At Media Matters, Accuracy Doesn’tGroch-Begley's error, it seems, is calling something unconstitutional because the Supreme Court of the United States found it unconstitutional. I've been reading Marbury v. Madison wrong all these years, apparently, and SCOTUS' judgement on constitutional matters is less meaningful than that of the National Review editorial board.
In criticizing an NR editorial, Hannah Groch-Begley of Media Matters can’t get through her first sentence without getting something wrong. “The National Review editorial board used the murder conviction of Kermit Gosnell to push for an abortion ban it acknowledges to be unconstitutional that would outlaw all abortions after 20 weeks, even in cases when the health of the mother is at risk.” The editorial “acknowledges” no such thing, stating instead that the ban would conflict with Supreme Court decisions that themselves lack constitutional merit. (“The Court should welcome the opportunity to revisit its rulings on the subject, which have been by any measure extreme, to say nothing of their fundamental lack of constitutional merit.”)
The rest of the post is bullshit, too. I'm not going to bother to break it down here -- go look; the key phrases are "rarity is of course a matter of perspective" and "she repeats the spin that the Gosnell case resulted from excessive restrictions on abortion. That may be what her side of this debate would like to believe..."
In any case, "At Media Matters, Accuracy Doesn’t" is about the last title Ponnuru should be using -- unless the idea is to convince regular readers that some enemy of the people lied without obliging them to look at the facts, which, come to think of it, never mind.
UPDATE. In comments, trex is very good on Ponnuru's prevarication regarding the Gosnell grand jury report.
There is no need for this ban, since it has been scientifically proven, repeatedly, that so-called "abortion" is a medical impossibility.
ReplyDeleteHey, if you're gonna nullify, why fuck around?
Ah-ha! The ol' "I Reject the Premise!" argument.
ReplyDeletePremise: The Supreme Court rules on constitutionality
I REJECT THE PREMISE, because I think differently!
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I've been reading a lot of conservative comment threads lately, and after a while you come to realize they are absolutely correct about what is and isn't constitutional -- in Bizarro America, where nothing has happened since the day after Washington's Inauguration in 1789. (Of course, if you zip back there to look around for a minute, those same people are all atwist over Washington's Inauguration. "O, dreade tyranny! So utterly a violation of those Articles of Confederation that we fought and bled to defend!")
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"she repeats the spin that the Gosnell case resulted from excessive
ReplyDeleterestrictions on abortion. That may be what her side of this debate would
like to believe..."
"... but in reality, the state that gave us Planned Parenthood v. Casey and a subsequent array of similar draconian legislation has basically no restrictions on abortion whatsover, just like the rest of the United States. Remember, at National Review, accuracy is a filthy slut who should die in childbirth."
At National Review, the facts aren't... ed...
ReplyDeleteI really wish they'd put Ponnuru on the TV machine more often, because he's so thoroughly combative and unlikeable. Plus, he's brown, which would cause considerable cognitive dissonance among the baggers watching - they like what he's saying, and they like even more that he's being an asshole...but how can he be "one of us" when he's the wrong color?
ReplyDeleteActually I just took some time to read up on Marbury vs. Madison; it's a rather bizarre ruling, actually. Marshall ruled that Marbury was perfectly in the right to be appointed a judge and that there should be a legal remedy for him to be appointed as a judge and that when rights are wrong, they deserve to be remedied within the scope of the law. Then Marshall went on to say that the court had no power to actually remedy a situation that somehow had to be remedied.
ReplyDeleteNu? Who would Marshall say had that power? Interestingly, Marbury never did become a judge. IOW, Marshall ruled that Marbury was right and Madison was being an ass, but then through up his hands and said "well, there is nothing the constitution allows anyone to do about it" and essentially gave Madison carte blanche to be an ass. What a way for the court to firmly establish its authority to review laws!
I imagine agreeing with him on politics would be taken as proof they are not racist.
ReplyDeleteSee also: Malkin, Allen West, DuJan, Yockey, Rubio, etc., etc.I wouldn't be hugely surprised if NRO eventually markets a laminated cheat sheet: "I can't be racist/sexist/homophobic because I like..."
ReplyDelete"At the National Review, Ramesh Ponnuru is an illiterate hack"
ReplyDeleteThere - fixed that for you.
Hell, you probably had the Tories who were still insisting that there was nothing wrong with remaining under the Crown and if only that pop-eyed, blue-pissing German had abdicated...
ReplyDeleteY'know, without arguing from a false premise, the NRO probably couldn't exist.
ReplyDeleteIt's one of the few places that sees the manufacture of rhetorical fallacies as an art form (I imagine columnists there high-fiving each other when they come up with a clever new variation on an old fallacious construct--perhaps because I see Der Pantload as having an outsized editorial influence there).
