Women's Bodies Can't Perform Magic. Someone Please Tell Republicans

By Jessica Valenti, The Guardian UK

25 February 15

 

o Republican men think women are mythical creatures, like unicorns or fairies? It’s the only explanation I can come up with to make sense of the party’s continued insistence that women’s bodies can perform feats of absolute magic.

On Monday, during testimony on a state bill that would ban doctors from using telemedicine to prescribe abortion pills, Idaho Republican Rep Vito Barbieri asked a testifying physician if pregnant women could swallow small cameras so that doctors could “determine what the situation is”.

Dr Julie Madsen – who I imagine must have been suppressing the eyeroll of a lifetime – responded that it couldn’t be done because “when you swallow a pill it would not end up in the vagina.”

Barbieri now says the question was a rhetorical one (that’s the ticket!) but his gaffe reminds us all about just how little Republicans understand about women’s bodies. Though, again, I’m honored that they think we hold such awesome abilities. After all, who could forget then-Rep Todd Akin’s assertion that women who were “legitimately” raped would not get pregnant because “the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” Like a superpower! Or Rush Limbaugh’s belief that women’s bodies are so all-powerful that we actually require a birth control pill every time we have sex to keep from getting pregnant. But it doesn’t stop there.

Conservatives apparently also think that women are so magic as to almost be immortal - you see, they don’t believe that abortion are ever necessary to save a woman’s life or protect her health. They’re so sure of this, in fact, that they’ve been willing to bet our lives on it. It was just four years ago that House Republicans proposed to pass a bill that would have made it legal for hospitals to deny life-saving abortions to women who needed them and even deny them transfer to another hospital willing to perform the procedure. Maybe they just think we have nine lives?

Republicans must think we’re magic – how else do they think we can possibly have all these kids (since we’re not supposed to need or want or get abortions) with no paid maternity leave, no subsidized child care, no livable minimum wage and a culture that thinks we’re supposed to grin and bear it?

Shockingly, all the fairy tale tales conservatives have told themselves about women’s bodies and abilities hasn’t done the Republicans any favors around election time. And despite trainings for Republican candidates to learn how to talk about gender without saying something idiotic about rape or vaginas, Republican men continue to think stupid things about women and women continue to not vote for them.

So please, keep it up, guys. Talk more about what our vaginas can do, or how getting pregnant after rape is a “gift from god”. The more we watch as men who lack basic knowledge of biology and the human reproductive system make laws about what we can do with our own bodies, the more I believe that maybe women really are magic. We take care of our families as Republicans insist we’re “strong” enough to do with less. We battle back against archaic laws and dinosaur politicians. We do things a lot more impressive than swallowing a pill and having it migrate to our vaginas. That’s just weird.

Giuliani "Loves America," but His Fellow Americans, Not So Much

By William Boardman, Reader Supported News

25 February 15

 

Jiving “patriot” is just another draft-dodging political narcissist

atriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, they sometimes say, but they are too kind. Patriotism is the first and permanent refuge of authoritarian scoundrels like Rudy Giuliani. The former New York Mayor demonstrated his basic demagoguery once again with his recent, widely reported performance of one of the raging right’s most popular, long-running hit pieces. Echoing screeds long since turned into obsessive liturgy by the Limbaughs, Hannitys, and Nugents of this world, the derivative Giuliani re-enacted their politically sacred right-wing ritual denunciation of the president-as-imagined: a macabre dance of character assassination, the tarring and feathering of a fantasy crucified straw man.

Giuliani offered his fawning crowd-pleaser to a fatcats audience honoring Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, a prime exemplar of how to run a democratic state for the benefit of the 1% while lying about it to everyone else. Giuliani, an old hand at pandering to his patrons, smoothly repackaged the ritual, reactionary incantation of right-wing Republicans’ self-satisfaction with their own importance and worth, even though that room represented one of the nastiest political minorities seeking to run the country these days.

Reaction to what Giuliani had to say to rich folks at their 21 Club watering hole on February 18 has been ample, but largely superficial. Much media coverage makes this personal, a Giuliani-throws-mud-at-Obama kind of sideshow, which it certainly is. But that’s nowhere near all that it is. This ideological iconography is now so well-choreographed that its form and content should be recognized as structural. Spontaneity is gone from this universal totem to reactionary nostalgia for a reality that never existed. Giuliani is only the most recent to tap into the perennial darkness of revenge-seeking, revolutionary wet dreamers seeking to drive a final stake though the heart of American constitutional democracy – and in the name of patriotism to boot!

