In a follow up to my Ryan Sorba post of yesterday, I see that both Erik over at his True/Slant digs and Megan McArdle have taken roughly the same approach to the CPAC audience’s reaction to Sorba. Megan commented,

To me, the news story was this: Sorba got booed off the stage. At CPAC. This seems like great news. So why focus on the sad truth that yes, there are still homophobes out there? Maybe this is just heterosexual privilege, but this seems like a genuinely great moment in gay rights–and the gay conservatives and libertarians who sent met that clip seemed to take it as such.

And Erik noted,

That’s pretty astonishing if you ask me. While Andrew and others lament how awful conservatives have gotten lately, I see quite the opposite. Never before in the history of this country have gays and lesbians received such support from conservatives – and that support is growing at a pretty incredible pace.

Many of the commenters to the post have expressed their skepticism about how much this incident ought to count as a marker of change within American conservatism writ large. I think that skepticism is well founded and in light of Erik and Megan’s comments I would wend more closely towards that skepticism than describing Sorba speaking and getting booed off stage as “astonishing” or “a genuinely great moment in gay rights”. Especially insofar as that skepticism keeps us real about what kind of challenge stands in front of us and keeps us working hard .

It is, at best, a marker of what could perhaps best be described as the slow shifting in a general direction. That general direction is towards a greater acceptance of gay rights within conservative discourse, but the reaction to Sorba isn’t a slam dunk or a touchdown in terms of that movement such that I would call it describe it as Erik and Megan do.

[Read more →]

“I now put the chances of a substantial health care bill passing at 75%, and the chances of the Democrats losing the house in 2010 at about 66%.” ~ Megan McArdle

Megan’s second estimate is absurd.  The 75% chance of health care legislation passing seems about right.  (By what statistical analysis?  Why – my gut of course!)  But really, does Megan honestly think that the Democrats will lose the House in 2010?  She predicts this will happen at a staggering 66% – based on what exactly?

I think that ramming through the bill on a party line vote makes it very likely that the Democrats will lose the house in 2010; the American public doesn’t like uniparty votes, especially on something this controversial.  A lot of liberals have gotten angry at me for saying this, but it’s not a normative statement; it’s an observation.  IF the Republicans had been willing to push forward on a controversial bill with no Democratic cover, we’d have private social security accounts right now.  But they weren’t, for a reason.

Again, sheer nonsense.  I’m the first to say the current proposals are no good (without major changes), but A) those changes might still happen, and B) the effects of any reform won’t even take place by 2010, at least not in any meaningful way.  So the public backlash over any ill effects won’t occur until at least 2012, and the public is so overwhelmingly anti-GOP right now that I can’t imagine a sudden anti-Democratic backlash because they “rammed it through” without bipartisan consensus. [Read more →]

There seems to be quite the fooferaw over responding to the Tiller murder developing between several bloggers that I respect: Publius and Hilzoy at ObsidianWings, and Megan McArdle.  A quick summary: 

Agreeing with an Ezra Klein post in essence calling (correctly) the murder an act of political terrorism, Hilzoy wrote that Congress should respond to the murder by repealing most restrictions on late-term dilation and extraction (ie, repeal the Partial-Birth Abortion Act), require training in late-term abortion techniques for OB-GYN certification, and require that any hospital provide a woman with the opportunity to have a late-term abortion under certain circumstances.  The reason this should be done, according to Hilzoy, is to make sure that this act of terrorism not only doesn’t pay, but actually hurts the cause.

Megan, who describes herself as pro-choice (although that term is susceptible to multiple meanings), responded by saying that: (1) if you believe abortion is murder, then the murder of Tiller “makes total sense”; and (2) Hilzoy’s proposed response is “doubling down” on the very policies that drove the murderer to terrorism – in essence, it repeats the mistakes the US made in response to 9/11. 

In follow-up, Publius and Hilzoy (and again in response to another Megan response) accusing Megan of justifying the murder, and also saying that they are not proposing “doubling-down” in the face of terrorism, but instead only want to reinforce a settled constitutional right to an abortion.  They further argue that therefore what they are proposing is entirely distinct from our response to terrorism.  Finally, Megan has two particularly excellent final contributions here and here.

Unfortunately, I think Publius and Hilzoy are way off the mark on this.  First, Megan did not state that she thought the murder was justified if you accept the premise that abortion=murder – only that she could understand the impulse towards thinking that the ends justified the means in such a circumstance.  She further argued that the fact that such an impulse is understandable – though I emphasize NOT justifiable – is a sign of a deep political failure in our abortion debate. 

More importantly, though, what Hilzoy and Publius advocate misunderstands the nature of what they are proposing, the central holdings in Roe and Casey, and just how similar their proposed response appears to the very responses they (correctly, in my view) criticize with respect to terrorism. 

Let’s be clear – Hilzoy is not proposing merely increasing security for late-term abortion providers, a response that is not only understandable, but also entirely correct.  Instead, she is proposing the removal of those restrictions on late-term abortion that do exist, combined with an outright mandate that such abortions be provided or available from just about any OB-GYN practitioner.  This is the equivalent of responding to 9/11 by quadrupling our presence in Saudi Arabia.   Worse, late-term abortion – as opposed to earlier-term abortions – is something that an overwhelming majority of Americans oppose, not just ardent movement pro-lifers, on the grounds that a majority of Americans view late-term fetuses as something approaching fully human.  In making such procedures even more legal than they already are, Hilzoy’s proposed response risks “radicalizing” ever-more members of this opposition.

