Category Archives: News Media

For the Bible Tells Me So

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The current issue of Newsweek is running an article by Lisa Miller that argues the Bible does not define marriage as being between one man and one woman. I think she makes a good case. Most of the Old Testament guys were polygamists, after all, and Jesus and Saint Paul didn’t explicitly say anything about one-man-one-woman marriage in the New Testament.

A Christian minister named R. Albert Mohler Jr. takes issue with Ms. Miller at the Washington Post‘s On Faith site. But Mohler’s arguments, IMO, don’t make sense. Basically his argument is, OK, so marriage as described in the Bible were not like marriages today, but they were still heterosexual and about procreation. So the Bible can’t be used to argue in favor of same-sex marriage.

But I don’t think Ms. Miller is using the Bible to argue in favor of same-sex marriage as much as she’s just saying that biblical marriage was not the one man-one woman thing current conservative Christianity wants written into law. Thus, there is no biblical authority supporting the way most conservative Christians define marriage. A number of other commenters at On Faith, including Christian clergy, admit this, and also argue that a Christian case could be made in favor of gay marriage.

And, of course, I don’t give a bleep what the Bible says about marriage or sex or procreation or asparagus. Writing something into law because it’s in the Bible is a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

Writing at NRO, Mark Hemingway sputters in outrage over the Newsweek piece.

The cover story in this week’s Newsweek, which makes “the religious case for gay marriage,” has come under fire from a large swath of the religious community. Newsweek’s own blog has been keeping track of the controversy, with religious heavyweights such as Albert Mohler, Ralph Reed, and Richard Land criticizing the article. The Politico devoted an entire article to cataloging the backlash, The Weekly Standard called it a “dire mess,” and countless blogs commented unfavorably. (Not to mention that the piece was not popular in the Hemingway household.)

I can’t believe these people are still citing Ralph Reed as some kind of spiritual authority.

While there is certainly a religious debate to be had over the validity of gay marriage, most of the criticism of the article sidestepped the main issue to comment on how the author, religion reporter Lisa Miller, wrote the article. Aside from making numerous basic factual errors,

I’ve yet to see any of these “factual errors” clearly pointed out. The couple of “errors” cited by Mohler were matters of interpretation, his inference of what some passages meant.

the author insisted — before the end of the first paragraph — that biblical views of marriage are déclassé: “Would any contemporary heterosexual married couple — who likely woke up on their wedding day harboring some optimistic and newfangled ideas about gender equality and romantic love — turn to the Bible as a how-to script?”

And, if you read Miller’s piece, she makes a good case that we would not, because marriage in biblical times was in no way about gender equality and romantic love. But Hemingway doesn’t even answer this. He quotes Miller as if no civilized person should ever be allowed to suggest that marriage today is different from what it was in Old Testament times, even though it plainly is.

What’s worse, for Hemingway, is that editor John Meacham does not explain Miller’s piece as “just her opinion,” but instead writes,

No matter what one thinks about gay rights—for, against or somewhere in between —this conservative resort to biblical authority is the worst kind of fundamentalism. Given the history of the making of the Scriptures and the millennia of critical attention scholars and others have given to the stories and injunctions that come to us in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament, to argue that something is so because it is in the Bible is more than intellectually bankrupt—it is unserious, and unworthy of the great Judeo-Christian tradition. …

… In this light it would seem to make sense for Americans to look anew at the underlying issues on the question of gay marriage. One can decide to oppose it in good faith, but such opposition should at least be forged by those in full possession of the relevant cultural and religious history and context. The reaction to this cover is not difficult to predict. Religious conservatives will say that the liberal media are once again seeking to impose their values (or their “agenda,” a favorite term to describe the views of those who disagree with you) on a God-fearing nation. Let the letters and e-mails come. History and demographics are on the side of those who favor inclusion over exclusion.

Good for Meacham! But the Right cannot stand the idea that a news magazine would publish anything other than (b) unfiltered right-wing propaganda, or (2) mush. Miller’s piece stands on its own. She makes a strong case that it’s nonsense to cite the Bible to “prove” what marriage “ought” to be. I haven’t seen anyone on the Right honestly answer Miller’s arguments. They just think it’s outrageous anyone would make those arguments.

Newsweek also is in the news itself this week because its circulation numbers dropped like a rock in the past year, and the magazine’s managers are considering slashing the number of copies printed by about 1.6 million. The editorial focus may move away from reporting news to becoming more of an opinion magazine, or a “thought leader.”

