage about the mother to sudden articles about ethical concerns. It has been interesting to note what, or who, has been fairly quiet on this event.

The radical feminist (aka Vagina Warrior) blogsphere.

Ace noted the lack of commentary, figuring since there was no male villain in the piece there was little for the VW’s to focus on.

But hints of what is really the core issue for VW’s - who have no problem with nasty mockery of Michelle Duggar - can be found with series of entries on Slate’s XX (as in female chromosome) blog space and then confirmed by Salon’s Judy Berman who curiously posits …

Meanwhile, feminists are asking serious questions about what Suleman and her octuplets mean for the future of women’s health.

… then immediately focuses on law and questions of racism.

Lynn Paltrow, executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women — “What I would check if I had the time is the extent to which coverage of this story — whether negative or positive — is framed as a question of ethics. When the pregnant woman is not brown or black and the drugs/technologies are provided by big pharma, the discussion focuses on questions of ethics. But if the issue is childbearing by low-income women of color, and the drug is homegrown/ illegal then the debate is a question of punishment through the criminal justice or civil child welfare system.”

Darleen links to Amanda Marcotte's post at Pandagon, "Not a Biological Clock Gone Haywire," which is worth reading for insight into the mindset of today's feminism. Even better, though, is this essay on Michelle Duggar (a mother of 18 and the subject of a reality show on TLC) over at Women’s Space, "Why is Michelle Duggar Fair Game?":

I think it might be a worthwhile exercise to do some thinking on why it is that Michelle Duggar seems to be fair game for pretty much everyone, including for feminists. It’s open season on the woman – mock her, make fun of her hair, her appearance, her clothes, her body, her reproductive organs, other of her internal organs, her vagina, attack her, depict her as a pig, call her brainwashed. (If you haven’t seen this, then look here for the latest, also here, here, here, and sadly, here and be sure to read the comments.) ...

Long discussion of other cultures, with pictures, then ...

Instead of scapegoating this one woman and targeting her as though she is the enemy, why not make it our business to critique the real enemy – systems and institutions of male heterosupremacy which make the choices Duggar and women like her have made the best deal they feel they can cut?

I thought I kept up with this stuff ... whew!

Obama Restart Hopes to Avert Self-Inflicted Meltdown

The Los Angeles Times reports that President Barack Obama, humbled by scandalous missteps, hopes to put the political spotlight back on his economic stimulus agenda:

In only his second week in office, Barack Obama is punching the restart button on his presidency.

On Tuesday, Day 14 of a tenure that began with high hopes and soaring promises of bringing a new competence to Washington, Obama essentially admitted that he had lost ground in confronting his biggest challenge - fixing the country's crippled economy - due to the "self-inflicted injury" of naming appointees who had failed to pay their taxes.

He shed two of those appointees and then took to the airwaves - conducting not one but five Oval Office network television interviews in which he sought to seize control over the economic stimulus debate. Republicans have found traction on the issue by painting themselves as defenders of taxpayers and homeowners, while portraying Democrats as frivolous big spenders.

"I'm frustrated with myself, with our team," Obama told NBC's Brian Williams in a comment that was typical for his afternoon of televised mea culpas. "But ultimately my job is to get this thing back on track, because what we need to focus on is a deteriorating economy and getting people back to work."

The frustration's not likely to end anytime soon, given the supercharged expectations the Obama campaign banked on during the election.

In fact, as Victor Davis Hanson argues, this administration's off to one of the worst starts ever, and without a downshifting of Democratic hype, a full-on political meltdown is practically inevitable:

Some of us have been warning that it was not healthy for the U.S. media to have deified rather than questioned Obama, especially given that they tore apart Bush, ridiculed Palin, and caricatured Hillary. And now we can see the results of their two years of advocacy rather than scrutiny.

We are quite literally after two weeks teetering on an Obama implosion—and with no Dick Morris to bail him out—brought on by messianic delusions of grandeur, hubris, and a strange naivete that soaring rhetoric and a multiracial profile can add requisite cover to good old-fashioned Chicago politicking ....

This is quite serious. I can't recall a similarly disastrous start in a half-century (far worse than Bill Clinton's initial slips). Obama immediately must lower the hope-and-change rhetoric, ignore Reid/Pelosi, drop the therapy, and accept the tragic view that the world abroad is not misunderstood but quite dangerous. And he must listen on foreign policy to his National Security Advisor, Billary, and the Secretary of Defense. If he doesn't quit the messianic style and perpetual campaign mode, and begin humbly governing, then he will devolve into Carterism—angry that the once-fawning press betrayed him while we the people, due to our American malaise, are to blame.

Mark Thompson and the Scientific Falsification of God

It's certainly cliche to suggest that faith in the public square is in retreat. Of course, while polls show that Americans by a huge majority "believe in God or a universal spirit," there's nevertheless an extremely vocal and increasingly influential contingent on the progressive left that is intent not only to deny the potential epistemological basis for religious faith but to excoriate anyone who deigns to make a reasoned case to that effect.

I normally don't get involved in these tussles, but with the vicious neo-Stalinism we've seen on the left in response to California's Proposition 8 and the Warren invocation (and that's just for starters), it's pretty clear that the hordes have swept over the windswept passes of the barbarian steppes and folks of good standing need to stand a post and do battle in defense of eternal goodness and right.

What got me going on this is Mark Thompson's crudely pedestrian essay, "Falsifying the Unfalsifiable," over at the Ordinary Gentlemen.

Readers may recall that Mark is the publisher of Publius Endures. Once a staunch libertarian, Mark has sold out to the Obamessianism that has engulfed the land following "our national holiday from reason that was the Obama presidential inauguration" (to quote myself). In one of the strangest introductions to a blog post I've ever seen, Mark cites Homer Simpson - that's right, that Homer Simpson - as an authority on the ontology of religious faith and evangelical trust, arguing that the Simpson's get right to "the crux of the problem." And to think, Robert Stacy McCain generously called these guys "intellectuals." Go figure?

In any case, here's a key snippet of the point that Mark is trying to elaborate (and elaborate ... frankly, ad nauseum, at least 25 times at the piece):

For the religious person, there is simply no way to prove through science that god exists or does not exist - as long as there is something in the universe that cannot rationally be explained, there is a basis for trusting in the existence of god. For the atheist, there is likewise simply no way to prove through science that god exists or does not exist - as long as a scientific or rational explanation for anything in the universe is theoretically possible, there is a basis to trust in the ability of reason to explain everything, and no basis to trust in the existence of god.

