Rick Perry now opposes abortion in the case of rape and incest:
Responding to a question about the change in position, Perry said, “You’re seeing a transformation.”
Perry says his unprecedented and heartfelt transformation came after watching Mike Huckabee’s new documentary, “The Gift of Life”, which premiered in Des Moines. In related news, the latest PPP Iowa poll has some interesting internals:
Santorum actually has the best favorability numbers of any of the candidates at +27 (56/29). He’s also the most frequent second choice of voters at 14%. Whether he can translate any of this into a top 3 finish remains to be seen, but he’s someone who would seem to have the potential to grow his support in the final week.
They might as well rename the “Iowa Republican Caucus” to the “Abortion and Gay-Hating Referendum” and be done with the charade that there’s anything else going on in that state.
Baud
Mark my words, by the end of the day, Romney will accuse Perry of being an unrepentant flip-flopper lacking in core conservative values.
MattF
I’ll admit to feeling a shred of sympathy for Perry. He was clearly pushed into the deep end by the money guys, and he’s in over his head. Now, it’s true that ‘in over his head’ isn’t saying very much, but that’s not his fault. And now there’s all those Texans who have gotten tired of hearing the rest of the country saying ‘You elected him as Governor?’
SiubhanDuinne
Oh mistermix, you’re so droll.
Calouste
Nah, that would be “Abortion and Gay-Hating Referendum and Corn Subsidies”.
RSA
From the article:
Later, after watching the movie Resident Evil, Perry promised to zero out research funding in the National Institutes for Health.
I’d like someone to ask Perry about fertility clinics and IVF procedures.
MikeBoyScout
The bias to crazy in the Republican Iowa Caucus has been evident since ’88 when Robertson came in 2nd.
For me, the interesting thing to come out of exit polling in the Iowa caucus next week will be turnout. How many Republicans even show-up?
Romney’s early dissing of the caucus would seem to drive down whatever remains of the non-crazy.
Popcorn stock shall likely continue to sky rocket.
Comrade Javamanphil
@MattF:
After 16 years, I’m sure they are used to the question by now.
jeffreyw
He’s “in over his head” in knee deep water.
Zifnab25
Remember when Republicans used to rabble-rouse the loudest about taxes and deregulation? I miss those days.
PK
Then he saw the movie Brokeback Mountain and decided he was a secret gay cowboy.
amk
How could Iowa that really gave Obama the presidency could even stand these hateful nutters ?
rlrr
@MikeBoyScout:
The bias to crazy in the Republican Iowa Caucus has been evident since ‘88 when Robertson came in 2nd.
And Pat “the Nazis weren’t so bad” Buchanan coming in 2nd in ’96.
rlrr
The Google ad servers are funny…
rikyrah
this is who they are. no shock
rlrr
@Zifnab25:
I’m old enough to remember when bat shit insanity wasn’t a prerequisite for being a Republican…
RossInDetroit
Like a weather vane on a blustery day.
geg6
Jeebus. Thankfully, I know only liberals from Iowa and, thankfully, they are all coming out for O in 2012 again. Can’t say the same for Indiana, for instance. It’s such a shame that, every four years, the nutjobs who make up the Iowa GOP make the whole state look like a bunch of idiotic, god bothering assholes. Iowa Dems really have my sympathy because of that. Most Iowans are great people but they really need to re-think that whole first-in-the-nation contest stuff. It paints them all as loons.
redshirt
“Transformer” is such a nicer word than “Flip-Flopper”.
MikeBoyScout
@13 rlrr:
From a political science point of view, the fish bowl that is the Iowa Republican caucus bears a strong resemblance to a beer hall in Munich.
JGabriel
mistermix @ top:
Minor fix for accuracy and diplomacy.
Let’s not forget that Iowa, overall, is a blue-leaning state typically favoring center to center-left policies. It’s just the state’s Republicans & fundies that got their hate goin’ on.
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Jerzy Russian
@redshirt:
I would vote for someone who could change himself into a car and take me somewhere.
JGabriel
@Zifnab25:
Given that rabble-rousing over taxes and deregulation led to the last 30 years of corporate rapacity, I’m okay with Republican rabble-rousing over conspiracies, religion, and bigotry — makes it that much easier for independents to figure out that the GOP really is fucking nuts.