I’m of mixed views on this. What the weekly news magazines can sometimes do very well, when they try, is in-depth reporting like the recent “Secrets of the 2008 Campaign.” But I don’t subscribe to any of the weeklies any more. I don’t remember why I stopped getting Newsweek — probably because I never had time to read it — and I canceled Time because of the infamous Ann Coulter issue of April 25, 2005. Oh, and because I decided Joe Klein is a dork.

I think that at some time during the Bush years the weekly news magazines started to seem so damn insipid. They were too careful not to piss off the Right, and in doing so pulled their punches on the Bushies far too many times. Most of the time I could get better, and fresher, information from the web.

Maybe now Newsweek has decided that publishing applesauce to please the Right wasn’t getting it anywhere, and it’s going to publish some meat now and then.

Newspaper Crisis

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The Chicago Tribune Company may file for bankruptcy, and the New York Times Company plans to borrow against its new West Side corporate headquarters to meet a cash shortfall. (Full disclosure — as a writer for About.com I work on contract for the New York Times Company, and I’ve been in the corporate headquarters a few times. Lovely building.)

Naturally, some are rejoicing in the downfall of the evil MainStreamMedia, or MSM. Little Lulu got the brilliant idea that some wealthy right-wingers ought to snap up newspapers while they are going cheap and replace the staffs with right-wing ideologues, effectively turning the nation’s newspapers into propaganda rags for the Right. Which is what they’ve pretty much been for the past several years, anyway, but the Right will not rest until they control all information being received by the American public.

Some right-of-center investors attempted to establish a right-wing challenge to the New York Times (like we don’t already have the Post?) called the New York Sun. The Sun bombed spectacularly and finally stopped publishing earlier this year, but not before losing its deep-pocket investors a ton of money. Scott Sherman wrote in April 2007,

Although it is funded by a coterie of wealthy individuals, published on a shoestring and edited by a tenacious journalist, Seth Lipsky, the paper is not a financial success: Last year Lipsky told journalism students at Columbia that the Sun lost $1 million a month. But those losses amount to pocket change for the proprietors, whose investment and ongoing commitment have yielded something else: a broadsheet that injects conservative ideology into the country’s most influential philanthropic, intellectual and media hub; a paper whose day-to-day coverage of New York City emphasizes lower taxes, school vouchers and free-market solutions to urban problems; a paper whose elegant culture pages hold their own against the Times in quality and sophistication; a paper that breaks news and crusades on a single issue; a paper that functions as a journalistic SWAT team against individuals and institutions seen as hostile to Israel and Jews; and a paper that unapologetically displays the scalps of its victims.

They lost $1 million a month? I feel so bad. Snark.

The Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s pockets must be a lot deeper than those of the Sun‘s investors, because he’s keeping the Washington Times afloat in spite of the fact that it has lost money every year since its launch in 1982. However, even Moon had to scale back a bit and let go of some staffers earlier this year. Times are hard.

I’m not a regular reader of the Tribune and cannot comment on its quality. The Times, which I do read, has much room for improvement in its journalistic standards. Plus, the entire business model on which newspapers rested is eroding away; people just don’t sit and read newspapers any more. However, I think with imaginative and forward-thinking management, the NY Times could evolve into a great news provider for the 21st century. We’ll see what happens.

However, I don’t see propaganda rags turning a profit, ever. I don’t think there are pockets deep enough to carry out Lulu’s plans.

Will Rush Go Down Too?

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A couple of weeks ago, Steve Elman and Alan Tolz wrote in the Boston Globe that the influence of rightie talk radio is in major decline:

Consider some of the major stumbles this year by the medium’s 800-pound gorilla. Rush Limbaugh vigorously promoted three separate political objectives over the past year, all of which failed: derailing John McCain’s quest for the Republican nomination, sabotaging Barack Obama’s drive for the Democratic nomination by fomenting Republican crossover votes for Hillary Clinton, and ultimately stopping Obama’s march to victory in the general election. Contrast this with the impact talk radio once had on local taxes, the impeachment of Bill Clinton, congressional pay raises, a mandatory seat belt law, etc.