Funny thing, though. If one vociferously defends a fallacy, one is still wrong, no matter how cleverly the fallacy may be put together to deceive the reader. (Perhaps this is one of the long-lingering deleterious effects of the College Republicans' debating style on public discourse: "Hey, we lied good. We scored points!")
Now, Dartmouth has become pretty much inured to graduating its brain-damaged right-wing Dartmouth Review editors, but i continue to wonder why Princeton hasn't asked Ponnuru to return his degree in history, since he is a continuing blight on Princeton's reputation as an educational institution of high rank. For someone claiming to have read history, his respect for the facts is questionable, and his dependency upon dogma ought to be cause for embarrassment.
"Groch-Begley falsely suggested 'are you fucking deaf?' The editorial states instead LALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU."
ReplyDelete... but how can he be "one of us" when he's the wrong color?
ReplyDeleteMore like: How can be be the wrong color when he's one of us?
Members of the tribe may be forgiven of anything.
That Ponnuru is considered an "intellectual" on the right tells us everything we need to know about the intellectual standards in conservative land. This particular pile of Ponnuru just epitomizes the magical thinking they take for intellectual rigor.
ReplyDeleteThe only virtue of the decision is that it seems to have worked.
ReplyDeleteThe Right has been hugely successful in firmly lodging one premise into the national conversation about abortion... the premise that a fertilized egg is a person, and a blastocyst is a baby. Progressives need to, and have been largely unwilling to come right out and say "I reject THAT premise", and so we end up continually fighting rear guard actions in anti abortion legislation by trying to carve out exemptions for rape, incest, and the life and/or health of the mother. The Right will continue to fight for personhood amendments and laws in the reddest states they can find, and we need to push back just as hard.
ReplyDeleteIf some environmental toxin were causing 18,000 toddlers to die every year, I suspect that Media Matters would not treat it as a rare and unimportant occurrence.
ReplyDeleteOne of these things is not like the others.
I'd challenge Ponnuru to think of what the difference might be, but honestly I don't have forever to wait for him.
Asking questions are genuinely nice thing if you
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At the National Review, facts are stupid things.
ReplyDeleteBut wait, there's more. (Anywhere else he'd be an ex-meteorologist-turned-Sonic-fry-cook by now with that track record.)
More like, "I reject your reality and substitute my own!"
ReplyDeleteIt's too hard to argue against that premise, because basically you're arguing against biology (fertilized eggs and blastocysts do eventually become babies, for the most part). I'd rather fight them on moral grounds: this blastocyst is going to kill the mother, therefore it is a murderer and must be stopped; this blastocyst exists as the result of involuntary action on the mother's part, like dioxin poisoning of a town's water supply; and one of my favorites, this mother is financially/psychologically/physically incapable of caring for this blastocyst, and rather than condemn the eventual baby to a life of misery and/or potential criminality, I'd rather it were stopped humanely right now. They hate the last one and argue about adoption, but I think there are sufficient statistics on how inadequate adoption is to force them to yield on that point.
ReplyDeleteHe also gets tagged as one of the more "thoughtful" cons, the sort that liberals should be able to have a reasonable conversation with.
ReplyDeleteYeah.
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Romish Pawnspewyou...but it’s the opposite of what the grand jury found: which is that the laws that were on the books were not being enforced by state governments that favored keeping abortion as free from restriction as possible.
ReplyDeleteFunny how when you're busy working to create a theocracy a landmark Supreme Court decision has no bearing on constitutionality, but a local grand jury finding, on the other hand, carries the weight of a Magisterial teaching.
Except that's not what the grand jury found.
The grand jury found that the state and local state health departments stopped inspecting abortion clinics under the Republican administration of Tom Ridge because of how they chose to interpret state regulations, which is to say they deemed inspections weren't their job. A witness claimed it was because the administration feared enforcement of structural requirements for clinics (e.g. width of doorways) might place an undue burden on them and force them to close. Regardless of motive, when structural inspections stopped so did those for safety and health. The grand jury did not speculate on the motivations of the state but simply observed that inspections stopped and that this became the standard under subsequent administrations.
Contra Ponnuru's claim that this case was about abortion "as free and without restriction as possible" the grand jury writes in its report: "we don't know why this happened."
So he's just flat out lying about this. Flat out.
The grand jury did conclude very pointedly, however, that the reason the horrors at the Gosnell clinic went unheeded by state and local officials despite complaints (unsanitary conditions, botched surgeries, infections, women becoming infected with venereal disease after procedures, et al) is because this clinic served "the poor and women of color" - and the jury surmised that the bureaucrats were indifferent to the health or welfare of these politically powerless individuals.
Let's repeat that. The grand jury found that Gosnell clinic tragedy happened because when people brought the glaring abuses and stories of personal harm and injury to the attention of the proper officials, no one gave a shit...because it was just poor blacks and browns complaining.
