Apr 30

Obama’s awkward bragging campaign

Geopolitics, Media, Politics, Society No Comments »

He has used other bluffs to their fullest extent. Now the president and his team are playing his  ’killed Osama bin Laden’ card for all it’s worth. Is it a gamble?

I think so. For many reasons. But first, let me just say I’m very uncomfortable with the president of the United States ‘gloating‘ over this or any other killing, even though this one took out a deadly public enemy who eluded allied forces for about a decade.

With the May 1 anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s killing upon us, the White House is going to great lengths to remind everyone all about it. For starters, there’s Joe Biden’s new stock phrase: “Bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is alive.” Then there’s the ad suggesting that Mitt Romney wouldn’t have had the guts to approve the raid. And it culminates with an interview of President Obama by NBC’s Brian Williams that airs next week from the White House Situation Room, notes Politico. That’s where the now-iconic photo was taken of top officials watching the raid.

“Few presidents have talked about the killing of an individual enemy in such an expansive way,” says the New York Times in a story today about the strategy. It could be a risky one.

It started with a weird and, I think, unpresidential ‘victory lap’ a year ago, as Saturday Night Live captured in a ripe parody. Lately, it’s been ramping up as a campaign boast, and that gets us up to speed, sort of. As much as I don’t want us to be ‘at speed’ with this one.

Senior Obama campaign adviser Robert Gibbs defended the campaign’s use of the event in a recent Web video and in a speech from Vice President Joe Biden. Meanwhile, senior Romney adviser Ed Gillespie characterized the political steps surrounding the death as a “bridge too far.”

Which is the exact term I used when Obama took the already controversial ‘individual mandate’ in his healthcare law (with government requiring citizens to purchase something) to a new level with the HHS mandate (with government requiring citizens to purchase something that violates their conscience).

But I digress…

Team Obama released a video on Friday, partially narrated by former President Bill Clinton, that praised the president’s decision to order the killing of the al Qaeda chief one year from Tuesday and questioned whether Romney would have made the same choice. Biden similarly questioned the former Massachusetts governor in a campaign-style speech on Thursday.

When I first saw it, I found it hard to take seriously or even hard to believe that the president’s team thought it worthy of presidential politics. What would Mitt do? Seriously? You are campaigning on that?

Okay, back to the principled thinking here.

Gillespie, a former aide to former President George W. Bush and former chairman of the Republican National Committee, said utilizing the raid for political purposes is one of the reasons Obama has “become one of the most divisive presidents in American history.”

“He took something that was a unifying event for all Americans, and he’s managed to turn it into a divisive, partisan political attack,” Gillespie said in a separate interview on the same NBC program. “I think most Americans will see it as a sign of a desperate campaign.”

The campaign video received criticism from Republicans, including from 2008 Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain. On Friday, he called the minute-long spot “a cheap political attack ad.”

Nonetheless…

Biden teed off what will likely remain a talking point from Team Obama through the election in a Thursday address that previewed a potential 2012 slogan.

“If you are looking for a bumper sticker to sum up how President Obama has handled what we inherited, it’s pretty simple: Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive,” Biden said during a speech at New York University, lines Gibbs echoed on Sunday.

The president will pick up the message with what the campaign has billed as the president’s re-election kick-off on Saturday.

So it appears we’ll hear plenty about who and what Obama has killed and allowed to live. An inauspicious strategy, but an unsurprising one, for a campaign used to running on bumper sticker slogans.

UPDATE: Arianna Huffington calls the president’s ‘bin Laden ad’ despicable.

UPDATE II: SEALs slam Obama for using them in election campaign.

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Apr 29

Liberals sometimes want bishops to speak up

Church, Culture, Law, Politics, Society No Comments »

Until they don’t. Depends on the issue.

But it’s interesting to juxtapose reactions to the US bishops speaking out on different issues.

Like former Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s flip-flopping (popular term in politics) from wanting the bishops to stay out of politics when it comes to matters of faith and morals and Catholic politicians, to wanting the bishops to speak from the pulpit actively engaging Catholics to support a measure she backed and felt they should, too. That time, it was immigration reform.

