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- Written by: Rita Cormulley
- Category: Letters
- Hits: 2
By KATHLEEN PARKER
Published Wednesday, February 07, 2007
In a world wary of flip-floppery, it is nearly impossible for a politician to change his mind without appearing unprincipled.
Just ask John Kerry. Up front, I admit to enjoying a flip-flop moment now and again. Kerry made it too easy, with so many flip-flops that CBS News posted a “Top Ten” list during the 2004 presidential race.
Famously, Kerry said: “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it,” referring to supplemental funding for the war in Iraq. The flip-flop slogan stuck to Kerry like Spandex because he couldn’t stop contradicting himself.
Now the flip-flop has landed at the feet of Republican Mitt Romney, who is being compared to Kerry. Romney, you see, was pro-choice before he was pro-life.
A YouTube video shows Romney during a 1994 debate with Sen. Ted Kennedy in which he supports abortion and gay rights. After being elected governor of Massachusetts in 2002, Romney opposed same-sex marriage and became a pro-life champion, notably by opposing cloning and embryo farming.
The debate, at least as edited for YouTube, is painful to watch if only because Romney seems so sure of himself and, yes, eager to please. A grayer Romney today displays equal certitude, even as he seems to reverse himself.
Did Romney change his tune for political gain? Or did he risk his political future by changing his mind?
In fact, Romney has never supported same-sex marriage, which wasn’t even on the table in 1994 when he said he supported “full equality” for gays. In the context of the times, equality generally meant protecting gays from overt hostilities. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruling to allow same-sex marriage wasn’t until Nov. 18, 2003.
On life issues, Romney isn’t the first person to change his mind after closer scrutiny. Technological advances have forever changed the abortion debate, allowing us to see what we weren’t able to see before and making ethical decisions all the more challenging. Knowledge may be power, but it’s also a pain in the neck sometimes.
Embryonic stem cell research, on the other hand, is so abstract and complex that most Americans probably can’t explain what it is exactly. They just know that pro-lifers, generally associated with the religious right, are against it; and Michael J. Fox is for it.
In a popularity contest, Fox wins over Falwell.
Romney found the stem cell debate so complicated that he called in the nation’s top scientists for a private tutorial. What many Americans may not know about Romney is that he’s a nerd. A Harvard-educated wonk, he’s the kind of guy whose class notes you could borrow (if he’d let you) and know that you got the whole story.
After studying the data, Romney decided that life begins at conception. Explaining his position on cloning in a March 2005 opinion piece for The Boston Globe, he wrote:
“Once cloning occurs, a human life is set in motion. Calling this process ‘somatic cell nuclear transfer,’ or conveniently dismissing the embryo as a mere ‘clump of cells,’ cannot disguise the reality of what occurs.”
From that position, all other life decisions flow. If you believe that life begins when an embryo forms, then you can no longer support abortion or research that destroys embryos.
Romney does support a promising alternative form of stem cell research that has received little media attention, probably because it isn’t sexy enough to compete with Paris, Lindsay and Britney. I’ll try to juice it up.
It’s called “altered nuclear transfer” FREE PORN!, which offers the same elasticity and applications as embryonic stem cells NUDE LIVE GIRLS!, but without creating an embryo. Ergo, no life destroyed.
There now, that wasn’t so bad. All of which is to say that Romney did the nerd-wonk thing: He studied, he listened, he changed his mind.
Unfortunately, the flip-flop factor has shifted focus from other issues of greater concern both to Romney and most Americans, including the war in Iraq and terrorism. You have to be not dead before you can enjoy the luxury of defining life.
Now there’s a principle immune to flip-floppery.
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- Written by: Rita Cormulley
- Category: Letters
- Hits: 2
Well, he asked for it. “He” being Mike, the editorial page editor. Since he couldn’t ignore the ultimatum, he asked for reader feedback. Hey, ash is a reader, even if she’s no longer a subscriber. You know what to do. Just hit this LINK for the article to which she’s responding. And yes, the letter wrote itself.
Of the many aspects and tangents to Coulter’s latest incendiary statement, I’ll concern myself primarily with the inevitable pushback to the proposal to cancel her syndication by the State Journal-Register.
