This WaPo story about McCain summarizes everything that is wrong with our current politics:
The bus had been rolling for a half-hour and McCain was holding court on everything from Iraq to college basketball. (“Who woulda thought? VCU,” he exclaimed upon boarding.) And then someone asked about public funding for contraception in Africa to prevent the spread of AIDS.
“I’m sure I’ve taken a position on it in the past,” he stammered as he looked to his communications director. “I’m sure I’m opposed to government funding.”
Sensing a vulnerable moment, reporters kept the questions coming. What about sex education in the schools? Should it mention contraceptives? Or only abstinence, like President Bush wants?
“I think I support the president’s present policy,” he said, tentatively.
More questions: Do condoms stop sexually transmitted disease?
A long pause.
A stern look.
“I’ve never gotten into these issues or thought much about them,” he said, almost crying uncle. “Obviously, we all want to stop the spread of AIDS. Everybody wants to do that. What’s the most viable way of doing that?”
Well? The reporters asked?
In a last ditch attempt to rescue himself, McCain told an aide to go get a briefing paper prepared by Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn, a doctor, who he said has been advising him on “these issues.” But the aide couldn’t find the briefing paper. “We’ve lost it,” McCain mumbled.
You shouldn’t need a position paper to tell you where you stand on this issue, or which groups need their egos finessed.
Contraceptives help stop unwanted and unneeded babies. Condoms help stop hideous diseases.
Unless you are a total moron, the answer is clear. You support handing out condoms. That we need position papers to figure this out is irritating to no end.
Zifnab
Oh bullshit. McCain knows exactly to whom and how he’s pandering to people. He doesn’t give two shits about disease prevention or condom use or even pre-teen sex. He cares about becoming President.
He needs a paper to read off of because its very hard to hold an actual, coherent position in the Republican Party without being riped to shreds by your competitors for being too far-left or being completely ignored by mainstream America for being so desperately out of touch.
And the ‘Pubs have so many memes flying around, many of which Mr. Straight Talk hasn’t bothered to keep up with, that he needs a whole filing cabinet to keep them straight in his head.
Tsulagi
Pretty sad. And to think that once I would have voted for that bastard.
The Straight Talk Express was derailed years ago. Ever since he’s been on the Weasel Train traveling backwards.
mark
I can’t imagine Goldwater kowtowing to the theocrats of the religious right the way McCain has. Conservatism in the US has sold out to people who get their positions from an imaginary friend who lives in the sky.
CaseyL
McCain is an object lesson on what happens when ambition overwhelms everything else. Yes, more than Kerry; more than (either) Clinton.
I don’t wonder how he can look in the mirror. I wonder how his family can stand him.
Pb
Another example that I thought was rather telling–Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both speak to AIPAC. Clinton does the straight-up pander dance, while Obama has the gall to bring up the Palestinians too–and the political judgement in the media seemed to be that Obama made a big mistake there by, you know, failing to pander enough to a particular interest group. Well, maybe they’ve got a point, if you don’t have a soul.
Pb
At least you don’t have to wonder with Rudy–they can’t stand him.
Richard 23
So does abstinence. And condoms and contraceptives fail. But you speak like an authority on the subject as if contraception always stops unwanted conception and as if condoms always stop diseases.
Abstinence is 100% effective, unlike the condom and contraceptive alternatives.
How “honest” of you. The “last principled conservative,” indeed!
John Cole
Now I am no Wilt Chamberlain, but I have been around the block. And when I use condoms, it pretty much means I have passed by the abstinence option, r-tard.
Barry
John, can we arange for Richard23 to get a short (by that I mean very, very long) tour of Baghdad? No body armor, of course – that would merely lead him to think that getting shot is acceptable. I want him to face up to the full consequences of getting shot.
If I can’t do that, can I have medical guardianship of him? I’ll check all conditions; if he’s even a bit to blame for anything, no drugs for him.
Baby Jane
Solutions for humans beings will yield better results.
mark
If you don’t think abstinence fails, you don’t know gonads.
ThymeZone
We Arizonans are having a lot of laughs this year as the rest of the country finds out what a pathetic pandering weasel John McCain is. Just keep one thing in mind: The man will say whatever it takes to win votes. Whether he means any of it or not, not important. Say it, get the votes. He is surely the most ambitious man running this time (HRC being the most ambitious woman; who wins the ambition contest between those two, couldn’t say, don’t care).
Pb
Wow… now here’s a horrible story:
Richard 23
Hey, I got called a name by John Cole. Now my week is complete! Thanks, John. Have a great weekend!
Barry: the answers are no and no. Thanks for playing.
Dreggas
So is swallowing…
Dreggas
Onto the bigger picture now…if you need a policy paper to figure this shit out you are far too old to be running for anything save possibly the block captain in your retirement community.
