I have a friend who, for much of his life, as far as I am aware, has considered himself Republican or independent with Republican leanings. Back when Ronnie Raygun was President, he was pretty firmly in the Republican camp, having fallen for the whole trickle-down economics BS and the entire smaller-and-less-intrusive government shtick. At that age, I was somehow able to see where the GOP was headed... maybe it was obvious, I don't really remember... it seemed obvious to me.

I warned my friend that the GOP was leading us down the path toward Theocracy and Fascism. He thought I was just being alarmist... and probably "a nay-sayer", as Reagan liked to call liberal Democrats at the time.

And look at where we are now. Does he speak of this at all? No... not really. He's pretty apolitical, generally speaking, and he's doing very well, leading a pretty comfortable life. He definitely worked hard for it... he's not one of those silver-spoon types. But I know he thinks this country has taken a wrong turn. All I'm saying is that I told him when I saw the GOP signaling for that turn, and I don't expect him to acknowledge it.

One of the things that has irritated me the most in all of this time has been the degree to which the GOP has shown absolute disdain for the rights of women. Some of them claim to support women's rights to succeed in business, but they're highly unlikely to actually try to work towards that goal. But should a woman get pregnant at any age, she becomes a brood-mare with no capacity to decide her own destiny. This fundamental lack of respect, even disgust, for women, is absolutely intolerable, and no amount of blathering about small government and lower taxes can make up for it. What about less-intrusive government? Wasn't that one of those principles? Oh... I get it... that only applies to businesses... almost invariably run by men.

I want an apology... not just from him... but from all the people with whom I've had such political discussions over the decades. Their stupidity (or apathy) is what has brought us here.

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will do or say just about anything to win the Presidency, it appears. No lie is too great, no distortion too bizarre, to deflect from the quest for the Holy Grail of the Presidency of the United States.

It appears to be the way he lives his life. Tired of his wife, just get a new one; as if she were a worn and tattered pair of shoes.

And the nature of his politics, if his shifting and triangulating are any indicator.

Which is by no means to say that Obama is perfect, though McCain wants it way too badly to be trusted.

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to list the things McStain hasn't flip-flopped on than to list the things he has!

The list is getting too long to remember!

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Wait, is this the flip or the flop, or the flip back again? On the other hand it could be a flip flop and a half.

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But so far as abortion is concerned, in the middle ages there was always the village wise woman, and in any case, no one pretended that women were anything other than chattel.

The contemporary pretense that women are somehow different these days is one of those sad jokes that leave you wondering whether to laugh or to cry. Women were 'liberated' at the end of the 60's, when the production of birth control pills coincided with the big GOP push to get rid of all things liberal once and for all. Corporate industry wanted cheap labor, and presto! Women were liberated ... if you call what we have liberation.

Apart from gaining access to a few professions which were closed to them, and for which they are still paid 70¢ on the male worker's dollar, the position of women can hardly be called improved. They now have the privilege of raising their children single handed far more often, though rarely in the personal sense - instead they have to consign them to warehouses more often than not, though single mothers don't have a monopoly on that choice, so called. They are often privileged, while working outside the home fulltime and supervising those children, to look after the family's infirm and disabled elders, too. And though there is probably no profession which is closed to women today, most women are still employed in traditional pink collar jobs, which pay even less now than they did thirty years ago.

I'd say women in the middle ages had it better. They frequently were called upon to run the family affairs and businesses while their men were off in the Middle East crusading .. gosh, deja vu anyone? And if the worst happened and they needed to opt out of a pregnancy, well, they didn't have a male medical heirarchy back then, what they had was midwives and wise women, and no one to say them nay.

Not that I'd want to go back to carrying water from the village well, but lets not kid ourselves about our liberation status, eh?

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Quote:
"...Tony Perkins, the president of the conservative Family Research Council.....[said].."I think he would be aborting his own campaign because that is such a critical issue to so many Republican voters..."

Critical issue?

Normal human beings living in the USA right now have issues from this list (in no particular order):

The Economy
The Housing mortgage crisis
Health Care
Education
Drugs and Crime
The War in Iraq/Afghanistan
FEMA failures
Increased government surveillance

It seems the Funkymentalists have a much shorter list:

Abortion (ban it)
Homosexuality (ban it)
Gay Marriage (ban it)
pre-marital sex (ban it)
sex education (Abstinence only)
Evolution education (ban it)

There seems to be an underlying pattern of fear and self loathing with an unhealthy dose of misogynistic sexism added.

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