Jive-ass Giuliani’s quietly rabid rant was just another variation on the endlessly parroted Obama-bigotry regurgitated by Republican and Tea Party reality-haters since at least 2008. Stonewalling the country’s “half-white president” (in Giuliani’s phrase) passes for patriotism among Republicans, but has absolutely nothing to do with making the country work well for most of its citizens. Republican patriotism has everything to do with defying the twice-elected president and denying the will of the majority of the people, all for the sake of partisan political advantage at everyone else’s expense. This is not a new game for rich, remote elites. The recent Bush administration smothered the country with the same manipulative but mindless zeal as described a century earlier by Count Leo Tolstoy, referring to his own czarist Russia:

Patriotism … for rulers is nothing else than a tool for achieving their power-hungry and money-hungry goals, and for the ruled it means renouncing their human dignity, reason, conscience, and slavish submission to those in power. … Patriotism is slavery.

At the same time, in 19th century England, George Bernard Shaw observed: “Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it.” What Rudy Giuliani had to say was an excellent, if inadvertent, illustration of the insights of Tolstoy and Shaw. Giuliani apparently took himself seriously, as ever, and showed no awareness of the irony of his sacramental posturing. Giuliani even acknowledged that what he had to say was “horrible,” but he didn’t let that stop him from saying it anyway, at a dinner in honor of another cookie-cutter man-of-the-rich-people, Scott Walker, whose anti-democratic assaults on Wisconsin have made him, preposterously, a current Republican front-runner for the 2016 presidential nomination.

Giuliani’s “horrible thing to say” was nothing new, and took no courage to offer to that audience. It was just his variation on the tired right-wing trope about Barack Obama being different, as if that were a bad thing, or even an unusual thing. Giuliani’s riff on patriotism is every bit as craven and dishonest as Tolstoy suggested, but with a twist: Giuliani’s slavish submission is not to those in power as legitimate authority today. Giuliani’s is rather a slavish submission to those who were in power yesterday, craving to be in power tomorrow. Giuliani, like the rest of the rabid right, has no qualms about subverting legitimate authority for the sake of his narrow claque’s regaining power over the much greater majority of his fellow citizens. Giuliani is one of the people who love their country so very, very deeply that they’ve spent more than six years working to destroy its constitutional structure.

The banal sentiments, the elitist attitude, the smug moral superiority, and the lies about basic facts are all familiar elements of the traditional right-wing baffle screen that Giuliani uses as his political template. His latest variation on the same old theme, as reported by Politico, went like this:

I do not believe, and I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the president loves America. He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through love of this country …

... with all our flaws we’re the most exceptional country in the world. I’m looking for a presidential candidate who can express that, do that and carry it out. And if it’s you Scott [Walker], I’ll endorse you. And if it’s somebody else, I’ll support somebody else.

That’s what Giuliani had to say, or some of it, and it’s been widely circulated, and repeated, and commented upon, and one has to wonder why. How on earth does it matter to any serious person what an aging political hack says he believes about anything? Giuliani says he believes in human impact on the climate. His lobbying firm represents “conventional energy sources” in their effort to stay in business and make climate change worse. In other words, what Giuliani believes doesn’t even matter to Giuliani.

“I know this is a horrible thing to say,” Giuliani says, unpersuasively. What he knows is that it’s just the kind of horrible thing his bigoted right-wing audiences want to hear. That’s why he and all the other vocal sock puppets of hate have been saying such things for eight years. That’s why they’ll keep on saying them. And that’s why they have no incentive to stop saying horrible things that undermine that very America they profess to love and honor.

“I do not believe the president loves America,” Giuliani says, as if it matters what he believes. How would he or anyone else know who does or doesn’t love America? What does that mean? What is love? This is trigger language designed to make the Rorschach blot look monstrous. But suppose, for argument’s sake, that Giuliani is right and the president doesn’t love America? So what?

Seriously, so what if this president, or any president, doesn’t love America? The president’s job is not to send Valentines. His obligation is to work for the common good of 300 million citizens, not pamper them like puppies. The president’s job is to run the country well, to improve America for the sake of most Americans, not just for Halliburton. Giuliani says he liked the way George W. Bush loved America, though he mentions only the cheerleading, not the lying and the wars and the economic crisis from which we’re still trying to recover. Really, if that’s love, the country would have been much better off with a hater.

If you want to be loved, it helps to be lovable, and to act lovably

“He doesn’t love you,” Giuliani says, meaning the rich political donors in his audience, people who are used to buying influence and calling it love. Why should anyone love these people? What have they done to deserve this political love? Well, someone like Scott Walker would love for them to buy into his campaign for the presidency, he’d love them for that, no doubt. But is loving fatcats the same as loving America? It’s more like Stockholm syndrome, as pathetic politicians chase the money dangled to bait them into destroying America for the many to serve the few.

“And he doesn’t love me,” Giuliani says, perhaps getting to the core of what he hates most about Obama. The unstated assumption here is that Giuliani is somehow lovable. Evidence for Giuliani’s lovability is not easy to discern. His serial betrayals of his wives probably didn’t strike them as a really lovable personal characteristic. His political betrayals are not especially endearing either.