And this is why I think Chris - and E.D. - are absolutely correct in stating that the proper response to the question of the existence of god is “Who Cares?” The existence of god simply cannot be proven or disproven through pure reason, and neither side does themselves any favors when they insist otherwise.

I think Mark wants to say "there is no basis for trusting in the existence of God" in the first paragraph, but if it's not clear in the passage cited, we've got redundancies galore at the post to confirm the point.

And this is why I'm spending time to correct Mark, and, frankly, to reveal him even further as the rank nihilist that he is.

I'm still figuring out where Mark and his gang are coming from, but they certainly aren't conservative, despite the circle-jerk exclamations for Culture 11 found repeatedly at the blog. Think about this in the context of this essay from the Calgary Herald, "At Least Atheists Got Mentioned":

People appear very keen for a lot of things to change on the Obama watch. One of those hopes is that Christianity would revert more to a private choice rather than the state religion it often appeared to be under George W. Bush.

Now before I debunk this slimy palaver, I just came across Troy Anderson denouncing those of faith who respond to such bunk as "Christian apologists."

Really, Christian apologists?

So we've got those on the left hip to the "Age of Obama" who are looking to see Christianity revert to a "private choice" rather than a "state religion"? And those who debate in favor of the existence of God are "Christian apologists"?

Sometimes I doubt this is the same United States of America where I grew up?

When Mark Thompson slops out such intelletually deadening prose as " the lunacy of religion attempting to masquerade as science," I'm frankly at a loss at the metaphysical methodology of the enterprise.

The fact remains, and it has thus been, that there is no epistemological basis for asserting religion as science in the first place. It's a sickly straw man to posit intelligent design as threatening nearly fifty years of post-Engel secularism in U.S. constitutional jurisprudence. If we see science as the scholarly generation of explanatory theory based on logically derived predictions based on observable phenonomen, it makes little sense to suggest religion is "masquerading as science." There is no data with which to subject the claim that "God exists" to falsification. Sure, we can debate the scientific legitimacy of the Gospels, but to find proof for the verity of the divine is nonsense. Perhaps Mark Thompson can clarify the point in a future post, but thus far he's been too busy playing ring around the rosie with Freddie and the rest of this nihilist gang.

The larger question in any case is the problem of Judeo-Christian ethics. When Christopher Hitchens argued early this decade for the morality of regime change Iraq, it's unlikely he was drawing on any other well of fundamental right outside of the Biblical narrative of Mosaic universality.

It is, of course, precisely this Western Judeo-Christian heritage that the progressive left seeks to destroy. Andrew Sullivan is no conservative when he promotes a gay radical licentiousness that knows no moral boundaries. Thus, the solution: just rebrand the model in your own image and label adherents to classic teachings as "Christianists." I mean really, Mark Thompson cites E.D Kain as suggesting "who cares"?

Well, excuse me, but damn! I'd think we all would. The West is best. QED.

I'll have more on this later, so I'll close with Licia Corbella's rebuttal to the privileging of atheism over religion in the public square:

The atheist ethic has killed more people than any religion by a staggering margin. Fascism, Nazism and Communism have murdered many tens of millions of people. Think of the former Soviet Union, Cambodia, Vietnam, the Nazis, Communist China etc. Mao Zedong's regime alone murdered 70 million countrymen. Stalin, 20 million. Their successors millions more. To this day, Falun Gong and Christians are jailed in China and then killed to harvest their organs.

It's no coincidence the freest, most prosperous nations in the world are virtually all Christian-based, not atheist or even Muslim, Buddhist or Hindu. As the Bible says: "Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty."

With the exception of Japan, which had its democratic system imposed on it by the U. S. after the Second World War, and Israel, which is Jewish, no non-Christian country is truly free.

Atheists make up a very small minority of the "believers" in our society and yet it is their religion that is constantly being rammed down the throats of the majority.

They better be careful what they wish for. So should all people who love freedom, regardless of what they believe.

Obama's Ethical Performance Breakdown

What does a "chief performance officer" do? Well, according to the Washington Post's analysis of the new position created by the Barack Obama presidential transition, one of the responsibilities is governmental transparency and accessibility:

Releasing information publicly will help engage the general public in the work of government, as well as allowing measurement experts in academia and business to parse data and offer ideas to improve federal management. Transparency also creates an incentive for agencies to do a better job of collecting and using data.

The Post's essay is dated January 7, 2009, and the article specifically mentions by name Nancy Killefer, President Obama's nominee for the position.

So today's news that Ms. Killefer has withdrawn from consideration as the chief performance nominee ought to really tell us something about both the competence and integrity of the new boss in Washington and the Democratic "values" that have taken over the town.

Was Ms. Killefer taking the appointment seriously when the transparency of her very own credibility was at stake, her credibility as the administration's top officer charged with governmental transparency? Did it take the media's amazing snap from its Obamessianic slumber - with the growing attention in the press this last week to the slew of ethical fiascos among a host of Obama appointees - for her to see the light?

It seems not too long ago that the Democratic congressional majority was championing a new ethics of responsibility in Washington, and throughout campaign 2008 the online left routinely scourged the GOP for its corruption, starting with Vice President Dick Cheney on down to the lowest congressional backbencher. But now where is the left on what's emerging to be a banana republic's version of governmental propriety?

Tim Geithner got a pass at Treasury, but his chief of staff's a long-time lobbyist doing deals inside the Beltway. So much for those lobbying standards President Obama established when he announced a new day on the Potomac? Maybe the Geithner Treasury's ethical end-run was a bit much, as it now seems that Thomas Daschle's bid for health secretary is sailing into some stormy waters. With the New York Times editorial board calling for Daschle's name to be withdrawn, it's pretty obvious that the bloom is off the roses along the corridors of power of the new Democratic era.

Actually, it's breaking that Daschle's now withdrawing himself (and I wasn't going to bet on it), so perhaps folks on the left are noting the clarity of hypocrisy that's now finally coming into focus just a couple weeks after our national holiday from reason that was the Obama presidential inauguration.

George Packer, at the New Yorker, is warning that President Obama "can’t afford hypocrisy." But that's a bit like saying Kurt Warner can't afford to throw an interception. What's done is done now, and the country's already living with a reign of impropriety, and the train's barely left the station. There's no second chance for Warner's Hall of Fame bid, and we're barely into the first 100 days and Obama will be lucky to win a second term the way the Democratic scandals are already rocking the administration.

No worry for the online fever swamps of the left, naturally. They'll just give the finger to anyone who's got the temerity to point out the hypocrisy of the president, his campaign, and his party. Meanwhile, that much touted "transparency and accessibility" is going down the memory hole faster than you can say Zoë Baird.