Tim in SF
Richard said:
The failure rate for condoms, when used properly, is somewhere between one and two percent. Over seventy-five percent of high school senior are not virgins, even in districts where abstinence is emphasized.
It looks like the “failure rate” of your abstinence is a hell of a light higher than condoms.
Andrew
When abstinence fails, it’s God’s way of telling you that every sperm is sacred.
Pb
Dreggas,
Reminds me of the hilarious technical virgin videos…
Richard 23
It’s funny (not really) that you guys miss the point. Abstinence is 100% effective (except in the case of the Virgin Mary) when adhered to. The 75% of high school seniors that Tim refers to who are not virgins are obviously not practicing abstinence.
Pray tell, of the remaining 25%, how many got pregnant or STDs? Then compare that to the 75% you cited.
I bet the numbers are higher for the sluts.
rachel
Abstinence is 100% effective for preventing pregnancy and STDs, but who wants to live as a sexless worker ant with nothing to look forward to in life? Or get married at a ridiculously early age so you can finally get you some? If you want that, fine. But other people will make their own choices, and so they need to know all the facts so they can choose what’s right for them.
Shawn
John,
Can I put in a request for the next site update? I’d be interested in something that would enable me to remotely send an electrical shock to Richard23’s unused, shriveled up gonads.
Any female who has sex is a slut, thus she deserves to die of AIDS. That’s compassionate conservatism for you. I don’t post much here, usually just lurk, but I really wanted to take this opportunity to jump in and call Richard23 a retard, too.
Retard
Baby Jane
Solving issues of sex by focusing on the demographic that doesn’t have sex is antilogical.
Mike
That’s right Richard, and because morons like you (unless you are a too-subtle spoof, I haven’t decided yet. In that case, I apologize and bow to your spoofiness) keep telling them that condoms don’t work, and then they go fuck anyway and pass on STD’s when there was a better than average chance that they wouldn’t have had they been instructed on how to use them properly and done so at the appropriate time.
In the meantime, please use a body condom whenever you are around people. I hate to think of whatever infects you and the rest of the 20-odd percenters infecting more unsuspecting people. Fortunately more and more people seem to be shaking off the disease, but we haven’t quite wiped it out yet.
Mike
I wish you guys wouldn’t insult actual retards by associating them with Richard and his ilk…. although it reminds about feeling sorry earlier for the vomit.
JWeidner
Actually, it’s funnier that you miss the point…by a wider margin than most, I’d say. Abstinence isn’t a reality-based solution. It’s pie in the sky thinking. There hasn’t been an era in modern human history in which people haven’t had sex outside of marriage. To pretend otherwise is, to say the least, delusional.
It’s true that those who abstain from sex with get neither pregnant nor contract an STD. But what you fail to realize (willfully, it seems), is that, you will never reach 100% acceptance of abstinence as a “birth control” method, particularly among the young – they’re too damn curious and they WILL experiment. Nothing you or any other person does or says will change that.
That’s pretty fucking tacky. What, no derisive term for the men that partake in sex out of wedlock? Only the women are sluts? The men get free passes, apparently. (illogically, since they’re the ones passing around sperm and STDs – two leading causes of both pregnancy and, well, STDs)
Remfin
Look at the jackalope!!
Don’t get distracted, abstinance-only vs condoms isn’t relevant anyway to the point. If he was hardcore abstinance-only he STILL would not be suffering from the confusion shown in that conversation, he wouldn’t have had to even think about the answer first. Either he has no moral stance AND rejects good science in general, or he is blatantly pandering and got nailed for it
Either way he decided he could have weaseled out of it with the classic “but I don’t know if it’s my place to make that decision for them” (which is sometimes true), but evidentally he hasn’t added that to his political phrases.
Mikef
John McCain was being asked about AIDS in South Africa, not in American high schools. AIDS in South Africa is the plague that everyone feared it would become in the United States. 25 – 35% of the young adult population has it. That’s 25 – 40 year olds, not high school teenagers. That’s married women contracting AIDS from their husbands. It’s women and men who are trying to have families, who don’t realize they’ve got AIDS. It’s a generation of orphans being born.
Are you honestly going to lecture them about abstinence?
Everything that can be done to stop this plague should be.
John McCain is smart enough to know that. He’s just not brave enough to say it.
CaseyL
Yeah, let’s get back on topic, here:
Even if you buy that ridiculous premise – that abstinence is all we should advocate in order to prevent pregnancies and STDs – why would McCain need to refer to a position paper?
Is there anyone in the US who doesn’t know “abstinence only” is the wingnut policy? Does McCain really need a crib sheet to remind him of that?
If he does, then he’s senile.
