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"Ain't Gonna Study War No More"

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Right-To-Life Party, Christian, Anti-War, Pro-Life, Bible Fundamentalist, Egalitarian, Libertarian Left

Monday, July 04, 2005

Margaret Sanger's Nation of 'Morons'

HOODWINKED

Editor's note: The following commentary is excerpted from Jack Cashill's eye-opening new book, "Hoodwinked: How Intellectual Hucksters Have Hijacked American Culture," where he shows how, over the last century, "progressive" writers and producers have been using falsehood and fraud as their primary weapons in their attack on America.

Although Planned Parenthood has tried desperately to shred the files of its founding mother, Margaret Sanger herself has left a detailed record of how she lived and how she thought. The most unimpeachable source of the former is her autobiography, written in 1938, and of the latter, her landmark book, "The Pivot of Civilization," written in 1922.

"A religion without a name was spreading over the country," Sanger enthuses about those heady days before World War I. "The converts were liberals, socialists, anarchists, revolutionists of all shades." Then living in New York, Sanger wanted part of the action.

Sanger found her own calling quite by chance. One evening, a scheduled lecturer at a meeting of socialists had to cancel, and the organizer asked Sanger to fill in. Knowing little about politics, she spoke about what she did know: health. And she made a great hit with the women present.

In 1914, Sanger launched her own publication, the Woman Rebel. Never one for subtlety, Sanger adopted the altogether revealing slogan: "No Gods. No Masters." In the first issue, the increasingly radical Sanger argued that women had a duty "to look the world in the eyes; to have an idea; to speak and act in defiance of convention." For the rest of her career, Sanger did just that.

Curiously, Sanger admits to having no great sense of compassion for the less fortunate, a seeming drawback for their would-be liberator. "I hated the wretchedness and hopelessness of the poor," she writes, "and never experienced that satisfaction in working among them that so many noble women have found."

Sanger saw the poor not as a people to be helped, but as a problem to be solved, and birth control offered the perfect solution. If "The Pivot of Civilization" is as loud and clear as a bell about this solution, "The Autobiography of Margaret Sanger" is almost entirely silent. It is not hard to understand the silence. The autobiography was published in 1938, the same year that Joseph Goebbels made the following declaration about his fellow National Socialists:

Our starting point is not the individual, and we do not subscribe to the view that one should feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, or clothe the naked ... Our objectives are entirely different: We must have a healthy people in order to prevail in the world.

Now consider the following declaration from Sanger's "The Pivot of Civilization," one that makes Goebbels' proclamation seem, by comparison, a model of restraint:

... the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective. Possibly drastic and Spartan methods may be forced upon American society if it continues complacently to encourage the chance and chaotic breeding that has resulted from our stupid, cruel sentimentalism.

Planned Parenthood is forever chastising pro-life advocates for quoting Margaret Sanger out of context, but "Pivot" is all context. Sanger posits two primary reasons why birth control is necessary. The first, the one that has endured in progressive mythology, is "the liberation of the spirit of woman and through woman of the child." The second, the one that has been cleansed from the record, is "to prevent the sexual and racial chaos into which the world has drifted."

Sanger reviews the remedies for dealing with a nation half filled with "morons" and finds them all wanting. She reserves her greatest scorn, of course, for the traditional. The Catholic Church's claim that even deformed children have souls, she argues, has had "the practical effect of making this world a vale of tears." To "open-minded" individuals – presumably, like herself – such orthodoxy appears "crude and cruel" and a "menace to civilization."

Traditional philanthropy, if anything, is crueler still. "Organized charity," writes Sanger, "itself is the symptom of a malignant social disease." By keeping so many "defectives, delinquents and dependents" alive and breeding, charity at some point becomes an injustice for the self-supporting citizen and a "positive injury to the future of the race." Indeed, students of Sanger could not have been surprised by the massive progressive indifference to the torture and death of Terri Schiavo. The seed of that indifference has been deeply planted.

Sanger's American Birth Control League and its allies had enormous influence in their day. In 1927, in a now notorious case known as Buck v. Bell, the U.S. Supreme Court accepted the state of Virginia's ruling that Carrie Buck and her infant daughter were mentally defective and thus deserving of forced sterilization.

"It is better for all the world," wrote famed progressive jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., "if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind." Sanger could not have said it better herself.

In 1946, with the full horrors of the Holocaust revealed, the American Birth Control League quietly changed its name to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. In a memory purge impressive even by Soviet standards, Planned Parenthood and its friends in the cultural establishment proceeded to cleanse all trace of eugenics, positive or negative, from Sanger's record.

