“For The Right Reasons”: Yes, Let’s Weigh In On Chris Christie
Every week, it seems, New Jersey governor Chris Christie’s name inches higher on the list of potential 2016 Republican presidential candidates.
As a result, unlike any public figure in recent memory, he is increasingly compelled to assure reporters and the general public that his weight does not impair his ability to lead.
Christie, by any measure, is obese. This has provided endless fodder for late-night talk show hosts — David Letterman has ridiculed him for years — and politicos who hope to use his weight against him.
Stereotypes masquerade as facts: Fat is undisciplined. Fat is lazy. Fat is bound for an early grave.
Fat makes for great TV, too, the theory goes, from sitcoms to cable news shows. So after Christie jokingly pulled out a doughnut on Letterman’s show earlier this week, former White House physician Connie Mariano diagnosed the governor from afar on CNN:
“I worry that he may have a heart attack,” she said. “He may have a stroke. It’s almost like a time bomb waiting to happen unless he addresses those issues before he runs for office.”
Mariano worked for three presidents and wrote memoirs about her time at the White House. Visit her website, however, and you’ll find a photo of her only with former President Bill Clinton and a quote from him extolling her book. Combine her on-air interview with her website and she comes off as unprofessional and partisan.
Christie’s response to Mariano was typically brusque: Unless she does what a doctor is supposed to do — examine the patient and record his family history — “she should shut up.”
Agreed.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that more than one-third of Americans are obese. Still, fat jokes are a popular form of entertainment in this country. If you’re on Facebook, for example, you probably have seen the photos of morbidly obese customers at Walmart. The comment threads about the ample backsides of unsuspecting shoppers will make you lose faith in humanity, I swear.
Such cruelty can play out differently in politics, which brings us back to Christie. His approval ratings soared in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. Even those who hated him had to concede that he was there for the people of his state — so much so that he hugged the president and then fired back at those who dared to criticize him for his gratitude.
The flood lines receded, and the fat jokes returned, but Christie’s political opponents — Republicans and Democrats alike — are ill-advised to make his size a campaign issue. When it comes to the governor’s struggles with weight, millions of Americans are on his side. Don’t think for a minute that Christie doesn’t know that, too.
“If you talked to anybody who has struggled with their weight, what they would tell you is, ‘Every week, every month, every year, there’s a plan,’” Christie said Tuesday at a news conference in New Jersey. “The idea that somehow I don’t care about this — of course I care about it, and I’m making the best effort I can.”
Sounding like millions of other Americans, 50-year-old Christie acknowledged that dieting has been a regular part of his life for decades.
“Sometimes I’m successful, and other times I’m not,” he said. “And sometimes periods of great success are followed by periods of great failure.”
But I’m not a Christie fan, because of his version of America. He has consistently attempted to demonize public-school teachers and called their union leaders “political thugs.” When a woman asked him, during an interview on a local television show, whether it was fair for him to cut funding to public schools when his children attend private school, he smacked her down.
“None of your business,” he said. “I don’t ask you where you send your kids to school. Don’t bother me where I send mine.”
Christie opposes marriage equality for gay Americans and vetoed a bill last year that would have allowed it.
He is also anti-choice. He’s just fine with turning over control of a woman’s body to the government. He’s got an attitude problem with women, too. Responding to a female heckler at a Mitt Romney rally last year, he said, “You know, something may go down tonight, but it ain’t gonna be jobs, sweetheart.”
Those are just some of the reasons Christie should never be president. There are plenty more.
Enough with the speculation about Christie’s health.
It’s the weight of his politics that could threaten the well-being of Americans.
By: Connie Schultz, The National Memo, February 7, 2013
“Stupid Is As Stupid Does”: Bobby Jindal’s Guidance To Republicans Comes With A Catch
In the wake of his party’s defeats in the 2012 elections, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) has positioned himself as a leader in setting the GOP on a smarter path. He was the first Republican to publicly condemn Mitt Romney’s “gifts” comments, and soon after, Jindal declared he wants Republicans to “stop being the stupid party.”
And while these efforts are drawing praise from some on the right, let’s pause to note the superficiality of Jindal’s vision. Take his comments yesterday on Fox News, for example.
Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA) accused failed Senate candidates Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock of saying “stupid” and “offensive” things that damaged the Republican Party.
“We also don’t need to be saying stupid things,” he said. “Look, we had candidates in Indiana and Missouri that said offensive things that not only hurt themselves and lost us two Senate seats but also hurt the Republican Party across the board.”
On abortion, while Jindal said he’s pro-life, “we don’t need to demonize those that disagree with us. We need to respect the fact that others have come to different conclusions based on their own sincerely held beliefs.”
Here’s the detail Jindal neglected to mention: he opposes any and all abortion rights, without exception. If the Louisiana governor had his way, women impregnated by a rapist would be forced by the American government to take that pregnancy to term. The same would be true in cases of incest or pregnancies in which the health of the mother is at risk.
In other words, as far as public policy is concerned, the only difference between Jindal, Akin, and Mourdock is word choice. Jindal doesn’t want candidates in his party “saying stupid things,” but he’s entirely comfortable with those candidates adopting the same extremist positions he espouses.
