In my mind, it’s not at odds to defend her from slimeballs while working for her active political failure. Calling out the slimeball bullshit changes absolutely nothing about how I feel about her as a politician and where I want her to go. The two are not contradictory.

Look, I’m really crafting (and I think Annoyed is also making) a sentiment that there are spheres of situational decisions that call for strong utilitarian thinking and others that call for weak utilitarianism or Kantian or some other way of thinking about the meaning of the action you’re about to take. The rather Kantian approach that Cara pushes here, is something that I’ve always thought was entirely inappropriate in an evolving situation. It’s very much like talking about respecting Hitler’s right to a fair trial just after D-Day. The most intuitive way of thinking about the way to go is almost certainly kill the fucker dead–It’s one of the cases where an assasination might have brought a war to a close earlier.

It’s the same if you want to think about the child prostitute that killed her kidnapper. People went straight to an attitude that the child should not have killed the man, that she should have to pay for not valuing the life of someone who intended grave harm to her. Now she’s going to juvie, which is still wrong, and wrong in a wasteful manner.

It’s also the same game as what happened during the Clarence Thomas Anita Hill hearings, where conservatives used Clarence Thomas’s blackness in order to carry him past the fact that he was…not a very good person, and plenty of liberals carried water for this process! In the end, we have a black guy on the court who is pretty much anti-black as well as anti-women and just anti-decency in general.

Now we have Sarah Palin. Do you know what has happened and will happen? She simply use these nice, full-throated defenses of her right to run (of course which are all we don’t like her, but–edited out–) in order to screen herself against legitmate criticism. She’s an Uncle Tom, and our first priority is to get the fuck rid of her, not defending her against trash, which gentlemen club owners and porn people are. They will *always* shout from the bleachers, as I have noted with Hillary Clinton. We SHOULD speak out against Larry Flint, but we should speak out against Larry Flint, not FOR Sarah Palin.

Look, just because you don’t agree with someone’s politics is NO REASON to degrade someone sexually or even call her petty names.

Here’s a quick American law lesson: ONLY CONGRESS CAN CHANGE THE LAW! Not even the supreme court has the power to make abortion illegal. Even if the supreme court did turnover Roe V Wade, abortion would still be legal until individual states created laws WITHIN THEIR OWN CONGRESS.
——–> Sarah Palin’s abortion opinions are IRRELEVANT! Give the woman a break. She can’t change Roe V Wade as a Vice President.

How about being PRO-CHOICE when it comes to stating your OPINION on abortion?

It’s that people think it’s okay to carry ON with that and use that, that two wrongs make a right. That there are fauxgressives guffawing at this whole thing and saying it’s okay to violate her ’cause she set herself up for it. I DON’T BUY THAT.

And if I’m wrong for feeling that, and if I’m too touchy-feely and radical, then fine. I don’t care.