Besides, it’s not like the Republicans have stopped campaigning on taxes and deregulations. With 16 (more or less?) debates, they’re just getting a lot more coverage and a lot more opportunities to make public jackasses of themselves on more issues than ever.
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Canuckistani Tom
@Jerzy Russian:
Yeah, but these clowns can’t all be Starscream
Brachiator
The thing is, in some states, governors are getting elected who then push restrictions on reproductive rights, and the pushback is not as strong as it should be. I don’t know why this is, and it has got to be more than just that the mainstream media is “hypmotizing” voters, especially when poll after poll shows people rejecting anti gay rhetoric and policies.
amk
A month-by-month round up of how teabaggers’ congress ratfucked amurikans in 2011.
Sasha
I have to say, this is the only anti-choice position that makes sense. If abortion is murdering a child then allowing an exception for rape or incest is incoherent. Personally I think people that support that exception are motivated by racism and disgust. They can’t stand the idea of forcing a white woman to bear a black man’s child and are disgusted by incest.
JGabriel
@rlrr:
Damn, what’s it like being 120 years old?
(I’m assuming “old enough to remember when bat shit insanity wasn’t a prerequisite” = “old enough to have voted for Teddy Roosevelt”.)
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Cat Lady
Listening to The Takeaway on NPR this a.m. was pretty funny. They interviewed a 26 year old female teabagger and an evangelical pastor, neither of whom had committed to a candidate yet, because “they liked all of them because they’re all strong”. The radio host, after a moment of dead shocked silence, said that that hasn’t how the field has been characterized throughout the rest of the country, and the pastor said “it depends on your perspective”. Yes it does, pastor, yes it does, and yours is from inside your rectum.
Brachiator
@Sasha:
I am pretty disgusted by your slimy insinuation that the only rapists in the world are black men preying on white women, and by your disregard of victims of incest.
Jerzy Russian
@Sasha:
This is true. Taking things a bit further, one should then oppose the death penalty, and also wars and the like. If killing an unborn child is wrong, then killing anyone should likewise be wrong. I wonder what Perry’s stance on the death penalty is?
Jerzy Russian
@Cat Lady:
Jesus, Maria, and Jose. The campaign has been going on for how many months now, and you still need time to make up your mind?
JGabriel
@Jerzy Russian:
I wouldn’t … but I’d date her.
(Are there any female Transformers(tm)? I’m not all that familiar with the Transformer(tm) mythology.)
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Felinious Wench
I can genuinely say when Rick shuffles off this mortal coil, I will not spit on his grave, but my belief in a just God will be reaffirmed.
I cannot stand that ignorant, rock stupid son of a bitch.
Signed,
A female Texas liberal, and Molly Ivins, may her spirit grace us through this Republican primary season
Gromitt Gunn
@J Gabriel #28: Nah, Most Republicans in New England were sane up through the 90s. The Gay/Straight Alliance movement in high schools was prompted by Governor William Weld (R-MA), for example.
Woodrow/asim Jarvis Hill
@JGabriel:
…yes.
And the less said about that situation, the better.
PeakVT
My current political fantasy is that Paul wins the caucuses, which discredits them so much that neither party accepts the caucus results in future presidential races. Unlikely, but a boy can hope.
danimal
I keep warning everyone who will listen: Santorum will explode onto the scene in the Iowa caucuses. My dream scenario: Paul wins, Santorum is #2 and Romney hangs on in a tie with Perry for third. But I’m rooting for the GOP nomination to be complete mess for as long as possible.
Calouste
@Sasha:
Someone’s looking for a bit of time on the sidelines here.
Mark S.
I wonder if Perry’s newfound love for fetuses will manifest itself into a proposal to provide free pre- and postnatal care to indigent women.
I’m also in the market for a bridge, preferably one in Brooklyn. Does anyone have any leads?
burnspbesq
Meanwhile, the Iranian Navy is conducting a major exercise in the waters surrounding the Strait of Hormuz, the obvious goal of which is to demonstrate to the world that it has the ability to close the Strait to commercial (i.e., oil) shipping if it ever chooses to do so. Whether they could actually do it in the face of a spirited US response is a matter of some uncertainty. But there is certain to be a major wingnut freakout over this Outrageous Iranian Provocation !!! and a call to Do Something Now!!!!!
No One of Consequence
Holy Hyperbole, MM!
Seriously, Mr.Mix, no need to bash Iowa. And no need to get a even bigger, even broader brush to paint an entire state.