By the time Sanger died in 1966, the cultural establishment had transformed her into the Mother Teresa of birth control. "Eugenics" does not appear among the 2,200 glowing words in that ultimate arbitrator of establishment worth, the New York Times obituary.

The Margaret Sanger that the Times reader is asked to remember is a "dynamic, titian-haired woman whose Irish ancestry also endowed her with unfailing charm and persuasive wit." The only quibble that the Times raises is that her opposition to the Catholic Church led her to oppose the election of president John F. Kennedy.

In fact, so strong was Sanger's opposition to the Church that she had threatened – a threat then novel among the elite – to leave the country if Kennedy were elected. The Times, however, offers this tidbit not as a criticism, but as proof of her tenacity. Indeed, Sanger's "years of birth-control advocacy appeared to be making an inroad in Rome" enthuses the obituary writer. What is more, a papal commission was about to propose "leaving the matter of specific birth-control techniques to the individual Catholic conscience." In short, the wonder-working Sanger was about to save the Catholic Church from its own follies.

Two years later, of course, Pope Paul VI issued the encyclical "Humanae Vitae" reaffirming the church's position in spades and revealing, even then, how the Times was passing off fantasy as news.

Jack Cashill is an Emmy-award winning independent writer and producer with a Ph.D. in American Studies from Purdue.
© 2005 WorldNetDaily.com


Heaven's Gate

This week, President George W. Bush gave a big speech "explaining" the Iraq war to the American people. It was the usual load of lying blather and false piety -- deeply, even murderously cynical. But there's no point in wasting a single thought over these clown shows anymore. Bush is a nasty little moral cretin fronting a gang of elitist thugs whose only concerns are loot and power. Nothing he says has the slightest credibility. Only his actions -- crimes soaked with human blood -- have any meaning or truth.

So let's deal in truth. Let's talk about crime. Specifically, the flagrant war crime committed by Bush and his comrade in moral cretinhood, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, in May 2002, as TomPaine.com reports. Yes, 2002 -- long before the ground invasion of Iraq in March 2003. The "Downing Street Memos" -- top-level British government documents whose authenticity has been confirmed by Blair's own office -- show clearly that Bush and Blair began a ferocious air war against Iraq in May 2002, despite the unequivocal ruling by Blair's lawyers that such a campaign constituted a clear act of military aggression: the "supreme international crime" for which the Nazi leaders were condemned at Nuremberg.

The avowed purpose of this bombing campaign -- openly admitted by U.S. military brass -- was to destroy Iraq's defenses in preparation for the long-planned ground assault. It began months before the U.S. Congress gave its rather vague approval for possible military action to enforce the disarming of Iraq's nonexistent WMD. And it had nothing to do with the "no-fly zones" maintained for years over southern Iraq by the United States and Britain, ostensibly to prevent Saddam Hussein from using aircraft to suppress Shiite unrest. (Strangely enough, the only time Saddam actually tried to use airpower against the Shiites, in 1991, he was given explicit permission to do so by America's leaders at the time: President George H.W. Bush and Pentagon chief Dick Cheney.)

Bush and Blair's secret air war against Iraq is perhaps the most blatant and indefensible aspect of their multi-headed war crime in Iraq. No amount of contorted legal quibbling or weasel-worded readings of UN resolutions can justify such a large-scale military action undertaken without the approval -- or even the notification -- of Congress and Parliament. And the documents make clear that the Anglo-American leaders knew the air campaign was illegal -- as was the whole case for "regime change," which the memos admit was "weak" and unsupported by evidence.

But the memos reveal that Bush and Blair had already decided on war, during their April 2002 meeting at Bush's ranch in Crawford. No doubt the two Christian leaders -- who bray their faith in Jesus at every opportunity -- knelt in prayer together as they sealed their pact of blood. From that point on, the memos show, Blair and Bush ignored all concerns about legality, all questions about the shaky WMD evidence and the extensive worries of many insiders about the near-total lack of planning for the postwar situation. They sought only to "create the political conditions" for war, manufacturing public consent through slick, fear-mongering propaganda and, in the memos' most famous phrase, by "fixing the facts and intelligence around the policy" of aggression.

