Who's The Best, the Most Beautiful Fetus©™ Fetishist of Them All?

JJ's blogpost about $arah reminds us that it's been a number of days since we've mined that mother lode of rightwing political humour.


It appears that Palin is reminding her admirers who made the best, the most saintly choice of them all. Not one to languish in the shadow of another woman's moment of glory, $arah uses Trig as leverage to keep her name in the news. After all, part of the agreement she has with FoxNews is to to keep promoting herself so that viewers will click on to see what's the latest buzz in her life.

Did she really just call for Rahm Emanuel to be fired because he allegedly used the term "fucking retarded" to refer to fellow Democrats in a private meeting? Last summer? Did she really?

[...] does anyone actually believe that Palin's name for the child of miraculous provenance was found by her deep knowledge of ancient Norse as she claims in her magical-realism novel, "Going Rogue"? I mean, seriously. She knows about as much ancient Norse as she does English grammar.

Meanwhile, you'll also find Palin in her habitual power-red jacket while you wait in the check-out line at the supermarket, on the cover of a glossy tabloid magazine virtually enthroned as the anti-abortion matriarch.

The mother-daughter exclusive, which reportedly earned the duo $100,000, has commentators asking: Is Sarah Palin further squandering her political cred to cash in on fame — or is this latest move a savvy play to broaden her base?

Palin’s turning celebrity — and why not? Palin earned almost as much in the eight hours it took her to pose for ‘In Touch’ as she did governing Alaska for a year [...] “With payouts like this,” it’s hard to imagine why she'd ever return to the difficult, unremunerative job of public service.

$arah's certainly not letting Pam Tebow steal her thunder!

And the Maurice Vellacott Award goes to ...

those manly, virile, and likely R.E.A.L. fathers4justice fellows commenting after the CBC news story about Christopher Little being found guilty on two counts of first-degree murder.

The erudite:

Murder is horrible for everyone.......cheating is alos horrible, against the law in many places(I know Iknow not here). Many posters are saying that the cheating is irrelevant? Are u nuts? Being cheated on puts people in horrible mental states...our society's way of thinking is still too primitive to understand this fact. I am not defending this murder or saying I am an advanced thinker (lol), but seriously....do you expect people to behave civily after this? This is assuming they were together since CBC stated she was having an afair....

The conspiracy theorist:

Maybe the two women were having the affair. It makes no sense for him to have killed both of them. Had he killed his wife for the affair it might make sense, had he killed her lover it might make sense. But why bother to kill the ex wife of the lover. How would that make any sense. Something is not right about this one.

The men's rights advocate:

What substantial evidence did the jury have that convicted Chris Little of this this double murder without a doubt?

And his sidekick:

I am a female and currently knows of a single father involved with the Ontario Justice system in a family law matter. The biasness towards the single father is beyond believable for 2009. I do not believe that there is evidence beyond the shadow of a doubt in the Chris Little case. In regards to the evidence against Chris Little, infidelity causes a person to do strange things. However, I do not believe he committed a double murder.

The wimminz-are-more-evul dude:

If it had been a woman who'd killed her cheating husband, what do you want to bet that the sentence wouldn't have been nearly as harsh? She probably would have cried in the court room about how upset she was, claimed he was abusive, that she let her emotions get the better of her and didn't know what she was doing, etc., and probably would have only been charged with manslaughter and got parole!

Yeah, dude. Violent men never get just a little slap on the wrist for vicious crimes they committed.

And finally, last but not least, Mr Misconstrue-and-blame-the-gold-digging-unfit-mother-bitch-who-got-what-she-deserved:

Let me see you cheat on the guy, bring you girlfriend to the matrimonial home as possible witness so you can protect your finical interest encase the guy assaults you, but you miscalculated this guys rage and you lost your life and the life of your girl friend, thank god the children were not harmed.

Christopher Little was found guilty of planning and carrying out the "honour" killing of his estranged spouse and he was also found guilty of killing a second woman as a means to evade responsibility for his actions.

The Gynophobe Award is named after Maurice Vellacott in recognition of his recent public statements regarding abortion, namely that it is used as "part of a male agenda to have women more sexually available". Vellacott, a former pastor, claims that women tell him "stories of being badgered, harassed and coerced into getting their abortion by boyfriends, partners, parents and employers". Maurice likes women when they're victims.

When women make choices that he doesn't approve, he says that those are not "real choices".

Uppidate: More on MV's warped perspective, one that emphasizes the victimhood of women and the predatory nature of the male gender. Huh? And neocons like Blob Blogging Wingnut and R.E.A.L. women call pro-choice feminists "men-haters"? Grand merci, big city lib.

Just another fetishist of The Fetus©™

We learn, via CC's blogpost The Justin Chronicles that another Blogging Tory blathers on and on, using the familiar "Because I say so" approach to zygote zealotry. Expect the same-old same-old rationalizations and equivalencies, as always based on the premise that a blob of dividing cells has more human rights than the female vessel that carries said blob.