The Left's Normalization of Evil

I was reading Kathy's essay at Comments from Left Field yesterday, which is a response to Michael Yon's "How Can the World Be Blind to Israel’s Existential Threats?"

My first inclination was to write a post rebutting her main argument. But there really wasn't one. Kathy doesn't respond to Yon's case for Israel. She scourges him for standing up for freedom and right while elevating Hamas terrorists to the level of beknighted freedom figthers. I've debated and denounced these horrendous leftists before. Kathy might as well have been storming the hallways of hotels in Mumbai, killing the innocents, and it would have been days before the media began to focus on the true intent of death and destruction - the murder of the Jews. People like this elevate evil above the standards of democracy and freedom. It's hard sometimes to continuously, endless, debunk and repudiate this godless insanity, but it needs to be done.

Thank goodness then that Judea Pearl keeps up the good fight. This week is the seventh year since the death of his son Daniel, and it's a world that the former Wall Street Journal reporter would barely recognize:

Those around the world who mourned for Danny in 2002 genuinely hoped that Danny's murder would be a turning point in the history of man's inhumanity to man, and that the targeting of innocents to transmit political messages would quickly become, like slavery and human sacrifice, an embarrassing relic of a bygone era.

But somehow, barbarism, often cloaked in the language of "resistance," has gained acceptance in the most elite circles of our society. The words "war on terror" cannot be uttered today without fear of offense. Civilized society, so it seems, is so numbed by violence that it has lost its gift to be disgusted by evil.

The entire essay is must reading.

Professor Pearl offers one explanation for the normalization of evil: the glorification of leftist indocrination of America's college campuses.

I'll have more later ...

Rendition, Extraordinary Rendition, and Leftist Hypocrisy

It's a sure sign of political hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy: The more feverishly the left works to discredit and spin the news that the Obama administration will continue the Bush-era policy of terrorist renditions, the more close real world events have shown their messiah to be a normal politician who campaigned on a bill of falsehoods and ethereal platitudes.

Scott Horton's going on the offensive, for example, alleging that Greg Miller of the Los Angeles Times got punked. Apparently, there are "renditions," then there are "extraordinary renditions," and never the twain shall meet:

There are two fundamental distinctions between the programs. The extraordinary renditions program involved the operation of long-term detention facilities either by the CIA or by a cooperating host government together with the CIA, in which prisoners were held outside of the criminal justice system and otherwise unaccountable under law for extended periods of time. A central feature of this program was rendition to torture, namely that the prisoner was turned over to cooperating foreign governments with the full understanding that those governments would apply techniques that even the Bush Administration considers to be torture. This practice is a felony under current U.S. law, but was made a centerpiece of Bush counterterrorism policy.

The earlier renditions program regularly involved snatching and removing targets for purposes of bringing them to justice by delivering them to a criminal justice system. It did not involve the operation of long-term detention facilities and it did not involve torture. There are legal and policy issues with the renditions program, but they are not in the same league as those surrounding extraordinary rendition. Moreover, Obama committed to shut down the extraordinary renditions program, and continuously made clear that this did not apply to the renditions program.

This is pure bull of course. Not even Hilzoy's painstaking attempt to deflate the issue can hide the key point: Barack Obama will preserve a central anti-terrorism tool that served as the key antiwar cudgel to demonize the Bush administration as the reincarnation of the Third Reich.

It does not matter what it's called: The ideological left - on principle - considered torture AND enemy rendition as one and the same. For the past seven years the nihilists have excoriated the "evil BushCo" regime for its state-sponsored terror-regime, but now that the policy shoe's on the other foot, it's time for the left to parse and twist itself out of hypocritical jam. Andrew Sullilvan's the worst. In a post last year, two days after Obama was elected, he cites Alex Massie, who is quoted saying:

The Iraq War was ... unpopular across much of the world, but its Guantanamo and rendition and secret CIA prisons around the world that have done far more damage to the United States' reputation.

To the left, it's obviously all of a piece, which is why the hordes of the nihilist fever swamps, as noted, are working overtime to square the new administration's policy with the Democratic campaign's outlandish promises from all last year.

As QandO shows (citing Progressive Justice), Human Rights Watch, the leading progressive NGO for international human rights, called for a blanket abolition of the Bush administration's policy of enemy rendtions. The group called on the U.S. government to "repudiate the use of rendition to torture as a counterterrorism tactic and permanently discontinue the CIA's rendition program ..." But according to Greg Miller's report at the Times, Human Rights Watch now says under "limited circumstances, there is a legitimate place" for renditions.

The problem is that those "limited circumstances" are in essence simple assurances by the Obama administration that the U.S. will not render suspected terrorists abroad if the possibility for coercive interrogation exists. It's a classic double standard. CIA Director Michael Hayden guaranteed in 2007 that the U.S. was not rendering suspected terrorists to foreign governments for torture. He said renditions were being conducted "lawfully" and "responsibly," which is now what leftists say the Obama administration will do with its continuation of the previous government's policy.

Andrew Sullivan, who has gone through fits of hysteria over the Bush adminstration's "torture" policies, pulls a play out of Hayden's book when he says:

What some on the far right seem not to grasp is that opposition to torture is not about being soft on terrorism. It is about being effective against terrorism - ensuring that intelligence is not filled with torture-generated garbage, that we retain the moral high-ground in a long war against theocratic violence, and that we can better identify, capture, kill or bring to justice those who threaten our way of life. Rendition and temporary detention are tools in that effort - tools that now need to be as closely monitored and assessed as they were once recklessly abused.

These people are not only hypocritically bankrupt, but their comprehensive program of leftist relativism is designed to destroy this country. Now that Barack Obama's in power the left can do no wrong. Bush hatred has been transformed to Obamessianism. Those on the "far right" will be demonized and ostracized for their previous policies, facts and logic be damned. Meanwhile, previously reviled policies will be continued.

It's a shameful situation we're in with the Democrats, but to be expected after the most dishonest media-enabled Democratic presidential campaign in history.

James Harrison Didn't Think He'd Score on Interception

James Harrison, who scored in yesterday's incredible 100-yard interception return, says of the play: “To be honest, I really didn’t think I’d make it all the way back” ... “My teammates threw some vicious blocks.”

Here's Bill Plaschke of the Los Angeles Times:

From a stirring national anthem to a tingling late finish, the Steelers' 27-23 victory over the Cardinals was the greatest Super Bowl ever, one whose Roman numbers should have been XXL for its double-extra-large helping of theatrics and dramatics.

