Please Let Our Soldiers Live

If anyone watched FRONTLINE last week, you know now that, although abortion may be legal, the Reich has imposed a mountain of legislation requiring poor women to jump through so many hoops that the end result is most can't get abortions.

Okay, there's one of two things we can do.

We can give in and admit the abortion issue, although already lost, is killing us and drop it as a progressive issue and then sweep every office in the country.

The right to life can then be reframed as a "right to life" for gays and lesbians, since that term will have lost its function on behalf of fetuses.

The other option is to keep allowing this issue to turn our nation over to callous conservatives who do far more damage beyond forcing poor women to bear children they cannot afford. Frankly, considering how Republicans hate and fear poor people, I have never understood why it is not Republicans who are not in favor of abortion, not as a humane issue of human rights for women, but as a way of getting rid of poor people.

But they haven't had to reveal that they really, the majority of them, don't mind abortion at all.

It's time to be as pragmatic as the Republicans and admit we're less fond of it then they, we were only trying to mitigate women's suffering and poverty.

But we're no longer doing that.

Abortion in this country, except for in a few states such as California, has become a mute issue. It's been taken away. The right is gone. We lost the fight.

It's just that no one except poor women, who of course have no voice, realizes it yet.

Making an abortion impossible to obtain would not be such a terrible abridgment of a woman's right to choose if she had choices other than raising her kid in poverty, living without health care, working for an obscenely low minimum wage, having no access to affordable day care so she can go back to school or get a good job (not some nightshift position at McDonald's) and had financial help in actually raising her kid other than the scourge of Welfare.

This is the hypocrisy of the Reich. They force you to raise children in poverty as they work to get rid of Headstart, schools, scholarships and foodstamps. They refuse to provide medical care for these kids, refuse to provide anything that would give them "a leg up."

Surely, if their God exists, and I mean the hell fire and brimstone one that they threaten everyone else with, they will be first in line for the pitchfork, based on their stunning hypocrisy and how they are so intent on punishing poor women, and women in general, for having sex.

What's next? Stoning?

Oh, these "Christian" hypocrites wouldn't do that, at least not unless they're also going to start building workhouses and orphanages a la Charles Dickens' world as well. For you know they don't want any responsibility for these children.

Do you know these groups go to abortion clinics en mass and say things like "Please mommy, I want to live?" over and over like a chant in these poor woman's faces?

I think it's time we began taking pictures of our soldiers to churches whose congregations support the war in Iraq and start chanting, "Please, brother, we want to live."

Take it to Washington and chant, "We want to live." But don't expect a permit for gathering. Expect to be arrested for standing up for the lives of real, living people.

Cindy Sheehan was.

It's only fetuses the religious and political Reich love. Probably because they can't vote, have no opinions and, as adults, can be convinced to fight unnecessary wars so people like Bill O'Reilly can live the fat life.

Speaking of which,I love this article from the San Francisco Chronicle by Mark Morford:

It's almost too easy. He's too easy a target, really, Bill O'Reilly of the casually toxic Fox News, too bloviated and too silly and too undercooked, and no one whose opinion you truly value or with an IQ higher than their waist size actually watches him with anything resembling intellectual honesty or takes anything he says the slightest bit seriously. You hope.

Especially when he, like Pat Robertson ranting about how gays caused Sept. 11 or that Dover, Pa., is now a doomed and godless hell pit, given how the town fired every single one the imbecilic, intelligent design-supporting Repubs from the school board, especially when Billy goes off his nut once again and essentially wishes al Qaeda would attack San Francisco, well, it is up to us to merely look at him like Shiva looks at a sea slug -- i.e., a moment of compassion for his regrettable incarnation -- and then laugh and shake our heads and move the hell on.

I mean, what else do you want to do? Allow him credence? Give his infantile words any sort of weight and import? Let him slither into your heart like a worm and fester and burn? O'Reilly is, after all, the Right's most self-aggrandizing blowhard, one who still vilifies France like a child who hates broccoli, one who has, next to Rush Limbaugh, perhaps the worst spin in all of media.

And he is one who now suggests that because San Francisco dared to ban aggressive military recruiting in our high schools so disadvantaged 18-year-olds won't be unwittingly sucked into the brutish military vortex so they can be shipped off to Iraq to die for appalling and indefensible reasons, al Qaeda should blow up Coit Tower.