If he doesn’t – if he was ‘confused’ because he knows the policy is damned stupid and was just trying to avoid having to say so because that would alienate the constituency he’s decided to pander to – then he’s spineless.
Ted
I was going to say something about this childish idiocy, but so many already beat me to it.
Paddy O'Shea
Happy Saint Patrick’s Day, ya heathen scum.
Just remember, while it might not be easy being Irish amongst all you Germans, we can still kick yer slack asses.
RSA
There’s another point no one has commented on: Tom Coburn? Tom “rampant lesbianism in OK schools” Coburn? I realize that he’s an MD, but surely McCain could have found someone with better intellectual credentials to write his “briefing paper”. It wouldn’t have been as panderrific, I suppose.
Andrew
Dream a little dream with me…
Richatd Bottoms
But remember, Hillary is always worse.
According to John.
grumpy realist
Plus the “abstinence 100% works!” people act as if certain icky things don’t exist: Rape and the persistence of such mind-boggingly stupid ideas as having (unprotected) sex with a virgin will cure AIDS, for starters.
(I was going to say that rapists don’t use condoms but have read somewhere that now there’s a higher incidence of those that do because they don’t want to leave DNA evidence.)
Rome Again
That song is only supposed to connote good things for me, please don’t ruin it… my poor brain can’t take that.
Rome Again
I vote for spineless, personally.
Rome Again
The whole reason why is that MARRIAGE has been the problem all along. Marriage is unnatural and should never have been invented.
Zifnab
That is biblically and scientifically entirely untrue. Only a real heathen would go about blasphomeying the virgin birth like that, you Godless, vile little liberal.
Furthermore, if abstinence is so effective, why does Mary Cheney have a baby?
And did the Lord not say, “Go forth and multiple”? By not having babies, we are violating God’s will with our satan-spawned phyallis of hubris. Indeed, the issue is not abstience, but a lack of marriage.
All teenagers should be married by the time they leave High School. The fact that you so recklessly, irresponsibly, and immorally refuse to acknowledge this fundamental truth shows you up for the simple minded, ignorant, wretch that you are.
Baby Jane
Spineless triangulating politicians is a constant source of frustration, but when it comes to McCain it’s hard to care. His apparent goal: beating the reaper to the Oval Office at any price, is a pathetic spectacle. McCain has no future. None. Sex, on the other hand, has majority support.
Something else on abstinence: People who abstain from sex due to STD or pregnancy concerns, when there are other effective options available, have a phobia. Promoting mental ills to combat sexual ills is an inefficient health policy.
Faux News
“The whole reason why is that MARRIAGE has been the problem all along. Marriage is unnatural and should never have been invented”.
I have several divorced male and female friends who would agree with that statement.
BTW, have you ever hear of adultery? Seems like marriage does not guarantee fidelity either.
BadTux
John McCain is the John Kerry of this election cycle — a tired hack who’s been in the Senate forever, running on past glories, who believes whatever he thinks is going to get him votes in whatever election is coming up and has no fundamental underlying principles of his own. Both Johns started out as principled politicians but something happened to them along the way. Now their only belief is getting re-elected, their only goal in life winning the next vote, their only principle being “whatever wins the next election is what I stand for.”
The fact that these tired hacks even get the time of day from their respective party heirarchies is telling. And yes, while I voted for Kerry, I held my nose while doing so — he was an incredibly weak candidate. As someone who wants to see the tail end of the Republicans, I would be overjoyed to see this tired hack McCain get the nomination. About the only Democratic candidate who would *not* wipe the deck with McCain would be John Edwards (why is he even running, I wonder?), who was an incredibly weak vice-presidential candidate who couldn’t even win his own state. But Edwards’s chance of winning the Democratic nomination given who else is running is less than zero.
KCinDC
Adam Nagourney’s version of the McCain meltdown is good too. It ends with this:
Rome Again
Uh, yeah… I think that was what was meant when JWeidner said:
Or did you not realize that “having sex outside of marriage” and “adultery” were the same thing?
Richard 23
Remfin, I’m not sure what the “jackalope,” a mythical creature, has anything to do with John’s post. Please try to stay on topic.
Uh oh, Paddy’s here. He’s probably sloshed already.
But back to the subject at hand. John McCain will never become President and I think he knows this. At this point he’s only going through the motions, trying to be a spoiler.
He even skipped CPAC and the Club for Growth’s yearly gathering. He’s no conservative. Good riddence.
Richard 23
Another example of the ‘deep thinking’ of the left, courtesy of Rome Again. See, the left really does want to destroy marriage.
Use your imagination if you must. But I don’t think society at large is that thrilled about turkey baster babies.
Richard 23
To be more clear, I really doubt that Mary Cheney was practicing abstinence when she got pregnant. Ask your parents about the birds and the bees. Maybe they’ll explain it to you.