Are we agreed on this? Cardinal fans aren't too thrilled, obviously. How about the "Boss time" of the halftime show? Did that performance contribute to the "greatest Super Bowl ever"? Jeralyn's totally floored. Dan Riehl not so much ...

Family Values at American Power

I thought some folks might grumble at bit at yesterday's post on Ann Althouse.

Cracker asks in the comments:

Professor you have referred to this blog as a "family blog".

You have recently commented on the suspect "values" of Family Broadcast Companies.

If my daughter is studying "Civics" in her 7th grade class.....and I recommended not only to her, but other classmates of hers that "American Power" has a good take on "conservatism" as it stands right now in our country and there is No indicator that you have to be 18 to view its content.

How do you suggest I respond to her, and her classmates, and perhaps her instructor ..... questions about the blog authors obsession with another blog authors breasts (nipples, tube tops, farrah etc etc.) ... as related to family values, content responsibility, and of course any hypocracy indicators that could possibly be applied not only to the "American Power" blog, but in a wider net, the entire conservative movement right now....

Check the comments for my response at the post.

I'll add further here that I'm not for one moment "obssessing" with Althouse's breasts. In fact, I'm not sexually objectifying Althouse at all. Like perhaps millions of adolescent boys in the mid-1970s, I had a poster of Farrah Fawcett on the wall in my bedroom. Does that disqualify me today, as late-40s heterosexual male observer of popular culture from commenting on a fellow blogger's dress and sexuality in a picture from the 1970s?

Check Althouse's comments if you want sex talk, where one visitor says: "Those some nice looking tits. Great rack. You could serve dinner on those things." This commenter also suggests when he meets Althouse "we are definitely going to get to 2nd base."

Althouse responds: "Not if you keep chickening out."

And besides, as noted yesterday, Althouse is a notorious breast blogger, and she's instigated some of the web's greatest flame wars with her observations on Jessica Valenti's breasts. By posting pictures of herself in a tight-fitting shirt, does Althouse succumb to same self-objectifying promotion as other women whom she's criticized? Valenti didn't like it when Althouse accused her of poking her breasts out while standing for a photo opportunity with former president Bill Clinton:

Last year I had my own run-in with online sexism when I was invited to a lunch meeting with Bill Clinton, along with a handful of other bloggers. After the meeting, a group photo of the attendees with Clinton was posted on several websites, and it wasn't long before comments about my appearance ("Who's the intern?; "I do like Gray Shirt's three-quarter pose.") started popping up.

One website, run by law professor and occasional New York Times columnist Ann Althouse, devoted an entire article to how I was "posing" so as to "make [my] breasts as obvious as possible". The post, titled "Let's take a closer look at those breasts," ended up with over 500 comments. Most were about my body, my perceived whorishness, and how I couldn't possibly be a good feminist because I had the gall to show up to a meeting with my breasts in tow. One commenter even created a limerick about me giving oral sex. Althouse herself said that I should have "worn a beret . . . a blue dress would have been good too". All this on the basis of a photograph of me in a crew-neck sweater from Gap.

Perhaps folks take all of this a bit too seriously. There's was a personal context to my post that didn't need elaboration, or so I thought. It doesn't matter anyway. While this is a "family blog," what I wrote last night is hardly disqualifying. My earlier reference to being a "family blog" was to crude vulgarity, which I do not employ. Plus, every once in a while I'm going to shake it up around here and discuss off-topics that are completely germaine to the blogging medium. In any case, I'm a man, and as Little Miss Attilla notes, "There is a marked tendency for heterosexual men to be interested in women." For some proof of that maxim, see Robert Stacy McCain, breast-blogger extraordinaire, who pronounced last November "International Natalie Portman Cleavage Day in the blogosphere."

Look, I often have young students sitting in the front row in my classrooms showing so much cleavage it's as if their endowments are about to burst out on their desktops. Actually, I think it's a bit much. I will, of course, continue to write about these things as a participant in the web's social commentary. I would think folks would find this much more acceptable than the Democratic Party's agenda of providing abortion services to 15 year-old girls or Disney-ABC's "family" programming that glorifies teenage pregnancy and underage drinking.

Ann Althouse: Bangs and Nipple

Ann Althouse has scanned some pictures of herself from the 1970s. The second one caught my eye, not just for Ann's beautiful hair and bangs, but also for her left nipple straining to poke through her chemise:

Ann's in her late '50s, so she's about 25 years-old according to the date of the picture (1976). I was just entering high school about that time, and I'm trying to remember how women presented their sexier sides back then. Nowadays on campus (circa 2006-2009), it seems deep-cleavage bustier-types of tops are de rigeur. I think young women today who normally wouldn't be pumping themselves up as "totally hot" nevertheless dress in a tone that is more expressly sexy than the girls I dated as an adolescent young man.

That said, although "tube tops" or some variation were popular back in the seventies, I think Ann captures the more wholesomely-hot look of Farrah Fawcett's 1976 superstar "red swimsuit" poster.

Anyway, Ann's one of the very best bloggers out there, and I meant to do something about the really dumb attack on her last week at Media Matters (Ann's not at all dogmatically conservative as her detracters allege), but never got around to it.

Oh yeah ... commenters will please save the sexist slurs against me and this post. Althouse is a well-known breast-blogging specialist herself, and I'm sure she can understand the aesthetic blogginess of my current entry into the genre.

Sweet Nothings of Civility at Ordinary Gentlemen

The phrase "effete snobs of the Democratic Party" popped into my head recently when reading Freddie de Boer's rambling twaddle over at the Ordinary Gentlemen. Not that such drivel is unexpected from the denizens of the nihilist left, but with a new chief executive snob in town, there's a special obnoxiousness to Freddie's long-winded puffery. Freddie's the kind of Democrat who takes Obamessianism to a whole new level of intolerant bombast foisted off as intelligently uplifting progressivism.

Anyway, I've previously smacked down Freddie on his ignorant gay marriage absolutism. Today I'm interested in this little tussle between Freddie and Robert Stacy McCain, and the follow-up incoherencies served up by Scott Payne in his extraordinary post.