But a big talking point for liberal Catholic Democrats in Congress who disagree with Church teaching and vote for measures according to their own lights, is the primacy of conscience.

Which the Vatican took up as the focus of a conference on the whole issue of conscience, after it got batted about with no small amount of confusion.

So because these legislators have so emphatically insisted on the preeminent primacy of conscience, I’m wondering why the the legislation authored by Congressman Jeff Fortenberry, Respect for Rights of Conscience Act failed in the Senate as the Blunt-Fortenberry bill, and why it’s not getting more support in the House.

“We have come together to say it’s time to act to protect Americans’ most basic rights – our religious freedom and rights of conscience,” Fortenberry said. “I am very pleased to stand with House and Senate colleagues of both parties to call for swift action on this bill.” 

Yes, it’s bipartisan. It’s about the fundamental human right to conscience protection. But it’s received no primacy of attention, or any at all, from those liberal Catholic politicians and precious little from moderates and even conservatives. Because it’s political kryptonite for ambitious senators and congressmen.

In early March, Cong. Fortenberry told me he had 220 co-sponsors and he was hopeful more members of Congress would sign on since the recently announced HHS mandate posed unprecedented federal threats to conscience rights and religious liberty. Last week, Cong. Fortenberry told me he has 224 co-sponsors. That’s shameful, for a lot of people.

The bishops are speaking out alright, more unified than they’ve ever been before. This is their Magna Carta.

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Apr 26

Meanwhile, Ron Paul

Abortion, Culture, Law, Politics, Society 1 Comment »

He shouldn’t be an ‘also ran’ or even an afterthought. And he’s not being taken as one, at least by those who realize the importance and strength of the candidate’s following.

I’ve been saying for a while now that whoever wins the GOP nomination had better take Ron Paul and his followers, more like a movement, seriously. I’m staring to hear news pundits say something similar. Like the political analyst on one of the networks who noted “Ron Paul’s campaign is about $2 million in the black. And he’ll probably have a role in the convention on the platform.” Good for him. He deserves it.

All the GOP contenders should have a voice in hammering out the platform and policies on the issues, social and fiscal, domestic and foreign.

But Ron Paul is that sure and steady candidate still actively campaigning in order to keep his message in the forum. And it’s being heard.

If forcing his philosophy into the mainstream is the benchmark, Paul can claim victory. Listening to his rivals in the Republican debates demand that the Fed be audited and the Departments of Energy and Education be shuttered, it’s clear that many of Paul’s positions, once considered extreme, are now Republican talking points. Paul’s influence outweighs his low poll rankings and back-of-the-pack primary returns.

“Our time has come,” says Paul, tempering the display of optimism. “It’s still going to be a knock-down, dragged-out fight.”

Paul leaves behind a small army of brawlers itching to take up the battle in his name. This election year, at least 65 of his supporters are campaigning for local, state, or national office in 23 states. They join more than a dozen Paul acolytes who won elections in 2010…

Usually, “when a candidate drops out, the followers go too,” says Aaron Libby, a 29-year-old Maine blueberry farmer and Paul die-hard who was elected to the state legislature in 2010. “They were following a candidate; we are following a movement.”

And he keeps going, consistent in his views and positively persistent in his determination to make a difference not just in politics, but mainly in government.

“He has very fresh ideas and I think it’s easier, as you build your own philosophy, to accept those things,” Gonzalez said. “I can only speak for myself and my chapter members. We really like the fact that Ron Paul is just a really down to earth and honest man. That is so rare in politics.”

I interviewed Dr. Paul recently and appreciated his frank and sincere views on the unquestionable beginning of human life at conception, and the human rights of each life. That noble simplicity has, or should have, a role in his party’s future.

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Apr 25

Romney’s election night launch

Politics, Society No Comments »

It had the air of a new day and new beginning. Even critics in media punditry noticed that.

Or the ones who covered Tuesday’s five state elections and Gov. Mitt Romney’s remarks at the end of the day.