Rome Again
Wrong, sir… I am not “THE LEFT”, I am but one tiny sliver of it, I do not control the way “THE LEFT” thinks, at all… I am just as much subject to it’s whims as you are, hence, I bacame an Independent.
curtadams
Yeah, abstinence works so well that when an abstinence-only program was established in Uganda the HIV infection rate DOUBLED. http://donklephant.com/2006/05/25/abstinence-uganda-hiv-rates-suggest-failure/ Oh, and it was the Bush administration that was pushing the abstinence-only program with strings attached to funding.
What the theocrats are so desparately trying to hide is that with safe sex and only mild restrictions on promiscuity (basically, don’t cheat and get to know somebody before you have sex) it’s possible to have a very wild and randy sex life with very little chance of unpleasant consequences. Where do you go for extraordinarily low STD rates often 1/10 of the abstinence-worshiping US? Western Europe, where not only is it fine not to wait for marriage, increasingly people don’t even bother to get married. If you *really* want to stop STDs, abstinence isn’t even part of the equation.
chriskoz
What happened to the concept of love for all human life?
Now I don’t know for sure, but I would bet that “turkey baster babies” are more common than “snowflake babies”. Perhaps society at large (or at least Richard 23) needs to come to grips with their existence. Along with the existence of sex out of marriage.
JWeidner
Spoof.
Latah!
Zifnab
But turkey-basters produce children. The big secular argument against gay marriage was that there would be no kids. Logically, then, marriage between a woman and a turkey-baster should be perfectly legal.
That said, I imagine Mary Cheney got pregnant through artifical insemination. That, or cloning. Either way, we have a clear instance in which abstience does NOT prevent pregnancy.
QED
fwiffo
Not driving is 100% effective at preventing car accidents. Not flying is 100% effective at preventing plane crash deaths. Not eating is 100% effective at preventing obesity.
Doug H.
Not posting is 100% effective and preventing spoofs?
Matty M
“BTW, have you ever hear of adultery? Seems like marriage does not guarantee fidelity either.”
See Gingrich, Newt
Duel
Richard 23 never got laid in highschool or college, like most uptight wingnuts. He had to ‘wait’ until his wedding night, and he had to turn off the lights, but if you saw his wife, you’d turn off the lights too.
Richard 23
Jesus wept. The “randy” left for all to see.
Richard 23
I know you’re kidding but this is the path we go down when we allow same-sex marriage. Man-boy. Woman-girl. Human-animal. And, heh, lesbian-turkey baster.
But seriously, it’s a slippery slope America is walking upon.
Rome Again
Why are you so obsessed with what other people do? Aren’t you happy enough in your own life Richard that you don’t have to consider what others are doing? Oh, I see, you want everyone to fit into your own description of “okay”. I see. Forget that, I mean to be just as different as I can be, in that case, just to bug the shit out of people like you. :)
rachel
Isn’t the “slippery slope” argument one of the more commonly-known logical fallacies?
RSA
You realize that some social conservatives have made this same sort of slippery slope argument about marriages between Christians and Jews, Protestants and Catholics, whites and blacks, and so forth? All human adults. And America is still here.
CaseyL
You must be spoofing. I mean, really: the concept of “mentally competent adult consent” can’t be all that mysterious.
Richard 23
So let me get this straight, RSA, you’re arguing in favor of human-animal marriage? Good luck with that, wackjob.
RSA
I don’t think you’re getting anything straight, Richard 23. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
maf54
Pizza party at my place and Richard 23 is invited!
Richard 23
Probably too old for you maf. Thanks anyway.
Rome Again
Richard, would you please answer my question to you on the “Why people ignore the Drudge Report” thread? It’s just a request, but I’m hoping you’ll take me up on it. Never let it be said I didn’t try to point you to my philosophy on marriage sometime in the future.
jenniebee
I tried abstinence once.
It failed, but when it failed, it wasn’t abstinence any more, so it didn’t count against the abstinence success rate.
And there you have it on McCain – if that long shot happens, it’ll be Coburn’s sex ed for everybody. We’ve already had eight years of kids being given sex ed lectures like this:
God forbid that when the knight doesn’t listen to the princess’s advice she says “fine, here, I’ll show you,” kills the dragon herself, and gives us all a moral like: “you can be a princess without all the sitting around and waiting to be rescued. Get your shit together, get out of your tower, and find a knight who isn’t such a fragile flower that he has to have his hand held in the dragon killing department.”
mere mortal
McCain didn’t need the position paper for his stance, he needed it to recite the dog-whistle code words required to assure the crazies that he doesn’t really mean it.
Richard 23
Thank you for your honesty jenniebee. That’s exactly what I was trying to say. Although I’ll probably chose the maiden instead since she’s not a bossy know-it-all.