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War On Women Target Zone (image: EN2008, flickr)
America’s media landscape is being subtly changed by the War on Women being waged by the talibangelicals. And our news media need to be alert to their own participation in it. Congressman Ron Paul discussed his completely legal ob/gyn practice and the legal pharmaceuticals he legally prescribed for patients. Read how Yahoo! News introduced its report on Dr Paul’s appearance on “The Tonight Show”:
Ron Paul, during an appearance on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” Tuesday night admitted that he prescribed birth control pills during his time as a practicing OB-GYN in Texas.
“admitted“?
Why is the entirely legal prescription of entirely legal birth control pills an admission? Nothing surreptitious happening here, nothing illegal, nothing but the above-board practice of medicine.
“admitted“?
Why is the completely routine issuance of prescriptions within a medical practice an admission, Yahoo!? No illegality, no hypocrisy, no shock value. What makes this an admission to your news desk?
The War on Women is changing America’s media. News editors and reporters need to check their bias against women and routine provision of women’s health care when producing news stories. There’s no admission here. Ron Paul didn’t admit anything. He merely described an entirely non-salacious, routine aspect of any ob/gyn practice. He’s a women’s health doctor. Women’s health doctors prescribe birth control pills.
And when an ob/gyn tells you he’s prescribed birth control pills, he’s admitting nothing.
39 Comments
Perhaps you’ve seen other examples of this you’d like to share in the comments?
Dr. Paul was forced to admit it because of course supporting mandatory pregnancies is, well, mandatory among the GOP’s base.
They are trying to change language and meaning itself on this one as they do on everything. It won’t work.
“Admit” – as if confessing a crime.
Fuck you Yahoo, you’ll soon be in the dustbin of history with the rest of these dinosaurs if you don’t smarten up.
Hey, Teddy.
Knew some people, my ex’s mom and pop who were strictstrictstrict Southern Baptists. So much so, that their neighbors were tired of the dad knocking on all of their doors with tracts. The ex had no friends in the neighborhood, due to the family’s reputation as, you know, woo woo.
They had 4 girls and one son. When the oldest got pregnant in high school, they stuffed her in a car, drove across state lines for a, a, gasp, abortion.
I don’t know if that qualifies as a story of hyprocisy for this thread, but there you have it.
(Glad to see you and glad to be here.)
As a slight caveat, yahoo “news” is as deplorable as they come. I avoid it like the plague. Thanks for the info and observations though. Recommended.
“Dr. Paul was forced to admit it”
So they wrung a confession from him, huh?
That’s exactly what it seemed like to me: confessing a crime. Also: fuck Jay Leno for asking if Ron Paul had prescribed birth control pills. What does that have to do with Paul’s position on abortion, anyway?
Yeah, I realized their worth when they started getting their “news” feed from Tucker Carlson’s vanity project, The Daily Caller. But this story looked like a pickup from ABC News.
I fear this kind of stuff is just part of “news” media absorbing the right-wing point of view more generally, not just (sigh) on women’s issues. It’s “admitted” because from the point of view of the rabid RW, it is a confession.
By which I do not in any way mean that I’m not also appalled. Just maybe not surprised…
The right wing knows how to win the framing wars. Even Alan Grayson throws around terms like “gay marriage” like it’s nothing. I’m sure it never even occurred to him that he was repeating a right wing LGBT hater approved framework. I try every day to make sure things like “Democrat Party” and “clean coal” don’t become set in the stone of our vernacular.
Guess I owe you a drink! You beat me by a minute.
Great pickup on your part Teddy. This is how we can head a lot of that spurious framing and rhetoric at the pass.
Jay Leno is an admitted Republican. Goofball Jay has always been a Conservative manservant. Duesenberg Jay loves his cars, his money, and low, low Federal Income taxes.
Of course, Obama has given Jay everything he wants. But Jay prefers to stroke and coddle Republican balls.
Actually, Paul admitted that he aided and abetted recreational fucking, and every republican knows that you’ll burn in hell for that…unless you’re a republican doing it.