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- Written by: Rita Cormulley
- Category: Letters
- Hits: 2
Published Sunday, March 11, 2007
Your opinion, please
ANN COULTER was a featured speaker early this month at the 34th annual Conservative Political Action Conference. After her prepared remarks, Coulter was asked to discuss presidential hopeful former Sen. John Edwards.
"It turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word 'faggot,' so I'm kind of at an impasse - I can't really talk about Edwards," said Coulter.
It was an idiotic, sophomoric statement. Besides that it didn't even approach making any sense. It was Ann Coulter doing what she does so well - tossing a verbal bomb. Of course, it wasn't the first time Coulter has tossed a bomb, and it certainly was not the first time she has been idiotic.
BUT THIS TIME a lot of people have decided, enough is enough. As of late Friday, at least seven newspapers across the country had fired Coulter from their pages. A newspaper in North Carolina, The Sanford Herald, reported that it had received about 1,000 anti-Coulter e-mails in recent days. The paper, which has decided to drop Coulter's column, was one many listed on the MediaMatters.org Web site as carrying her column.
MediaMatters missed us, thank goodness, so we have not been deluged with anti-Coulter e-mails from across the country. Quite frankly, we are not all that concerned what people in Boise, Idaho, think about us carrying Ann Coulter's column. However, we are concerned with what our real readers think. And we are beginning to hear from some of them.
"I hope the SJ-R does the right thing by dropping Ann Coulter from your paper. Frankly, I don't think anyone who calls all liberals in general 'godless traitors' should have been given space in any respectable paper to begin with. She cheapens the quality of political debate and poisons the waters of American politics," wrote Will Reynolds, who labeled Coulter in his blog ("Where there's a Will, there's a way) as "The Shame of the SJ-R."
A nice woman called late Friday afternoon to make the same suggestion. "I think this recent comment has simply gone too far," she said, though she did not threaten to drop her subscription if we continued to carry Coulter. That was a nice touch - usually the call or e-mail begins with that threat. We did have one promising variation on that - one fellow last week promised that he would actually sign up for a yearlong subscription if we dropped Coulter.
THE PROBLEM with giving in to threats is that they never stop coming. We could pretty quickly be reduced to running the school lunch menu if we decided it was our job to never offend anyone again. That's not our job. Likewise, it is not our goal to provoke people with incendiary columns. We would not have run Coulter if we did not believe she held value for at least some of our readers.
We are also hearing from some that we have become too conservative. "I would like to see more balance on the SJ-R editorial page. They print a group of far-right conservatives like Coulter, Maulkin and Novak ..." wrote Reynolds.
That's kind of funny, since we often take calls from those concerned we are leaning too far left. And when Molly Ivins was still alive, we got plenty of calls and e-mails suggesting we dump her too. Some called her hate-filled and irresponsible - adjectives also used to describe Coulter.
It's a precarious position. We truly try to have an open and diverse editorial page - the volume of reader letters should attest to that. We are extremely uncomfortable with censorship. We are also interested in what our readers think about keeping Ann Coulter as a columnist.
WE WANT to hear from you - pro and con. Tell us why we should either keep or dump Coulter. You can e-mail
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- Written by: Rita Cormulley
- Category: Letters
- Hits: 1
ash is a great fan of the writer/blogger/columnist and proud liberal Eric Alterman, whose blog she reads every weekday. One of his pet peeves is the conceit of establishment journalists, a prime example being the one mentioned in her letter to Mr. Alterman, who himself entered enemy territory as she describes. By the way, Mr. Alterman published ash’s remarks, though only the first paragraph of the text:
I’m convinced Joe Klein came to blogging not on orders from the boss but to take that old adage “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” and twist it into “If you can’t ignore them or ballyhoo them out of prominence, then trod on their turf to change the rules of the game.” He honestly believed he could, reluctantly and quite late, bully the blogosphere into conforming to his concept of how blogging should be conducted, which happens to be similar to how traditional punditry is played. Now, some months after he should have concluded otherwise, he is still befuddled that hordes of independent minds didn’t abruptly adhere to his journalistic standards simply because he proclaimed that it be so.