You are currently browsing the daily archive for October 21st, 2008.
Hey, how about that? Fifteen-thousand hits. Makes me feel like a big star. [applause] Hey, hey, I know it. I’m just the talky-man you come to here, not the guy you read about in Collier’s Magazine. I don’t have the glamour of an F. Scott Fitzgerald or an Ernest Hemingway or the insane passion of a Harry Crosby (for which I am eternally thankful). I’m no song-and-dance man. I’m an essayist and monologuist, a racconteur and conversationalist. I am the incessant nagging voice of panic and unreason.
And that’s why you love me.
To celebrate this milestone, I’d like to welcome a few musical guests to our show.
First up, Steeleye Span!
And now I am pleased to once again welcome our most frequent musical guest, Keren Ann!
And introducing Lightspeed Champion!
The Large Hadron Collider is nothing! The Economist Magazine has seen this economic collapse coming for years.
You’ll love GraphJam, a website of knee-slapping scatterplots and side-splitting distributions.
I am an Undecided Voter. I am an undecided voter because it seems to me that, regardless of who I pick, both Obama and McCain are monsters. I exaggerate, of course, but both of them support things I, as a Catholic, simply cannot countenance. The argument to vote Catholic for McCain always centers on his opposition to abortion and gay marriage. I’ll grant that these are, yes, vitally important issues. I also think they’re quite shallow, and I’ll tell you why.
I don’t trust Republicans to do a damn thing about either. Why? Because they hold control of the entire elected federal government for six solid years, and did nothing. They did nothing because they can’t do anything. They can’t do anything because, thanks to Roe v. Wade, abortion is Constitutional law. And here’s the kicker, here’s where I really pull out the stops: as much as I agree that Roe is simply awful, as much as I agree that it’s allowed profound evil to spill out into the public space, as much as its enabled the deaths of millions — the decision was simply correct. Not right or moral, but certainly correct. I certainly think they read the Constitution properly.
The only way to deal with it, then, is to amend the Constitution, and honestly, how many anti-abortion amendments came out of the Republican congress? They wrote amendments to ban gay marriage, but did they write one to explicitly remove abortion from the Constitution? No. No, they did not.
Such a lousy track record! Am I supposed to vote for someone based simply on their opinions? Is my vote simply centered on some vague distaste for abortion, and not a proven effort of trying to end the bleeding practice?
Obama or McCain, neither of them can or will do a single thing about abortion. Not one. I don’t trust them there, so abortion is not an issue for me. If I vote for McCain based on his position on it, I’m surely to be disappointed, while not a single child will survive because of him. We place far too many of our hopes on our politicians, ask far too much of them. I believe and have for some time that abortion will only end, can only end, in personal conversion and not in legislation. That’s it. That’s all.