Hey Justin, one more reason to give thanks to your g-d that you were't born female, right?

Clearly nobody is going to force you to endure 9 months of unwanted pregnancy, but being a neocon man, you have the right to opine about humanity. And bonus points for you - you'll have the opportunity to kill human beings who have the bad grace of living on land that a government (who considers them sub-human) wants to occupy.

Kathy Shaidle is a Prevaricator.

But then you already knew that, right?

Two headlines - the first from CNSNews.com and the second from Shaidle.

Obama’s Science Czar Said a Born Baby ‘Will Ultimately Develop Into a Human Being’

FOX: Science “Czar” believes babies “will ultimately develop into human beings” only after birth.

Then she provides her NewsRealblog readers with the 'money' quote.

"The fetus, given the opportunity to develop properly before birth, and given the essential early socializing experiences and sufficient nourishing food during the crucial early years after birth, will ultimately develop into a human being."

In Holdren’s defense, such views were not entirely out of the mainstream in the 1970s, when leftist pro-abortion activists routinely described fetuses as mere “blobs of tissue,” and technology such as the prenatal ultrasound had yet to be developed.

Wrong, Kathy. According to the History of Ultrasound, a team of specialists presented and published their first obstetric scans at an internationally attended Ultrasonics Symposium in the US in 1962. Gynecologists in Canada have used echography as a diagnostic tool for high-risk pregnancies since the 1970s. Doesn't it make you wonder what else she gets wrong, or baldly lies about to put her point across?

Also, the "view" that Shaidle cites, is selective and deliberately misleading when detached from its context. Here is the full quote, from CNSNews:

"To a biologist the question of when life begins for a human child is almost meaningless, since life is continuous and has been since it first began on Earth several billion years ago," wrote the Ehrlichs and Holdren. "The precursors of the egg and sperm cells that create the next generation have been present in the parents from the time they were embryos themselves. To most biologists, an embryo (unborn child during the first two or three months of development) or a fetus is no more a complete human being than a blueprint is a building. The fetus, given the opportunity to develop properly before birth, and given the essential early socializing experiences and sufficient nourishing food during the crucial early years after birth, will ultimately develop into a human being. Where any of these essential elements is lacking, the resultant individual will be deficient in some respect."

Shaidle claims that Holdren has a "history" of promoting the kind of radical environmentalism that privileges the planet over people and has done little since his appointment to distance himself from past controversial statements.

Putting aside the fact that Shaidle twisted information to support her attack on Holdren, isn't the rest of her opinion piece a classic example of the narcissistic views that childless, dessicated, rightwing harridans like Shaidle and Ann Coulter - individuals who truly don't give a damn what happens to humanity and to the planet in 10, 30 or 50 years from now - regularly spew?

Eliminationism: Interview with David Neiwert

Good read. Longish interview with David Neiwert, author of The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right at AlterNet.

The intro:

In April, the Department of Homeland Security issued a report (PDF) warning that the shifting political climate and tanking economy were spurring a resurgence of violent right-wing extremism (known as "terrorism" when applied to those holding other political views) in the United States.

At the time, a number of right-wing commentators lambasted the report as a politically motivated attack on mainstream conservatism rather than what it was: an early warning on the dangers posed by a violent, fringe minority within their movement. Under pressure from GOP lawmakers, Homeland Security Chief Janet Napolitano apologized for the report.

But in the short weeks since, the department's warnings have proved prescient. An abortion provider who had been a frequent target of Fox News' bloviator Bill O'Reilly was gunned down during a church service in Kansas; a mentally disturbed man who believed the "tea-bagging" movement's contention that the Obama administration is destroying the American economy -- and who reportedly owned a number of firearms -- withdrew $85,000 from his bank account, said he was part of a plot to assassinate the president and disappeared (he was later captured in Las Vegas); and this week, a white supremacist who was deeply steeped in far-right conspiracism entered the U.S. Holocaust Museum and opened fire, killing a guard before being shot and wounded by security personnel.

The three incidents share a common feature: All of these men thought they were serving a higher moral purpose, that is, defending their country from an insidious "enemy within" as defined by the far right -- a "baby-killer," the Jews who secretly control the world and a president who's been accused of being a Manchurian Candidate-style foreign agent bent on nothing less than the destruction of the American Way.

David Neiwert, a veteran journalist who has covered violent right-wing groups for years, calls the worldview that informs this twisted sense of moral purpose "eliminationism." It's the belief that one's political opponents are not just wrongheaded, misinformed or even acting in bad faith. Eliminationism holds that they are a cancer on the body politic that must be excised -- either by separation from the public at large, through censorship or by outright extermination -- in order to protect the purity of the nation.

As eliminationist rhetoric becomes increasingly mainstream within the American right -- fueled in large part by the wildly overheated discourse found on conservative blogs and talk radio -- Neiwert's new book, The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right, could not have come at a more important time. In it, Neiwert painstakingly details how the rise in eliminationism is a very real threat and points to the dangers of dismissing extreme rhetoric as merely a form of "entertainment."