Wednesday, November 17, 2004
How to Win the War, Just Like in Iraq
When you preside over a half-assed one-man blog like this one, you can't begin to cover everything you'd like to, and in a timely fashion. Sometimes (like yesterday), you've just got to disengage from the media torrent, whether it's for the sake of your sanity or because you need to do actual remunerative labor instead. And even when you're soaking in it, bloggable news and commentary slips through the cracks--or, to use a better metaphor, it goes blasting through the firehose and you don't see it until later, if at all. So I'm seriously late getting to this Matthew Yglesias article from The Prospect, which was posted last week--but you should read it anyhow. In it, he tallies up just what moral values voters have gotten from the first four years of Bush, in the wake of that sink of moral depravity known as the Clinton Years.
Ain't Nothin' Like the Real Thing, Baby: Earlier this week various Internet sites, including Wonkette and Electablog, as well as the Harper's Weekly Review, noted a story from Indiana claiming that a congressman there was proposing a bill to change the name of Interstate 69 to a more moral number. The story comes from something called Hoosier Gazette, which is apparently Indiana's answer to The Onion, because the story is a joke. Yet the very fact that lots of people took it seriously--including me for a minute--is a pretty effective commentary on the state of the Union at the moment.
When you preside over a half-assed one-man blog like this one, you can't begin to cover everything you'd like to, and in a timely fashion. Sometimes (like yesterday), you've just got to disengage from the media torrent, whether it's for the sake of your sanity or because you need to do actual remunerative labor instead. And even when you're soaking in it, bloggable news and commentary slips through the cracks--or, to use a better metaphor, it goes blasting through the firehose and you don't see it until later, if at all. So I'm seriously late getting to this Matthew Yglesias article from The Prospect, which was posted last week--but you should read it anyhow. In it, he tallies up just what moral values voters have gotten from the first four years of Bush, in the wake of that sink of moral depravity known as the Clinton Years.
In 1994, when the Democrats controlled everything, there were no civil unions; gay marriage was a concept most people had never even considered; abortion was legal; and new policies allowed homosexuals to serve in the military only if they agreed to stay in the closet.So cultural conservatives are losing their culture war despite having their hand-picked generals running it. Sound like any other war you know?
In the four years hence, Republicans captured the Congress and then the presidency. Abortion is still legal, and, under Bush's policies, the number of abortions has grown--a consequence of rising poverty, declining availability of health care, and a faith-based campaign to make it harder to obtain contraceptives and scientifically accurate sex education.
Civil unions now exist in Vermont. More and more corporations and state governments allow gay and lesbian couples to enjoy similar joint benefits in health care and other areas. Laws are being implemented in Hawaii, California, and New Jersey to give gay couples most of the rights of heterosexual couples, albeit without the term "marriage." In Massachusetts, of course, the term itself may now be applied. Anti-sodomy laws were deemed unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court--and rightly so--struck down mainly with the votes of Republican-appointed justices, while a mostly-Democratic court ruled the other way in the 1980s. Thanks to the proliferation of cable and the Internet, pornography is now more widely available than ever. The feminist movement, whose early "assaults" on traditional morality sparked the backlash in the first place, is now utterly victorious....
This is what decades of voting for conservative politicians has wrought: nothing.
Ain't Nothin' Like the Real Thing, Baby: Earlier this week various Internet sites, including Wonkette and Electablog, as well as the Harper's Weekly Review, noted a story from Indiana claiming that a congressman there was proposing a bill to change the name of Interstate 69 to a more moral number. The story comes from something called Hoosier Gazette, which is apparently Indiana's answer to The Onion, because the story is a joke. Yet the very fact that lots of people took it seriously--including me for a minute--is a pretty effective commentary on the state of the Union at the moment.