Elman and Tolz cite these factors as reasons for the decline:

  • The radio medium is in decline generally. Younger people in particular prefer their iPods to radio. The radio audience is aging.
  • “New ears” are essential if radio talk show hosts are to have any impact on public opinion. If they are just talking to a core audience of people who already agree with them, they won’t be changing any minds.
  • Cable television news programs have moved into and taken over talk radio’s opinion-venting niche.
  • Talk radio hosts in general have earned a reputation for being irrational and rabid promoters of one-note opinions.

  • Talk radio programs have moved away from taking calls from listeners expressing diverse opinions.

Today everyone’s favorite nerd, Nate Silver, has more good insight as to why talk radio, and the Right in general, is going down. You need to read Nate’s entire post to get all the nuances of his argument. But he makes these key observations:

  • “There are a certain segment of conservatives who literally cannot believe that anybody would see the world differently than the way they do. They have not just forgotten how to persuade; they have forgotten about the necessity of persuasion.”

A correlation to that observation is that many conservatives think anyone who sees the world differently from the way they do is motivated by evil. This is another reason why they don’t think it’s worth trying to persuade us of anything. (Example.)

  • “…the distinguishing feature of radio is that it exists in a sort of perpetual amnesiac state.”
  • “Moreover, almost uniquely to radio, most of the audience is not even paying attention to you, because most people listen to radio when they’re in the process of doing something else.”

Therefore, Nate says, the radio host’s job isn’t so much to present interesting ideas as it is to keep the listeners emotionally stimulated. Talk radio is like aural caffeine.

  • “The McCain campaign was all about stimulation. The Britney Spears ads weren’t persuasive, but they sure were stimulating! ‘Drill, baby, drill’ wasn’t persuasive, but it sure was stimulating! Sarah Palin wasn’t persuasive, but she sure was (literally, in Rich Lowry’s case) stimulating!”

I never watch Faux News, so I wouldn’t know if this is true:

  • “FOX News is unusual television, really, in that almost all the stimulation is verbal, and almost all of it occurs at the same staccato pacing as radio. You could take tonight’s broadcast of Hannity & Colmes or the Factor and put it directly on radio and you’d lose almost nothing (not coincidentally, Hannity and O’Reilly also have highly-rated radio programs).”
  • “Conservatives listen to significantly more talk radio than other market segments; 28 percent of conservative Republicans listen to talk radio regularly, as opposed to 17 percent of the public as a whole.”

I take it that for much of the conservative base, conservatism is less an ideology than it is an emotional addiction.

Disintegration

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The Right is splintering into McCain and Palin camps. C’est une hoot.

Faux News, a wholly owned subsidiary of the upper echelon of the Republican Party, is leading the charge against Palin.

Even I think the “she’s so dumb she doesn’t know Africa is a continent” story is farfetched. The larger point is that the string-pullers want to make Sarah Palin the scapegoat. They are swift-boating their own.

The puppets are not having it. Erick Erickson of Redstate announces Operation Leper:

We’re tracking down all the people from the McCain campaign now whispering smears against Governor Palin to Carl Cameron and others. Michelle Malkin has the details.

We intend to constantly remind the base about these people, monitor who they are working for, and, when 2012 rolls around, see which candidates hire them. Naturally then, you’ll see us go to war against those candidates.

It is our expressed intention to make these few people political lepers.

They’ll just have to be stuck at CBS with Katie’s failed ratings.

I think the whispering campaign is being facilitated from higher up than the McCain campaign, but that’s a hunch. I’m not exactly a GOP insider. Certainly most of the whispering is coming from the McCain campaign, but if higher-ups didn’t want Palin to be the scapegoat, you know Faux wouldn’t be repeating the whispers.

My sense of things is that most of the Right blogosphere is siding with Palin, not McCain. But there is disintegration among rightie bloggers, too. For example, there has been some sort of falling out between Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs and Pam Geller of Atlas Shrugged. I don’t quite understand what’s going on with this, but there it is.

I may not be a GOP insider, but I do know that the talking points memo that went out from On High to the GOP minions yesterday had these two bullet points:

  • Warn Democrats that they’d better not pursue a culture war.
  • Warn Democrats that they’d better not push for card check.

I know this because every representative Republican bobblehead on cable news yesterday brought up these two points. And I believe these are points that otherwise would not have been on anyone’s mind yesterday, especially card check. If you haven’t heard about card check, go here for an explanation.