Thus, with full knowledge that they were following in the footsteps of the Nuremberg criminals, Bush and Blair began the war in May 2002, dropping hundreds of tons of bombs on Iraq over the next 10 months. Not only were they clearing the path for the coming invasion, but the memos show that the leaders also hoped to provoke Saddam into retaliating, thereby giving them a PR excuse for war: "self-defense" against Iraqi "aggression."

But Saddam, this "raging madman" lusting to destroy America with his fearsome weapons, did nothing. He sat meekly while his air and naval defenses were pounded. And here we see how the bombing campaign strips bare the Big Lie that drove the whole enterprise: the supposed threat of Saddam's WMD. The Crawford knee-benders never would have launched their war if they really believed Saddam might rain anthrax on Jerusalem or slip Osama a plutonium core. They knew, as his lack of response to the air assault proved, that the WMD threat was empty, that Saddam, their former ally, was a broken reed.

In fact, Saddam spent the months of bombardment frantically offering a virtual surrender: unhindered WMD inspections, free elections under international supervision, support for any U.S. position on Israel-Palestine, vast oil concessions. But these offers, negotiated through back channels with U.S. intelligence and leading neo-conservatives, were spurned by Bush, The New York Times reported in November 2003. The moral cretins wanted conquest, not disarmament or Iraqi freedom; they wanted the power and status given to "war leaders," as Bush himself told the family biographer, Mickey Herskowitz, in 1999, CommonDreams reports.

"One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief," then-candidate Bush told Herskowitz. "My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it. If I have a chance to invade ... I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency."

Thus, by his own admission, Bush regards war -- slaughter, ruin, chaos and terror -- as the measure of success, the path to greatness. He sees blood as the prime lubricant for his rapacious domestic policies. He uses unprovoked military aggression to achieve his personal and political goals.

In what way, then, is he different from the moral cretins who were hanged at Nuremberg?

Annotations

The War Before the War
TomPaine.com, June 24, 2005

General Admits to Secret Air War
The Sunday Times, June 26, 2005

The Real News in the Downing Street Memo
Los Angeles Times, June 23, 2005

Two Years Before 9/11, Bush Talked of Invading Iraq, Says GhostwriterCommonDreams.org, Oct. 24, 2004

Saddam's Desperate Offers to Stave Off War
The Guardian, November 7, 2003

The Case of the Last-Minute OfferSalon.com, November 7, 2003

The Iraq Avalanche Cannot Be Stopped
Informed Comment, June 24, 2005

How the Downing Street Memos Were Leaked
The Sunday Times, June 26, 2005

The Downing Street Memo Reader
Rolling Stone, June 22, 2005

From Memos, Insights Into Ally's Doubts About War
Washington Post, June 28, 2005

Iraq Attacks Preceded Congressional OK
San Francisco Chronicle, June 19, 2005

Iraq: The Oil Carve-Up Begins
The London Line, June 23, 2005

US Was Big Spender in Days Before Iraq Handover
Reuters, June 21, 2005

Chris Floyd
Copyright © 2005 The Moscow Times
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Filibuster Deal Puts Democrats In a Bind

Pact May Hinder Efforts to Block High Court Nominee

Democrats' hopes of blocking a staunchly conservative Supreme Court nominee on ideological grounds could be seriously undermined by the six-week-old bipartisan deal on judicial nominees, key senators said yesterday.

With President Bush expected to name a successor to Justice Sandra Day O'Connor next week, liberals are laying the groundwork to challenge the nominee if he or she leans solidly to the right on affirmative action, abortion and other contentious issues. But even if they can show that the nominee has sharply held views on matters that divide many Americans, some of the 14 senators who crafted the May 23 compromise appear poised to prevent that strategy from blocking confirmation to the high court, according to numerous interviews.

Among the bipartisan "Gang of 14" are, from left, Sens. Mark Pryor, Mike DeWine, Susan Collins, Olympia J. Snowe, Mary Landrieu and Robert C. Byrd. (By Melina Mara -- The Washington Post)

The pact, signed by seven Democrats and seven Republicans, says a judicial nominee will be filibustered only under "extraordinary circumstances." Key members of the group said yesterday that a nominee's philosophical views cannot amount to "extraordinary circumstances" and that therefore a filibuster can be justified only on questions of personal ethics or character.

The distinction is crucial because Democrats want to force Bush to pick a centrist, not a staunch conservative as many activist groups on the political right desire. Holding only 44 of the Senate's 100 seats, Democrats have no way to block a Republican-backed nominee without employing a filibuster, which takes 60 votes to stop.

