I have not been able to post for the last two months for many reasons. It’s been a hard couple of months. Between making a pilgrimage back to the sacred soil of my Alma Mater and then on to Shopping Mall – which, thanks to both of them being unmasked hell holes – gave me a case of COVID. After two years of avoiding it, even with two trips overseas, I found myself in Shopping Mall feeling worse with each passing day. Upon my return home, I went and got tested. ” No more calls; we have a winner!”.
Anyone who says, “COVID is just the flu” needs to be punched in the face. Hard. Even though I was vaxxed and boosted, the infection kicked my ass. It took me well about three weeks to get to a normal level of energy, and even now, I still feel tired at the end of the day. I’m fortunate that I had what was considered a “mild case,” which means I sure don’t ever want to find out what a severe case is about. As soon as the doctor clears me, I’m going for a second booster.
The other thing that happened over the last two months was the disgusting decline of the land of my birth. Related to my illness, an unqualified ( as judged by the ABA and many competent legal professionals) decided that masks were no longer required on public transportation and airplanes. The opinion that this worthless shrew wrote is not based on any solid legal reasoning – non whatsoever. She did what her masters at the Federalist Society wanted her to do. Before hearing the case, she decided on the outcome, then tried to tie it together in a string of so-called “facts.” Legal experts from across the country have ripped the opinion for being amateurish at best and politically motivated at worst.
“It reads like someone who had decided the case and then tried to dress it up as legal reasoning without actually doing the legal reasoning,”
And of course, now, some three weeks later, COVID cases and hospitalizations are rising across the country, which is precisely what the experts predicted would happen.
It is in no way so surprising and is in keeping with the incompetent response of the United States, which has, as of this week, led to the deaths of a million Americans. That number alone is nothing short of a crime. A crime that folks like Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott should be made to pay a severe price for.
But of course, they won’t.
For me, it’s been just another depressing example of the future turning out to have failed us all – and reinforces the question I continue to ask myself in contemplative moments.
“What was a life’s work for? Certainly, it could not have been for this.”
That point was driven home, especially in the events of the last few days where the garbage opinion of Samuel Alito in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
Now I am not a feminist supporter, as my writings have made quite clear. But this event has galvanized my feelings quite clearly. Give me a pink hat and a picket sign; I’m ready to join the march! I certainly have ZERO desire to see the US go back to the world of back-alley abortions. I’ve been pro-choice most of my adult life, even during the years I was a Republican. The action of these six hacks has made me certain I made the right choice to tell the teabaggers to go fuck themselves some 13 years ago.
The draft opinion was leaked to Politico, showing that Alito and the rest of the Federalist Society acolytes are ready to overturn Roe vs. Wade. Moreover, this action showed three of these Justices to have perjured themselves during their confirmation hearings when they stated that they considered Roe vs. Wade to be settled law.
Who leaked the draft? I don’t know, and I don’t care. I have my own theories about who did it, and Adam Silverman echoes it over at Balloon-Juice. Contrary to the beliefs of so many worthless slags on the right, it was not a liberal law clerk.
By now everyone has developed their own pet theory on who leaked the draft opinion in Dobbs V Mississippi, why it was leaked, etc. And a lot of really smart and good people are trying to get the news media gatekeepers – The NY Times for the mainstream, whatever mainstream actually means in 2022, and Fox News for the conservatives, whatever conservative actually means in 2022 too – to focus on the real issue, which is that at least five Republican Federalist Society backed appointees to the Supreme Court are prepared to and will overturn Roe and Casey and do so in a way that is intended to set up pretty much everything else back the Civil War amendments to also be overturned. Obergefell, Griswold, Loving, Brown, the Civil Rights Act, whatever’s left of the Voting Rights Act, everything pertaining to the New Deal, and then gutting the Civil War amendments. That’s the substantive story. Flat stop. Don’t pass go.
Up to this point the news media has failed to focus on the substantive, real story.
And that’s because their was a strategy in the leak. It wasn’t a leak, it was a feint and a provocation!
On the night that the draft decision leaked and the next day I was texting about it with TaMara, BettyC, and Tom Levenson. One of the points I made was this was done by the conservative majority on the Supreme Court – an idea that has now become something of common wisdom. But it was done so as part of a defined strategy. That strategy has four lines of effort:
Make it harder, if not impossible, for Chief Justice Roberts to peel off Kavanaugh and maybe one of the other junior justices for his compromise that allows the Mississippi fifteen week limit to go into effect, but also keeps Roe and Casey intact.