On a symbolic night for his campaign, Mitt Romney returned to New Hampshire to thank his supporters for his all but certain claim on the Republican nomination and to spell out the economic themes that will underpin his fall battle with President Obama.

Four years ago, Obama “dazzled us” with sweeping promises of “hope and change,” Romney said. “But after we came down to earth, after all the celebration and parades, what do we have to show for three and a half years of President Obama?

“Is it easier to make ends meet?” he said, in a riff on presidential candidate Ronald Reagan’s famous query in 1980, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?”

“Is it easier to sell your home or buy a new one?” he asked, as the sign-waving crowd shouted, “No!” to each consecutive question. “Have you saved what you needed for retirement? Are you making more at your job? Do you have a better chance to get a better job? Do you pay less at the pump?”

Romney capped off by suggesting, “If the answer were ‘yes’ to those questions, then President Obama would be running for re-election based on his record, and rightly so. But because he has failed, he will run a campaign of diversions and distractions and distortions.

“That kind of campaign may have worked at another place and at a different time, but not here and not now,” he said, and borrowing from a Clinton-era slogan, added, “It’s still about the economy, and we’re not stupid.”

It’s time to elevate the political conversation, and the claims to do so for the past four years have been hollow. Lately, the president has campaigned on the politics of class warfare and gender warfare, and it is tiresome.

News roundtables on Tuesday echoed the message that the choice has just been made clear.

Romney also coopted Obama’s “fairness” theme, which the president has invoked to describe the gulf between an over-taxed middle class and under-taxed elite. Romney suggested that fairness could be achieved any number of ways in society under conservative proposals.

“We will stop the unfairness of urban children being denied access to the good schools of their choice,” he said. “… We will stop the unfairness of requiring union workers to contribute to politicians not of their choosing. We will stop the unfairness of government workers getting better pay and benefits than the very taxpayers they serve. And we will stop the unfairness of one generation passing larger and larger debts onto the next.

“…In the America I see, character and choices matter. And education, hard work, and living within our means are valued and rewarded. And poverty will be defeated, not with a government check, but with respect and achievement that’s taught by parents, learned in school, and practiced in the workplace.”

The chattering classes choosing to dwell on a gaffe here or there by any candidate at this point seems small minded. We have major, course-changing, life-altering paths set before us and we have to decide which to take, which worldview best represents leadership of and service to the common good. Anyone who says there’s little or no difference between Gov. Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama is not serious or just not intellectually honest.

Sometimes, I hate politics. I’d rather talk about morals and principles and advancing true human rights, according to the founding documents of the United States and the Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations, before both became so politically hijacked. But politicians use the language and provide the vehicle so we must engage.

Some analyst on television the day after Romney’s primary victories and pivotal speech said approvingly that his speech soared, without touching on things like marriage issues and contraception. And I thought ‘why the heck are you even saying that? Who is making contraception an issue for government, anyway?’

Note to strategists and partisan ‘pundits’ combox trolls: The ‘flip-flopper’ charge against different GOP candidates and especially Gingrich and Romney just don’t work when the candidate flipped one way, which was a conversion to a new way of seeing an issue. If only President Obama would ‘flip’ on the sanctity of life and religious libery issues.

If Gov. Romney is to be his party’s nominee, the time to rally ’round has come, as it did for Democrats in ’08 when Obama pulled away from Hillary Clinton.

Jordan Sekulow is only one of many analysts making the case for social conservatives to embrace Mitt Romney.

With the tremendous differences between the Obama platform and Romney platform, what we need now is clarity.

And the party to have his back.

I hope this year’s election going forward will be more authentic, about the real issues that need immediate attention and the real role and limits of government. We’ll do our part here to cover that.

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Apr 22

On earth day

Culture, Geopolitics, Media, Society No Comments »

At its core, stewardship of the environment is an important ideal. At its extremes, it has become an anti-human ideology.