What do you do with that? You laugh. Sure, file a formal complaint with the Fox network. Sure, demand that Billy be fired, which is a bit like demanding Ronald McDonald be canned from the McDonald's corporation for poisoning our children. Yes, you have to do it, even if such complaints come from someone like San Francisco Supervisor Chris Daly, not exactly the poster child for tact and grace when it comes to political maneuvering.

But of course, it won't make one bit of difference. BOR is still Fox's cash cow. He draws big ratings, even here in the Bay Area. And even if O'Reilly's cultural relevance is tanking right along with the bad ship BushCo, he's still getting PR for miles out of the childish comment. Hell, you're reading a column about it right now, which means all those extremist right-wing inbreeding sites get to squeal "San Francisco in Uproar Over O'Reilly Comments," and grunt and revel in our displeasure. Ah well. It matters not.


Here's the takeaway, the only thing you need to know: Bill O'Reilly is a walking, snorting cautionary tale. For those of us who occasionally tread similar terrain of barbed political commentary (tempered, I hope, with satire and hope and sex and humor and fire hoses of divine juice), he is the Grand Pariah, the threshold, the Place You Do Not Want To Go as an intellectually curious human soul. He is the guy you can always look to, no matter how bad it gets, and say, Wow, at least I'm not him.

In a way, we should be grateful for O'Reilly and Robertson and Limbaugh and Coulter and their slime-slinging ilk. They live in those black and nasty psycho-emotional places, so we don't have to. They show us how ugly we can be, how poisonous and ill, so we may recoil and say, Whoa, you know what? I think I need to be more gentle and less judgmental and kinder to those I love. BOR works an inverse effect on anyone with a vibrant and active soul -- he makes us better by sucking all the grossness into himself and blowing it out via a TV channel no one of any spiritual acumen really respects anyway.

Hell, this very column has been known to wallow in political extremes too, often and regularly wishing fiery karmic pain upon Rove and Cheney and Dubya et al. for the humanitarian and environmental and moral hells they have unleashed upon our once-prosperous, gorgeous, diverse nation, and for the wars and the homophobia and the misogyny and the rampant lies and the unchecked ignorance of the workings of the human spirit.

But I would never go so far as to wish terrorists would blow up, say, Washington, D.C. Or Bill O'Reilly's personal fetish dungeon at Fox HQ in New York. I would never take a similar BOR tack and suggest that every red state that openly supports Bush and his miserable wars (and by extension, O'Reilly and his miserable worldview) should offer up their kid as a blood sacrifice to the Iraq War.

Check that: Maybe I would. Of course I would. But I would recognize the inherent silliness of it all, and the futility, and push it so far into satire that I'd suggest we also send in the NRA, and the Bush daughters, and Ashlee Simpson, and moreover I'd suggest they string up Karl Rove as bait because you know what Islamic extremists think of creatures both godless and porcine.

Conversely, BOR, of course, takes himself quite seriously, the inflation of his ego and speed of his rapid-fire fury matched only by the obvious deterioration of his heart.

But maybe that's not quite true. It has been rumored, somewhere, that Bill O'Reilly has a soul, that he was personally hurt and wronged by that sex scandal last year, that he's reasonably intelligent and that his almost comical lack of nuanced comprehension on the air and in his public persona, like Bush's mumbling incoherence or Condi Rice's apparent lack of the slightest hint of femininity, is a bit of a stage act, a dumb ruse that masks a keener intelligence, all designed to milk his bloviation for his bloody, mealy slice of fleeting fame. You may believe this as you wish.

It does not matter. What is clear is that BOR has made a Faustian bargain of the ugliest kind, taken on a worldview where there is no room for humor and light and sex and joy and grace, whereby he gets to unleash streams of rather appalling ignorance upon the progressive segments of the nation -- like, you know, cities that dare to encourage peace and nonviolence and a measured, respectful response to the world -- and he gets paid enormous sums and lives like an angry, sneering king, while the gods of karma can only sigh, and shake their heads, and wait.

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Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate and in the Datebook section of the SF Chronicle. To get on the e-mail list for this column, please click here and remove one article of clothing. Mark's column also has an RSS feed and an archive of past columns, which includes a tiny photo of Mark probably insufficient for you to recognize him in the street and give him gifts.

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