I happened to hear the following on C-SPAN yesterday. It is from a special orders speech by Trent Franks (R-AR).
Today has been sort of a remembrance of heroes. We’ve talked a lot about George Bush, we’ve talked a lot about Abraham Lincoln. In a sense, it is so appropriate to do that on January 22, isn’t it? Because we are reminded that, just as America was used after 6,000 years of rampant slavery in the world, we were the ones that had a moral conflict with it. And yes, we had a little disagreement called the Civil War over it, but we were used of God to change this tragedy of slavery, and now it is at least discredited all over the planet. And I believe that this country will be the country that will lead the world to discredit this tragic practice of killing our children before they’re born.
My first reaction was “Why haven’t I heard of this guy before? I mean, that’s some industrial grade dumbth. That’s like Steve King level stupid.”
As it turns out, Franks’s words just prior to when I tuned in were:
Mr. Speaker, it has been an absolute honor to serve with Steve King in this body. He and I came in as freshmen a little over 6 years ago. And time has a way of getting away from all of us, but I just want him to understand what a hero I think he is.
Then, following the first statement quoted above, which presumably imparted a fair number of RPMs to the bones of Billy Wilberforce, Franks suggests that Americans ought to “remember what makes us special. And what makes us special is because we once held these truths to be self-evident…”, and he provides TJ’s list.
In other words, according to Franks, Americans are special not for anything we’re doing now, but for something we used to believe, something that, I’m forced to presume, nobody else ever bothered thinking, perhaps because we’ve been treating TJ’s ideas as trade secrets for over two centuries.
Franks closes: “God bless George Bush. God bless Abraham Lincoln. God bless every little unborn child trying to come to this country and to walk in the freedom of American liberty. And God bless America.”
American fetuses– even the ones that don’t have nervous systems yet — just know these things. When we say “Let freedom ring”, it’s really so the fetuses can hear it and be happy they’re being born somewhere without socialized health care.
And all of this is just the tail end of an hour-long special orders session featuring Franks, Steve King (R-IA), and Mike Pence (R-IN), which they call the “Sunset Memorial”:
You see, it is January 22, 2009, in the land of the free and the home of the brave. And before this sunset today in America, almost 4,000 more defenseless unborn children were killed by abortion on demand. That is just today, Mr. Speaker. That is just today, 36 years to the day from Roe versus Wade. That is more than the number of innocent lives lost on September 11th in this country, but it happens every day.
Or put another way, 4,000 more pregnant women, whether due to a lack of the personal or financial resources that would allow them to help a child thrive, to medical exigencies, to the fact they were impregnated by a rapist, or to some uncategorizable set of unfortunate circumstances, were put in the unenviable position of concluding that the best way forward — for themselves and also, perhaps, for any future children they might desire — would be to terminate their pregnancies. However, don’t expect Franks to talk about women with full and complex lives who struggle to reach decisions — except to warn them that they will be mysteriously “not quite the same” for their choice.
Here’s the full transcript of Franks’s initial remarks. Given that the chance of any given sentence containing at least one logical, historical, scientific, or rhetorical howler is close to 100%, it is probably well worth the time of anyone feeling shrill and blogofascisty. Gluttons for punishment can check out Pence and King too.
I’ll include a few more quotes from Franks, but for the full “George W. Bush = demigod” effect, you’ll have to go read the whole thing:
since we have made a great transition in this country, I feel as if it is also appropriate for me tonight to say some words in tribute to one George Walker Bush who had the courage, the commitment and the compassion in his soul to stand up for these little babies who couldn’t stand up for themselves.
[...]
In his Presidency, George Bush faced the catastrophic disaster of September 11, the deadliest terrorist attack or any other enemy attack against America in her entire history. He faced the calamity of Hurricane Katrina, one of the five deadliest storms to ever strike American soil. And then President Bush faced a worldwide financial crisis demonstrated by the largest 1-day drop in the Dow Jones in the history of the Nation.
Now, Mr. Speaker, any sane mind knows President Bush did not cause any of those disasters to happen. And any honest mind knows that his response to those disasters was due to trying to do what he truly thought was the right thing for the country instead of what was right for him politically.
[...]
President Bush was willing to fight, not because he hated what was in front of him, but because he loved what was behind him. He loved America. He loved freedom. And he loved the innocent.
[...]
there are many reasons I will remember President George W. Bush. I will remember him for his courage. I will remember him for his patriotism, for his love of freedom, for his thankful heart and his commitment to human dignity and protecting, once again, those innocents that could not protect themselves. I will remember him because he vowed to keep us safe, and he did. I will remember him because he saw the greatness in America. And the greatness of America always lived in his own heart. I will remember him because he recognized that indeed there is a good and evil in this world. I will remember him because he rejected the liberal intelligentsia’s posture that there was moral equivalence between murdering innocents to advance an ideology and liberating the innocent to advance freedom.
Anyone know what that last bit even means? And if “President Bush was willing to fight, not because he hated what was in front of him, but because he loved what was behind him” isn’t the best straight line you’re likely to get all day…
Also, Jesus rode a stegasaurus to the wedding at Cana.
What in the world? How did Bush “face” these things? Did he just look at them with a dullard’s stare?
I always picture J as a Triceratops type. Also, riding a Stegasaurus would give new meaning to “saddle sore.”
God bless every little unborn child trying to come to this country, indeed, because gawd knows they won’t be given any consideration once they’re born. Once born, their importance, they’re “specialness”, seems to disappear.
I always thought Jesus was more of an Apatosaurus type.
Pinko is obviously unaware of the skilled and valued trade of those who removed plates from the backs of stegosaurs to provide room for human riders and ensure they did not get stegosores.
Did they work at stegostores?
