I was puttering around looking for some abortion stuff when I ran across a 2018 Wall Street Journal editorial confidently proclaiming that abortion rights were safe no matter who Donald Trump appointed to the Supreme Court:
The reason is the power of stare decisis, or precedent, and how conservatives view the role of the Court in supporting the credibility of the law....Our view, supported by more than a little reporting, is that even though they think Roe was wrongly decided, most of the current conservative Justices would shy from overturning it and handing abortion law entirely to the states. The exception is Justice Clarence Thomas, who has made his intentions clear.
I love the patronizing use of "supported by more than a little reporting," as if we benighted souls in the cheap seats couldn't possibly have an opinion as informed as the Journal editorial board.
That editorial board was sure that conservative justices would all shy from overturning Roe v. Wade. Four years later, every single conservative justice voted to overturn it.
I wonder: Was the Journal just making shit up, as usual, to justify their view that everyone should remain sanguine about appointing conservative justices to the Court? Or did they actually believe what they wrote even though it was ridiculous? Beats me. But it sure isn't a bit of gaslighting that's aged well.
Making shit up. As usual. Next question.
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A question: Do you believe abortion should be available as a form of birth control from conception to birth?
Pffft. Another question: Do you believe birth control in any form should be available prior to conception?
Yes.
When I was raising my son, and he was still in the "psychopath" age range (2.5-18 yrs old), I told my wife that abortion should be available from conception to age 24 or so.
After that, responsibility for that decision shifts to society in general.
Surely, Republicans are entirely OK with that last part, even if they pay lip service to opposing the first.
Post viability abortions are effectively unheard of. (Abortions are occasionally performed long enough after conception that they're in the time range for viability, but the fetuses in such cases are so damaged that they are not and never will be viable.) Post viability surgical pregnancy terminations, on the other hand, are quite common, but they're not called abortions; they're called Caesarean sections.
Maybe this is an outlier, but can we, not all agree that the procedures this Doctor admits to performing are wrong?
https://twitter.com/McCormackJohn/status/1658246427540180993?s=20
Just asking questions.
Please don't feed the troll.
I asked a simple question about beliefs. No one has given me a direct answer.
Of course, a completely good-faith non-attempt to hijack the thread.
Fwiw, I'll bite: yes (for varying definitions of "available" that are keyed to things like medical needs, advice, and the individual circumstances of the folks involved).
I think that I, a dude, have no place to say anything about what someone else should do with their body. It is obscene to think I should be allowed to force anyone to give birth.
"Of course, a completely good-faith non-attempt to hijack the thread."
I thought blogs were a place for open discussion. I least I examine my beliefs regularly. You all are just like the people on my side that refuse to question their assumptions. You all like a good narrative that makes you feel righteous. So do I, quite frankly, but at least I try to be honest about my motivations and have reasons (not just emotions) for my beliefs. I am also willing to learn. I have learned things from this blog. When I ask a question, I truly want to know what you believe. I guess I have more respect for the people who comment on Kevin's opinions than I should. I respect Kevin; otherwise, I would not read his blog. Well, cat blogging helps.
"Just asking questions!™"
Making shit up. They certainly don’t do any reporting
It was the op-ed page, right? Not the "factrs" pages?
The WSJ is owned by Rupert Murdoch. There are no “facts” pages in a Murdoch publication. .
That really is a nice touch of superciliousness, I agree.
But since you ask, I think they did believe it in a kind of whistling-past-the-graveyard way. It was still early enough in the trumpian term that there was residual belief in the "wiser heads" guardrails and disbelief that he and people around him were really serious about breaking whatever they could. I don't know whether it was before or after the "I like beer" parody performance art that destroyed nomination hearings as anything meaningful, but if after, the implications might not have sunk in yet.
Or maybe they had, and the editors were trying to reassure each other and their readers about the state of the world. Isn't this the kind of comforting thing mid-level executives really want to believe about their legal environment? And that reassures them that the guy they supported for those great tax cuts isn't really doing shit that will shake the country to its foundations?
