laceblade

On Friday, Tim Ryan, an antiabortion Democrat from Ohio, took to the House floor to say he had been influenced by the nuns to vote for the bill.

“You say this is pro-abortion,” he said to Republicans, and yet “you have 59,000 Catholic nuns from across the country endorsing this bill, 600 Catholic hospitals, 1,400 Catholic nursing homes endorsing this bill.”

For decades, the nuns did the bidding of the priests, cleaned up their messes, and watched as their male superiors let a perverted stain spread over the entire church, a stain that has now even reached the Holy See. It seemed that the nuns were strangely silent, either because they suspected but had no proof — the “Doubt” syndrome — or because they had no one to tell but male bosses protecting one another in that repugnant and hypocritical old-boys’ network.

Their goodness was rewarded with a stunning slap from the über-conservative Pope Benedict XVI. The Vatican is conducting two inquisitions into the “quality of life” of American nuns, trying to knock any independence or modernity out of them.

The witch hunt has sparked the nuns to have a voice at last. Vulnerable children were not protected by the male hierarchy of the church, which treated sexual abuse as a failure of character rather than a crime. The men were so arrogant it never occurred to them that they should be accountable to the secular world. In their warped thinking, it was better to let children suffer than to call the authorities, embarrass the church and risk diminished power.

Now the bishops think that it’s better to deprive poor people of good health care than to let the church look like it’s going soft on abortion.

Under the semantic dodge of ideological purity, the bishops also are doing the bidding of the Republicans, trying to kill the bill and weaken the president. But the nuns are right when they say that “the Senate bill will not provide taxpayer funding for elective abortions” and that its protection of pregnant women is the “real pro-life stance.”

The nuns stepped up to support true Catholic dogma, making sure poor people get proper health care. (Which would lead to fewer abortions anyway.)

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid apologized Saturday following reports he had privately described then-candidate Barack Obama during the presidential campaign as a black candidate who could be successful thanks in part to his “light-skinned” appearance and speaking patterns "with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one."

His first term in office, after the euphoria of the election win, had seemingly run aground, taking on water from turning the other cheek. They had sought a warmer, gentler path but the conservative forces - unleashing their attack dogs from the lunatic fringe - repeatedly pounded the new president, a sustained attack that cleaved his approval rating.

Then the White House sent out its communications warrior woman to set the media straight. Now, the White House was fighting back: it was going to ''let Bartlet be Bartlet''.

This was the turning point in season one of The West Wing - and it was a defining moment for Josiah Bartlet's presidency.

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The start for the Obama team hasn't been particularly inspiring, beyond the soaring rhetoric. (Ditto for his fictional counterpart.) But here's hoping the real-life protagonists can be as successful in overcoming their obstacles as team Bartlet, which even managed to pull together a comprehensive Middle East peace plan in its second term - one that had the approval of both the Israelis and the Palestinians.

Now that would be worth imitating.

Questions! Questions! Katie, where are your questions?

Let me suggest a few: Why is that a consensus? And should the Supreme Court be serving up consensus and calling it constitutional law? If you say the case is good because it is consensus, then why would it not have been preferable to allow the democratic processes to play out and produce consensus? Why should courts impose consensus? And why are you praising the lines drawn in Roe, when the Court redrew the lines in Planned Parenthood v. Casey? "It says in the first three months that decision should be left to the woman"... ahem... that hasn't been the doctrine since 1992!

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Why didn't Couric press him on his expansive view of his own power and disregard for the role of the states? Will he bring similar expansive theories of constitutional power to the executive branch?

Absolute deafening silence from Katie Couric. She gave him a free pass. The viewer is invited to sit back and admire Joe Biden as an impressive authority on constitutional law... not like that ignoramus Sarah Palin. Very few viewers will perceive what has been done here.

Couric: What other Supreme Court decisions do you disagree with?
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Palin: Well, let's see. There's, of course in the great history of America there have been rulings, that's never going to be absolute consensus by every American. And there are those issues, again, like Roe v. Wade, where I believe are best held on a state level and addressed there. So you know, going through the history of America, there would be others but ....

Translation: I'm not going to answer the question, so I'll just repeat myself about how wonderful federalism and add that American history is great.

When you're talking about bad Supreme Court cases, it's not a good time to call American history "great," since the worst decisions entail slavery and segregation, which were, to say the least, not great.

Couric: Can you think of any?

The gotcha is dripping from her lips.

Palin: Well, I could think of ... any again, that could be best dealt with on a more local level. Maybe I would take issue with. But, you know, as mayor, and then as governor and even as a vice president, if I'm so privileged to serve, wouldn't be in a position of changing those things but in supporting the law of the land as it reads today.