Born and raised, escaped a few times and am raising a family here. Many of us are genuinely confused every four years where you find the yahoos requisite to have a Repub Caucus.
But please, don’t tar the entirety, because of the volume of an increasingly minor part of our population.
Kossahk of the GOS whinges about this every few years. Ewwwww, iowa! Wahhhhhh iowa! Why do they get to start things off, etc.? Doesn’t seem fair to me, and I live here. So, let’s move it someplace nice and more representative, and nice and considerably more expensive (to run media campaigns).
Don’t get me wrong. Much love Mr.Mr.Mixer. But, I gotta defend the state of my home, and I have friends and family here I can certify are not crazy. Or at least no crazier than I am.
Peace,
– NOoC
JGabriel
Ah, here we go again, the myth that Conservatives / Republicans were saner in the past.
Usually, people try to represent Reagan as some mythically saner variant of the GOP but that’s easily dispensed with by pointing to Reagan’s 1961 views on Medicare or Reagan’s choice, for his first appearance after his 1980 nomination, to give a speech on State’s Rights in Philadelphia, MS.
Weld — weirdly enough, I’ve had dinner at his boyhood home in Long Island (it’s a historic landmark, and a friend was the live-in caretaker at the time) — really is an anomaly in the GOP, though. I wouldn’t call him entirely sane, but he’s one of the last, possibly the last, of the Republican social liberals.
I’ll have to give you that one, while noting that Weld really isn’t a fair choice to use as an example of the modern GOP. Weld is pretty much sui generis at this point (he supported Romney in the 2008 primary, then went on to endorse Obama in the general) — and even at that he’s still quite conservative on spending and economics.
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burnspbesq
@efgoldman:
If you haven’t read the complaint, you should. It is Comedy Gold.
jrg
Any government small enough to fit in a vagina doesn’t have that kind of money.
JGabriel
@danimal:
That is a real possibility. It’s about time for a new Not-Mitt, and it’s Santorum’s turn.
And not only that, but Santorum has visited every county in Iowa. When the local caucuses get mired in indecision over Gingrich, Paul, and Romney, it’s possible they’ll turn to the guy they’ve actually met, Santorum, as a ‘safe’ consensus choice.
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burnspbesq
@JGabriel:
It’s only a myth if your frame of reference doesn’t go back past 1980.
Rockefeller. Eisenhower. Brooke. Case. Scranton. George Romney. Percy. Goodell. I can keep going if you’d like.
Mark S.
So Virginia requires the people who go out to collect signatures to be eligible Virginia voters. It sounds like a stupid law, but I don’t see how it violates the Constitution.
shortstop
Despite being pro-choice, I have to note that people who oppose abortion in cases including rape and incest are simply being consistent. If you really believe abortion is murder, then it doesn’t logically become less than murder because the woman was raped or the victim of incest. It’s just that these dudes know they can’t possibly get elected unless they make that exception. And that enrages the no-exceptions anti-choice crowd, which leads to Hail Mary passes like this one.
Instead of asking Perry about why he’s changed on rape and incest, reporters should be asking him whether “I now oppose abortion in all cases” includes when the woman’s life is in danger. I won’t hold my breath waiting for someone to do that, but the answer would be instructive.
JGabriel
@burnspbesq:
Nixon, Goldwater, Birchers, Wm. Buckley, McCarthy, Ayn Rand, Prescott Bush and the other assholes who formed a conspiracy to overthrow FDR in the 30’s, Hoover, Coolidge, Harding, Taft. Taft is pretty much where the GOP craziness begins in my book, so I can’t keep going much further than that.
The point is that there was an enormous influence of the crazy on the GOP going back to the early 20th C. They didn’t just go suddenly nuts after 1980.
1980 is just when they started getting their policies implemented, and, not coincidentally, when inflation-adjusted incomes for the bottom 99% stopped going up, i.e., when rich stopped sharing productivity gains with everyone else. But, that much, I’m sure you already know.
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Joel
So what did Perry feel after he watched 300?
MattF
@JGabriel: I think it’s fair to say that until relatively recently, Republicans had both a ‘sane’ branch and an ‘insane’ branch. Northeastern Republicans, in particular, could even be libruls– you can look up people like Javits, Weicker, Morella– all of whom were rather to the left of the current Democratic party.
lol
@Brachiator:
Liberals are too focused at the national level and have neglected state level fights, especially incremental ones.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the left could learn a lot from how the right has gone about banning abortion. They’ve done it inch by inch and they never punish reps for “only” banning partial birth abortion or “only” requiring parental consent. They quietly bank their gains and then get ready for another pass.