First note Freddie's update to his post excoriating McCain's alleged fealty to "Bushite dead-enderism" and the sounds of "bat-shit talk radio" conservatism:

Helen Rittelmeyer, I’m sorry to say, chimes in with a “Hear, hear” for McCain in his comments. This, I take it, is a function of Helen’s lamentable opinion that it’s more important to stick up for your side than to value intelligence, principle, democracy, morals or logic. I’m afraid that the McCains of the world are the inconvenient hole in Helen’s philosophy of loyalty; some people, and their opinions, do not deserve your loyalty, no matter how much they tell you they are on your side. That Robert Stacy McCain is a tedious nothing will come as no surprise to those of us with a Web browser and the ability to read. Stranger still, Helen likes precisely the kind of faggy thinkers and writers– you know, those guys who care about, like, good arguments, and stuff – who McCain would consider a part of the damnable pretentious elite. But Helen’s philosophy, I think, doesn’t permit her to give anyone who is ostensibly on her side the heave hoe. Her position on party and loyalty threatens to leave her like the person who, out of loyalty, refuses to take the keys from her drunk friend, right before he drives her off of a cliff.

Folks can see what I mean by obnoxious snobbery, and in fact, I'm not the first to notice. Sonny Bunch takes issue with Freddie's "low-level snark," and then as noted Scott Payne takes to the keyboard to put in his two cents:

... I think that Bunch is absolutely correct about this kind of aggressive and ultimately pointless communication permeating the Internet by my lights. It frankly shocks me how often I run into someone commenting on a post who thinks that the only thing he or she is required to do in order to further a conversation is rhetorically pistol whip whomever they happen to disagree with. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that American culture ... but the sheer lack of civility that informs so much of our online discussion is disheartening for someone who wants to believe that things like blogs and online magazines can act as a means of truly forwarding discourse in meaningful ways. It’s hard to hold out hope for that belief when much of the effort you witness on sites is peoples’ creative means of calling each other fucking morons (pardon the language).

Gosh, that's simply wonderful. I don't know what to say at this lost promise of online sweet nothings, except it's rather interesting that Payne spends more time calling out the rude witless hacks of the blogging chat boards than his own extraordinarily hare-brained co-blogger.

That's not surprising, either, as it turns out, since the whole enterprise so far over at Ordinary Gentlemen is a ramshackle edifice of erstwhile libertarians and neoconservatives who have succumbed to the pull of Obamessianism. (True though, Freddie's apparently a "movement" progressive who's sipped a little too deeply at the well of Democratic victory. Maybe he'll anchor this Edsel's progressive creds, as that's where things there are headed anyway.)

In any case, I've written already about the very issue at base of this whole dust-up, so I'll save the heavy intellectual firepower for later. It's not like I'll be needing to dig too deeply into the stockpiles, in any case, especially given Mark Thompson's intellectual impotence demonstrated during previous go-rounds in a preview outing as one extraordinary cohort of the League.

More later, then ...

Republicans Are the New Punks

From the comments at Helen Rittelmeyer's post, "'Conservatism for Punks' for Punks":

Punk Rock is not conservative. True conservative movements (and not just those calling themselves such ...) have a core of stability and continuity. This stability and continuity is not characterized by the characteristics of the movement, but by the the stability and continuity of the characteristics.

Well, speaking of punk rock, stability, and continuity, Doug TenNapel argues "Republican is the New Punk (prefaced by a photo of Johnny Ramone):

The rebellious spirit of rock is dead. No better evidenced than by its formal endorsement of President Obama. Never before has rock been so central to the inauguration of a president. Bono is an ambassador in sunglasses who still knows how to pull a string and get an audience of thousands to put their fist in the air.

But rock cannot be both establishment and anti-establishment. It can’t be a rebellious underdog while endorsing and distributing the status quo. And yes, President Obama is the status quo of unlimited spending and government expansion he supposedly opposed during the election … then again, he also said he would fight to reduce abortion but couldn’t wait three days in office before throwing the pro-life useful idiots who voted for him under the bus. No change there. If this is what he meant by “reducing abortions” I can’t we to see what he meant by “reducing taxes.”

This is the mainstreaming of the bad boy, complete with rat-pack suit and cigarette in hand. A snappy skin spread over the boring, failed, liberal Democrats of the sixties. Hope and Change was nothing more than a repackaging of policies that have no right to be associated with hope or change.

Lefty politics are no longer the fringe and no matter if the voters knew it or not they carved lefty politics into stone. Bill Ayers became the system he once fought against. Sure, they still wear the earring and say “fuck” a lot to maintain street-cred among the academics, but now rock has taken sides — it is for the establishment. Same with journalism, the university and pop-culture. The left has become a cliché. They’re not “Arrested Development” they’re “Golden Girls” with a soul patch. Snore.

Now that the art nerds and punks just became the football jocks and prom queens, a new rebel is emerging from the wilderness. They are the new anti-establishment. One minority force bands together against every other branch of government swallowed by the Democrat octopus. The last evidence of a check or balance against the popular people are now the Conservative Republicans.

As a longstanding skate-punk, I find most of this amusing. When I was really punk, punk was anti-culture, seek-and-destroy against the establishment. As Johnny Rotten sung famously:

Dont know what I want but
I know how to get it
I wanna destroy the passer by cos i
I wanna be anarchy!

Or in Darby Crash's gutteral screams:

I'll get silver guns to drip old blood
Let's give this established
Joke a shove
We're gonna wreak havoc
On the rancid mill
I'm searchin' for something
Even if I'm killed...

Helen Rittelmeyer and her visitors can wax around poetically about what it's like to be punk or conservative, but some of the greatest punk rockers back in the day are now nihilist mouthpieces for the new age establishment currently proceeding to tear down the wisdom of the ages.

In any case, I miss Joe Strummer.

The Secret Life of ABC's Family Network

The Los Angeles Times reports that Disney's ABC Family cable channel is offering sexually mature material to a core audience that includes a third of viewers who are 12 to 17 years-old.

Is it just me, or is something terribly wrong with that picture? According to the article:

"The best way to resonate with your audience is to be authentic," said Anne Sweeney, president of Disney-ABC Television Group. "And you're only authentic if you are holding up a mirror to your audience and saying, 'I see you.'"

Being "authentic" apparently includes programs featuring "sex, underage drinking, absentee parents and the challenges of growing up today."

A look at the article suggest that American family life is so disfunctional that the premiere network for "wholesome" kids' programming is now and outlet for the hits-and-misses of 15 year-old home pregnancy testing. Here's more:

I'd love for these shows to be 'Little House on the Prairie,' but that isn't going to happen. Family programming is all about bringing families together to watch shows so that they can dialogue about these sensitive topics," said Pat Gentile, a top ad buyer for P&G and co-chairman of the Alliance for Family Entertainment, a coalition of major advertisers that advocates for family programming.

