There was a time, I suppose, when such adjectives as “monstrous,” “wicked,” “atrocious,” ghoulish,” etc. could not have been fairly applied to Democrats or to the progressive Left generally. Wrong—frequently. Dishonest—not infrequently. Stupid—ditto. Unsavory and reprehensible—sure. But not evil. No, not that.

But somewhere along the line of their long march through history the Dems and the larger Left passed a milestone. And there they left their souls. I know this because Senator Richard Blumenthal, with the support of a majority of his Democratic Senate colleagues has introduced a bill they call the Women’s Health Protection Act. Conservative commentator David French has suggested that it should be called the Kermit Gosnell Enabling Act, and I can see why.

Blumenthal’s bill would effectively bar states from exercising any regulatory oversight of abortion clinics. In other words it would foster and legalize the environment in which Kermit Gosnell of Philadelphia, no serving time for murder, when about his bloody work. Senate Democrats propose to protect women’s health by erasing such basic state regulations as the requirement that abortions be carried out by licensed physicians. Current state laws that ban the horrific procedure known as partial-birth abortion would be summarily overturned. The bill would also legalize sex-selection abortions—well, why go on, because if it ever became law, Blumenthal’s bill would create an anything-goes abortion economy—precisely the kind of environment in which a monster like Gosnell thrived. As the editors of National Review note:

The Gosnell gore-fest was a direct consequence of the elevation of abortion to divine office: Neither the local authorities in Democrat-dominated Philadelphia nor the Democrat-dominated statewide bureaucracies in Pennsylvania were much inclined to exercise basic oversight of abortion clinics. Even after a woman died under Dr. Gosnell’s knife, there was little interest in investigating his practice: It took allegations of illegal prescription-drug use and the piqued interest of the DEA to put Gosnell on the radar.

Senator Richard Blumenthal wants to establish that standard for the whole country, which is monstrous, wicked, atrocious, ghoulish and more. The Democratic Party has reduced itself to this and it's an ugly thing to contemplate.

Posted by tmg110 at 1:28 PM EDT

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Progressives can’t live without hysteria. Unless they’re in a three-foot hover about something, their ideological commitment appears suspect in their own eyes. Amerika is a racist, sexist, homophobic, imperialist, quasi-fascist state, after all—what’s not to be hysterical about?

Just now the supposed epidemic of rape and sexual assault on college campuses is producing progressive hysteria, with feminists leading the charge. But this isn’t sexual assault as normal people understand the term. No, this is the ideological criminalization of behavior arising from the very sexual culture that progressives have championed. The typical campus “sexual assault” has three components: binge drinking, hooking up, and morning-after remorse. A female student gets blind drunk. She allows a male student—possibly a friend, possibly a stranger—to cajole or pressure her into having sex. The next morning, the female student, feeling used and guilty, decides that she was raped.

The problem for campus officialdom in cases of this kind is that there’s usually no physical evidence of sexual assault: It’s her word against his. Now feminists will tell you that women never lie about sexual assault. But of course they sometimes do. To be fair, however, most young women on campus who raise charges of sexual assault believe what they’re saying. In a small minority of cases actual rape of sexual assault has occurred. But mostly the charge arises from the humiliation and remorse that young women feel after they succumb, with the aid of copious amounts of alcohol, to the hook-up culture. This explains why actual criminal charges are so rarely filed in cased of this kind. Most are adjudicated by campus officialdom, which finds itself under extreme pressure from campus feminists to run the proceedings like one of Stalin’s purge trials. The young woman’s charge is to be accepted without question; the young man’s guilt is to be assumed in the absence of evidence or even in the presence of evidence to the contrary.

I’ve said before that progressivism has evolved into a variant of totalitarianism. The bogus epidemic of sexual assault on campus, manufactured by progressives and exploited by them with contempt for the most elementary precepts of justice, is living proof of that.

Posted by tmg110 at 8:12 AM EDT

Updated: Tuesday, 15 July 2014 12:46 PM EDT

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Give me an afternoon at the summit
Of summer. Give me the long light of June
That frets the verdant crowns of these old oaks
With evening gold. Give me a glass of wine,
Cold to my touch and bright upon my tongue
With the herbs and acids of the good earth.
Give me these blessings. Return them to me
Year by year. Let me be happy in them.
Let me not mourn the failure of the sun.

The winter solstice, miser of the light,
Cannot sustain the empire of the night.

Posted by tmg110 at 11:15 AM EDT

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Simon Waxman is the editor of Boston Review, and he thinks that the US Army’s tradition of naming its helicopters after Indian—excuse me, Native American—tribes amounts to a racial slur. “Why do we name our battles and weapons after people we have vanquished?” he sobs. Well, the answer is obvious! “For the same reason the Washington team is the Redskins and my hometown Red Sox go to Cleveland to play the Indians and to Atlanta to play the Braves: because the myth of the worthy native adversary is more palatable than the reality—the conquered tribes of this land were not rivals but victims, cheated and impossibly outgunned.”

Pardon me while I wipe an empathic tear from my eye.