Regarding culture wars, I wonder if the GOP realizes that the anti-reproductive rights movement could be turning into more of a liability than an asset. The alliance with the so-called “pro life” crowd certainly didn’t help the GOP Tuesday. I’m guessing there are closed-door discussions going on right now about whether to cut the cord, so to speak, with the Fetus People. If the FPs are dumped, they will be dumped slowly and gently and gradually so that nobody, including them, notices.

However, my first prediction for 2012 is that by then abortion as a national issue will have quietly been forgotten. It might not survive to 2010, in fact. It will still have potency in some states, of course, but it will be kept local. Unfortunately, fighting same-sex marriage will be ramped up to take abortion’s place as the “central front” of the culture wars.

More interesting fallout:

Take a look at the “McCain Belt” — places where McCain did better than Bush did in 2004.

The map linked above inspires dumb hillbilly jokes, and as a hillbilly-American myself, I know a lot of ’em. But I will refrain. For now.

This will not surprise you — the “Impeach Obama” campaign already is underway.

The Usual Slop From David Books

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David Brooks begins his latest column this way:

There are two major political parties in America, but there are at least three major political tendencies. The first is orthodox liberalism, a belief in using government to maximize equality. The second is free-market conservatism, the belief in limiting government to maximize freedom.

So, Brooks says, orthodox liberalism is “a belief in using government to maximize equality.” What does he mean by “equality”? If he means “equal treatment under the law,” then I agree. If he means equal opportunity, I agree. But I infer that’s not what he means, based on what he writes later. But first let’s deal with the next sentence.

“Free-market conservatism,” Brooks says, is “the belief in limiting government to maximize freedom.” But “maximizing freedom” is not at all what “free-market conservatism” does. In effect, “free-market conservatism” is about turning most of the population into a cheap labor resource, to be exploited for the benefit of the wealthy few. In truth, there is little “freedom” in the lives of most workers under a “free market” system, especially during times when jobs are scarce and quitting one means cutting yourself off from health care, not to mention losing your home.

But there is a third tendency, which floats between. It is for using limited but energetic government to enhance social mobility. This tendency began with Alexander Hamilton, who created a vibrant national economy so more people could rise and succeed. It matured with Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War Republicans, who created the Land Grant College Act and the Homestead Act to give people the tools to pursue their ambitions. It continued with Theodore Roosevelt, who busted the trusts to give more Americans a square deal.

The “Civil War” Republicans, more often called “Radical Republicans” in the history books, were the flaming liberals of their day. They not only drafted civil rights legislation that would have been considered radically liberal a century later, they also created what I believe was the first large-scale social welfare federal bureaucracy, the Freedmen’s Bureau. The purpose of the Freedmen’s Bureau was to assist newly freed African Americans in their transition from being slaves to being productive members of an industrial, capitalist society. Unfortunately, the work of the Freedmen’s Bureau was effectively kneecapped by President Andrew Johnson, so that most of the freed people were little better off “free” than they had been before.

Brooks mentions Theodore Roosevelt’s “Square Deal.” The Square Deal was, IMO, the real foundation of American “orthodox liberalism.” And TR was no “small government” guy. He believed strongly in using the federal government in a pro-active, progressive way to balance the interests of the “little guy” against the “big guy.” TR was not against the accumulation of wealth, but he was very much against even a whiff of plutocracy.

But Brooks cannot have anything called “liberalism” be the hero of the story. So he re-invents liberalism as something in favor of a sloppily defined “equality.” What does he mean by “equality”? And how is “equality” different from “freedom”? I think most of us liberals would argue that there is no freedom without equality (meaning, equal protection under the law, equal opportunity, equal access to justice). But I think Brooks is using “liberalism” to mean something closer to “socialism,” and liberal orthodoxy in America was never socialistic. There have been and are moderate socialists among us, yes, but they were never a majority. I’m not saying whether that’s good or bad, just that that’s how it is.

Anyway, after re-defining American liberal orthodoxy into something it never was, Brooks then takes genuine American liberal orthodoxy, waters it down a lot, and re-names its proponents “Americanized Burkeans, or to put it another way, progressive conservatives.” See, anything virtuous has to be called “conservative.” It’s a rule.

Brooks continues,

McCain shares the progressive conservative instinct. He has shown his sympathy with the striving immigrant and his disgust with the colluding corporatist. He has an untiring reform impulse and a devotion to national service and American exceptionalism.