I was just finishing up my undergraduate training in 1992 when Vice President Dan Quayle attacked the portrayal of Murphy Brown, of the comedy series starring Candace Bergen, as "a character who supposedly epitomizes today's intelligent, highly paid, professional woman - mocking the importance of a father, by bearing a child alone and calling it just another 'lifestyle choice'."

Quayle is often said to be one of history's worst vice presidents, but few in high public office have been as clear and morally right on the heaviest social questions facing the country. And that was almost 20 years ago. It's even worse today. Where perhaps then society had accepted that women's independence, including single-parenting by successful career women, was a natural outgrowth of civil-rights advances and sociodemographic change at the family level, it can't be that we've moved to a social equilibria in which kids who cannot legally drive a car are getting knocked-up and mainstream family channels on cable television portray this as "credible" programming for today's children's television markets.

It makes all-too-much sense though, unfortunately, in today's upside-down world where "progressive" values include the glorification of teenagers chugging-back cold ones like Friday afternoon construction workers on payday.

As I noted the other day in the "Deceptions of Democratic Family Planning," the Democratic-left wants us to think that the "family planning" provisions in the Obama administration's gargantuan spending spree are about expanding Medicaid coverage to more families. Perhaps. But a close look at the expansion of eligibility shows that family planning coverage will extend to unpregnant minors receiving services without the knowledge of their parents. The bill, in other words, not only accepts teenage behavior that in the past would have been seen not only as socially inappropriate, but destructive to the life chances of teenage girls and facilitative to the whimsical evisceration of traditional parental model of moral teaching of children.

If there's a bright lining to the Times piece is that some parents are outraged at the Family Channel's fare:

"I thought it was going to be more like Disney Channel, a little more grown-up but less provocative," said Mary Alden, a Pasadena mother of 14-year-old twins. She became alarmed when she heard dialogue from characters in "Secret Life" who were discussing whether one of them should end her pregnancy. "I didn't think that would be on a Disney channel," she said.

Michele MacNeal, a mother of three who lives in La Crescenta and heads a local branch of the powerful watchdog group Parents Television Council, agreed.

"It's kind of a misnomer to call ABC Family a family channel," she said. "When you call something 'family,' it gives the impression that it's safe for all members of the family, even young children."

Another possible upside to all of this is President Barack Obama's presidency. The president's daughters, Malia and Sasha are 10 and 7, respectively. If President Obama really doesn't want his daugthers "punished" with an unexpected pregnancy, then perhaps he might use the tremendous power of the presidential bully pulpit to help restore a little more sanity to the direction of social norms by lobbying Hollywood for the same kind of appropriate social behavior that he'd expect from his own kids.

Of course, considering that Hollywood is one of the Democratic Party's main financial benefactors, I'm not holding my breath.

Former Insurgents Stumping for Candidates in Iraq Vote

Blackfive offers a nice roundup of today's historic parliamentary elections in Iraq:

Fifteen million Iraqis are voting today. Because of the strong turnout, the voting time was extended. And I saw a stat on one of the cable channels that there are over 400 women running for office in this election.

Historic.

It's not just the women. One of the most interesting things in the news today is that former Sunni insurgents joined the political campaign, stumping for candidates and competing for votes. The Los Angeles Times reports:

Abu Mujahid brags that he bombed a U.S. Army Humvee and wounded two American soldiers just last month. Now he's stumping for Sunni candidates and talking matter-of-factly about the importance of safety as Iraqis head to the polls today.

"This is something like a truce so the elections will be implemented in a secure environment," said Abu Mujahid, an active member of the 1920 Revolution Brigades, an armed Sunni Arab group. "We want to allow people to vote and let them decide without pressure from any groups."

With one foot in the political process and the other firmly rooted in violence, fighters such as Abu Mujahid offer a glimpse of the Sunni community's evolution over the last five years: from waging guerrilla war against Iraq's ascendant Shiite Muslim majority and its U.S. backers, to tentatively embracing electoral politics.

The Times reports that this shift to ballots, not bullets, is fragile, but just a couple of years ago antiwar creeps like Cernig at Newshoggers were saying we'd never see success in Iraq. Even today, after the obligatory highlighting of violence, Cernig is forced to conclude his post by conceding that yes, indeed, there's progress, but supporters of the war shouldn't gloat:

These elections are a good thing, but they're not a universal panacea. Still, the American Right wants to have its cake and eat it. They want to pretend that provincial elections mean "victory" while getting ready to blame only Obama if Iraqi social fractures ignored by Bush for so long lead to more violence later.

Readers should recall Newshoggers has outwardly applauded the deaths of U.S. military personnel on the ground, so acknowledging success today must be like swallowing a barrel of Tabasco. Moreover, on issue after issue, as I've shown in recent posts, Cernig's been spectacularly wrong on trends in the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy. And hey, don't even get me going about Juan Cole, who highlights a few violent tragedies in today's voting to cast aspersion on the whole showcase of democratic emergence.

These people truly are dead-enders.

Claire McCaskill's Idiots

Who are the "idiots" Senator Claire McCaskill's denouncing in her Senate floor lecture attacking executive compensation? Wall Street's? Or Capitol Hill's?

Perhaps McCaskill's on to something, as the Wall Street Journal reports (here or here):

Wall Street's pay system isn't dead yet. But it is in trouble.

President Obama's rhetorical assault on "shameful" bonuses reverberated across trading floors, investment-banking desks and executive suites Friday. Officials at several securities firms acknowledged that compensation, already down sharply because of evaporating profits, could shrink even more in the next few months as Wall Street scrambles to avert a government crackdown that some fear could be even more painful.

Sen. Claire McCaskill (D., Mo.) introduced legislation Friday that would limit the salary, bonuses and stock options of executives at financial companies getting federal bailout aid to no more than what the U.S. president earns: $400,000 a year, excluding benefits. In 2007, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein earned that much in about two days.

The editorial page at WSJ weighs in, "Idiots Indeed":

In our experience, political nuance has never been the strong suit of Wall Street executives ... Yet the hard truth remains that whether on Wall Street or across the American business landscape, compensation levels are a business judgment made under the pressure of competition. The "idiots" notwithstanding, Wall Street has lots of highly talented financial minds and mobility among firms based on compensation is routine.

If Congress is going to start setting legal limits on salaries and bonuses in the U.S., it is going to drive talent out of Bank of America and these other banks and into institutions without such limits, perhaps abroad ... The danger of targeting what capitalists we have left for abuse or prosecution is that they will stay on strike, as they did in the 1930s. It won't be pretty this time either.

Hat Tip: Memeorandum.