Nor is Hilzoy’s proposed response justified on the grounds that it is merely reinforcing a settled right, an argument that misunderstands the nature of the opposition to late-term abortion.  Although both Hilzoy and Publius claim to understand that the difference between pro-lifers and pro-choicers is over what constitutes “life,” they both – though especially Publius – seem to suggest that the debate over abortion cannot be resolved without removing the “right to privacy” from our Constitutional jurisprudence.  While there are certainly many in the pro-life movement who have a problem with the “right to privacy” parts of Roe, this is not remotely why the issue of abortion continues to be so hotly contested.  One could absolutely support, or at least accept without lasting bitterness, the idea of a right to privacy while still opposing abortion (and definitely while still opposing late-term abortion).  So far as I know, there isn’t a passionate and large movement dedicated to closing Trojan factories due to their opposition to Griswold (I’m aware there are some who probably are passionate about doing so, but we’re talking about a much smaller group than those who are passionate about shutting down abortion clinics).  Conversely, I don’t see any pro-choicers passionately claiming that the right to privacy extends to a mother’s right to kill her own children.

No, at root, the trouble with Roe and its progeny has always been that it drew an arbitrary line as to where personhood begins – a line that Justice Blackmun himself admitted was necessarily arbitrary.  The drawing of such a line has more in common with the Dred Scott decision than pro-choicers are willing to admit in the sense that it usurped a locality’s authority to define who was and was not a “person” for purposes of that locality.  That’s not to say that I think Roe is in the same ballpark as Dred Scott in terms of the egregiousness of its flaws, only that the problems caused by those flaws have a similar source – it takes a special kind of blindness to reality to define someone as not a “person” simply because of their race compared to the understandable difficulties in figuring out when a fetus becomes a human. 

Still, that’s why Roe continues to engender such passion, and sadly indefensible violence as well – it removed a decision historically and properly the role of the legislature and/or localities, and turned it into a settled question of constitutional law despite acknowledging that the Constitution provides little guidance as to how to define a “person,” and absolutely no guidance on how to define “life.”   In the process, the Court removed what has always been a political question almost entirely from the political process short of a Constitutional amendment.  I’ve long argued (and apparently at the time of Roe, now-Justice Ginsburg would have agreed) that Roe’s compromise (particularly as revised by Casey) would have become the law of the land in almost all states in relatively short order through ordinary democratic processes.  Had this happened, I think opposition to abortion would be no more violent than, say, the opposition of many Catholic groups to the death penalty, where there are clearly accessible political processes to overturn these decisions. 

But even with all of that aside, Hilzoy and Publius ignore that the “right to privacy” has never been held to extend to provide absolute protection against restrictions on late-term abortions.  Indeed,  the very act that Hilzoy wishes to largely repeal, the Partial-Birth Abortion Act, has been specifically upheld as constitutional by the Supreme Court.    Thus, what Hilzoy is proposing is not merely the protection of a clearly established Constitutional right as interpreted by the Supreme Court – instead, it is the expansion of the right to an abortion beyond the already-controversial parameters of Roe and Casey.  Furthermore, in mandating training in late-term abortion for certification as an OB-GYN and mandating provision of late-term abortion by all hospitals, Hilzoy’s proposal goes to another level entirely – it holds the right to an abortion to be more important than a doctor’s right to act in accordance with her own ethics.  Indeed, to the extent that doctor might view the late-term fetus as essentially human, it would even go so far as to force that doctor to violate their Hippocratic Oath. 

If Hilzoy and Publius think that this is still good policy in its own right, fine – that is their honestly held opinion.  Where they go off the reservation, however, is in suggesting that these policy proposals are an appropriate response to terrorism.

Megan McArdle  completely misses the point of “fake news”, or at least she’s missed the point of the Daily Show, which along with the fake punditry of Stephen Colbert is just about the best fake news out there.  Read this passage from her critique of Jon Stewart’s interview with Jim Cramer and just replace any reference to Stewart or the Daily Show with “The Onion” to see how absurd this is:

Jon Stewart also shapes peoples’ decisions.  Video is a medium with powerful claims to reality–people tend to think that if they saw it, it must be true.  This makes it uniquely good at manipulating its audience with skillful editing.  I’m very sympathetic to Stewart’s deep critique of financial shows, but I don’t think the way to go about it was to string together a bunch of very misleading clips.  Nor to imply that Santelli, who has been vocally against all bailouts from the beginning, was merely frothing on the forclosure program because ordinary taxpayers were finally getting a taste of federal largesse.  But Stewart carefully claims he’s just an entertainer, so he has no obligation to hew to journalistic standards on things like quoting out of context.

Deep critique?  “Satire” is more like it.  Stewart doesn’t do deep critiques.  That’s why he uses cheap shots and lots of video editing.  He’s making a satirical point in a twenty minute tv spot on a late night cable comedy channel.  He doesn’t have time for deep critiques.  When you want to make a point, and you want to be funny, you don’t have much you can accomplish in the way of depth.  Poignancy must be done via wit, not “deep critique.”

This last line from Megan’s post is baffling.  Maybe somebody could help explain it to me:

Financial journalism isn’t, as Stewart argues to Cramer over and over, entertainment.  So how come Stewart acted as if it was?

I just fail utterly to see what she means by this.  Stewart used his pedestal as an entertainer and social critic – not journalist mind you – to take a swing at financial reporting and the lack of integrity of financial journalists, anchors, and the shows in general.  He was making a very specific point: these shows should be reporting.  Not entertaining. The Daily Show exists to entertain.  It doesn’t report because it is fake news.  Any reporting it does is by its very nature, fake.  It does do satire, which is really the entire point of fake news to begin with.  And satire is entertainment, sure, but it’s also a very effective critical medium.

[Read more →]