Just one example should suffice, given the way Giuliani has wrapped himself in 9/11 ever since it happened. Giuliani, now self-apotheosized as the patron saint of firefighters and police officers, knew for years that emergency services needed radios that allowed them to talk to each other. He knew that from the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. Eight years later he had done nothing to fix the problem. Hundreds of firefighters and police officers died for his sins. And the ones who survived in the toxic aftermath went begging for needed health care from the Giuliani administration. Funny, now that he’s the one with the martyr complex.

“He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through love of this country,” Giuliani says of Obama, packing a lot of dishonesty in short sentence. Only a handful of Americans were brought up the way the rich people in that room were brought up (and not all of them were brought up that way). Giuliani, with a convict father doing time for a violent robbery, was not brought up as they were. As for the “love of this country” part of it, Giuliani’s heritage includes a draft-dodging father during World War II, as well as four draft-dodging uncles during the same war. That family value made it only natural for Giuliani (classified 1-A) to express his own love of country by evading service during the Viet-Nam War, even as he cheered on its killing other young men who seem to have loved their countries more.

“With all our flaws, we’re the most exceptional country in the world,” Giuliani says, while claiming that Obama does not express love for America, an opinion that is demonstrably false (as the N.Y. Times has documented). In fact, Giuliani’s point about exceptionalism was vividly made in 2004, when Barack Obama acknowledged “that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.”

I would go anywhere, any place, anytime, and I wouldn’t give a damn what the President of the United States said, to defend my country. That’s a patriot. That’s a man who loves his people. That’s a man who fights for his people. Unlike our President.

This is what Giuliani was deceitfully saying to cheers in Arizona a week before his Obama-bashing affair for Scott Walker in New York. Giuliani’s Phoenix appearance at an anti-Iran conference was reported by Wayne Barrett of the N.Y. Daily News and apparently no one else in conventional media circles. The video of Giuliani’s February 13 speech appears to have gone viral on right-wing blogs. There, Giuliani’s inflated demagoguery and manipulative falsehoods elicit cheers from his fellow American-president haters. Giuliani’s fascistic rhetoric in Phoenix includes an emotional manipulation of the 1979 hostages in Iran and the intellectually manipulative, false claim that Obama doesn’t recognize ISIS as a threat, even though this administration has waged undeclared war on ISIS since last summer.

Turns out this year’s Giuliani right-wing red-meat-fest is nothing new. He performed the same tropes for the same hate-hungry crowd a year earlier. In 2014, Giuliani even claimed that Iran has “killed more Americans than any other country.” That raises a historical question or two about the death toll in the American wars with Iraq and Viet-Nam, or Germany and Japan. Iran has killed more Americans than any of them? And we’re not doing something about it?

All the focus on the personalities of Giuliani and Obama minimizes the larger importance of the Giuliani pattern, especially the successful racial divisiveness that has characterized both his career and the country’s history. The essential argument being peddled here is that only the true patriot loves his country enough to divide it in as many ways as possible for the sake of purifying it. For all the media twittering about loving America, the absence of political pushback indicates the deeper reality: there is a large constituency still out there for war-mongering and race-baiting and any politician confronts it only at his peril.

“The soul and substance of what customarily ranks as patriotism is moral cowardice – and always has been.” ~ Mark Twain's Notebook

Fifty years ago the country’s reactionary mindset was characterized as a “paranoid style,” as Jeffrey Toobin notes in The New Yorker. The shards of Giuliani’s explosive outbursts “are meant to tap into a deep wellspring of American political thought,” Toobin rightly says. But in the genteel style of The New Yorker avoidance, he only tepidly links “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” to the present political moment in which forthright political sanity is rare and thought to be dangerous to anyone expressing it.

Despite the media flurry, Giuliani remained pugnacious, secure in the knowledge that his intended audience still loved what he was saying. Aware of that, The Wall Street Journal of February 22 gave Giuliani op-ed space to continue his attack:

And to say, as the president has, that American exceptionalism is no more exceptional than the exceptionalism of any other country in the world, does not suggest a becoming and endearing modesty, but rather a stark lack of moral clarity….

I hope also that our president will start acting and speaking in a way that draws sharp, clear distinctions between us and those who threaten our way of life.

Those who (like Toobin) feign objectivity in order to consider Giuliani jive on its “merits” are accomplices to the poisoning of their own culture. In the political hurly-burly of today, they are allowing the worst among us to frame the debate in a way they cannot lose. Objective, responsible observers are enabling the very people who would extinguish them. They have attacked the messenger, but all their nattering serves only to give the calumnies more currency, while letting the essence of the deranged and vicious message stand unchallenged.