I agree with Altoid's assessment. The WSJ Editorial Page is not red primarily by MAGA nut-jobs. Rather, it is red primarily by middle- to upper-income Republicans who would have liked to believe that the MAGA nut-jobs had served the useful purpose of getting Republicans into control, and that the typical old-school Republican objectives would be well-served by that fact.
Little did they recognize back then that the MAGA nut-jobs were well on their way to destroying the Republican Party of Dwight Eisenhower, Everett Dirkson and (the real) George Bush.
Is it gaslighting when the centrist-dipshit readership of the Wall Street Journal already wholeheartedly agreed with the assessment? In the fifty years since Roe was passed, middle-of-the-road Democrats have conveniently believed, desperately chose to believe that the matter was settled and that they didn't need to trouble their beautiful minds with the prospect of a Roe reversal. By 2018, of course, it was too late for it to matter that they were wrong, but they had fifty years during which time they did nothing because of their certainty that Roe was, effectively, the law of the land.
Shorter version: Did the WSJ believe in their own bullshit or not?
"Shorter version: Did the WSJ believe in their own bullshit or not?"
As a person who sometimes has to sell a tough concept to strangers, I find that it is best to act as if you believe the bullshit you are dishing out, because most people can tell if you are bullshitting. This talent in your audience vanishes if you really believe the bullshit.
Later, after you are counting the money, you can revert to a reality-based universe. Just don't do it when you are selling something.
Short version of Adam's absolutely-correct assessment:
The key to selling is sincerity. If you learn to fake sincerity, you'll be successful in sales.
They were just setting up their defense of …. was it Kavanaugh? The pick of Gorsuch was enough to set off fire alarms about anyone else Agent Orange might pick. Unfortunately the liberals and the Dems were right all along. The cons were just waiting for their opportunity to put women in their place.
This is what the media does.
https://nypost.com/2023/08/09/climate-scientist-admits-the-overwhelming-consensus-is-manufactured/
“That’s what we’ve got now: a massive government-funded climate alarmism complex.”
The NY Post, WSJ, Fox etc. all throw bullshit at us every day. It’s hilarious.
The person quoted in the article (byline Peter Stossel!) is a scientist who has been quoted many times in right wing circles and has testified before Congress and was offered a position in the Trump administration. She is reminiscent of that Dr. Peter Duesberg who denied HIV causes AIDS.
Some people will do anything for a fucking tax cut and many of them read the WSJ.
TaXaTiOn iS ThEfT
hurrdurrrrr
"Was the Journal just making shit up"
They were lying, Kevin. Not wrong, not confused and not making shit up. Lying.
The purpose that the WSJ serves is to get everyone on board with using the SAME lies.
Lying is more efficient and more effective that way.
"This is Rumor Control."
Perhaps the WSJ thought RBG would never DIE...
I used to read some hard-core conservative Catholic blogs, and they all took it for granted that SCOTUS would never overturn Roe. Maybe they would chip away at the corners of Roe, but never actually overturn it. The logic was that "HELP US STOP ABORTION!" was far too effective of a fund-raising pitch to ever give it up. The R Party needed Roe for their own financial viability.
At least, that was the word in that sector of the internet.
The hard-core conservative Catholics were one of the few groups willing to admit, 30 years ago, that opposition to abortion meant opposition to abortion even in cases of rape, incest, and danger to the mother's health. Pretty much everyone else ignored the logic that chipping away at abortion rights would inevitably lead to elimination of all possible abortion rights, whether in the name of preserving a being that had been graced with a sole, or one that could be defined as a human, or whatever. Hell, even with Dobbs, the utterly disingenuous claim was that this was just returning the issue to the states, even as national 12-week bans, 6-week bans, etc. were being proposed. And there are enough RW Catholics on the WSJ editorial board to know exactly where this was likely to lead.
For goodness sakes, it's the Wall Street Journal editorial page. If they said water runs downhill, I'd say - oops - we built all those dams backwards.
I think the issue is, as usual, more nuanced.
All political parties are broad coalitions, but the current Republican Party is somewhat in the position of the Whigs just before the Civil War, or the Republicans (plus Bull Moose) around 1910, namely coalitions of parties that care about things almost diametrically opposed to each other, and so the brink of fracture.