Indeed, the larger irony of Jindal presenting himself as a forward-thinking, far-right leader is realizing just how odd a choice he is.
On the one hand, the Louisiana governor says he’s “had enough of this dumbed-down conservatism”; on the other, Jindal is a fierce, anti-gay culture warrior who wants children to be taught creationism and believes he participated in an exorcism.
As this relates to abortion, Jindal is effectively urging his party to adopt the same vision as Mourdock and Akin, but present their agenda with less-offensive talking points. It’s reminiscent of Charles Krauthammer’s advice to the GOP: “The problem … for Republicans is not policy but delicacy.”
They’re both misguided if they think softer, more polite language can make the right-wing social agenda seem more palatable to the American mainstream.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, November 19, 2012
“Until The Umbilical Cord Is Cut”: In GOP View, Life Is Sacred, Except When It’s Not
“… And I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.”
— Richard Mourdock, GOP candidate for the U.S. Senate
Life is sacred.
That, Mourdock would later insist, was what he was trying to say last week during a debate with his opponents. Instead, he became the latest in a growing list of conservatives to trip over women’s bodies. The Indiana Republican said he didn’t mean it the way it sounded, i.e., that rape is something God intends or approves. Rather, his point was that “Life is precious. I believe (that) to the very marrow of my bones.” His party agrees.
This year, the GOP adopted — again — a platform under which no woman could ever legally have an abortion. Not if she was impregnated by her own father. Not if she was raped. Not if the abortion were needed to save her life. Never. Because life is sacred.
And that leaves you wondering: what about the 12-year-old girl who has grown up dreading the midnight creak of her bedroom door, the weight settling above her, the whispered assurances that “This is our secret.”
What about the sixth-grader whose barely adolescent breasts are suddenly swollen and who wakes up racing for the toilet every morning, sick to her stomach? Is her life sacred?
What about the co-ed who can still feel the stranger’s hands forcing her knees apart, still feel his hot breath on her cheek, the lashing whip of his curses, that terrible moment of penetration, invasion, violation and bitter, impotent rage?
What about the student who now holds the home pregnancy test strip in her hand, watches it change colors and feels, as she slips to her knees on the bathroom floor with that hateful seed growing in her womb, as if she was just raped all over again? Is her life sacred?
What about the mother of three, just diagnosed with an aggressive cancer, the woman whose doctor says she needs chemotherapy immediately if she is to have any hope of survival? What about the agonizing decision she must now make, to refuse chemo, knowing it will mean dying and abandoning her existing children, or to take the drug, knowing it will kill the child she carries inside? Is her life not sacred?
It doesn’t seem to be, at least, not in the formulation embraced by the Grand Old Party. In that formulation, women are bystanders to their own existence, their individual situations subordinate to a one-size-fits-all morality, their very selves unimportant, except as vessels bearing children.
For that matter, the children themselves, once born, are not particularly sacred, especially if they have the misfortune to be born into less-than-ideal circumstances, situations where they might need help from the rest of us. But you see, “life” is not just the fact of existence. The term refers also to the nature and quality of that existence. So if we truly hold life sacred, we do not balance budgets by denying funding to programs that feed hungry children. We do not look the other way when kids have no access to health care. We do not countenance easy gun availability that makes the playground a war zone. We do not put up with child welfare agencies where tragedies routinely befall children who are always said to have “fallen between the cracks.”
Mourdock and other conservatives frequently tout the sacredness of life, but they seem to have a rather narrow definition thereof. They seem to consider life sacred only until the umbilical cord is cut. So for all its moral earnestness, their argument against abortion rights always manages to go too far and yet, not nearly far enough. If life is sacred when it is in the womb, well, it is also sacred when it is not.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., The National Memo, October 31, 2012
“Romney’s Latest Abortion U-Turn”: A Cynical, Shameless, Blantant And Misleading Incremental Republican Strategy
How embarrassing is it to have a surrogate caught on tape saying exactly the opposite of what you’ve been saying for years? Not very embarrassing, apparently, if you’re Mitt Romney, and especially if the topic is abortion rights. Then, cynical shamelessness is your standard operating procedure.
Yesterday, former Republican Sen. Norm Coleman told a Republican Jewish Coalition gathering in Ohio that when it comes to Roe v. Wade, pay no attention to those men in black robes. “President Bush was president eight years, Roe v. Wade wasn’t reversed. He had two Supreme Court picks, Roe v. Wade wasn’t reversed,” Coleman said. “It’s not going to be reversed.”
That’s blatantly and intentionally misleading, crafted to assuage voters who are presumably socially liberal in what looks to be the most crucial state for the election. It’s also the exact opposite of what Romney has promised he’ll support, publicly and often.
Coleman’s plausible deniability comes from the fact that it looks as though not much changed under the last Republican president. But as I reported last week, these kinds of shifts don’t happen overnight — not only because it takes years for laws to be passed and then to wind their way through the court system, but because many in the anti-choice movement have opted for an incremental strategy to avoid scaring the public, even as they prepare the legal, political and societal groundwork for the full-on abortion ban they desire.
