Tag: the week
Reproductive Rights: Letting It All Hang Out

Reproductive Rights: Letting It All Hang Out

To understand the right-wing mindset on reproductive freedom, I would recommend a glance at this series of tweets by National Review correspondent Kevin D. Williamson, followed by Damon Linker’s saner response in The Week. In a nutshell, Williamson urges that women who have abortions should be hanged – along with the doctors, nurses, and other staff that oversee the procedure.

A notorious blowhard, race baiter, and misogynist, Williamson evidently yearns to stir outrage (and attract attention to himself). But the magazine that employs him is well within the Republican mainstream – and as Linker explains, nobody should be shocked by Williamson’s smirking sadism, which proceeds with perfect logic from the “conservative” insistence that abortion is infanticide.

To implement Williamson’s medieval notion of justice would require a lot of scaffolds. According to both Planned Parenthood and Operation Rescue, about one-third of all American women undergo an abortion by the age of 45.

In their endless war on women, the most fervent wingnuts take no prisoners.

On Obama ‘Assassination,’ Kessler Went Over The Line — Not For The First Time

On Obama ‘Assassination,’ Kessler Went Over The Line — Not For The First Time

Nobody will ever accuse Ronald Kessler of good taste. Having authored a couple of salacious, best-selling books about the Secret Service, the former Newsmax reporter has now published a scathing attack on the agency’s director, Julia Pierson, over the recent revelations of failures that could have endangered President Obama and his family.  But Kessler — who has long specialized in publishing nasty anonymous gossip, supposedly sourced from Secret Service agents — went too far when he seemed to blame the president for his own potential murder in a Politico essay:

 Agents tell me it’s a miracle an assassination has not already occurred. Sadly, given Obama’s colossal lack of management judgment, that calamity may be the only catalyst that will reform the Secret Service.

To put Kessler’s work in perspective, consult this sophisticated catalog of errors in his latest book compiled by Marc Ambinder in The Week and this Media Matters report on specific flaws in that gossipy volume. It may be a mistake to take Kessler too seriously, unless you believe that Donald Trump actually intended to run for president.