See also, Allahpundit, "McCaskill on capping pay of CEOs who take TARP money: “These people are idiots”.

Bush Hatred and Obamessianism

Peter Berkowitz, at the Wall Street Journal, makes the case that Bush hatred and Obamessianism (i.e., Obama euphoria) are one and the same:

Now that George W. Bush has left the harsh glare of the White House and Barack Obama has settled into the highest office in the land, it might be reasonable to suppose that Bush hatred and Obama euphoria will begin to subside. Unfortunately, there is good reason to doubt that the common sources that have nourished these dangerous political passions will soon lose their potency.

At first glance, Bush hatred and Obama euphoria could not be more different. Hatred of Mr. Bush went well beyond the partisan broadsides typical of democratic politics. For years it disfigured its victims with open, indeed proud, loathing for the very manner in which Mr. Bush walked and talked. It compelled them to denounce the president and his policies as not merely foolish or wrong or contrary to the national interest, but as anathema to everything that made America great.

In contrast, the euphoria surrounding Mr. Obama's run for president conferred upon the candidate immunity from criticism despite his newness to national politics and lack of executive experience, and regardless of how empty his calls for change. At the same time, it inspired those in its grips, repeatedly bringing them tears of joy throughout the long election season. With Mr. Obama's victory in November and his inauguration last week, it suffused them with a sense that not only had the promise of America at last been redeemed but that the world could now be transfigured.

In fact, Bush hatred and Obama euphoria - which tend to reveal more about those who feel them than the men at which they are directed - are opposite sides of the same coin. Both represent the triumph of passion over reason. Both are intolerant of dissent. Those wallowing in Bush hatred and those reveling in Obama euphoria frequently regard those who do not share their passion as contemptible and beyond the reach of civilized discussion. Bush hatred and Obama euphoria typically coexist in the same soul. And it is disproportionately members of the intellectual and political class in whose souls they flourish.

More at the link.

"Passion over reason" certainly explains these folks, although it's not just "members of the intellectual and political" class (see this blogger for example).

I noted previously how I became creeped out a bit when one of my own political science classes started chanting "na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, hey, hey, eh ... good bye..." during lectures. And when I drive down the road and see wide-eyd 50-ish women captaining Toyota Prius' plastered with "Change We Can Believe In" stickers and with mugs of "O'Biden" poking out from every corner of the vehicle, I can only shake my head at the success of Obama's mesmerizing political campaign of pop-culture sheeples indoctrination.

The sad part is this has just begun.

Life in the poltical wilderness I can handle, but not a few Americans worry about an Obama gulag for those not swallowing the Democratic ideological kool-aid of "The One."

Berkowitz suggests that all of this "hatred and euphoria" may weaken, and it wouldn't come a moment too soon.

Conservative Decline? Pajamas Media Goes Belly Up

Well, I just read through every post at Memeorandum in response to Jeff Goldstein's layoff notice from Pajamas Media.

Long story short is that Roger Simon has pissed away his venture capital on hand and new revenue has dried up as the recession has sapped online advertising. It looks like Pajamas is going to focus on its television programming venture, and the main Pajamas portal will stay up and continue publishing conservative commentary. Those big blogs that signed exclusive advertising arrangements are now out of the remuneration stream. Goldstein's feeling the rejection: "I am officially out of work. So save going to a pay model, this site will likely have to shut down."

I have some personal interest in all of this, as I started publishing at Pajamas last year and I was interviewed by Bill Whittle for a PJTV episode last October. In my case, of course, I've never had any illusions that I was going to make a lot of money blogging. Folks have asked why I don't run ads on the sidebar, while others have ribbed me for my prodigious output. My response is that American Power is a labor of love, and my goal all along has been to make a name for myself as a public intellectual in the blogospheric commentariat. Keep in mind that the Blogger platform is free, so the only cost I incur is time, and lots of it. And since the blogging enterprise has a steep start-up curve for new entries, it's not likely that lower-level 9th-tier bloggers are going to overtake Hot Air anytime soon. The networked structure of the blogosphere prohibits easy entry to the top of the hierarchy of opinion, so newcomers will need to worry about finding both a niche and an outside means of support more lucrative than Google's Adsense. In my case, I have a day job.

There's a lot of sour grapes and I-told-you-sos over the news, but this comment at Tools of Renewal is worth pondering:

I used to see the PJ fiasco as the result of greed, treachery, foolishness, and dishonesty. These days I see it more as the evidence of a curse. The US is declining very quickly. We’re not going to be the world’s leading nation any more. The economy may have a dead-cat bounce left in it, but we’re going into a recession which will never end. We’re going to settle permanently at a lower level of prosperity and power, and we may experience a near-depression on the way to that level. The self-destruction of conservatism is probably just one of the tools that will be used to work this judgment on America ....

The right used to be blessed. Until maybe 2003, our star was rising. Maybe that’s because we were more closely attuned to God. Now we think we have to dump God in order to attract voters. We keep hearing that the problem with the right is that the religious nuts hijacked it. But the right was stronger back when religious people had more power. And it will weaken more and more, as we get more desperate and distance ourselves from God. And if we give up our support of Israel, things will get even worse. In many ways, we already have.

I normally blow off such prattle about America's inevitable decline. It's nonsense. The U.S. is already taking the rest of the world down with it to deep-recession levels, and there's no other current competitor ready to replace the U.S. as the king of the hill (least of all China). Most importantly, there's no other nation-state on the face of the planet possessing the intellectual-demographic dynamism that will form the bases of the next boom of entreprenuerial-scientific market renewal (see Bill Whittle for more on America's sure return to the towering heights of prosperity).

The second part of Renewal's comment is worth further consideration. We've seen all of this debate about the GOP's path back to power, and one of the biggest meme's is that the sooner we dump cultural conservatism the better. Hogwash. I've said it before and I'll say it again: The "GOP Must Stay True to Core Values." We're riding the downside of the political cycle, but religious expression is hardly in decline, and in fact Christianity is the most dynamic religion in the world today. If America indeed drops off the top ranks of hierarchy in international relations, the cause will be the godless progressivism now stripping this country from its founding roots and the bases of its historical strength.

As for future of conservative media like Pajamas? Well, Andrew Breitbart just started Big Hollywood, and I was intrigued reading over there the other day that Breitbart was offering $100,000 to Matt Damon to debate neoconservative warhawk Bill Kristol on Iraq. I have no clue as to Breitbart's funding model, but $100,000 a good chunk of change, and Big Hollywood's off to a good start.

So, keep plugging away right-bloggers! There's gold in them thar hills!