Now, it would have been better to go back into history -- Palin brought up history -- and name a couple of the notorious cases that everyone acknowledges were bad. I suspect that Palin worried that she might get a case name wrong or that she'd be quizzed about exactly what happened in those cases and that she had a risk-avoidance strategy. Stalling for time, she began to repeat the old federalism point -- "best dealt with on a more local level" -- and then she shifted to a perfectly good excuse for not accepting the invitation to discuss Supreme Court cases: An executive official -- a mayor, governor, or vice president -- should respect the authority of the Supreme Court as it has articulated the meaning of the law.

If Palin had named some current cases -- as opposed to the historical cases that the Court itself has already disavowed -- that she disagrees with she would be claiming greater expertise in legal analysis than the Court itself or, alternatively, she would be saying that the Supreme Court's interpretation of constitutional law is not final.

Either proposition would be difficult to maintain and should not be attempted in an impromptu style in a high-stakes situation. This is the sort of thing a Supreme Court nominee facing confirmation hearings would prepare for intensely and face with trepidation. Palin deserves credit for seeing the situation for what is was and opting out.

It is difficult enough to maintain that one Supreme Court case is wrong, and Roe is that one case. The decision to oppose that case has been carefully thought out and is exceedingly important to Palin and others. (Note: I support abortion rights.) Roe stands apart from everything else because it entails what Palin, I presume, sees as a profound moral wrong: the continuing widespread murder of innocent babies. There are not some additional cases to toss in alongside Roe. The general rule, to which Roe is a unique exception, is that the Supreme Court is the authority on the meaning of constitutional law. And that is exactly what Palin said.

In that interview, Palin did two things that hurt the McCain campaign and, but for McCain's late afternoon shenanigans, would have garnered much more attention. First, buying into the premise of one of Couric's questions, she all but stated that if no bailout legislation is passed, we'll be headed into the next Great Depression. Even if true, that's not a very smart thing for a politician to say and, importantly, it all but foreclosed any possibility of McCain voting against the bailout.

That is not a good soundbite. Not only does it confirm that Palin is in way over her head, but every time the clip is played, viewers get to hear Couric point out that McCain has a 26 year record of not favoring regulations.

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I think the McCain campaign knew the Couric interview would be a disaster as soon as it was done taping and spent much of the day frantically trying to think of a way to push it out of the headlines. The clincher for me is the fact that McCain cancelled his Letterman appearance at the last second and instead sat down for an impromptu interview with, of all people, Katie Couric. The hope was to bump the Palin interview even on the CBS Evening News, which otherwise would have hyped and teased the Palin interview all afternoon and used it to lead the broadcast. Instead, CBS devoted most of its coverage to McCain and played segments of the Palin interview almost as an afterthought. Mission accomplished.

OBAMA The problem is we can’t appear angry. Bush called us the angry left. Did you see anyone in Denver who was angry?

BARTLET Well ... let me think. ...We went to war against the wrong country, Osama bin Laden just celebrated his seventh anniversary of not being caught either dead or alive, my family’s less safe than it was eight years ago, we’ve lost trillions of dollars, millions of jobs, thousands of lives and we lost an entire city due to bad weather. So, you know ... I’m a little angry.

OBAMA What would you do?

BARTLET GET ANGRIER! Call them liars, because that’s what they are. Sarah Palin didn’t say “thanks but no thanks” to the Bridge to Nowhere. She just said “Thanks.” You were raised by a single mother on food stamps — where does a guy with eight houses who was legacied into Annapolis get off calling you an elitist? And by the way, if you do nothing else, take that word back. Elite is a good word, it means well above average. I’d ask them what their problem is with excellence. While you’re at it, I want the word “patriot” back. McCain can say that the transcendent issue of our time is the spread of Islamic fanaticism or he can choose a running mate who doesn’t know the Bush Doctrine from the Monroe Doctrine, but he can’t do both at the same time and call it patriotic. They have to lie — the truth isn’t their friend right now. Get angry. Mock them mercilessly; they’ve earned it. McCain decried agents of intolerance, then chose a running mate who had to ask if she was allowed to ban books from a public library. It’s not bad enough she thinks the planet Earth was created in six days 6,000 years ago complete with a man, a woman and a talking snake, she wants schools to teach the rest of our kids to deny geology, anthropology, archaeology and common sense too? It’s not bad enough she’s forcing her own daughter into a loveless marriage to a teenage hood, she wants the rest of us to guide our daughters in that direction too? It’s not enough that a woman shouldn’t have the right to choose, it should be the law of the land that she has to carry and deliver her rapist’s baby too? I don’t know whether or not Governor Palin has the tenacity of a pit bull, but I know for sure she’s got the qualifications of one. And you’re worried about seeming angry? You could eat their lunch, make them cry and tell their mamas about it and God himself would call it restrained. There are times when you are simply required to be impolite. There are times when condescension is called for!

“Let me just say from the outset that I don’t consider Bolton credible,” the president said bitterly. Bush had brought Bolton into the top ranks of his administration, fought for Senate confirmation and, when lawmakers balked, defied critics to give the hawkish aide a recess appointment. “I spent political capital for him,” Bush said, and look what he got in return.