Ken Cuccinelli’s statement and opinion on abortion clinics

Now and then, when I’ve lost my temper during political arguments, I’ve said things I don’t believe or that I know aren’t true. Sometimes this has happened at bars. In 2003 at bars all over Austin I argued against Operation Iraqi Freedom with anyone willing, and if I’d missed a day or two of news, I found myself without commensurate access to the facts. It was tempting at those times to exaggerate. If I exaggerated wildly enough, though—or if I downright lied in anger—a shimmering zigzag streak, sort of like the aura that precedes a migraine, would flash across my vision like some guardian spirit urging me toward calm. It frightened me into telling the truth, and I haven’t lied since. But I haven’t forgotten the phenomenon, and sometimes I imagine other people seeing the streaks of light too when they say certain things.

The Cooch. (Pic | Toby Otter)

“Today, a long, hard-fought battle for women’s health and dignity has finally been won,” said the attorney general of Virginia yesterday in response to a bill whose aim is to make it as hard as possible for Virginian women to obtain abortions. The bill, which passed the General Assembly and is headed to the governor’s desk, seeks to regulate abortion clinics like hospitals. It could have the effect of closing 17 out of 21 women’s clinics in Virginia that now provide abortions.

The point I’m about to make isn’t about the morality of abortion. I’ll grant that Ken Cuccinelli probably believes in good faith that abortion is murder. You can’t convince me for a second, though, that he honestly believes yesterday’s bill helped win a “battle for women’s health and dignity.”

I know it’s passé in 2011 to point out how fond certain Republicans are of what’s come to be called Orwellian language. There’s the concept of the Right to Work, encoded into Virginia law, which only strips us of important rights, and there’s George Bush’s Clear Skies Act, which would have helped clear the sky of little beyond birds. Then there’s the old standby that gutting social safety nets “promotes liberty.”

The idea behind propagandistic euphemisms is simple: repeat them often enough that they’ll become permanent fixtures in our lexicon, so that even non-followers of politics will “know” things just by virtue of speaking idiomatic American English. We’re aware of more words than we know the literal meaning of, and some of them seem to define themselves. To give an example removed from politics, this is how the word nonplussed has been corrupted. Because it looks sort of like it should mean unimpressed—perhaps the opposite of plussed—people who didn’t know its real meaning began using it in that way, e.g. “I’m kind of nonplussed by the new MacBook Pro.” The meaning caught on and is on the verge of becoming the word’s more common usage.

Right-wing propagandists’ hope is for similar magic to happen with phrases like “the right to work.” These days the governor of Wisconsin envies Virginia’s “right-to-work law” and hopes to emulate it in his state. It’s a common enough phrase that millions without a strong or clear opinion about labor law speak of the “right to work.” I’m not accusing them of dishonesty; they’re just making use of the language handed down to them. But when government officials and their henchmen in the right-wing media speak of the right to work, they know exactly how they’re perverting language—which brings me back to Cuccinelli.

I sometimes imagine that the attorney general and others like him derive pleasure from the willing bastardization of language and logic that comes with statements like yesterday’s. If any equivalent exists for them of the zigzag streaks of lightning I described above, they like it, and so they try to give themselves more and more white flashes by wildly flailing toward illogic, no matter its nature. We should prosecute science professors for conducting scientific research! We should order university presidents to discriminate against gays and lesbians! Health insurance reform is the biggest destruction of liberty in history!

This picture of Hitler is also a form of cheap rhetoric.

If there’s physical pleasure to be had in saying sickness is health and peace is war and hate is love, it could upend our understanding of the brain. At the very least it could explain why Fox News compares liberals to Hitler so much. Since that’s always an nonsensical comparison, one wonders why it’s made so often—unless it turns out to feel good, in which case it makes sense. As Ted Haggard and George Rekers have shown, people will do anything, no matter how hypocritical, if it feels good. The more blatantly outrageous the statement, the more pleasurable the sensation. Yesterday Qaddafi compared himself to the queen of England and said his opponents are high on hallucinogenic drugs that al Qaeda poured into their Nescafe, which must have brought the beleaguered colonel some comfort.

Uh-oh, I just compared Fox News to Qaddafi. It felt sort of soothing, too. I guess I’ve proven myself correct. Luckily there’s no subpoenable record. Note to neurologists: when you verify my theory, do it in a state that won’t subpoena your research.

Propaganda aside, Cuccinelli is correct that a hard-fought battle for women’s health and dignity is being waged. Yesterday in that battle the side of women’s health and dignity took casualties. The Pilot says “regulations may not be imminent,” because groups including the ACLU of Virginia are preparing lawsuits. The middle letters of ACLU stand for “civil liberties,” which propagandists have been trying throughout my lifetime to turn into a dirty word. I’m nonplussed by their success.

Maryland’s Senate approves bill allowing same-sex couples to wed

Our neighbor to the north inches closer to sending a gay marriage bill to the desk of Governor Martin O’Malley, who says he’ll sign it.

Justice won’t defend DOMA; Obama holds sexual orientation to higher scrutiny

In a welcome surprise announcement, the Justice Department said Wednesday it will no longer defend Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act, which it now calls unconstitutional. Obama has said lately he’s “grappling” with certain gay rights issues, and I’m pleased he has found this grappling hook. In fact I read the news with downright astonishment, especially since it came without prior warning. The president claims he was inspired by Radiohead’s surprise early release of their album The King of Limbs last weekend. “With everything ready, the band decided… there was no need to wait,” Radiohead had said about the lack of notice. There has been no similar explanation of singer Thom Yorke’s bizarre dance in the video (which you’ll find at the end of this column) accompanying the new single “Lotus Flower.” An eager world awaits Obama’s Lotus Flower moment.

Virginia Senate candidate Jamie Radtke said yesterday she abhors Obama’s Defense of Marriage Act decision, in part because of “high numbers of out-of-wedlock births.” According to her website, questions are welcome, so if you want to ask her what she scored on the Logical Reasoning section of the GRE, call (804) 451-5985.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, not wanting to let Radtke hog all the good feelings, soothed himself yesterday by claiming “he’d never been around when a president decided not to defend a law on the books.” Given that presidents have decided not to defend laws on the books throughout Cantor’s adulthood, his statement is being interpreted to mean he is a cyborg who usurped his human counterpart in 2009. This raises questions about his eligibility for Congress. I’ve never been around when a cyborg was House Majority Leader.

Yesterday the DOMA reversal was the New York Times’s top headline. The fact that it’s barely to be found in today’s Times is perhaps a sign of how much other hugely important news is happening right now. This column is called If You Read the Paper, but you really should go read the paper.