Dr. Robert Zubrin explains in detail with extensive references in his book Merchants of Despair. From the forward:

Antihumanism is not environmentalism, though it sometimes masquerades as such. Environmentalism, properly conceived, is an effort to apply practical solutions to real environmental problems, such as air and water pollution, for the purpose of making the world a better place for all humans to thrive in. Antihumanism, in contrast, rejects the goal of advancing the cause of mankind. Rather, it uses instances of inadvertent human damage to the environment as points of agitation to promote its fundamental thesis that human beings are pathogens whose activities need to be suppressed in order to protect a fixed ecological order with interests that stand above those of humanity.

It’s that inverted order of things that’s causing controversy in the scientific and academic community. And in the culture. And Zubrin challenges it in his ideological throwdown.

Antihumanism has recently enormously expanded its influence by raising hysteria about global warming. This phenomenon, by lengthening the growing season and increasing rainfall and the availability of atmospheric carbon dioxide for photosynthesis, has actually significantly enhanced the abundance of nature, to the benefit of both agriculture and the wild biosphere alike.

 What?

Nevertheless, according to antihumanism, punitive measures, especially harmful to the world’s poor, are required to suppress mankind’s activity and economic growth in order to deal with this putative threat.

However…

That antihumanism should propose such global oppression as a response to an improvement in the Earth’s climate should not be surprising, since…similar vicious antihuman solutions to fictitious problems have been repeatedly advocated and implemented by antihumanism’s followers for two centuries–that is, since long before global warming was an issue at all.

And Zubrin says it has a brutal history. Which continues to play out with a lot of social compliance these days under the guise of good and noble causes.

Jarring. Stewardship of the environment is a good and noble cause. However, he warns,

some of today’s most fashionable political and social ideas are essentially replays of earlier ideological fads that have been continually used over the last two centuries to motivate and justify oppression, tyranny, and genocide.

And this nuclear engineer and contributor to The New Atlantis pulls together all these ideas and misdeeds and morphed sensibilities into a book that intends to stop or slow history from repeating itself, and eliminating the humans from the story.

While disputes about overpopulation, racial equality, pesticides, resource limites, nuclear power, biotechnology, and global warming may appear to be about different subjects, they are ultimately but different faces of the same conflict: a fundamental debate over the worth of humankind.

It is a debate we need to win.

And that’s just in the preface.

I interviewed Dr. Zubrin last week before I even knew we were headed into Earth Day weekend (it didn’t get a lot of press this year, with all the political scandals and controversies brewing). A scientist who was listening on radio wrote me a grateful, detailed email commenting on the excesses Zubrin has long written about and the need to dispute false claims. A women who identified herself as ‘a radical environmentalist who happens to be pro-life’ also wrote me, asking for a clear treatment of the issues.

We clearly need to have this discussion. Dr. Zubrin is coming back to continue the conversation. His book has 49 pages of footnotes, and interesting chapters on population control and “pseudo-science.” I’m still wading through it.

Meanwhile, the Population Research Institute has been airing some provocative work  on the myth of overpopulation. 

And this time last year…

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Apr 21

Chuck Colson’s legacy

Culture, Media, Politics, Society No Comments »

In the first hours after news broke that Chuck Colson passed away Saturday, headlines referred to him in either neutral or slightly derogatory tones with reference to the Watergate era. Most missed his most important role in Christian ministry. As if a decades-long witness to the grace of conversion was a mere footnote to the fall that preceded it.

Here’s a sanctimonous snip from nearly four decades ago that endured in much of big media.

Before Colson went to prison he became a born-again Christian, but critics said his post-scandal redemption was a ploy to get his sentence reduced. The Boston Globe wrote in 1973, “If Mr. Colson can repent of his sins, there just has to be hope for everyone.”

Indeed there is. Rich Lowry shed light recently.

Colson, 80, is a giant of our time. He is a reminder of the true meaning of redemption, a concept that has been debased in our Tilt-a-Whirl media culture that can’t distinguish between notoriety and fame. In contemporary America, redemption begins sometime between the first check-in into rehab and the first cable-TV interview, and reaches completion when everyone gets distracted by someone else’s attention-grabbing disgrace.

Colson’s personal redemption was wrenchingly sincere, a shattering experience that brought him through that great narrative arc of conversion: worldly success, crushing humiliation, and then victory in terms he never would have imagined when he was at the pinnacle of power by the side of the leader of the free world….