It really is amusing to see progressive busybodies like Waxman tossing blood clots over something about which normal people, i.e. the overwhelming majority of Americans, Native Americans included, don’t give a hoot. He’d probably fall dead out of his lushly padded office chair if he ever got a look at these campaign streamers that are affixed to the US Army Flag. Then there were the World War Two-era Tribal-class destroyers of the Royal Navy. The British actually had the nerve to name one of them Zulu! And they did it again in the 1960s, with the Type 81 Tribal-class frigates!

The weird obsession with such trivia shows just how divorced our elites have become from the reality of life in contemporary America. I have no doubt that Mr. Waxman is far more indignant over the Apache helicopter and the Tomahawk cruise missile than he was over the case of Kermit Gosnell or the sad plight of the long-term unemployed. What a doofus!

Posted by tmg110 at 11:42 AM EDT

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I gave you the impulse; you raised your hand
With my hand on your arm, and I kissed you
Knowing that the road ahead would be hard.
You empowered me with a father’s pride
And I learned to live with a father’s fear,
Knowing that my hand had lifted your arm.
Daughter, you followed the road of duty,
Kept faith with your friends and with the dying,
And by the grace of God returned to me.
I well recall how breath stopped in my throat
When first I raised my hand as I pronounced
The fatal oath whose binding words we know.
So help us God, then, we’ll abide as one:
Father and daughter, soldiers together—
But to you belongs the post of honor.

Posted by tmg110 at 11:41 PM EDT

Updated: Wednesday, 25 June 2014 11:45 PM EDT

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You may remember Wendy Davis, she of the pink running shoes and extreme pro-abortion views. As a Texas state senator she became a progressive celebrity for her (ultimately futile) filibuster of a bill regularing abortions in the Lone Star State. Now she's running for governor. So how's that going?

Alas for Wendy, not too well. Recent polls show her ten or twelve points behind her GOP opponent, current Texas attorney general Greg Abbot. Perhaps Texas voters noticed the logical disconnect between her defense of partial-birth abortion and her claim to be "for the children"…

Posted by tmg110 at 9:50 AM EDT

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I can sum it up for you in three words: comprehensive immigration reform.

Immigration is the most politically toxic issue in America, and on no other issue is the gap between the people and the powerful so wide and deep. Political elites across the political spectrum, reflecting the views of fashionable progressives and business interests alike, are committed to amnesty for illegal immigrants and open borders for America. These elites are contemptuous of boobs in the American heartland who oppose high levels of immigration from poor countries south of the border. Hey, American business needs those low-wage workers! And if the border is closed, who’s going to take care of Barbra Streisand’s lawn and landscaping?

In the aftermath of soon-to-be-former GOP House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s shocking primary debacle there have been various attempts to explain away his loss as due to anything but immigration. Really? As Rich Lowry explained in an article for Politico, the people peddling this line are simply kidding themselves. While it’s true that Cantor had some other problems, it was his suspected support for comprehensive immigration reform that killed him in his district. Cantor’s opponent, economics professor Dave Brat, hit that issue hard during his underdog campaign, and it resonated. Cantor was held up as an example of everything that wrong with the GOP establishment: out of touch with the people, unconcerned with bread-and-butter issues, in bed with special interests. Immigration is the one issue that encapsulates all these discontents. At a time when the US economy is sputtering, with high structural unemployment and dwindling prospects for working-class and middle-class Americans, the argument that the country needs more immigration cuts no ice. Indeed, it has sparked a backlash whose basis is economic populism. Why all this care and attention to the problems of illegal immigrants at a time when Americans are hurting?

That Cantor was made to bear the burden of these discontents may seem unfair. His actual record shows that he is far less committed to comprehensive immigration reform than the likes of Barack Obama and John McCain. Certainly he’s more conservative than House Speaker John Boehner. But as a member of the GOP leadership Cantor became the poster boy for everything that people don’t like about their federal government. His equivocal comments on the DREAM Act raised suspicions that whatever he and his colleagues might say, their actual intent is to ram a comprehensive immigration bill through Congress.

But Cantor’s defeat spells the end of comprehensive immigration reform for as long as the Republican Party controls one or both houses of Congress. Forget what the apologists are saying: A political earthquake has rattled the Seventh Congressional District of Virginia, and they’re feeling the aftershocks in Washington DC.

Posted by tmg110 at 9:29 AM EDT

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Hillary Clinton’s new book, Hard Choices, has been widely panned as a great big bore—no surprise to me, since I’ve always considered the Pants-Suited One to be a hole in the air. You’d expect a banal, boring nonentity to write a banal, boring book, right? But wait! In the alternate universe of gender feminism, there’s a different explanation for the hollowness of Hard Choices. Writing in the (UK) Guardian, Jessica Valenti moans: “[W]henever she's hinted at being anything other than measured and guarded, Clinton has been attacked as hysterical, a ballbuster or worse. So if people are bored by Hard Choices, they should blame the misogynist expectations of Washington, not the careful crafting of a seasoned politician.” See? It’s your fault, White Male Establishment! Remember how you mocked her when she got all weepy on the 2008 campaign trail? Hillary the Seasoned is just tiptoeing through the minefield of your misogyny.

