Cleaning up political dirty laundry

Marvin George Miller’s Laundry List published on Dec. 11 is hopelessly stuck in the spin cycle. He buys uncritically whatever the Conservative spin-doctors tell him without a shade of truth. In fact, he doesn’t even present such easily checkable facts as the number of abortions Planned Parenthood performs and it never enters his mind to check the number of abortions Planned Parenthood prevents each year by information about contraception. So, let’s apply the detergent of reality to his “dirty laundry.”

First, let’s take the issue of abortion. Planned Parenthood prevents 216,000 abortions per year by providing non-judgmental contraceptive advice. 34 percent of its funding goes towards preventing unwanted pregnancies. Only 3 percent of its funding goes towards abortion. None of the abortions are funded by Federal money except in the cases of rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother. (Planned Pregnancy of America, 1/14) Since Mr. Miller deals only in suppositions, I’ll give you a fact that happened to a friend of mine before Roe v. Wade. She had a very rough birth of one of her children. She was ordered to abstain from sex in order for her body to heal. She was raped and became pregnant. The doctors found that the fetus would kill her and die before viability. She applied for an abortion. It was granted, but only after the law of the day allowed an abortion. She went ahead and found an illegal provider; fortunately they were competent and she survived. Miller talks about the joy of seeing a newborn child; now let’s imagine the sorrow of the father looking down at the graves of his loved ones.

Mr. Miller also uncritically believes in the videos of Planned Parenthood plotting abortions for profit. I’ll be willing to bet that he believed in the ACORN videos of 2008. Well, it turns out that both are frauds, black propaganda at its worst. A congressional committee found that the unaltered videos were “unreliable” for any inquiry (NY Times 8/28/15). “FactCheck.org further demolished the video’s credibility in a July 21 post (Mediamatters for America, 7/22/15).” “Yet in the very infancy of the ACORN scandal, Fox News host Gutfeld was peddling a false story about O’Keefe’s pimp costume, a false story that quickly morphed into accepted fact (MediaMatters for America, 2/23/10).” The bottom line is that, if Mr. Miller is an example, Conservatives are uncritically accepting people, helplessly manipulated by their leaders and the spin doctors they employ.

Photo ID for voting is great: if, and only if, access to those ID’s is equally available to each and every voter. The Conservative process harms minority voters. According to Dr. Cathy Cohen, Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and Professor Jon Rogowski of Washington University black youths are four times as likely to be challenged for ID as white voters. Latinos were twice as likely (Sacramento Observer, 3/13/13). Unless poll workers apply voter ID laws equally to all voters these laws are discriminatory and violate the American tradition of “one man, one vote.”

Human caused global warming, according to Mr. Miller, is ridiculous: it’s all in God’s hands and, besides, is just a money-making scam. Unfortunately, Mr. Miller is wrong. According to Dr. Vincent Courtillot et al. up until around 1985 there was a fairly tight bundle of factors: solar irradiance, several indices of geomagnetism and global temperatures. Then, in 1985, global temperature started rising rapidly. The only factor that had changed in correlation with global temperature is greenhouse gasses (Earth and Planetary Science Letters 253: 328-339). It’s odd that Dr. James Hansen first testified before the Senate in 1988, just when Courtillot first started tracking the break out of temperature from normal environmental indicators. If you believe that global warming can be adapted to perhaps you should consider this: a recent study done by the University of Leicester shows that at the present rate of warming phytoplankton (which provide 60 percent of the Earth’s oxygen) will be unable to produce oxygen by the year 2100 (Science Daily, 12/1/15). Add that to the present destruction of the rain forests, which produce 30 percent of Earth’s oxygen. I think it fair to say that the loss of 90 percent of the world’s oxygen is the greatest test of our time.

Mr. Miller claims that, “marriage is between one man and one woman.” His justification for that: God told him so. That’s fine and dandy, but Muhammed’s God told him that marriage was between one man and up to four women; Brigham Young’s God told him that marriage was between one man and 52 women. Under the First Amendment to the Constitution, the federal government cannot prefer one religion over another. There are two aspects of marriage; the legal and the ritual. The legal aspect is that two consenting people enter into a contract that provides specific rights and responsibilities. The ritual is performed by a person accepted by the partners who sanctifies their bond. By the way, the wall of separation goes both ways: a Catholic priest cannot be forced to marry two gay men.

The national debt; caused by Liberals? Allow me to point out that the last budget surplus was in the Clinton Administration. The Liberal governor of Minnesota points out that the state will have a $1.9 billion surplus this year. If the budget deficit is caused by Liberals, why have so many Republicans signed on to the no increase in taxes pledge that the anarchist Grover Norquist has made a virtual requirement for Republican legislators? The Conservative Senator Alan Simpson, chairman of the Federal Budget-Deficit Reduction Committee, once described their stance as, “No new taxes even if your country goes to Hell.” He’s on record this year saying, “We know you can’t grow your way out of deficits, just like you can’t tax your way out.”

Anyone who claims that Israel is our ally is deluding himself. There are many particulars; I’ll give just two. The attack on the USS Liberty was a deliberate attempt to sink an American Navy ship operating in international waters. The NSA has released a signal intercept from one of the Israeli MTB captains, “what is this: Americans?” From his homeport, “never mind that, execute your orders.” Secretary Rusk, “... we refused to accept their explanations. I didn’t believe them then and I don’t believe them now.” Jonathan Pollard is the Israeli-paid spy who sent top secret and code word-protected information to Israel, which traded the secrets they couldn’t use to the USSR in exchange for Russian Jews. This is not an attack on Jews; just that Israel is not without sin.

I know very few Liberals who want to implement a Japanese style system of keeping guns virtually out of people’s hands. I do think that background checks, stiff punishment for “straw” purchases, and severe measures against a felon caught with a firearm are reasonable. By the way, I owned a Winchester 94, an over and under 12 gauge, a M 1911A1 .45, and a Ruger II. One of my friends is politically to my left and favors a Ruger 10/22 with a 25-round magazine. Liberals are not all unreasoning gun-haters.

Now we come to the issue of the distribution of wealth. According to Fortune Magazine (hardly a Liberal source), the inequality of wealth is worse now than at any time since the Great Depression. In fact, the top 160,000 families are richer than the next 145 million families combined. The magazine writes, “There is plenty of evidence to show that extreme inequality is bad for business.” I assume that Mr. Miller believes in capitalism, as do I, but if business is harming itself by greed then it makes sense to pay people a living wage so that they can buy things. The flow of capital is the heartbeat of capitalism. The safety net must be maintained. Nobody in their right mind lives on welfare voluntarily.

In sum, Marvin George Miller is stuck in a spin cycle of the imagination. It’s time for us moderates to take up our laundry and get on with life.

Jeff Bourget is a Coeur d’Alene resident.