As the furor over Watergate grew, he visited a friend one night, a successful businessman who had converted to Christianity. The friend read a passage from C. S. Lewis: “Pride always means enmity — it is enmity. And not only enmity between man and man, but enmity to God.” Later, Colson sat in his car outside the house weeping alone in the darkness, not tears of sadness nor of joy, but “of relief.”

When he realized that the exigencies of his legal defense were inconsistent with the forthrightness entailed by his new faith, he pleaded guilty and became Prisoner 23226 at Maxwell Federal Prison Camp in Alabama, stripped of “power, prestige, freedom, even my identity.” Critics doubted and mocked Colson’s conversion. His Nixon administration adversary, former Attorney General John Mitchell, jibed that if Colson were a Christian, “I’ll take my chances with the lions.”

Colson was forced, as he told James Rosen of Fox News a few years ago, to see “the world through the eyes of people who were disadvantaged and marginalized and rejected, the outcasts in society, the untouchables in American life.” Although in prison less than a year, he never quite left. He started his group, Prison Fellowship, which is now active in most American prisons, conducting Bible-study groups, sponsoring pen pals, and providing gifts to the children of inmates…

What seemed to be Chuck Colson’s fall from grace in the mid-1970s was really the opposite. It was the first step on an ascension to true courage and service. His life is a testament to how redemption, so often debased and abused in a 24/7 news cycle obsessed with celebrity and scandal, can be astonishingly powerful and real.

Many media can’t grasp that. Or won’t. Especially in an election year in which the Christian witness in the public square, and the constitutional right to hold it, figures so prominently.

May he, finally, rest in peace.

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Apr 16

‘Working mothers’ is a redundant term

Media, Politics, Society No Comments »

I remember being very impressed many years ago hearing a man of celebrity status earnestly credit his wife in an interview with having the toughest job in the world. She worked in the home raising their children, and he marveled at it, saying it was far more demanding than what he did.

That came to mind last week when I heard the remark Hilary Rosen made about Ann Romney. It came to mind again when I read this piece about it in the Weekly Standard.

I, and every conservative I know, have been eagerly polite, warmly encouraging to women who chose to work—from the very beginning, from the 1970s or ‘80s, when working women first changed the national landscape.

But that’s not the way liberals play it.

Not one Republican of national standing or any importance has ever announced that working mothers prefer dollars to their children’s happiness; that working mothers have chosen to let their children suffer a little, cry a little, and keep a little more sadness inside to satisfy their own vanity or avarice or (far more often) their husband’s avarice. Nor have I ever said such things to a friend, an enemy, anyone; I’ve never allowed anyone associated with me to say those things, because (this might be hard for Ms. Hilary Rosen to grasp) I don’t believe them. I don’t want to denounce working mothers, or any mothers. Working mothers do their best by their own lights. Most of them try their best to do right, as nearly all Americans do.

But that’s not the way liberals see it.

Nearly all men welcome the presence of women in the workforce because, on the whole, they get on better with women than with men. This is called “biology.”  Conservatives, moreover, back away automatically from any savaging of women. This is called “chivalry.”

But liberals do it differently.

Some liberal men are cheering Ms. Rosen on. No doubt their wives work. More power to them. Probably their mothers also work; but some of these liberals are as old as I am, and perhaps their mothers did not work—until the 1970s, most mothers didn’t. Perhaps their grandmothers didn’t work. Most liberals, even your average liberal who is 22 and majored in communications or business psychology, can find a grandmother or great-grandmother who didn’t work. And it used to be that Americans stood up for their mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers. My wife doesn’t work, and I’m grateful to her for all she’s done for our children and our family and for me.

Money was not invented in 1970.  It’s always been good to have.  And even if my mother had worked, I’d be just as grateful to my grandmothers, not only for what they did for me when I was a child and young adult but for what they did for my parents.  Many conservatives, many Americans feel this way. This is called “gratitude.” But evidently, liberals see things differently.