Hal
Do personhood laws ban treatment for ectopic pregnancies? If so, does this law shield Doctors who basically have to sit by while a mother dies?
JGabriel
@Hal: Yes and yes.
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Gromitt Gunn
@J Gabriel: Keep moving those goalposts.
Gromitt Gunn
@Matt F: Indeed. I grew up in a New England family that historically voted Rockefeller Republican. It wasn’t until moving to Texas that the pure lunacy of national Republican Party was made evident. But for my relatives that stayed in New England, they didn’t really see it until Weld got publicly humiliated by Jesse Helms when going for his ambassadorship, followed by the Clinton impeachment. As far as I know my dad and one of his brothers are the only two who didn’t vote for Obama.
JGabriel
@Gromitt Gunn:
Screw you, Gunn. I’ve been regularly commenting on this site for 5 years, and plenty of people who have been regular readers in that time can tell you I’ve consistently argued that GOP craziness begins in the early 20th C., post T. Roosevelt, circa Taft.
I may not have worded the above arguments with my usual exactitude (it was morning/very early afternoon, I just got back last night from 5 days in Pennsyltucky, et whinge al., etc.), but I’m not moving any fucking goalposts.
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JGabriel
MattF:
Yes, that’s ‘fair to say’ as far as it goes, but, as you note, the liberal elements in the GOP had been relegated to the NE post-WWII, and were largely despised outside of that region by a Republican party that had gone Mammon and corrupt by the time of Harding, paranoid by the time of Nixon & McCarthy’s HUAC, racist by the time that Buckley was opposing civil rights in the National Review, crazy by time of the Birchers and Goldwater, religiously fundamentalist by the time of Falwell & Reagan, and utterly intolerant of any deviation from conservative dogma by the time Gingrich was a back-bencher in the late 80’s.
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Jess
@shortstop: Totally agree. Banning abortion only in cases of consensual sex is clearly about punishing sexually active women, not saving lives. It’s hard to find a right-wing position that does not have the desire to punish at its core, or at least as a core part of its justification.
Gromitt Gunn
Dude, you’re the one presented three different arguements in the course of a half dozen posts. Not me. Argue that the Republicans started going off the rails after Teddy R is completely different than where you started.
someofparts
Read some old Matt Taibbi this weekend, from his younger days working on the Exile newspaper in Moscow.
His interactions with the American press in Moscow gave him a good look at the degenerate state of journalism in this country. He finally observed that the attitudes were just like mean girl clique politics we all remember from high school.
But his best quip was the one you reminded me of with the title of this post. He said that with most American journalists, there is always much, much less than meets the eye.
I love that line and can’t wait for a chance to toss it into some casual conversation.
Sasha
Brachiator, I think you misunderstood me. I didn’t say I felt that way, I don’t. I am not anti abortion. Nor am I suggesting that Black men are the only rapists. I just don’t think that anti-choice people who support an exception for rape or incest, think about or care about other situations. My point was, abortion, in the case of a healthy woman, is murder or it isn’t. If it is, then it makes no sense at all to endorse the murder of babies who’s fathers are rapists or who are the product of incest.
The fact that many conservative, right-to-lifers do support the exception makes me think they are driven by other reasons. The ones I came up with were racism and disgust. Just a hypothesis of mine; not my feelings.
Brachiator
@Sasha: Point noted.
portlander
@Sasha:
Under the law the question of homicide, and even murder, is not black and white. The question of intent and circumstance is always at the forefront. It’s a different matter if you planned to kill someone, got upset enough in the moment to kill someone, got in a car drunk and killed someone, got in a car sober and killed someone who stepped out in front of your car without looking. Intent, circumstance, get it? It’s important.
The reason why people can oppose abortion in some cases and not others is also because of the intent and circumstance. For some people it’s not ok for someone to simply choose to have an abortion because they do not want to have a child but it is ok if the pregnancy was forced upon them. And yes, there is no place for such nuance in the right wing which is why opposing abortion in all cases is on the rise. But just because they are not capable of understanding intent and circumstance does not mean we all have to lower our intellect to their level.