I can't quite put my finger on it, but it seems to me there is a lesson in there for a man named "Ramesh Ponnuru."
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"At Media Matters, Accuracy Doesn’t" sounds like a clisé! We are we still attached to this kind of reading?
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ReplyDeleteOh, I think more pushback is required, but, I'd put it this way. We know the wingers after this are after a whole slew of other theocratic changes. Abortion is just the most visible and contentious of the issues they've been humping for forty years.
ReplyDeleteIt's a mistake, I think, to respond as if these are reasonable arguments, first and foremost, because they aren't reasonable--saying that a clump of cells has all the rights and privileges of a walking, talking human being is just plain nutso, and it's just one part of a truly nutso agenda to give the craziest of the clergy governmental powers.
I'm all for responding, but first by saying that this notion of personhood is insane, is being promoted by insane people for insane reasons. One doesn't try to reason with crazy people, and one certainly doesn't try to ascribe rational motives to irrational ideas. We can do a lot of good by realizing that the rabid religious anti-abortionists are not interested in debating the matter in good faith (if they were concerned at all about reducing abortion, per se, they'd be embracing every single contraception plan that comes along, but, hey, guess what?--they're just as insane about that, too). They're religious cult crazies, and it's time they were treated as such.
Lard knows that treating them as if they're rational hasn't worked.
maybe some day we'll find
ReplyDeletethe marbury connection
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ReplyDelete[URL=http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/20/ponnuru.jpg/][IMG]http://imageshack.us/a/img20/7999/ponnuru.th.jpg[/IMG][/URL]
ReplyDeleteCheeky!
ReplyDelete"fertilized eggs and blastocysts do eventually become babies, for the most part"
ReplyDeleteSo do ejaculations into women who are near ovulation.
Does this make condoms lethal weapons?
"For the most part" is debatable; some guesses (and that's about all they really can be) regarding early first-trimester miscarriage run above 50%.
ReplyDeleteMy hair is a bird...
ReplyDeleteYes, he does look a bit like a chipmunk.
ReplyDeleteI presume after their wives have a particularly heavy and slightly late period they arrange for a funeral to be held.
ReplyDeleteWe must all combine to stop the horrors of 15th trimester abortions!
ReplyDeleteProof that arguments against abortion and birth control are not made in good faith:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/2012/10/zygotes-lost-with-birth-control-v-without-birth-control.html
"Sarah plays the game by the pro-life movement’s rules, and finds that birth control would actually, by their own arguments, save the lives of fertilized eggs, or zygotes."
With Birth Control:
Sample size: 100 fertile women
0.15 dead zygotes per month
2 dead zygotes by the end of the year
Without Birth Control:
Sample size: 100 fertile women
Each month 16% become pregnant and 16% have dead zygotes
85 dead zygotes by the end of the year
"So let’s get this straight, taking birth control makes a woman’s body LESS likely to dispel fertilized eggs. If you believe that life begins at conception, shouldn’t it be your moral duty to reduce the number of zygote “abortions?” If you believe that a zygote is a human, you actually kill more babies by refusing to take birth control. ... Even if you believe that a zygote deserves the same rights as a full grown human, there is still no reason to oppose birth control other than to control women.
"I don’t know about you, but I’ve had enough of the “personhood” smokescreen. Let’s call the anti-birth control message by its real name: anti-woman."
Of course, mere women did the math, so hardly anyone's listening. Maybe someday a dude will run the numbers and then suddenly people will take notice.
TWEET FIGHT!!!
ReplyDeleteI can't quite put my finger on it, but it seems to me there is a lesson in there somewhere for a man named "Ramesh Ponnuru."
ReplyDeleteNah, he considers himself protected, because his paymasters consider him one of the "good ones".
Well, Princeton does have Robert P. George on its faculty...
ReplyDeleteDamn, it hit me while I was in the pissoir, like most good ideas....
ReplyDeleteHe's an "Uncle Ram'"
Right-wingers place a high value on semantic games and rhetorical flourishes, but they have a real problem when dealing with data. It's as Colbert observed, facts have a liberal bias... but conservatives sure know how to polish a turd until it shines.
ReplyDeleteIn other words, he fits right in with rest of the rotting herd.
ReplyDeleteTampax is re-marketing their largest tampon as the Mini-Casket.
ReplyDeleteyes, that's why they want to re-ban contraception
ReplyDeleteOh noes! A flock of National Review readers will be here to share all of their *wisdom* with us!!
ReplyDelete(Which should take about 1.5 seconds.)
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ReplyDeleteYeah, wingers actually kind like a non-white crazy person. If that person deviates from orthodoxy, it turns into Sheriff Bart's arrival in Rock Ridge very quickly, but they like to have "one of the good ones" around. Racial progress, but in a less than appetizing form.
ReplyDeleteReally? What is this world coming to?
