In presidential elections, yes it is. George W. Bush lost the popular vote in 2000, Clinton didn’t get a true majority in either election because of 3rd Party candidates in the race, Carter barely eked out a majority at 50.08%, Nixon only won his first term with 42% of the vote, hell, John F. Kennedy didn’t even break the 50% threshold.
In your fantasies. You see, everything on that list would have required President Obama to have been an ineffective candidate and leader — which he is not. Now here’s the reality: President Obama was the superior to Mitt Romney in every way, and at no time did a majority of the electorate disagree with that contention. There wasn’t a single moment, not even after the 1st debate, where Mitt Romney was ever ahead in the polling of people who intended to vote in this election. There’s zero use in fantasizing about “what if” you’d had a candidate who wasn’t a smarmy lying plutocrat. You did.
According to this website, http://www.survivors.la/ (caution: annoying video and audio), if you were born after 1973, you’re alive because you’re not dead. Or something.
Shayna, your previous post (that I was commenting on) was declaring the death of the GOP as it currently exists. Quote from you: “There isn’t going to be a GOP going forward.” So Romney’s personality isn’t really relevant. The details of these two candidates aren’t relevant, unless you thinks it’s impossible that any future Pubs will be better than Romney or future Dems worse than Obama.
Your idea that Obama couldn’t have made some more mistakes because he is an “effective leader” is silly. Did his being an effective leader keep most people from viewing his first debate performance as bad.
Could the bin Laden mission have failed?
Could Sandy have been more devastating?
Could the economy tanked even worse?
And it’s interesting that you write: There’s zero use in fantasizing about “what if” you’d had a candidate who wasn’t a smarmy lying plutocrat. You did. The assumption there is that I was a Romney supporter, which I absolutely was not. Your remark reads like the very worst Us vs Them Republican paranoia.
Republicans turned it into Us vs Them when they flat out refused to work with the president on anything. Anything. Even the most mundane mechanics of legislating that have historically been nothing more than bookkeeping. They took us to the edge of default and cost us our AAA rating. They have artificially kept the unemployment rate higher than need be by refusing to pass a Jobs bill while focusing on the greatest number of anti-women anti-choice pieces of legislation we’ve ever witnessed, naming post offices and courthouses, and wasting time voting to repeal health care reform knowing full well it would go absolutely nowhere.
We just told them we won’t stand for that behavior any longer.
We just told them (and you) we will not allow you to control what we do with our bodies by shoving probes in us and forcing doctors to lie to us and limiting our access to health care and health care facilities.
What makes you think it it rights based? It’s just life-based. Abortion is killing an unborn child, and they don’t think you should kill it unless you have a good reason. And they don’t see “I would be inconvenienced by the existence of this child” as a good reason, but they do see “I was raped” as a good reason.
If you’ve ever seen the fervor in which these people believe, including trying to commit suicide because their girlfriend got an abortion of their child, or how Obama referring to a baby as “a mistake” made one girl on my Facebook wall think he’s the most evil man in existence, you wouldn’t continue believing that they are lying about it. They really believe abortion is a really, really evil act, and that, as such, it shouldn’t be allowed. They think only rape is worse.
I don’t know why everyone throws incest in there, as the incest exception is specifically about incest rape.
I wonder if my position on the subject would be more palatable to you: the kid’s right to exist is absolute after the point where it could survive outside the womb, barring medical complications. You only have the right to expel the child from the mother’s body, not take the child’s life.
It’s not quite murder if you do abort after this point–it’s closer to manslaughter, as there’s no malice. It might even be less than that if there’s an emotional problem in the mother.
It gets more complicated before viability. If brain waves are active, you need a pretty good reason. Before that, you need at least the reason you would use to kill an animal. At embryo stage, how difficult it would be to raise a child comes in. And, before that, feel free to do whatever you want.
That is, of course, too much gradation to fit into a law. The only thing needed legally is to outlaw abortions after viability, with the medical reason exception above. A woman controls only her own body, not that of the fetus She merely is allowed to evict that fetus. It’s just that, before viability, this results in death. After viability, it does not. Thus killing the child is a separate act.
Before viability, killing the baby before evicting it is just preventing suffering.
Abortion is probably better compared to divorce. Few people celebrate either. In both cases there are extremists who believe it is always wrong, most people who believe on some sort of scale of “its sometimes necessary” and a few yahoos who use divorce or abortion with what appears to be an uncomfortable (to me) casualness (and marriage and conception with the same casualness).
The Republican Party is substantially made up ideologues of various stripes. Anti-birth-control types are a big part of its coalition. Who would kick them out?
The Repubs “reverence for life” is a load of bs. The opposition to abortion is another way to control women and limit their effectiveness in the workplace. A woman who can’t control her fertility is going to find it difficult to advance in a career.