At the highest level, this split is essentially between those who cheer on capitalism (with more or fewer restraints) and are basically OK with the fact that it's continually changing society and culture; and those who are deeply unhappy with the fact that society and culture keep changing and are willing to slow down and limit capitalism if that's what it takes.
There's much more that can be said on this issue (and much has been said, including much that's dumb and stupid because it obsesses over one small area of disagreement rather than confronting the issue in the stark terms in which I have laid it out) but that's not important right now. What IS important is that, just as the most commenters on this blog not only have never thought about this and don't want to think about it, the same is just as true for most pundits (as opposed to serious thinkers) on the Republican side.
So the WSJ has no freaking clue how half the party really thinks; they are still in the position of Hindenburg and the Prussians thinking they understand and can Control Hitler. To them the cultural issues are, and always have been, a minor point to which you pay lip service, but which no-one takes seriously, and they have no idea how much of the party (and the country) disagrees with them on this point. This was not a lie, it was total cluelessness.
But the Democrats should not get too excited; the same fracture that's so obvious in the Republicans exists within their camp, it's just not YET so salient. That will come...
They're also an unnatural yoking of two groups that want completely opposite things and mostly hate each other ("the credentialed elite" and "the urban proletariat")
The more natural political configuration going forward is
- the party of the future: business, tech & woke; each happy with change, each willing to tolerate the other insofar as they get what they want
- the party of the past: most immigrants, the religious, old people & workers who don't need degrees; each disliking to terrified of change, for good reason, and willing to accept some version of what the others want in a return to the past as long as their particular fear is kept in check
These will not be given those names, of course. The politically useful (and more or less accurate) names will be something like "The Family/Community Party" and "The Progressive/Libertarian Party".
The details are not clear, but how this plays out is clear. A second Reagan+Trump will arise, someone with the full-throated support of the "Republican Base" (ie the current Republicans who care more about "family" than about taxes and business) and with the smarts to pick up the "Reagan Democrats", ie to talk not about "gays bad" but about "credentials bad", who says "don't care if you are gay or not, as long as you care about family, work, and responsibility".
The alternative would be a candidate who is so obviously a NuDemocrat (so all the current love of the actual Democratic party for business and the elite; combined with not even pretending to care about labor, unions, and the non-symbolic poor) that the great switch is forced on that side. Biden (currently aged 80!) just squeaked in as possibly the last Democrat who didn't present in that form. 10 years from now, my guess is all the serious contenders will be of the form I've described, essentially combination woke+libertarian.
It may well be whoever wrote this aforementioned article and others on the editorial board believed so long as John Roberts was the Chief Justice he would never allow Roe to be overturned or if there was a case before the court trying to overturn it it would be decided in such a way that would keep it on the statute books but render it useless.
Then Kennedy retired. Then RBG died. The Trump Administration got three choices for the court. Most Administrations are lucky to get one. Some, like Jimmy Carter's don't get any.
What's amazing is the WSJ should have been well-aware that it was the Federalist Society's goal to overturn Roe and that any justice so picked by the Society and confirmed would do just that. After years and years of GOP Presidents picking justices that disappointed them, they were not going to let this opportunity pass them by. You can't ask people to be activists in this cause for so very long and try to counter their passion and hard work with some sort of legalistic demand to "respect the process". Doesn't work that way.
Roberts knew, as many regular Republicans knew, that overturning Roe completely would be a disaster for the party. But Roberts has lost control of the court and Roe was repealed and now they're reaping the whirlwind. The WSJ can lament the fact the anti-abortion movement was not prepared for the aftermath of repeal but that's a canard. What did they think was going to happen? And wouldn't it have been prudent to be ready for such a moment? But they weren't because there is no "conservative" anymore in the realms of policy or intellectualism. There's just simple reactionism and performance art and worship of Trump and that all that matters to them at this point, consequences be damned. They can demand a 15-week ban but to do so nationally defeats the whole purpose of repealing Roe, and enacting draconian state laws simply reveals what they really want to do when given such power. Intellectually they're trapped thus again and again they are defeated politically.
Not every single conservative justice. Roberts concurred in allowing the Mississippi law but didn't join overturning Roe.
"Not every single conservative justice. .."
Correct. Speaking of making stuff up ...