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I reject THAT premise
ReplyDeleteI do. There is no such thing as an "unborn child." If it's not born, it's not a child. Calling a fetus an "unborn baby" makes precisely as much sense as calling a caterpillar an "unborn butterfly" or a tadpole an "unborn frog" or an acorn an "unborn tree."
So when the theocrats start talking about "unborn frogs," they can claim to have an argument about "unborn babies." Until then, they can't. (Even then they wouldn't, but at least they could make the claim.)
More bad faith: Anyone who talks about abortion being a "holocaust" is a liar. If there were a holocaust going on -- the army was out rounding up Jews or Armenians or the gawky or whatever, and killing them by the thousands or millions -- people would take up arms, barricade streets, lay IEDs, assassinate leaders. Because that's what you'd do in a holocaust. You wouldn't say, "There's a holocaust; I'll write some letters and vote in 4 years." Unless you're willing to be complicit. And clearly these people don't think they're a bunch of Nazis themselves, so... they also don't really think it's a holocaust. QED, jerks: you just don't like that people do things you wouldn't do. You hate our freedom.
ReplyDeleteGotta side with Ponnuru on the point that the Supreme Court -- whatever its practical finality on constitutional issues -- is not the be all and end all of what is and is not constitutional or preclude others from advancing reasonable interpretations. In my view, for example, sodomy laws were always unconstitutional even though the Supreme Court said otherwise in Bowers (as they later acknowledged in Lawrence). In my view the ACA's individual mandate is well within Congress' commerce clause power, even though the Court has said otherwise. Etc. etc. It is not improper or illogical to argue that the Supreme Court is wrong, any more than any other branch of government.
ReplyDeleteFred Clark made a good point about how strange it appears that anti-choicers claim that personhood begins at conception yet don't seem bothered by the very high number of pregnancies that end in miscarriage:
ReplyDeleteEach year in the United States there are about 6 million known pregnancies. According to the Mayo Clinic:
About 15 to 20 percent of known pregnancies end in miscarriage. But the actual number is probably much higher because many miscarriages occur so early in pregnancy that a woman doesn’t even
know she’s pregnant.
So that’s 1.2 million people — fully human persons — who die every year in miscarriages, not including the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions more such fully human persons who die without anyone ever even knowing they had been conceived.
Let’s just focus on the 1.2 million people there that we know about for certain. That makes miscarriage the largest single cause of mortality in our nation. Not cardiovascular disease. Not cancer. Those
are the No. 2 and No. 3 causes of death in the U.S., but miscarriage is a bigger killer than both of those combined. (The stats there are from the CDC’s page on deaths and mortality — a page that, like every other public statistic on mortality you will
ever hear, refuses to count the unborn as fully human persons.)
If you truly believe that full human personhood begins at the moment of conception, then you must also believe that miscarriage is the No. 1 health crisis in the United States. You should, at a minimum, be calling for private or public funding for research into this pandemic catastrophe.
Yet no one is doing that. At all. This massive crisis is a necessary and inescapable conclusion from the premise that full human personhood begins at the moment of conception, yet those who claim to believe that premise have not bothered to reach this conclusion.
SCOTUS isn't the "be all and end all"; the Constitution itself is. But when the Court rules on Constitutional issue, nothing in our government can contradict -- except an Amendment to the Constitution itself, or a countervailing ruling from the same Court.
ReplyDeleteIt's not infallible, but the authority -- like the International Olympic Committee.
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Well a few states have tried to make pregnant women report their miscarriage and prove it wasn't a stealth abortion. Like in the old days when clumsy women fell off horses
ReplyDeleteWhat Glenn's first comment said. (I'm a constitutional law professor, fwiw.) Ramesh Ponneru is an ridiculous ass, but the better view is that even after the Supreme Court rules on an issue of constitutional law, ordinary citizens can still think that the Supreme Court majority was wrong. Andrew Jackson in 1832, thus, famously defended his veto of a bill establishing the Second Bank of the US; he explained that even though the Supreme Court had ruled the Bank was constitutional, in *his* view it wasn't. Thomas Jefferson twelve years earlier had agreed, writing that "to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions [is] a very dangerous doctrine indeed." And that's just as well, since these days we're much more likely to see a five-Justice majority siding with the far right.
ReplyDeletethat's fine, but you don't fact check people who report current state of the law by saying what the supreme court ruled, by saying that your preferences are the actual truth of the matter. that is really stupid, even for a pretentious cock of a maybe internet lawyer like yourself glenn.
ReplyDeleteBelieve it or not, I wasn't trying to be condescending. If I seemed so I apologize. It's apparently automatic with me.
ReplyDeleteWith respect to you and Jon, I needn't and probably shouldn't have cited Marbury as my argument is at heart a common sense one, having to do with the relative value of a Supreme Court ruling against that of a National Review editorial.
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