This is the president’s affair now. I don’t need his apology or want it, but I am standing by to see whether he will apologize like a man to Mrs. Romney.

At last check, he declared the controversial comments ‘ill-advised’ and comments about spouses unacceptable. However, Hilary Rosen did apologize to him.

But Obama supporter Bill Maher took the offensive remarks further and made them more crass, drawing bi-partisan criticism just as Rosen did last week.

…Obama’s former domestic policy adviser also voiced concerns on Sunday.

“You know, the language, the sentiment are problematic,” Melody Barnes said on ABC’s “This Week” when asked whether the president needs to distance himself from the comments. “And the campaign has — and the president has said, look, the civility … it matters. The way we talk to each other matters. And they’re going to have to, as you said, make a decision.”

As Congresswoman Marilyn Musgrave told me Monday, their silence is deafening.

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Apr 12

A “game-changer in the fight for female voters”

Abortion, Culture, Law, Media, Politics, Society No Comments »

Just when liberal women were angrily trumpeting their bogus claim that the GOP has a ‘war on women,’ a high-profile liberal female Democrat drops a bomb on the wife of Gov. Mitt Romney.

Which The Hill reported as “a gift” to the Romney campaign. Really.

Hilary Rosen’s comments that Ann Romney had “never” worked outside the home triggered a new round in the culture wars and provided an opening for Republicans to close a gender gap between Mitt Romney and President Obama.

Both parties seemed to sense that the veteran Democratic strategist’s criticism of the stay-at-home mom could be a game-changer in the fight for female voters.

Obama’s campaign sought to distance itself from Rosen, an adviser to the Democratic National Committee, and Romney’s campaign put the candidate’s wife on television, where she urged Rosen to “respect” the choices of other women.

“Look, I know what it’s like to struggle,” Ann Romney said on Fox News.

“Maybe I haven’t struggled as much financially as much as some people have,” said Ann Romney, who has battled breast cancer and multiple sclerosis. “I can tell you and promise you that I have had struggles in my life.”

Ann Romney, who has emerged as a strength of her husband’s campaign, then defended the presumptive GOP presidential nominee.

“I would love to have people understand that Mitt and I have compassion for people who are struggling, and that’s why we’re running,” she continued.

She also defended her husband’s respect for women and his record of female advisers…

Obama has opened up a 19 percentage point lead over Romney among female voters, according to some polls, and Romney’s campaign this week has been doing everything it can to try to close the gap.

Rosen’s remarks on CNN Wednesday night, in that context, were a gift…

Rosen initially showed few signs of backing down on Thursday. On Twitter, Rosen responded to becoming part of the latest campaign controversy by tweeting, “Bring it on!” But under heavy fire from her own party, Rosen issued a statement of apology to Ann Romney later in the day.

“I apologize to Ann Romney and anyone else who was offended,” Rosen said in the statement. “Let’s declare peace in this phony war and go back to focus on the substance.”

Wait. What?

Suddenly it’s a “phony war”? What a tattered web they weave…

The coverage filled news and social network communications media on this for the past 24 hours. Elizabeth Scalia nailed it well here.

There is irony in Rosen sneering that Ann Romney knows nothing about working women, while she, Rosen, supports an administration that pays its female employees less than men. But I digress.

Rosen seems to truly not get why people, especially women (both working and at-home) took offense at this. In Rosen’s shallow world, where formal credentials matter to an excessive degree, and “what you do” matters far more than the person you actually are, Rosen’s remarks were seen for the rather elitist, class-warfare cues they were, (those rich Republicans are so out of touch with the struggling proletariat) but more importantly they brought back memories of Hillary Clinton saying she wasn’t “some little woman standing by her man, baking cookies…” and of Teresa Heinz-Kerry’s wondering if Laura Bush had ever worked a “real” job and the understanding that Michelle Obama had a $300,000 a-year job created for her out of whole cloth, and then discontinued when she left for the White House.

