I am deeply afraid.
* * *
This kind of shit infuriates me. The GOP is thinking about helping the Democrats approve the Iran nuke deal, so they have the issue next year to run on.
Some of us on the right (self included, occasionally) refer to the GOP as the "stupid party", but this isn't merely stupid. It used to be that the GOP, at least, was the party of adults who understood that sometimes you have to put your foot down and say, "Regardless of how we can run on this, it's not good for the country and we need to stop it."
Let me understand their strategy, here. They have a majority in the Senate and the House, and they think that they can make hay on "We can't be fucked to stop Obama?" Do they think we're going to forget that they have the power to stop this shit cold and merely refuse to use it for reasons undefined? (Except, "Hey, maybe we can win an election next year"?)
I'm already not voting for Mark Kirk when he's up for re-election. He blew that when he voted for Obama's amnesty crap; this was a guy who campaigned on being a conservative, but has comported himself like "Democrat Lite" ever since he got to D.C.
Meanwhile, all these machinations by the GOP leadership seem to forget, somehow, that the press is hostile to them and will report, at every chance, just what was the GOP's role in ratifying the deal...if the GOP's role was, "Hey, we're not going to stand in your way, Barry."
The GOP has long since ceased to have any principles. When they make a stand, it's a token effort--a pretense to keep the votors from rioting--but with this strategem, however, they are no longer even pretending.
* * *
Planned Parenthood's latest outrage: selling organs harvested from murdered babies.
Ace's previous post on this where he correctly asserts that it's ugly and illegal.
Look: in the US, it's illegal to sell human organs for a profit, regardless of source, because the last thing you want is there to be a profit motive in that arena. The organs must be donated; the donor, or his estate, cannot receive any kind of payment for the organs. (That latter--"the estate"--is to avoid situations where the unscupulous say, "If we bump off our brother Ted, and forge his signature on this document, we can sell his organs and clean up! He just needs to have an unfortunate head injury. Be careful of the eyes, though; we can get a lot for his corneas!")
That abortionist's cheerful discussion of where to crush the baby, in order to spare organs for harvesting, is no less cold-blooded or pecuniary than Ted's siblings are. Deciding how to kill someone in order to preserve the economic value of his organs is nothing more than simple butchery. There's nothing noble or good or decent about it.
...so of course, as Ace comments, the press will utterly ignore the story, because it shows abortion in all its ugliness and horror.
"Oh, you say that, but you eat meat!"
Go away, little kid. Adults are talking.
Karl Denninger talks about this issue, too, pointing out something important: for all the talk about how organ donation is supposed not to have any profit attached to it, the people who convey the organs and do the transplants sure make a hell of a lot of money on it.
...and all this had brought Steve Jobs to mind, too, even before I read what Denninger said; so let me digress a bit.
Steve Jobs had pancreatic cancer. A person who is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and who immediately begins treatment for it has a very poor life expectancy, five years or less. Jobs beat the odds, lasting six, but it might have been more if he'd sought actual treatment earlier, instead of relying on magical thinking and bullshit. It helped that he had the less-aggressive form.
Nonetheless, as a cancer patient, Jobs was not on the short list for any organ transplantation. It's the cold numbers; healthy organs are hard to come by and there's a waiting list for them, and of course the transplant issue is complicated by blood types and other factors. You therefore want to give organs to people who are likely to live longest, and a 55-year-old cancer patient is not a preferred risk. Further, Jobs was a rare blood type, meaning that if there was anyone else in the country in better condition (or younger than he) who needed a liver and had that blood type, that person would get preferential treatment.
Jobs, however, somehow managed to get a liver just when he needed it.
Somehow. I'm certain that his billions of dollars of personal wealth were not a factor. Right? Right?? It just so happened that they had this liver with exactly the right blood type, and no one else in the country needed it. Right???
...garnering him two and a half more years of life. Would another recipient have lived longer? Someone not as well-heeled but who had more lifespan ahead of him if only he had a good liver?
Back to abortions for organs: Elizabeth Scalia says it best, I think:
Sometimes, it’s just easier to hook the mother up to a sonogram, take a good look at the baby flipping around in there, and just target-crush those arms and legs, and pull them out of the mother, so you can get a clear grab of that organ-rich thorax.That last is pretty fucking hideous. WHAT ABOUT THEIR VALUE AS LIVING HUMAN BEINGS BEFORE THEY ARE MURDERED IN THEIR MOTHERS' WOMBS? Huh? Before their arms and legs are torn off by the forceps of the abortionist?
There’s a lot of nice vacations, and maybe a beach house, in them thar kills.
It takes a peculiar kind of savagery to perform these horrific abortions; it takes a certain kind of hatred to exploit poor women and subject them to it. It takes a deleterious political mind to hold oneself up as a champion of the poor and the downtrodden, and then to pronounce such barbaric infanticide as an unqualified, and positive, "right" that must be protected.
It takes politicians of particular duplicity who will "fight" for that "right" even as they quote scripture to prove their Christian bona fides.
If this all makes you want to puke, it should; it means you’re sane. There are people out there, right now, making excuses for this inhumane revenue-stream, and repeating tired old tropes about shredded infants being mere "tissue." Others are trying to persuade through pragmatism, "the babies are dead anyway, so we might as well assign some value..."
The world groans under the weight of human iniquity. I keep wondering why God doesn't wipe us right the hell out and replace us with something that makes sense; then I remind myself that despair is a sin. *sigh*
* * *
I cannot continue in that vein. It's too depressing to contemplate for very long.
I worked hard enough yesterday that I am pleased as punch that today is so pleasant. It's quiet here, and I can only hear birds and the hum of a distant lawn mower. A modern idyll, however temporary.
It's all too easy for me to rationalize sitting here and doing nothing but listening to the quiet.