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Notes from Underground

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By ANDY NOWICKI

Notwithstanding the sting-operation aspect of the story, it was clear, as Ingraham and Arroyo pointed out, that the Planned Parenthood employee in question had violated the law, which requires that authorities be told if an underage girl reports statutory rape. The incident put an already controversial group in an even more negative light and sent its leaders rushing into damage-control mode.

There is plenty to dislike about Planned Parenthood, the abortion-providing, contraceptive-distributing, anti-Catholic organization with roots in the sinister eugenics movement of the early 20th century, among whose supporters were numbered several Nazis and Nazi fellow-travellers. Ingraham and Arroyo used the occasion of the scandal to draw attention to the fact that the "charity" receives federal taxpayer money to the tune of $200 million a year. "Isn't it time this outrage be halted?" they exclaimed.

Their callers agreed wholeheartedly, as did I, and as would most TLD readers, I suspect, regardless of their views on abortion. Yet something in the discussion left me ill at ease. At length, I put my finger on it. Why, I wondered, had I not heard that type of rhetoric during the past eight years?

After all, Planned Parenthood's federal funding remained steady throughout the George W. Bush administration, as it had during the previous two decades under Presidents Reagan, Bush the elder, and Clinton. No federal budget has ever eliminated or reduced the flow of money to the coffers of the abortionist organization, and many of those budgets were formed under the leadership of the congressional GOP. Nor has any ostensibly pro-life Republican president ever vetoed any such budget in recent history. George W. Bush did squat to stop Planned Parenthood's federal sponsorship, and no pro-life spokesman of prominence ever took him to task for that. But now that Barack Obama, a Democrat, was moving into the White House, it was apparently permissible for the likes of Ingraham and Arroyo to draw attention to the issue again. I could not help asking myself, were they opposed to funding abortions with taxpayer money only when their party of choice was out of power?
 

***

More recently, the "tea party" protests against big government and egregious taxation garnered nationwide attention. Liberals, of course, disparaged the protesters as unsavory malcontents and darkly implied that a future Tim McVeigh or two might be standing in their midst. Such a response, though viciously unfair, was only to be expected from those wonderful tolerance-mongers of the Left.

Yet while the often-hostile press coverage made me sympathize with the demonstrators, I also couldn't help but be put off by the timing of the protests, occurring as they did on the first Tax Day since the inception of the Obama administration. Had the federal government not continued to grow larger and larger under Bush? Where were all of those people from Tax Day 2001 through Tax Day 2008? Is out-of-control spending by the state only a bad thing when Democrats rule the roost?

Were the protesters not aware that they had been manipulated by the puppet-masters of the Republican party, which is as much to blame for the bloating of the federal government as its Democratic rival, but now, being out of power, seeks to lay that mantle exclusively at the feet of the Democrats?
 

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Of course, I can't spare the Left as an object of my scorn, ridicule, and contempt on this matter, nor would I want to. As Justin Raimondo has recently asked, what happened to all of those lefties who were so fervently "anti-war" up until January 20, 2009? Where did they all go? Have they learned to be accepting of civilian bombings; sleazy military-industrial defense contracts; and midnight raids, arrests, searches and seizures, now that the smirky Bush has retired to his mansion in Dallas, and his successor, the Mulatto Messiah (peace be upon him) blesses us with his benevolent rule? It appears that they have "moved on," indeed.

Perhaps I am naive to be so dismayed. I'm well aware that partisanship has often trumped principle throughout history. I've also recognized that a pernicious "hurray for our side" mentality prevails among many these days, a sort of politics of Schadenfreude, which I have discussed on a previous occasion. Still and all, I continue to be amazed at the extent to which people are willing to allow themselves to be used so that unscrupulous politicians (or do I repeat myself?) can keep or regain power.

My inescapable conclusion: people are pathetic, and politicians are evil. So what else is new?

April 29, 2009

© 2009 WTM Enterprises. All rights reserved.
 

Mr. Nowicki's personal blog is Dyspeptic Myopic, at www.andynowicki.blogspot.com.

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