Here’s a quote from Steve King’s part in the proceedings (take some insulin before reading the second paragraph):
And this is also a man with a profound moral understanding of when his life began, at the instant of conception. And he has faced this issue with a number of big decisions in the Oval Office, decisions that had to do with the executive order that supports the Mexico City policy that forbids U.S. taxpayer dollars from being extorted from our pro-life citizens–of which I am one–to fund abortion services in foreign countries. That’s an executive order that’s balanced precariously perhaps on the desk of President Obama today. This man who called out for unity may not be doing so if he signs that executive order.
President Bush supports the Mexico City policy. It has protected millions of lives around the world and has protected the conscience of American taxpayers. President Bush burned many hours examining the embryonic stem cell research and finally decided the existing lines would be allowed to be utilized, but there would be no new lines that would interrupt innocent human lives with U.S. taxpayer dollars. It was a difficult and careful decision that he made. It has protected the lives of many little embryos. And I have held some of those snowflake babies in my arms–yes, they are people, they’re warm, they’re bubbly, they giggle, they laugh, they love just like the rest of us, having been frozen for 9 years as an embryo. President Bush understood that. There is a real humanity in this man. This is a pro-life President.
Fortunately, the next day Obama repealed the Mexico City policy (the Global Gag Rule), which in the calculus of those who can tell the difference between human beings with functional neuroanatomy and clumps of stem cells means that rather fewer human lives will be “interrupted”. You’d swear King thinks the blastocysts themselves are warm, bubbly, and giggly.
(NOTE: Anyone not in the mood to read about extreme fetal development errors should probably stop here.)
Has anybody looked closed at the stuff about fetal pain that the fetus über alles crowd goes on about? Just scanning the stuff that’s been incorporated into Wikipedia, I get the impression that these people can’t distinguish between hard wired reflexes and conscious suffering. This quote just sounds weird to me (a quote mine maybe?):
The assumption that neonates could not feel pain was challenged by the medical profession, as Fletcher writes in the NEJM, “Certainly not by those of us at the bedside of critically ill infants, who see them flinch from procedures, startle in response to loud noises, and turn from bright lights . . .”
An anencephalic neonate (one that developed without a brain) can have reflexes — some of them breathe and react to light and touch — but can have no conscious “feelings” of any sort. There’s nothing in that quote, though, that indicates any distinction being made between those kinds of reflexes and an actual consciousness suffering from pain.
I assume (hope?) the NEJM would not publish anything that scientifically careless, so I expect the quote is out of context. But certainly Terri Schiavo showed the distinct lack of interest on the part of the Culture of Lifeiness for such distinctions.
The human brain is designed to look for signs of agency in other human shaped objects. That we may interpret in personalized, emotional terms the actions of human bodies where there is no neurologically actuated “person” that can be said to be the source of the bodily movements is understandable and can be tragic, but seems no less a delusion for all its morbid inevitability.
I suppose those who believe in some quite literal sense that an immaterial soul is what animates the body can see an attempt by that soul to communicate even when there’s no possibility of conscious brain function to back it up. Though how one should distinguish between such messages from the anima and the known mechanical reactions of bodies is, let’s say, unclear.
I don’t think research into fetal pain is pointless. Late abortions are shockingly brutal procedures, and if it is indeed meaningful to view the fetus as experiencing suffering, then minimizing that to the greatest practicable degree when such procedures are necessary is imperative. But I don’t, of course, want to see such research held captive to the addled notions of the Culture of Lifeiness.
(Anyone interested in what’s hiding under the phrases “shockingly brutal”, “greatest practicable degree”, and “necessary” in the previous paragraph might read this Senate testimony by late abortion specialist Dr. Warren Hern.
Interesting slip on King’s part:
I am here to say thank you to President Bush for the things that he has done when he has had his steady hand on the till of leadership, and especially with our national defense.
He also manages to use the phrase “how this lion walked among them” in reference to Bush (where “them” refers to liberal “hyenas”).
And this is also a man with a profound moral understanding of when his life began, at the instant of conception.
This explains so much about these folks’ “thinking”: like the existence of God, the moment when life begins is a moral issue, a received absolute truth one can only faithfully accept, which therefore CAN’T be decided or even spoken to by science, a thing utterly out of science’s purview. How convenient for them.
And his commitment to human dignity and protecting, once again, those innocents that could not protect themselves. I will remember him because he vowed to keep us safe, and he did…? “Kept us safe” by having real, actual, living humans dehumanized and tortured, some to the point of death, who turned out to be innocent of anything. But he gave lip-service to making it harder to remove a bundle of cells from a uterus, so YAY! Barf.
I wish there were some alien plants that were giant uterus flower plant bags filled with stinky poison that could somehow fly across the universe and accost King with his own inky stench and then devour him into their deadly wombs. What a cobag.
The time I spent reading excerpts of his speeches could instead have been spent eating bacon. Thanks for wasting precious moments of my life.
Bacon will taste so much better next time though when you remember that you could be reading wingnut Congressional speeches.
Do you suppose we could market wingnuts as a flavor enhancer? I don’t suppose there’s any chance they’re less toxic than MSG…
And eating bacon while reading wingnuts probably causes all your senses to polarize in some extreme fashion. Your eyeballs may attempt to hide in your eustachian tubes or something.
Your eyeballs may attempt to hide in your eustachian tubes or something.
I’ve done that.
Yeah, absence of wingnut speeches makes the bacon taste fonder.
If we grind them into sausage – preferably chorizo – maybe it would all even out then?
If plover was tempted to shoot fish in a barrel, wouldn’t that mean he/she/it/bird is heron the Call of the Wild?
Note: link is not safe for work, and is also disapproved of by rabbits everywhere.
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