The Morning After, and Other Sundry Political Facts, Circa 2014 Midterms

...including media bias at CBS and also much on the myths created by Democrats (e.g., the "Republican War on Women", that we're "on the wrong side of history", that Republicans are the ones with the "gender gap", and that Hillary is the right, next Presidential candidate for the Democrats)

New Yorkers elect the youngest woman to the U.S. Congress...and she's a Republican. (Elise Stefanik, "You go, girl!" And don't tell me no one said that about Wendy Davis at the time she had her 15 minutes of fame. Just look at Wendy now. How'd that go, indeed.)

How about Mia Love, the first black Republican woman ever elected to Congress, nicely telling off CNN? Love Mia Love.

Former CBS news reporter Attkisson tells how her stories were only deep-sixed to the dustbin when they were negative about Democrats. Skip the sensational headline and leading, biased questions, just get to her answers. All of them. It's long, but she doesn't waste a word and she says something important with each one. A more level head in news reporting, there may not be.

"You can't be on the wrong side of history. History does not actually take sides."

At its most innocent, telling someone they are on the wrong side of history is an assertion that they stand in the way of others who will deservedly soon acquire more power and respect.

But often, the phrase has the ring of a threat. To tell someone that the story of history will be the story of their demise is to make a bet on your future power and to make a frightening promise: The arc of the moral universe is long, and those who disagree with me should be impaled on it.

The verdict of history is never really final.

And today, it turns out the liberal progressives' insistence that history is on their side is, at least for the next few years, just another one of the myths they expect you to close your eyes and swallow, like this one, pointed out in the liberal Los Angeles Times by Jonah Goldberg:

...saying, as NARAL Pro-Choice America did in a radio ad, that if you don't vote, the GOP candidate will ban birth control and cause a condom shortage might get some of these voters ['low-propensity voters,' a euphemism for people who don't care very much about politics] to turn out.

Now, if you haven't been paying attention, you might not know that [Colorado Senator] Udall's GOP challenger, Rep. Cory Gardner, actually favors making birth control available over the counter. That's forgivable ignorance. But if you think one senator from one state can ban birth control (never mind that he doesn't want to), then you are so staggeringly clueless about how our political system works, you shouldn't vote at all. Any self-esteem boost you might get from pulling a lever in a polling booth would be like a pebble in the ocean of shame you should feel for being so ignorant.

The New York Times Ross Douthat discusses the book,

“Gay and Catholic: Accepting My Sexuality, Finding My Community, Living My Faith,” by the, well, gay and Catholic writer Eve Tushnet. If you know only a little bit about Tushnet (who was profiled in the Times several years ago) you probably know that she is a celibate lesbian Catholic convert, in which case you may expect that the book is mainly a defense of traditional Christian teaching on same-sex sex, or an argument for why gay Christians should try to follow that teaching. It is not, or not really, and it’s definitely worth reading even if you’re inclined to dismiss (whether from the left or the right) its author’s identification and beliefs. It’s less of an argument and more of a memoir — or, really, a series of interlocking, memoir-istic essays on religion, conversion, alcoholism, sexuality and (especially) the idea of Christian vocation as something much more expansive than a marriage-or-holy-orders binary.

Tushnet is a lovely essayist and critic, in this book and elsewhere, and I would compare “Gay and Catholic” to Andrew Sullivan’s “Love Undetectable,” a book with which it is often effectively in dialogue, sharing similar interests and advancing overlapping ideas notwithstanding their very different attitudes toward Catholic teaching about sexuality. They overlap, particularly, in their interest in same-sex friendship as a (sometimes vowed) vocation across Christian history. This is another non-marital ideal and institution that’s fallen by the wayside in modernity, in part (again) because of both “conservative” and “progressive” assumptions — the former paranoid about homosexuality, the latter eager to discover explicit sexual attraction in every intense same-sex bond. Its relevance for gay-identified but celibate-and-orthodox Christians is obvious, which is why the small but diverse and interesting group of writers working in that territory tend to give it particular attention. But it’s a tradition, an inheritance, that more people in our present, increasingly-single situation — straight and gay, celibate and not, religious and not — could benefit from exploring, pondering, adapting.

"The numbers are definitive proof that, contrary to much conventional wisdom, Democrats have a bigger gender gap problem than the GOP."

It would appear the left-leaning pollsters and pundits have been dead wrong, in those months leading up to this election, and the Democrats lost big on almost every single one of their own measures of success:

For Democrats in the midterm election, it came down to this:  they defeated Republican Gov. Tom Corbett in Pennsylvania.  That was it.  Nothing more.  The next most embattled GOP governor, Sam Brownback in Kansas, was reelected.

There’s no reason to haggle over whether it was a “wave.” I’d simply call it a defeat worse than Democrats suffered in 2010. And it wasn’t just a rejection of President Obama and his policies.  It was a rejection of liberal Democratic governance and all its excesses from Washington to the hinterlands.

Democrats said the “blue wall” of Democratic senators Kay Hagan of North Carolina, Mark Udall of Colorado, and candidate Bruce Braley in Iowa would keep Republicans from taking the Senate.  All three of them lost.

The Democratic fallback position was they’d win one or two or with luck three GOP Senate seats, giving them a hedge against losses:  Mitch McConnell in Kentucky, Pat Roberts in Kansas, and the open seat in Georgia. They lost all three.

They targeted specific governors for defeat:  Scott Walker in Wisconsin, Rick Snyder in Michigan, and Rick Scott in Florida.  They loath Walker for having cut the power of public employee unions, Snyder for signing a right-to-work law, and Scott for being who he is—a rich and successful businessman.  All three were reelected.

Looking hopefully to a pendulum-backswinging future if you're a Democrat? Look again:

Hillary has a great, long, mouth-flowing history, it's an education for those of you recently educated (high school or college), you would do yourself a great service to read up on it. You could start with our sidebar links at right (or below), under the heading "MORE Hillary Backpedals." Or just look for the "BAN BOSSY" graphic.

After really educating yourself on Hillary's true self, I'd ask you just one question:

Is it more important that you can claim to have crowned the presumed first woman President, or more important that you are not among those who have helped destroy this nation and its position of resources for its own people and its strength (read, safety) in the world?

Be careful before you answer. Really read Hillary's thesis, see her falling in love with "Rules For Radicals" and Alinsky's thoughts and calling this radicalism the "fulfillment of Revelation." Ask yourself, does she mean this Revelation? And if so, what precisely is she looking forward to in the "end of the age"?

Once The United States of America is diminished, in all ways economic, geopolitical, and civilized, all the free-ride, free-love, free-everything bennies will begin to disappear, or at least stop being free.

The horse can only be buggy-whipped so long before it collapses and dies.

Tune in tomorrow to After Abortion blog, for more on this subject.