Vagina’s Vengeance: Republicans Officially Killing Their Party for Birth Control
Last night,stupid Catholic commentators like Chris Matthews, tried to blame Rick Santorum’s loss in MI on his Kennedy comment. Santorum must have lost MI’s significant percentage of Republican Catholics, Matthews figured, because he said he had vomited after listening to a John F. Kennedy speech.
That ignored the fact that the tide had already turned against Santorum a week earlier. Both Catholics and women abandoned him after he started embracing medieval mores. (His speech last night feigned feminism, so it’s clear he knows what happened.)
But I’m more interested in the timing of Olympia Snowe’s decision to retire.
She cited excessive partisanship when she announced her decision yesterday.
I do find it frustrating, however, that an atmosphere of polarization and ‘my way or the highway’ ideologies has become pervasive in campaigns and in our governing institutions.
[snip]
Unfortunately, I do not realistically expect the partisanship of recent years in the Senate to change over the short term. So at this stage of my tenure in public service, I have concluded that I am not prepared to commit myself to an additional six years in the Senate, which is what a fourth term would entail.
That usually means the other party is being too partisan.
Except this announcement comes just two weeks after Snowe (and Susan Collins) at first broke with their party to announce support for Obama’s compromise on birth control. But both women quickly flip-flopped, basically opposing a policy they had once proposed themselves. Snowe has announced her opposition to the Blunt Amendment–which will come up for a vote on Thursday. We’ll see whether she follows through on that.
We shall see–but one way to show the men in your party that women have the ability to affect events would be to retire at a time that makes it much less likely Republicans will win a majority in the Senate.
How nice to see Republicans destroy their party by insisting that women lose all control over their bodies.
I am just wondering if Senator Snowe thought about running as an independent. She certainly once was a moderate before she started caving in to the boys.
I wonder if there’s a money component to her decision: could “partisanship” be a codeword for realizing that her campaign funding sources would dry up if she didn’t toe the line?
Bob in AZ
i am happy to see the republican right-wing destroy the party it has taken over.
what i cannot understand, though, is just who it is that republican politicians think they are talking to when they start waving the scimitar of this american-taliban rhetoric about their heads.
just who is their target? who is it that wants to hear this stuff? a bunch of old-world-dominated catholic bishops, priests, and lay fanatics? a bunch of emotionally damaged evangelical goofballs?
can there be enough voters of this stripe to make it safe and profitable for a republican politician to ignore five decades of personally freeing birth control?
birth control of all kinds – daily pills, iud’s, condoms, abortion, plan b pills, tube tying, and vasectomies – have been embedded in american culture for decades. as has the sexual freedom it permits.
the absolute necessity of having these options is not going to change. the personal development and the economic consequences are too great for women to revert to hope, prayer, and aspirin.
and still, the republican pols, in states as well as nationally, keep kicking the rock. amazing.
From Matt Browner Hamlin on Twitter:
“If I wanted the government in my womb I’d fuck a senator”
@orionATL:
You obviously don’t understand the World of Fox. Heck, 25% of the electorate would vote for GWB again. Most of these are low-information voters in rural states that have little contact with the outside world, i.e., anything outside the boundaries of their own state.
Bob in AZ
@bmaz: LOL … Priceless !
Marcy, this Title belongs in the Blogoverse Hall of Fame !
It’s why the voter suppression stuff has been going on. Look at the map from a couple days ago, 8-10 states within 4% range D to R. That means it’s close enough to steal. If anyone thinks that Rove, Norquist, Luntz, the Kochs, Adelson, etc., are going to let two cycles go by out of power they are crazy. There is a plan to steal this WH, only a ridiculously high turnout as we saw in 2008 would prevent it. THAT is the lesson of 2010.
The GOP convention will be brokered to get Petraeus and [I’d guess] Christie for VP though Palin will wiggle around enough to sell some books. The Kochs, Adelson et al, will ensure all ad time is bought up, and Luntz and Rove will handle the message. Obama’s team will not have time, nor more importantly the media access to get the facts about Petraeus out. He’s no savior.
@Bob Schacht:
Half the people in West Texas have apparently never been farther away than Dallas. I suspect fewer have been out of the state – most of those were either born outside Texas, or have businesses or hobbies that take them elsewhere.
@P J Evans: I hear ya. But the other half of those West Texans are likely to be oil people, and some of them do get around.
When I was living in Houston, it was common to meet out-of-staters– but then, I was teaching at Rice University. I met East Texas locals who hadn’t been north of Nacogdoches in decades. San Antonio or Dallas was about as far west as any of them went (after all, why go to west Texas? Is there anything there worth going to?) But then, Texas is big enough to be 3 states.
I met someone once on an airplane who was from eastern Colorado, IIRC, and she was complaining that it was getting too crowded there, so she was thinking of moving to Montana.
Bob in AZ
@Bob Schacht: The sorry thing is that only 25% of eligible voters actually vote in most elections. More and more people are sitting out after becoming aware that voting machines are eminently hackable and the politicians in congress are in the pockets of the 1%.
Until the Americans who are underwater on their mortgages or who are not able to find work or who see that their kids’ futures are bleak realize that a class war of the most brutal kind has been waged against them in earnest for the past 39 years, this crap will continue unabated.