Translation: McCain is a standard “free market conservative” whose soft bleatings about immigration are more about cheap labor than altruism. He has also paid lip service to ending corruption but hasn’t accomplished much in that direction. His economic policy ideas are still all about favoring the rich and powerful at the expense of workers. And “national service and American exceptionalism” is code for “he’ll start more stupid wars.”

“McCain would be an outstanding president,” Brooks says, without offering much in the way of evidence. It’s possible the McCain that lives in Brooks’s head would make a decent president, but the flesh-and-blood McCain who is actually campaigning would be a disaster.

See also No More Mr. Nice Blog, Prairie Weather, and M.J. Rosenberg at TPM Cafe.

Update: Some rightie actually refers to “Bull Moose conservatism.” Please. TR’s Bull Moose party was progressive, not conservative.

Time and Tides

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These days events and issues and the nation seem to be sweeping toward some irresistible something that’s bigger than all of us. It feels like river currents rushing toward a waterfall. Have you felt that, too?

History shows us that no status quo lasts forever, no matter how solid and immutable it seems. Sometimes changes are slow and imperceptible, but occasionally some confluence of events breaks the old order apart and sets up a new one almost overnight, or at least within the space of a few years instead of a few decades. Most of the time invasion or insurrection are involved in these changes, but not always. The breakup of the Soviet Union is a prime example of events taking over and forcing change almost overnight without gunfire.

I’m not saying I expect armed revolution or a change in our form of government. I am saying that the political status quo that has prevailed in America for the last few decades is disintegrating rapidly. I suspect the next two or three years will be disorienting for most of us.

Assuming Barack Obama wins the election — it’s looking good, folks, but it ain’t inevitable — I don’t expect a replay of the Clinton years, in which a huge right-wing juggernaut worked relentlessly to destroy the Democratic administration.

Oh, they will try. I fully expect that within two weeks of an Obama inauguration, Tony Blankley will be all over cable television explaining ever so unctuously that the Obama administration has already failed. Hell, he might not even wait until Obama is inaugurated before declaring the Obama administration has already failed.

But Blankley is complaining that other “conservatives” are abandoning the cause, leaving him to fight on alone. His old comrades in arms, like George Will, Peggy Noonan and David Brooks have left the field of battle, he thinks.

In an Obama administration, George Will will still be an insufferable prick, Peggy Noonan will still mistake her psychological projections for insight, and David Brooks will still be an idiot. Some things will not change. What will change, I believe, is that the Right’s ability to dominate the national conversation and overwrite real issues with its phantasmagorical agenda will be much diminished. This will happen not because they’ve changed, but because the political climate of America will have changed.

The powerful Rabid Right is becoming old and shabby and, like, so last decade.

Please let me be clear that I do not expect to wake up on January 21 living in political utopia. I’m a Buddhist, remember; all phenomena are dukkha. And as I said, there will be massive disorientation while the Powers That Be figure out the new rules — indeed, until they begin to notice there are new rules. And there will be disorientation across the political spectrum, not just on the Right. It will take some time yet before Democrats in Congress stop cringing in fear of the vast right-wing conspiracy.

We see disorientation already in the way the McCain campaign evokes a “real” America that looks like the America they thought was out there somewhere, but which they are finding strangely elusive. Rosa Brooks writes,

The GOP code isn’t hard to crack: There’s the America that might vote for Obama (a suspect America populated by people with liberal notions, big-city ways and, no doubt, dark skin), and then there’s the “real” America, where people live in small towns, believe in God and country, and are … well … white. … But with each passing year, the “real” America of GOP mythmaking bears less and less resemblance to the America most Americans live in.

At the Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove writes that “the tax argument still works.” He lays out the arguments that he thinks McCain might still employ to pull off a win. Remarkably, these are the same arguments McCain has been employing and which are not working.

Meanwhile, Karl’s masterpiece, his personal Frankenstein monster, is a pariah even in his own party. People still listen to Karl … why, exactly?

The GOP is losing because they are marketing to a demographic that doesn’t exist — America circa 1980-2004. The political shift began with Katrina. It is being accelerated by the financial crisis. We are rushing toward something that is very different from where we have been. My hope is that Barack Obama is the leader he seems to be, and will steer us into a soft landing.

See also: Joe Klein, “Why Barack Obama Is Winning.”

Why Am I Not Surprised

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Today the seething aggregate of hate known as “Michelle Malkin” is raging about “Operation Joe the Plumber.”

