PROHIBITION HAS KILLED MORE FOLKS THAN SHERMAN EVER SEEN

Hey, if you haven’t completed your 2020 census form, please do it now.  I’ll wait. 

Fun fact: the 1860 Census helped the Union win the Civil War.  General William Tecumseh Sherman used census data to identify the likeliest foraging routes as his army burnt its way from Atlanta to the coast in the winter of 1864.  Fatalities on both sides exceeded 3000.  For a long time, Sherman’s March to the Sea was a bone in the throat of unreconstructed Rebs.  Maybe it still is.

But for some reason, the guy that broke Sherman’s record seems to be getting a free pass.  I’m speaking of Georgia’s current Governor, Brian Kemp, whose feckless “leadership” has resulted in over 4600 COVID-19 deaths – and counting.  If Donald Trump is the “new Cyrus,” surely Kemp ought to be considered the “new Sherman.”    

Republicans and their media enablers are fond of demanding that Democrats denounce every fringe incident perpetrated by anyone they can construe to be on “the Left.”  They also specialize in premature gotchas, as when Governor Kemp’s loosening of pandemic restrictions did not immediately result in mass fatalities.  “Where does Brian Kemp go for his apology?” was their rallying cry.  Ditto for Arizona’s Governor Ducey and Florida’s Governor DeSantis. 

Boy, were they smug.  Until people started dying.  Now they’re not quite so smug, although I’ve yet to hear any of those Republican worthies offer an apology for failing to protect their constituents from a deadly virus.

I’ve been reading tweets and blog posts from a guy named Erick Erickson, a right-winger who knows better but can’t help himself.  He’s based in Georgia, he’s got a wife with co-morbidities, and he’s smart enough to know that sending his kids back to school now would probably kill them, and him.  He knows Trump is a miserable piece of shit, and he knows the QAnon phenomenon is both dangerous and insane.  He even understands that Joe Biden is a good guy, a much better human being than Donald Trump. 

Nevertheless, Erickson intends to vote for Trump.

Why?  The overriding issue for Erickson is abortion.  He tweets and blogs criticism of Trump, but he always talks himself into the same conclusion.  Democrats are baby killers.  Nothing else matters.

That seems odd to me, on various levels.  When Roe v. Wade was handed down, Southern Baptists shrugged – a Catholic issue, they said, nothing to do with us.  But abortion opponents kept trying new approaches, and when they got around to testing the “baby killer” concept on focus groups, they hit BINGO.

It’s one thing to believe that abortion is wrong, or at least the option of last resort to save the mother’s life.  It’s another thing to declare that abortion is murder.  That’s an absolutist position that brooks no compromise.  If you really believe that abortion is murder, why wouldn’t you bomb clinics and kill the murdering doctors who perform them? 

There are several affinities between the “abortion is murder” crowd and the QAnon “Democrats and celebrities are pedophiles” crowd.  Most folks who hold both opinions are Republicans, of course, and my guess is that a substantial percentage of hardcore QAnon believers are pedophiles themselves, or at least pedophile-curious.  Projection is a helluva drug. 

I’m also pretty sure that the GOP has its fair share of people (men and women both – the guys who knocked up the gals don’t get a pass) who’ve had abortions.  But what distinguishes them from run of the mill hypocrites is that they’ve invented a theology in which members of their in-crowd are “saved,” and thus immunized against criticism for their sins.  “Christians aren’t perfect, just forgiven,” as the saying goes. 

But there seem to be a lot of Republican Christians who view forgiveness as an endless supply of Get Out Of Jail Free Cards.  Sin today, repent tomorrow, and Jesus will push the reset button on the Etch-A-Sketch, and you’re good to go.  I have a feeling that those folks are in for an unpleasant surprise when they meet St. Peter at the pearly gates. 

The MAGA/QAnon crowd is not big on self-reflection.  They’re probably not familiar with the concept of cognitive dissonance.  But their bizarre fantasy of Donald Trump as a crusader against pedophilia is just nuts.  Trump is the guy who partied – frequently – with Jeffrey Epstein; and who – repeatedly – offered his best wishes to Ghislaine Maxwell.

Erick Erickson and the other semi-respectable anti-anti-Trump pundits don’t have much to say about Trump’s sympathy for Maxwell.  They know, first that they can’t quit Trump, and second, that any attempt to spin Trump’s sexual history would be mocked as delusional.  So they just change the subject.

And when they change the subject, they always wind up with the babies!  Won’t someone think of the children?  But the only children Erickson and his ilk care about are the ones who haven’t been born yet – the pre-children. 

Why are conservatives freaked out about abortions, when the rate of abortions is now BELOW the rate immediately after Roe v. Wade?  The number of abortions has declined every year since 1980.  They ought to be celebrating instead of freaking out.

A smart approach to radically reducing the number of abortions would be an aggressive promotion of birth control.  Recognize that men and women of child-bearing age are going to have sex, and make sure they have access to information about reproductive health, and to condoms, IUDs, birth control pills, and any other contraceptive measure that might be appropriate in their situation.

Until conservatives embrace contraception, I’ll be skeptical about their claims to be pro-life.  Otherwise, why do they lose interest after a fetus turns into a baby? 

Actual living children – whether they’re babies, or toddlers in cages at the border, or adolescent girls trafficked by Trump’s pals?  Republicans don’t care.  Those kids should have been smarter about picking their parents (and their race, and their gender).  They need to stop complaining and find a free market solution to their problems.

I mean, if Republicans are so pro-life, why don’t they get mad at Trump for sacrificing 170,000 (and counting) Americans to COVID-19, while he tried to convince China to help his re-election campaign? 

The answer is, they’re not pro-life.  Republicans are a death cult with a fetus fetish.