I don’t know, Jessica, that seems to me to be a bit of a stretch. For one thing, I’d hardly call Hillary Clinton’s recent string of gaffes “measured and guarded.” You can’t really blame us wicked white guys for her post-White House poverty sob story or her I’m-responsible-but-not-really answer to Diane Sawyer’s question about Benghazi. Moreover, I submit that any presidential candidate, male or female, who broke down and cried on the campaign trail would have some mockery and skepticism to deal with. For the record, this was the softball question, from a voter, that brought Hillary to tears: “How do you do it? How do you, how do you keep upbeat and so wonderful?” Not exactly a zinger!

No, the claim that Hillary’s hiding her light under a bushel for fear of a misogynist backlash just doesn’t cut it. I’m going with Occam's Razor—the fewer assumptions the better. Hillary Clinton seems boring because she is boring. What part of that is confusing you, Jessica?

Posted by tmg110 at 8:09 PM EDT

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Poor Hillary Clinton—literally. In her telling at least, she and Bill were penniless paupers when they left the White House in 2001. “We came out of the White House not only dead broke, but in debt,” she sobbed in an interview with Diane Sawyer ABC News last night. “We had no money when we got there and we struggled to, you know, piece together the resources for mortgages, for houses, for Chelsea’s education. You know, it was not easy.”

No, I’m sure it wasn’t easy to line up all those five- and six-figure speaking engagements, the book deals and, of course, Bill’s post-presidential pension and benefits. By the end of 2001, the Clintons had raked in around $15 million. Their net worth today is in the neighborhood of $200 million. Since resigning as Secretary of State in 2013, Hillary alone has earned some $5 million in speaking fees. Oh, the humanity!

Bill Clinton was famous for his finely tuned political instincts: “I feel your pain” has passed into history along with “We have nothing to fear but fear itself and “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” But masterful politicians are born, not made, and despite decades of watching her husband harp on America’s heartstrings, Hillary Clinton can’t whistle the tune. All thumbs, two left feet, blind in one eye and can’t see out of the other—the mind gropes for a metaphor to describe the clumsiness of her political technique. Yet there are scores and hundreds of Friends of Hil who insist that she’s the most brilliant, accomplished person of any gender in the Land of E Pluribus Unum. I suppose if they go on repeating this mantra day in day out, the Friends of Hil may finally convince themselves that it’s true…

Posted by tmg110 at 7:59 AM EDT

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Even for the pratfall-and gaffe-prone Obama Administration, the lies, confusion and incompetence surrounding the prisoner swap that returned Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl to US custody was breathtaking.

It was obvious from Obama’s demeanor during his Rose Garden appearance with Bergdahl’s parents that he expected praise for closing the deal that brought home an American soldier captured in Afghanistan in exchange for five high-level Taliban leaders imprisoned at Gitmo. But the President surely knew that Bergdahl was no hero, having very likely deserted his post and given himself up to the Taliban after growing disillusioned with the Army and America. Surely he knew that Bergdahl may even have collaborated with the enemy. Surely he knew that Bergdahl father was a Taliban sympathizer. And knowing all that, he must have realized that the dog-and-pony show in the Rose Garden was, essentially, a cover-up—and a poorly engineered one at that.

That Bergdahl’s actions were, to put it at the lowest, questionable is not some new revelation. From the day of his disappearance stories that he deserted to the Taliban have been circulating. The Army tried to silence these whispers by ordering the soldiers who served with Bergdahl to keep their mouths shut, even making them sign non-disclosure agreements. But now that he’s back in US hands, they’re speaking out. And to a man, they say that Bowe Bergdahl is a deserter who must be held accountable for his actions.

So why was Susan Rice (of Benghazi infamy) permitted to go on a Sunday talk show and declare that Bergdahl had served with “honor and distinction”? Of all the people who could have been tapped to defend the Administration’s, she was the worst possible choice. Then there was Propaganda Barbie—State Department spokesperson Marie Harf—saying essentially that the soldiers who served with Bergdahl don’t know what they’re talking about.

But if Bergdahl was a deserter, how can his exchange for five of the most senior and bloody-minded Taliban leaders in US hands possibly be justified? Congress—many Democrats included—are angry about the Administration’s high-handed actions, which appear to have violated a law requiring prior notification to Congress before Gitmo detainees are released. Veterans and serving soldiers of all ranks are furious with the President and his people. In short, the prisoner swap that brought Bergdahl home is a policy and public-relations disaster for the Obama Administration.

And this debacle can be pinned on Barack Obama personally: the product of his arrogance, disdain for the press and contempt for the American people. Certainly he believed that his fellow Democrats would carry his water one more time. Undoubtedly he believed that the servile mainstream media would run interference for him as they have so often before. Clearly he believed that the optics—triumphant Rose Garden announcement, beaming parents, hometown euphoria—would beguile the credulous American people and smother the unlovely truth. Wrong on all counts, Mr. President.

Well, at least Bergdahl knocked the VA scandal off the front page…kind of like treating cancer by shooting yourself in the head…

Posted by tmg110 at 10:04 AM EDT

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