Why conservatives need the abortion issue

What is it about the abortion issue that makes it so popular with social conservatives? Do they really feel that equality between women and men and the act of a woman choosing not to bear a child represents a total meltdown of social order?

Yes.

But beyond that fear, here’s my other theory: abortion is essentially the only issue on the social conservative platform that has at least the appearance of being about something warm and fuzzy: babies. “Save the children” is a simple battle cry that implies you still have some actionable human feeling for others.

Can you think of any other such warm and fuzzy issues on the social conservatives’ agenda?

Let’s ponder… poverty is the result of laziness, minorities and immigrants are ruining America, unemployed people aren’t trying hard enough, gays are unnatural and do not deserve equal citizenship, Muslims are evil and should be persecuted, global warming is fake and the environment is underexploited, tolerance is code for “homosexual agenda,” teachers are paid too much…

In general, American social conservatism reflects a fair amount of hostility towards the basic well-being of others.

So here we have abortion. It is the sole demonstrable political way in which conservatives show ardent positive feelings for abstract “others,” which perhaps tellingly are not yet actual individuals (and thus exempt from the hostility).

Nagging Hillary Clintons made Obama press the war button

One of the cherished paranoid fantasies of wingnut conservatives is that feminists are secretly manipulating government and the librul President to… do things. What kinds of things? War this time, apparently. Feminists love war. Mark Krikorian of the National Review Online writes to point this out:

Obama’s pusillanimity has been hugely magnified by the contrast with the women directing his foreign policy and the fact that they nagged him to attack Libya until he gave in. Maybe it’s unfair and there shouldn’t be any difference from having a male secretary of state do the same thing, but there is.

I’m not really sure who Krikorian is referring to other than Hillary Clinton, who is apparently so full of testicles and nagging that she counts as a number of women when she directs Obama’s foreign policy. (Ed. note: I know he’s referring to other women i.e. Susan Rice at the top of the foreign policy hierarchy as well, but he doesn’t even bother to name them, so I’m making fun of him for it.) Krikorian also apparently read Obama’s hedging “I didn’t actually want to use the military option” as a sign that he was nagged into it instead of what it actually was, a rhetorical tool to reassure the rest of the world he doesn’t love killing brown people as much as his demon predecessor, even though in practice the distinction is less pronounced.

But no, the fact of the matter is that the Hillary Clintons wouldn’t quit texting Obama dumb messages for three whole days in a row every four minutes asking him to spend just a little extra money to buy her that Qaddafi-head mantlepiece keepsake that matches the drapes at the New York estate. “Reagan would be jealous,” one of the texts said.

[NRO via Salon]