My syndicated column today reports on Team Obama and the Obamedia’s mission to tear down Joe the Plumber. Yes, we are in the midst of a new contagion: Joe The Plumber Derangement Syndrome. JTPDS.

In truth, not Team Obama but the mainstream news media began to “background” Joe the Plumber as soon as John McCain made him his tax policy poster boy. And it turns out he’s not a plumber, his name isn’t Joe, he owes taxes on his property. Most of the stories I’ve seen about “Joe” have been mild in tone, however. Public interest stuff to satisfy the curious.

Frankly, he doesn’t interest me that much except as an example of a pig-headed conservative who continues to vote against his own economic interests. We’ve seen his type before. It’s called “dumb.” But let’s go on …

Does anyone else remember the crusade led by Little Lulu against the parents of Graeme Frost? Thanks in part to Lulu, the Frosts got death threats.

Another of Lulu’s targets, Denise Denton, committed suicide a few weeks after Michelle published Denton’s work address on her blog, along with the accusation that Denton aided sedition. To be fair (some of us try to be fair) Denton had a number of other crises in her life at the time, but being the target of a hate swarm could not have helped. Lulu, of course, refused to acknowledge even a peripheral responsibility for Denton’s death.

I could spend the morning digging up more examples of Malkin’s reckless cruelty toward ordinary people who have done something to displease Miss Perpetual Indignity. But you get the picture.

Obama and the Art of Wu Wei

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I keep hearing pundits say that McCain won the three debates “on points” but that Obama won “on style.” I think these guys were watching a different sports event from the one I watched.

The “on points” pundits were scoring a boxing match. McCain was more aggressive. He landed punches. He got in zingers. Last night Pat Buchanan compared Obama to a boxer in the late rounds who was sitting on a lead (doesn’t that mean he was ahead “on points”?) and was dancing around to avoid being knocked out while he ran out the clock.

What I watched was more like kung fu. In the martial arts, aggression for the sake of aggression is more likely to work against you than with you. The master knows how to use his opponent’s energy against him. He lets the more unskilled fighter beat himself.

Martial arts masters employ the principle of wu wei — the action of non-action. This sounds like passivity — it often looks like passivity — but it is the art of channeling the flow of energy around you to accomplish a task or defeat an opponent. Put another way, it is the art of letting action act itself, or letting movement move itself, while you go with the flow.

It’s also the art of knowing when not to act. If your opponent is beating himself up, don’t get in his way.

Those who think Barack Obama should have been more aggressive in his debates with McCain are, IMO, entirely wrong. If Obama had been more aggressive, he risked seeming angry or mean and giving McCain sympathy points. Instead, Obama masterfully let McCain beat himself and didn’t get in the way.

McCain, IMO, lost the debate when he got stuck in whiny, petulant mode and wouldn’t let go of statements by Congressman John Lewis — which were not spelled out in the debate, and I doubt most viewers had any idea what McCain was talking about — and Bill Ayers. Obama actually gave McCain several opportunities to drop the subject, and McCain would not. For that entire sequence McCain was, in effect, punching himself in the face, while Obama stood aside and let him do it.

This was skillful. It also took discipline — a lesser debater would have interrupted McCain to defend himself more forcefully, and I’m sure that’s what Pat Buchanan et al. thought Obama was supposed to do. But Buchanan and McCain are old-style Irish pugilists who stand straight up and punch away. Obama was in crouching tiger, hidden dragon mode.

______

I was struck by the pundits’ reactions to the abortion section of the debate. Granted, I was mostly watching MSNBC — sometimes flipping over to CNN — and I realize reactions may have been different elsewhere. But pundits I saw were shaking their heads over this part of McCain’s argument:

MCCAIN: Just again, the example of the eloquence of Senator Obama. He’s health for the mother. You know, that’s been stretched by the pro-abortion movement in America to mean almost anything.

That’s the extreme pro-abortion position, quote, “health.” But, look, Cindy and I are adoptive parents. We know what a treasure and joy it is to have an adopted child in our lives. We’ll do everything we can to improve adoption in this country.

McCain spoke of women’s health with a sneer on his face. He made “air quotation marks” around the word “health,” as if the mother’s health concerns were some kind of joke. He can’t stop whining about what John Lewis said about him, but women facing health complications in their pregnancies are just supposed to suck it up.

I realize the “criminalize abortion” movement routinely argues that “health of the mother” can mean a bad hair day, but in the real world pregnancies — including planned and wanted pregnancies — don’t always go well. I think most adults understand that. And most of the post-debate commentary I saw criticized McCain for the “health” comment.