One highly doubts that if either Bill Clinton, or John Kerry or Barack Obama had suggested he looked to his wife to get a sense of women’s economic concerns, Rosen would have for a moment thought those women lacked expertise in the realities of raising a family and earning a paycheck. And yet, Hillary Clinton, while she surely worked, had a governor’s mansion and a lot of help; she was never driving kids to soccer in a beat-up car; she probably never had to figure out how to stretch a pound of chopped meat through supper and the next day’s lunch while wondering if she had enough gas — at $4 a gallon — to get to work the next day; Teresa Heinz Kerry, of course, also had the help — the servants, cooks, chauffeurs — and Michelle Obama’s paychecks and circumstances hardly relate to the realities of most working women.

None of these women have lived the “reality” of most working mothers, any more than Mrs. Romney has. None of them.

She’s really only getting started here.

Well, excuse me, but I really must ask, how the hell does Rosen know what Ann Romney does or does not know? Does Mrs. Romney staying home mean her curiosity and intellect were drained from her, and she therefore reads nothing, explores nothing, studies nothing?

Ann Romney has at her disposal precisely the same economic records and reports that the privileged Mrs. Clinton, Mrs. Kerry or Mrs. Obama would use to educate themselves on the issue, of “struggling working moms”. For all Rosen knows, Mrs. Romney has, through observation and study, become a freaking genius on the economic realities of working women, because learning is not confined to classrooms (in only the “correct” schools) and human people have the capacity to understand a great deal, and even to become wise on some issues, because they are interested and curious, and because they think.

Of course, I don’t know what Ann Romney knows or doesn’t know, either — but as a woman who preferred to give up a salary in order to stay home with her kids, even though it meant rolling coin for haircuts, I’m willing to give her a benefit of a doubt. I’m willing to actually find out what Romney knows before sneering at her.

I know Elizabeth Scalia, and she wouldn’t sneer at Ann Romney or any other woman devoted to raising her children and serving charitable organizations and countless needy while supporting her husband’s goals to serve the country no matter what she knows or doesn’t know. And that’s the point that’s so clearly at the center of this illustrative series of events.

The ‘war on women’ claim in the 2012 presidential campaign is bogus, while the real one that wages on was launched quite a while ago by the pro-abortion contraceptive culture most visibly at work in the January takedown of the Susan G. Komen foundation by Planned Parenthood over Komen’s plans to stop funding the abortion giant, and the late January announcement by HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius that contraception, sterilization and abortion-inducing drugs would become mandated insurance coverage as “preventive care” for women.

Elizabeth has a lot of links on that blog post worth reading. Including in the updates.

UPDATE III:

Rosen makes apologetic statement and writes: “Let’s declare peace in this phony war and go back to focus on the substance.”

If by “substance” you mean the real phony war, which is the Democrat’s utterly fabricated “GOP war on women”, then I have to say is: Dear Ms. Rosen, You guys, first!

Tagged with: • • • • • •
Apr 11

Sen. Santorum bows out

Culture, Media, Politics, Society No Comments »

Going into Easter weekend, this seemed inevitable, and not for purely political cost/benefit calculations. Pundits who reckoned that way didn’t figure in the human factor.

CNN did.

Rick Santorum’s decision to drop out of the Republican presidential race came after he spent the holiday weekend evaluating the race with his family, who were grappling with the latest hospitalization of his 3-year-old daughter Bella…

“We made a decision over the weekend that while this presidential race for us is over for me and we will suspend our campaign effective today, we are not done fighting,” Santorum said during his speech in Gettysburg on Tuesday. “We will continue to fight for those voices for those Americans who stood up and gave us that air under our wings.”

He also acknowledged the decision was not entirely political, saying the past weekend was a “time of prayer and thought” as he and his family cared for his daughter Isabella, the youngest of Santorum’s seven children, who suffers from Trisomy 18, a chromosomal condition….which causes severe medical and developmental problems.

There are all the political ramifications and analytical scenarios. And then there’s this:

A senior Santorum source said that Bella’s hospitalization was a major factor in the decision to bow out.

“When you have enough time with your adrenaline down, you start to think about what’s really important,” the source told CNN. Sitting in the hospital with his daughter for the second time during this campaign put that in perspective for Santorum, the source said.

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