GOP leaders, sensing the Democrats' bind, expressed confidence yesterday that the Senate will confirm Bush's eventual nominee, no matter how ideologically rigid. "I think there is every expectation, every reason to believe that there will be no successful filibuster," Majority Whip Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said on "Fox News Sunday."

Under the "Gang of 14" accord, the seven Republican signers agreed to deny Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) the votes he needed to carry out his threat to bar judicial filibusters by changing Senate rules. The seven are implicitly released from the deal if the Democratic signers renege on their end. Yesterday, key players suggested the seven Democrats will automatically be in default if they contend a nominee's ideological views constitute "extraordinary circumstances" that would justify a filibuster.

Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), one of the 14 signers, noted that the accord allowed the confirmation of three Bush appellate court nominees so conservative that Democrats had successfully filibustered them for years: Janice Rogers Brown, William H. Pryor Jr. and Priscilla R. Owen. Because Democrats accepted them under the deal, Graham said on the Fox program, it is clear that ideological differences will not justify a filibuster of a Supreme Court nominee.

"Based on what we've done in the past with Brown, Pryor and Owen," Graham said, "ideological attacks are not an 'extraordinary circumstance.' To me, it would have to be a character problem, an ethics problem, some allegation about the qualifications of the person, not an ideological bent."

Sen. Ben Nelson (Neb.), a leader of the seven Democratic signers, largely concurred. Nelson "would agree that ideology is not an 'extraordinary circumstance' unless you get to the extreme of either side," his spokesman, David DiMartino, said in an interview.

The debate goes to the heart of Democratic leaders' strategy to prevent Bush from replacing the centrist, swing-voting O'Connor with a justice more aligned with conservatives Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia. For example, if Bush were to nominate Brown -- the outspoken California judge recently named to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit -- "I could assure you that would be a very, very, very difficult fight, and she probably would be filibustered," Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), a senior member of the Judiciary Committee, said on CBS's "Face the Nation."

But Graham flatly rejected that view. With help from only one or two fellow Gang of 14 members, he is positioned to dissolve the deal and thwart Biden's scenario -- either by having enough Democratic signers refuse to back a filibuster, or by having enough GOP members support Frist in outlawing judicial filibusters.

Graham predicted that Bush will nominate "a solid conservative" to replace O'Connor. Noting that the conservative Thomas replaced the liberal Thurgood Marshall, Graham said: "This idea of an ideological balance being maintained by a particular president has never been the standard."

Throughout the weekend, liberal and conservative activists sparred over an issue that has dogged judicial confirmation battles for years: How hard should nominees be pressed to say where they stand on contentious issues that could come before the court?

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) has said he would not ask nominees where they stand on abortion, affirmative action and similar matters, but Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said he certainly would. "The Supreme Court is a lifetime appointment that has enormous power, and I think the number one thing that I am interested in are the nominee's views," Schumer said on ABC's "This Week," where he appeared with fellow Judiciary Committee member Cornyn.

Asked if a senator might press nominees on whether the 1973 abortion rights ruling in Roe v. Wade "is settled law," Cornyn replied: "I think it's an appropriate question to ask what their views are on cases that have been decided and judicial opinions that have been written. But to ask them how they would decide, not knowing what the posture of the case would be if it were presented, I think is inappropriate, and it's asking them to prejudge the case." Schumer appeared surprised by the Roe comment, saying, "Maybe there's less disagreement than it appears."

Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), handling a similar question on NBC's "Meet the Press," said: "I wouldn't say, 'Are you going to uphold Roe?' But I would ask a nominee . . . 'When you have a decision which has been in effect for decades, and people have come to rely upon it, what kind of circumstances, how extraordinary must they be' " to try to overturn it?

The 14 signers of the May 23 agreement have said a Supreme Court vacancy would put their accord to its toughest test, and Republicans seemed eager to oblige them. McConnell said the agreement establishes "that there will be no filibusters except under extraordinary circumstances. And we know that judges like Janice Rogers Brown and Bill Pryor and Priscilla Owen are not an extraordinary circumstance."

Some conservatives would like to see Brown -- who is virulently opposed by many liberals -- elevated to the Supreme Court, arguing that the Senate would be hard pressed to reject her only months after confirming her to the appellate court. But Democrats said the Supreme Court stands alone in importance, and a senator's vote for an appellate court nomination plays no role in a Supreme Court choice. "Totally different ballgame," Biden told CBS.

Charles Babington and Susan Schmidt
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, July 4, 2005; Page A01

© 2005 The Washington Post Company