Four years ago, in the Kerry-Bush debates, Bush had a simple message on abortion — he was against it. Poor Kerry had to put together more than two sentences to explain his position — that he opposed it personally but didn’t intend to impose his views on others. The post-debate commenters — including Andrea Mitchell, as I recall — said of this that Kerry doesn’t know how to talk about abortion. (What the hell was he supposed to say? “I’m for it”?)

But now it’s the Republican who doesn’t know how to talk about abortion. Times, I believe, have changed.

And I’m sure you enjoyed this bit —

MCCAIN: I would consider anyone in their qualifications. I do not believe that someone who has supported Roe v. Wade that would be part of those qualifications. But I certainly would not impose any litmus test

Um, dude? You just imposed a litmus test.

Teh Stupid, It Runs Our Country

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In “Making America Stupid,” Tom Friedman writes of the GOP’s “Drill Baby Drill” mantra:

Why would Republicans, the party of business, want to focus our country on breathing life into a 19th-century technology — fossil fuels — rather than giving birth to a 21st-century technology — renewable energy? As I have argued before, it reminds me of someone who, on the eve of the I.T. revolution — on the eve of PCs and the Internet — is pounding the table for America to make more I.B.M. typewriters and carbon paper. “Typewriters, baby, typewriters.”

He goes on to say that McCain is running on nothing but cultural wedge issues to hide the fact that he has no more clue what to do about the economy than George W. Bush did.

Steve Benen says Friedman’s new membership in the “enough” club is significant, because Friedman is a major conventional-wisdom shaper.

And if you want to read a defense of McCain that’s bleeping hilarious, go here. Begin with the sentence. “Let us look at what oil is. It replaced whaling in provided fuel for lamps. This saved the whale,” and keep reading. If this guy were a satirist he’d be brilliant. Unfortunately, he isn’t.

Kevin Drum asks why McCain is running such a sleazy campaign.

So why is McCain doing this? Obvious answer #1: he’s just running a standard Republican campaign. Nobody should really be surprised by this. Obvious answer #2: This is hardly the first time McCain has sold his soul. He’ll regret it later, of course, but this is just who he is, despite the layers of maverickiness he’s managed to cover himself in over the years.

Kevin also suggests McCain genuinely believes Obama would be a bad president, and thus McCain feels morally justified in doing whatever it takes to stop him. I can think of one other possibility, which is that McCain is too mentally impaired to make his own decisions, and Karl Rove or a clone therof is actually running the campaign behind the scenes.

I don’t know what went down on the Sunday bobblehead shows, but some parts of America’s news media seem to be doing some real journalism for a change. This is the kind of reporting they should have done when Bush was running in 2000, and didn’t.

New York Times: “Once Elected, Palin Hired Friends and Lashed Foes”

Washington Post: “As Mayor of Wasilla, Palin Cut Own Duties, Left Trail of Bad Blood”

MSNBC: “Palin’s ‘Bridge to Nowhere’ Line Returns”

Boston Globe: “As governor and mayor, Palin hired friends for public posts”

San Francisco Chronicle: “Campaign check: Lies and half-truths outed.” This article analyzes six campaign commercials and finds them deceptive. Five of the six are McCain’s ads. It also found three statements made by McCain and Palin in speeches or interviews that were, um, wrong. One other item it found deceptive was an anti-Palin email, but there’s no evidence it originated with the Obama campaign. So — 8 McCain deceptions, 1 Obama deception, 1 source unknown deception.

Now, on to serious issues — a number of rightie bloggers are complaining that a “lib” photographer deliberately made McCain look sinister for a photo used on the cover of The Atlantic. Except I’ve got the bleeping issue of the Atlanic right in front of me, and there’s nothing the least bit sinister about the photo. If anything, McCain looks slightly noble and wise, if way wrinkled, in the photo. Apparently the photographer had some fun with “outtakes” — not the photo actually used — and bragged about it on a personal blog. Some rightie bloggers have twisted this into a claim that The Atlantic used one of the “sinister” photos on the cover, which one look at the cover reveals is not true.

This is not a press bias issue; it’s a personal expression issue. Once again, we see that righties hate freedom of expression, and if they had their way they’d ban any speech with which they don’t agree. And they’d do it in the name of “liberty.”