Multilateralism and the Globalization of Abortion

Many readers of this blog are likely not up on some of the hottest trends in international relations theory.

World politics, and the academic study of it, evinces a central tension between power and cooperation in international affairs. Since World War II, the great hope of international idealists has been to create institutions that would promote peace and facilitate cooperation among nations. As time has passed, real world events have shown the false benigity of such hopes, for example, in the emergence of the United Nations General Assembly as a Third World power shop seeking to shift global resources and influence away from the industrialized nations of the global north. Key manifestations are found in the demands for a "New International Economic Order" in the 1970s and ongoing U.N.-sponsored "Conferences Against Racism," with the next installment scheduled for April in Geneva. For an idea of the anti-Western agenda at the upcoming "Durban II" meeting, see U.N. Watch, which includes this photo:

I've been thinking more and more about academic international relations theory and "real world" events this last few weeks, especially since Foreign Policy announced its new website and stable of bloggers. In particular, the blogging debut of Harvard's Stephen Walt has been something of an eye-opener. My academic relationship to Walt is discussed here. I am now about halfway through Walt's book, The Israel Lobby and American Foreign Policy, which I find disturbing, but readers can get a feel for Walt's views at his blog. Walt's a "neorealist" who specializes in alliance formation and the balance of world power (it's interesting how the "amoralism" of realism is deployed so effectively by Walt to delegitimize the moral existentialism of the Israeli state).

My point in this essay, however, is to take a look at trends on the "neoliberal institutionalist" side of international theory, starting with Robert Keohane, Stephen Macedo, and Andrew Moravcsik's new essay at International Organization, "Democracy-Enhancing Multilateralism." The abstract of the article is at the link, but the basic gist of the piece is an attempt to secure some middle ground between critics of "global goverance" and "universal sovereignty," and those who favor the use of global mutlilateralism to advance "pragmatic" international change, cooperation, and democratic deliberation.

These passages from the conclusion are worth citing:

Our discussion has shown that multilateral institutions can empower diffuse minorities against special-interest factions, protect vulnerable individuals and minorities, and enhance the epistemic quality of democratic decision making in well-established democratic states. Moving some forms of governance up to a higher level, insisting on elaborate mechanisms for public debate and criticism, and making use of impartial and expert decisionmaking bodies can improve democracy ....

Democracy requires that governments control factions, protect minority interests, and maintain the epistemic quality of deliberation. Multilateral constraints, like other constitutional constraints, can enhance the ability of publics to govern themselves and enact their deliberate preferences over the long term ....

Yet we are not apologists. We emphatically do not claim that multilateralism always enhances domestic democracy. To the contrary, the standards we have articulated for defending multilateral institutions on democratic grounds equally enable criticism of democracy-inhibiting multilateralism, should international institutions promote special interests, violate rights of minorities, diminish the quality of collective deliberation, or seriously degrade the ability of people to participate in governance without compensating democratic advantages. There are good reasons to be concerned that multilateralism can sometimes empower unaccountable elites—a tendency against which it is necessary to guard.

I offer this review of multilateral theory mainly because it's the cutting edge of the discipline. Keohane, Macedo, and Moravcsik demonstrate the kind of academic detachment inherent to the scholarly enterprise, although the implications of some closely-related research in the field - and the ideological agenda of many adherents to multilateralism - leave much to be desired.

For a quick sample (albeit journalistic), let me leave readers with an example of the multilaterization of an emerging regime promoting abortion as a human right under international law. Michelle Goldberg has a piece on this at Slate, "Abortion Rights Go Global." Here's a chilling excerpt:

In the last four years ... women and their lawyers have brought abortion actions before the U.N. Human Rights Committee and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which investigates human rights violations in the Western hemisphere. Several times, women who've been denied abortions have won both compensation and an acknowledgment that their rights were violated. For feminists worldwide, this represents a great victory, since it elevates women's rights and safety above the often-sacrosanct principle of national sovereignty ....

Yet as abortion rights go international, so does the anti-abortion backlash. The globalization of the abortion wars creates some of the same tensions—between universal human rights and community mores, between majority rule and the protection of individual liberty—as Roe v. Wade, on a larger scale. All over the world, in countries including Kenya, Poland, and Nicaragua, local anti-abortion movements (often working with American allies) rail against the meddling of powerful outsiders. In Poland, traditionalists who oppose abortion bemoan the loss of their country's Catholic values as it integrates into secular Europe. They speak about international human rights and the courts that enforce them with something of the frustrated anger that American conservatives sometimes direct at the federal government. "Abortion proponents cannot win elections on these issues, so they have to go through the least democratic bodies in the world, the United Nations, for instance, and the courts," says Austin Ruse, the president of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, a pro-life organization active at the United Nations.

That last quotation from Austin Ruse brings us back to the theoretical foundations and benefits of multilateralism.

Will creating an international human rights regime for abortions advance the interests in individual nation-states of the international system? My feeling is that folks like Michelle Goldberg don't care, and the Democratic-left's accession to power in the U.S. with the advent of the Barack Obama administration will certainly put the push for a global abortion regime into hyperdrive. Obama's move to overturn the Reagan-era "Mexico City Policy" is a sign of the times for the power of the mulitlateralists to advance an agenda that is not only anti-democratic in its hubristic assumptions, but radical in its anti-life aspirations.

Obama's Change Reckoning is Here

The first ten days of the new administration have really put into stark relief the conservative warnings of Barack Obama during the second half of 2008. Even some of the most extreme ideological attacks on Obama are now ringing true as we see the beginnings of a new era of American politics that's nothing short of a wholesale statist makeover of American life. As Charles Hurt says of the adminstration's $819 spending boondoggle, and the law's provision to roll back two decades of welfare reform:

Ever since his election, many Americans have wondered which Barack Obama would show up at the White House: the most liberal member of the Senate or the post-partisan bearer of change we could all believe in.

One thing is clear: His "stimulus" bill is not change we can believe in. It's a return to big-government welfare that we will choke on.

What's especially troubling is that the Democrats are going to ram down "change" on the country by reign of deception and non-debate. I noted this morning that the left's "family planning" agenda is backed by lies, and as Kimberley Strassel points out today, we're moving toward socialism by stealth in the nationalization of health care:

With the nation occupied with the financial crisis, and with that crisis providing cover, Democrats have been passing provision after provision to nationalize health care.

If Democrats learned anything from the HillaryCare defeat, it was the danger of admitting to their wish to federalize the health market. Since returning to power, they've pursued a new strategy: to stealthily and incrementally expand government control.

It's worth reading Strassel in full.