Republican or otherwise, I’ve never found Leno funny.
Lol! I’m drinking water, thanks – way too much caffeine today. (it’s haaard to get up early every day!!!)
I’d say our comments were complementary.
I think they sincerely believe that everybody but they, themselves will burn for fornication, etc. It seems to be a conservative trait to believe that the mere claim of having “values” inoculates one from actually adhering to those values.
You know, the funny thing is, I used to, most of the time. Then NBC pulled that stupid stunt that put Leno on at 10PM/9PMcentral, and I never watched him again…well, or the once or twice I did, suddenly, he wasn’t funny anymore…
I had thought he was fairly liberal, but mostly his act was apolitical, I guess, so I was fooled.
LMAO! I’ve been getting up at 5:20 for almost a year now. I’ve gotten used to it!
I think I am echoing Margaret and tj, but it does seem like it is not OK if you are Republican to discuss birth control as a viable option to pregnancy any more, so for Ron Paul to say that he did (and probably would still, in the role of a practicing if unelectable Republican candidate) is a freaking “admission,” even though he is not exactly the nutdriver of the clown car.
Long past time for the re-emergence of Lysistrata.
Good point, Margaret.
I pick a little bluegrass with some guys who are quite conservative. I suspect that they voted for Santorum in the S.C. primary. We try to “accent the positive” and focus on the music, but every now and then one of them goes off on Obama’s “hypocrisy”, and there’s plenty of it, but when I point out good ol’ Pastor Ted Haggard, bashing gays on his TV program and then heading out to snort some lines of coke off a gay hooker’s bass, we get back to the music pert’ quick. :o)
LM did not like him at all, and she could not get over that he appeared every night in a time slot that she believed he did not belong, taking away some programs that LM must have enjoyed. She expressed her displeasure Every Time he showed up. LM was not much for that sort of opining, so it was remarkable.
I guess I will get used to these kinds of reminders, everyone talks about how much the mother is still evident long after her death.
I am off to get some milk for my coffee tomorrow. One day without my morning cuppa is enough.
Funny how we’re expected to hear them out but they aren’t required to listen to us…
Now this is why I’m starting to hate my new Apple desktop. It sanitizes my posts.
It IS funny to read about Haggard snorting coke off some gay hooker’s “bass” (Maybe he got a 12 pound lunker in some Colorado reservoir… :o) ) but it pisses me off. :o)
Why would it sanitize your posts? Gee, I think I’d take it back if I couldn’t turn that little
featurebug off. Bass? What if you were writing about a donkey? Would your computer turn it into a fish?That’s because they are Right and we are Left-out. My neocon twin brother has a nasty habit of hanging up on me whenever he cannot defend the thugs. I was informing him on the attack on contraception recently, and he shouted, “Oh, they never said anything about contraception!” Click. Self righteous mis-indignation.
I love your note….My mother has been gone since ’06; I am amazed how she is such a companion to me. I don’t delude myself that I know everything she would think, but there are plenty of times I can almost hear her say it. In some odd way, she really is not gone. Quite an experience, and, Im sure, not unique.
I guess what frustrates me most about this language issue is that I see/hear no one on the other side pushing back against this nonsense. The Dems get dimmer. Who speaks for the people?? (besides us — and who’s listening to us?)
No one.
Certainly none of the alpha female wannabes like Rachel, or any of the other over-the-hill female “reporters’ like Diane Sawyer, etc.
I was seated right behind my Congressional Representative at a luncheon recently. Now, I’d sent her a “you’re dead to me” letter after she voted for some bill that would weaken SS & Medicare…..when she didn’t even have to! So I wasn’t going to confront her (plus it was my daughter’s event, so I for-sure wasn’t going to cause a scene!) But she is a woman who has been in the House for years and years, and she doesn’t speak up, push back. Makes me crazy! (fortunately, we recently got redistricted, but who knows who my next Rep. will be. I’m in a red-purple area.)
Sent Maloney a drop dead ‘you doormat’ email too.