Set the narrative for the news media locking it into focusing on the leak, the damage the leak does to the court, and the danger to the justices and the Constitution as a result of the leak. This is just an extension of the normal conservative sore winner, we just got what we wanted, but we’re still the real victims and being victimized schtick they’ve been working for decades.
Kick off the response early. By getting everyone rightly outraged now it sets the conditions for the outrage to subside by the time the actual ruling comes out in four to six weeks, let alone by the time the midterm elections roll around in November. It is hard to sustain that level of anger and willingness to protest en masse over a sustained period of time. Think of this as normalization by exhaustion and demoralization. You can’t stop it. The Democrats don’t appear to have a strategy, let alone a tactic that will do anything but look like a failed stunt. So by November what should drive up Democratic turnout and turnout by Independents for Democrats actually doesn’t happen because everyone who was rightly outraged is now just exhausted and demoralized.
Set the conditions, as part of the narrative setting in the second part of the strategy, for someone who can be tied to the Democrats or the groups and movements that support them, to do something stupid, reckless, and downright dangerously violent in order to create an astroturfed backlash to the legitimate backlash. Here’s Yahoo News republishing Fox News reporting about how liberal groups have published the conservative justices home addresses as part of promoting their followers to go protest in front of their homes. If you keyword search “liberal groups publish justices addresses roe leak” all the reporting hits, other than the Yahoo republication, return for conservative outlets like Fox and National Review.
Silverman goes on to document how all the Fox clowns and their right-wing Congresspeople have all the same talking points. Which points the finger squarely back at Clarence Thomas and his traitor of a wife. Thomas has been advocating against the legal concept of Stare Decisis ( the respect for established precedent) for most of his career. Because he wants to rewrite the Constitution all by himself.
I believe Silverman’s theory for one particular reason, the statements and the strenuous efforts of the Justices themselves to try to maintain the fiction that the Supreme Court is worthy of continued respect.
News flash! It is not. That ship sailed long ago.
Consider the decisions that Robert’s Court has failed on – many of them I have written about here on the blog:
- Citizens United.
- Heller
- Hobby Lobby
- Upholding Texas’s shitty abortion law
- Not requiring states to pay into Medicare Expansion
- Gutting the Voting Rights Act.
- Allowing Gerrymandering.
And that is only a partial list. What’s even worse is Alito’s language in the draft, which left the door open for a full-frontal assault on a host of other freedoms and rights that can and should be guaranteed under the 9th and 14th Amendments. At its heart is the conservative obsession with the idea that no American has a right to any privacy, which is at the heart of both Roe vs. Wade and the Griswold decision. As Jared Polis, the governor of Colorado, stated today, “Republicans in Colorado and nationally are obsessed with taking away freedoms, whether it’s a Texas law that would arrest women and encourage vigilante attacks on women and doctors, the Florida law that infringes upon freedom of speech and bans the word, gay. They’re just obsessed about taking away freedoms.“
The question is, why? Even if you think abortion is morally wrong, it is not your place to dictate your perception of morality to others. It is probably the most significant and most troublesome change the evangelical church has made over the last 30-plus years, departing from the idea that convincing someone to change their path is to be done through persuasion to deciding to dictate one’s path by legislating morality.
Don’t like abortion? Don’t get one. But you simply don’t have the right to legislate others’ choices in this matter. And before someone brings up COVID choices, let me remind them that pregnancy is not a transmissible disease. It’s different, and hopefully, one is not so stupid as not to realize that.
As Mother’s Day comes upon us this weekend, we should again repeat the question, why are conservatives so hell-bent on doing this? Why now? John Palovitz provides us with a partial answer:
Mother’s Day should not be compulsory for any woman.
It should be the yearly celebration of a decision, a moment to mark a beautiful but perilous journey one has carefully or prayerfully chosen to traverse. It should not be an annual reminder of a destiny decided by strangers who will never know their names nor care about their stories nor partner with them in any way.
As the Republican Party and its surrogates in the highest court in our nation finalize the legislative removal of women’s autonomy, Mother’s Day will be forever weaponized. For millions of women, it will become not a voluntary holiday of reflecting on a difficult, yet desired vocation—but a mandatory act of reliving assault, of recalling trauma, of commemorating domestic abuse, of acknowledging their servitude, of feeling less-than.
No one should want any part of making Mother’s Day such a day for anyone.
Behind the public statements is the work of very evil men, who have set these wheels into motion. Tomorrow’s post will show you just how terrible these people are.
Their actions make sad for the future they are creating for this country.
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