Why do I say this? Look at the other things Repubs want to do: reduce or eliminate Welfare programs - so a woman who had a baby she didn’t want and couldn’t afford can’t get assistance. They are usually in favor of the death penalty, and have no problems with sending young people to other countries to die in unnecessary wars. It’s only when the life is inside the body of a woman that it suddenly becomes sacred.
Two things hadn’t come up here yet that I think are worth attention.
First of all, the Republicans who made the news this past election - and who mostly all lost their races - had extremist views, even by pro-life standards.
Those people had the view that abortion was never acceptable, even if the fetus was conceived through rape, a position that is far more extreme than how most Americans feel according to polling.
But not only were they more extreme than even the average Pro-Life American, they used horrifically inaccurate and often offensive “facts” to justify their extreme views. [ul]
[li]Pseudoscience: Todd “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down" Akin[/li][li]God’s Will: Richard “That it is something that God intended to happen” Mourdock.[/li][li]More pseudoscience: Joe “Advances in science and technology… There’s no such exception as life of the mother” Walsh.[/li][/ul]We can debate whether these guys lost their elections because they made bad arguments that offended people as opposed to their actual position. Would anything had changed if one of them made a statement something along these lines:
Please note that I find that view repugnant… But at least it has a certain logical consistency to it if you do believe that a fetus deserves a right to life like a fully formed and viable human being.
What I wonder, then, is how the electorate would react to such a statement. Would it be as negative as to the loony stuff that was actually said? Was it the tortured logic that sent people voting for the Democrat or the position itself?
This brings me to the second point that hasn’t come up.
While the above trio of quote machines got most of the ink and outrage - and some people blamed the media for hyping them all up so much (apparently asking a candidate to explain how their policy decisions will affect their constituents is a gotcha question when the constituent is a raped and pregnant women), a couple of very important things within the mainstream of the GOP happened with relatively little notice.
Paul Ryan was touted as a “policy wonk” and everyone heard about his controversial budget plans. But lost in the shuffle is the fact that he “Cosponsored All the Most Extreme Anti-Abortion Bills” in the House:
Other extreme measures that Ryan cosponsored, from the article, include:
So here is the guy that the Republicans ran as the #2-ranking Republican, the “real Conservative” on the Presidential ticket - with a history that is just as profoundly extreme as the Akin/Mourdock/Walsh trash triumvirate.
Even more importantly is that Ryan softened his extreme position while on the campaign and this garnered far less coverage from a mainstream media that had little difficulty reporting Romney’s many flip-flops.
On top of that, the Republican Party Platform itself - the committee of which was chaired by Virginia Governor Bob “Mandatory Invasive Ultrasound” McDonnell - wound up without a rape and incest exception.
I don’t think that abortion is going to go away for the Republican party since it is a very successful wedge issue for them. But the issue becomes a wedge issue within the GOP itself when you start to faction off the extremist views from the mainstream Pro-Life view.
When the far right say crazy things, even Pro-Life voters get offended. When someone who held crazy views changes them while on the Presidential ticket, it isn’t questioned. When the platform itself holds an extremist position, it goes away quietly.
These things are very inconsistent but I think it points that the Republican Pro-Life contingency will be allowed to hold views even way far to the right of what even Pro-Lifers believe as long as they don’t say stupid shit about it.
OR, they have a more nuanced view of the issue than you do.
Because there is a moral element in a pregnancy that resulted from consensual sex that doesn’t exist ina pregnancy that resulted from rape.
Take the case of the violinist. It doesn’t work so well in the case of consensual sex but works pretty well as a defense against abortion in the case of rape.
Because after the child is born, adoption is clearly a morally superior choice to killing the chld.
If you had to choose between a cannister of 100 frozen embryos and one live child, I don’t know that all these “reverence for life types” would decide to save 100 lives (in the form of the frozen embryos) over the one single living child.
So I don’t think they actually believe what they think they believe.
In this case the analogy would be between the violinist breaking in through a window or the woman leaving the door unlocked (by any manner of error: in information, so that the person doesn’t know how or why to use contraception, in performance, so that the person uses contraception incorrectly or it fails to work properly). Even if the woman invited the guest in, chances in circumstances could mean the guest is no longer welcome through no fault of its own (and dependent on the mother).
Isn’t this the case of children that are the unwelcome result of errors in contraception?
I can’t believe that pro-life politicians who do not support a rape exception don’t have a handy little retort ready for the obvious question that they have likely heard forever: How can you force a woman to carry her rapist’s baby to term?
For two GOP U.S. Senate nominees to flub that answer so terribly is ridiculous at this stage in their political careers.