Funnily, she hasn’t gotten back to me.
Speaking of media, does anyone know what Limbaugh’s ratings are now? Should be interesting when Huckabee goes up in the same time slot. Huckabee will have a very different style, I think, and may cut into the large one’s audience.
You have a lot more insight into that kind of mindset that I would have.
Actually, I don’t. I’ve never listened to Rush in my life and Huckabee is very conservative but not bombastic, I think.
This seems as good a place as any to put this out there:
Democrats and Progressives rue the lack of “backbone” and “balls” in their representatives in DC. Now, Liza Mundy was on The Washington Journal (CSPAN) this morning talking about her article and book “The Richer Sex”, which claims that women are overtaking men as the primary wage earners of the household.
If I were Karl Rove, this is what I would be thinking:
Men are angry because they are out of work, and if they do work, they are losing ground to women. Stereotypically, men become passive-aggressive when they are angry.
Democrats [Karl thinks to himself] have bitten on the “War on Women” meme [evil laugh]. Well, who’s not a woman? And who’s so angry they could spit?
Romney’s biggest demographic is white males. Silent, under-employed, angry white men. If you happen to have some say over the counting of the votes [yes, I -the author, not Rove- am saying the reps are capable of election fraud] the demographic you tweak is the one who hasn’t said much in the run-up to the election. And you would give the country a reason to believe that this silent horde has come out to vote in an unexpected way.
Further, the wives of these men are feeling the burdens of wage-earning (they are still predominantly responsible for the household’s upkeep, after all). Some women are going to go with “their men”. A female caller on the Journal wondered why women would want birth control, as it allows women to “be prostitutes and be on welfare” [paraphrase].
[So Rove thinks to himself] angry, punishing white men, and women who feel the burdens of economic freedom could come out in droves and put Romney [or whoever gets the nomination -now we can see why it won’t be Santorum, as his demographic is die-hard] in the White House.
[Back to the author’s voice] This explains why the reps are pushing the gender war even though it doesn’t seem to make sense to infuriate the majority of the population. Considering how many Obama supporters have become alienated and won’t vote at all -or will make this the election to vote third party or even cross over to the rep candidate who is most likely to be lying (that’ld be Mitt), this election is by no means a done deal for the incumbent.
In demographics land, 49% plus a small portion of 51% equals a win.
Sorry that was so long, and I by NO means think any of the men here are angry, silent, punishing, underemployed white males. I do think some of us have become unhappy with Obama. BUT, just One More Thing:
The Republicans lead better when they’re “out” rather than “in”. So is this rovian scheme going to backfire? Do the republicans even want the White House? Why not go for an even more obstructionist Congress and win it all in 2016?
OR could it be a Carter maneuver? Something will happen (something always does) which can be used to make Obama look even weaker than his current reputation. Reaganomney, the Sequel stage 2, will then be in the theaters.
Either way they win. This is Karl in his own words, I think: “use their strengths against them”.
If these tactics sound familiar, I ask you to consider the power struggles in your own lives. When one stands on principles, the other uses tactics.
The Democrats and Progressives think of elections as a patriotic debate. The Republicans think of it as a power struggle.
If the Ds and Ps started seeing it as a power struggle, the Rs would make it a patriotic debate. The idea is to keep the tension high. Just as the economic sector has learned to maximize profits from uncertainty, Republicans have learned to milk political profit from political uncertainty. It’s working, too. The country is looking so far right it can almost see behind itself.
Patriarchal, authoritarian control of sexuality–especially female sexuality–and sexual repression in general is a hallmark of Fascism. Until the US empire goes broke or something else checks it, we are likely to see more of this shit.
From Slavoj Zizek’s “Eternal fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Black Shirt” http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_blackshirt.html :
“12. Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters.
This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality). Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons — doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.”
Sorry, that was by Umberto Eco. I was reading an article by Zizek and got confused.
Yup. I agree with the mindset that takes exception to the spirit in the use of “admit” (after all, intent is the ruling factor, even when subconscious) And yet, you are 100% right.