As for Bush, he got two Supreme Court appointments, both replacing Republican-appointed justices, and an initial pick, Harriet Miers, was rejected by conservatives partly because they feared she wasn’t absolutist enough on abortion rights. The judge they did get, Samuel Alito, replaced Sandra Day O’Connor, who had been relatively moderate on abortion rights. The result was that when a major abortion case came before that court, it upheld an abortion restriction it had overturned several years before. The right has always had its eye on the ultimate prize, which is overturning Roe. With the retirement or death of a single liberal justice, they’re likely to get it, or come close.
Indeed, it’s worth looking at who seems fairly confident that a Romney presidency would change abortion access in this country: anti-choice activists, who passed on him in the primary but have publicly been a united front on his behalf ever since. Just check out this story in Life News noting that “Leading pro-life attorneys like Jordan Sekulow, David French, and James Bopp have confirmed they trust Romney as president when it comes to judges,” and quotes the president of Americans United for Life saying that the impact on abortion law via the Supreme Court would be “bigger than everything else combined, because of the long-term consequences.”
And though the Supreme Court appointments are indeed the most lasting legacy, the president also has other important powers when it comes to reproductive rights, from nominating lower court judges to choosing the heads of the Departments of Health and Human Services, the FDA and the CDC, as well as the attorney general, all of whom have discretion on these issues.
The past couple of weeks have been an interesting exercise in some Republicans running as far as they can from the prevailing stances of their own compatriots, and in Romney’s case, current and previous versions of himself. In Washington state, Republican Senate candidate Michael Baumgartner said he opposes abortion except in case of life endangerment but insisted, “Social issues and abortion isn’t the focus of this campaign. You wouldn’t see me voting to change any abortion laws at the federal level.” Republican Sen. Ron Johnson’s tactic on Sunday was to deny that the issue even matters, that voters care more about Benghazi. “Abortion doesn’t even show up,” he said, and claimed that “it’s not even an issue here in Wisconsin, it doesn’t even move the radar at all.” (Someone should tell Paul Ryan that!)
It’s almost as if they know that their policy aims are highly unpopular with a whole lot of voters.
By: Irin Carmon, Salon, October 30, 2012
“Mitt’s Ever-Slippery Position”: More Bobbing And Weaving on Abortion By Romney
Strangely enough, Mitt Romney’s ever-slippery position on abortion policy, one of the enduringly shameful features of his entire public career, is at the center of an argument that the mean old Obama campaign and the mean old Democrats are lying about Mitt’s positions and denying him his proper mantle of moderate conservatism.
Kevin Drum’s not having any of that:
It’s true that Romney thinks (accurately) that no flat ban on abortion is likely to cross the president’s desk in the near future. So in the sense of trying to figure out what will actually happen over the next four or eight years, it’s probably true that a President Romney wouldn’t have a chance to sign a flat ban on abortion.
But that’s only half of what any election is about. The other half is about what a prospective candidate wants to do. I don’t think the United States will ever return to the gold standard, for example, but the fact that Ron Paul supports it tells me that he’s a crank. That’s reason enough not to vote for him.
Likewise, even if Romney never has the opportunity to sign a nationwide ban on abortion, he’s obviously saying that he’d like to if he ever got the chance. What’s more, Romney probably would get a chance to overturn Roe v. Wade by appointing a Sam Alito clone to the Supreme Court, and he knows very well that this would result in plenty of states flatly banning abortion. This tells me he’s an abortion extremist, and it tells me a lot about who he is. It’s fair game.
Correct. But I’d go further. Aside from Romney’s comment on a hypothetical flat federal abortion ban, which would be obviously unconstitutional until such time as a President Romney stacked the Supreme Court to reverse Roe, he promised in his “My Pro-Life Pledge” ukase published by National Review in the early stages of the nomination fight to “advocate for and support a Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act to protect unborn children who are capable of feeling pain from abortion.” That would be a federal version of the state legislation being promoted around the country testing the very margins of Roe by banning abortions before an arbitrary point at which a very small minority of scientists and a very large majority of antichoicers claim a fetus can feel pain.
So looking at the big picture, Mitt Romney’s promised to do everything within his power to restrict abortion rights under Roe, and then everything within his power to get it reversed, all within a “pro-life” position that sometimes does and sometimes doesn’t include exceptions for the incredibly tiny percentage of pregnancies resulting from rape, incest, or direct threats to the life of the woman involved. And this has been his basic position since 2007, or at least as long as Paul Ryan has refrained from public praise of Ayn Rand as his great mentor and become a self-proclaimed Thomist.
It should also be recalled that Mitt has identified himself unambiguously with the argument of conservative religious figures that the HHS contraception coverage mandate is objectionable because it includes “abortifacients,” reflecting the belief of anti-choice ultras that Plan B, IUDs, and even standard contraceptive pills actually kill human beings.
This does not add up to a “moderate” position on abortion, however Team Mitt tries to bob and weave and play the victim.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, October 19, 2012
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