"[Acting Sec of Defense] Miller told associates he had three goals for the final weeks of the Trump administration: #1: No major war. #2: No military coup. #3: No troops fighting citizens on the streets."
Sounds totally normal.https://t.co/fdggXC1T3A
— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec) May 17, 2021
Axios, on “Trump’s war with his generals”:
John McEntee, one of Donald Trump’s most-favored aides, handed retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor a piece of paper with a few notes scribbled on it. He explained: “This is what the president wants you to do.”
1. Get us out of Afghanistan.
2. Get us out of Iraq and Syria.
3. Complete the withdrawal from Germany.
4. Get us out of Africa.
It was Nov. 9, 2020 — days after Trump lost his re-election bid, 10 weeks before the end of his presidency and just moments after Macgregor was offered a post as senior adviser to acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller…
The one-page memo was delivered by courier to Christopher Miller’s office two days later, on the afternoon of Nov. 11. The order arrived seemingly out of nowhere, and its instructions, signed by Trump, were stunning: All U.S. military forces were to be withdrawn from Somalia by Dec. 31, 2020. All U.S. forces were to be withdrawn from Afghanistan by Jan. 15, 2021.
What the fuck is this? Miller wondered.
A former Green Beret, Miller had directed the National Counterterrorism Center and was accustomed to following process. Trump had tapped him to run the Pentagon after his unceremonious firing-by-tweet of Mark Esper. It was Miller’s third day on the job…
The U.S. government’s top national security leaders soon realized they were dealing with an off-the-books operation by the commander in chief himself.
Many would rally to push back — sometimes openly and in coordination, at other times so discreetly that top Trump administration officials had to turn to classified intercepts from the National Security Agency for clues.
Trump’s instincts should have come as little surprise. He was frantically trying to salvage his own legacy while simultaneously trying to overturn the election results and block Biden’s transition to power. The result was chaos…
First rule of autogolpe: Get the generals on your side, then announce you’ve declared yourself President for Life. These guys have much more of a commitment to the standing order than some out-of-nowhere media personality (fortunately for the rest of us).
The reality is that subordinates of ALL stripes often ignored Trump because they knew he had the attention span of a coked-up cocker spaniel.
— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec) May 17, 2021
Ken
I’m having a Sesame Street flashback. One of these things is not like the others…
(Well, actually, none of them are quite like the others. But the NATO member stands out.)
Jerzy Russian
I like how the first wish was no major war. You have to keep your dreams realistic.
dmsilev
Watching a coked-up cocker spaniel would probably be adorably hilarious. Watching Trump, his fellow travelers, and their enablers take a wrecking ball to the foundations of our government and society, rather less adorable and rather less hilarious.
Mike G
1. Get us out of Afghanistan.
2. Get us out of Iraq and Syria.
3. Complete the withdrawal from Germany.
4. Get us out of Africa.
Putin’s wish list. I wonder what he promised TFG.
Splitting Image
The most important history book of the late 20th century will be the one that compiles all of the evidence and lays out when exactly the American right became infiltrated by Russian operatives, when exactly the goals of the American right became indistinguishable from those of Russia, and which happened first.
Jerzy Russian
@dmsilev: Is there any reason this particular breed was singled out? I am not a dog person so I don’t know all of the subtle behavioral differences among the breeds.
zhena gogolia
@Jerzy Russian:
They’re wiggly.
Served
Hmmm where was #3 in the summer of 2020?
artem1s
5. Buy Greenland
6. Pack up Ramstein Air Base
7. Sign 99 year ease with Russian Army
8. Build Berlin/Ramstein Wall 2.0
9. Write “Ich bin ein Russisch” speech
West of the Rockies
And his braying legions of followers won’t even care. “Fake news!”
hueyplong
Kind of liked “attention span of a coked up cocker spaniel.”
What’s so hurtful is that a guy this stupid could do so much harm to a supposed superpower that prides itself on “exceptionalism.”
craigie
A coked-up cocker spaniel would have made a better president, anyway.
Gravenstone
Given his tenuous command of English, it would almost border on hilarious to hear TFG mangle Russian.
hueyplong
duplicate?
hueyplong
@craigie: Also a better Senator from Texas, Florida, Mississippi, Oklahoma or Missouri.
And that’s before we get to “poor reader of Russian talking points” Johnson of MN.
Ken
@craigie: I’m a cat person myself, though I don’t know what a coked-up cat would be like. I assume it would be similar to when they decide for no discernible reason to run at high speed around the house at 2 AM.
patrick II
@craigie:
Not if it was another one of Putin’s dogs.
PsiFighter37
So this is the start of the Chris Miller rehabilitation tour, then?
?BillinGlendaleCA
Leave the cocker spaniels alone(sobs).
hueyplong
@Ken: Pretty sure a coked up cat quickly renders an upholstered piece of furniture into a curb side item for your weekly garbage collection.
Hilbertsubspace
(Augean Stables) x (Loony Tunes) = Log(Trump Administration)
Also, “WTF” was what I said about half way through reading this. I guess Miller is proof that even reprehensible people have standards.
Gravenstone
@hueyplong: Speaking of, didja see yesterday where ol’ RonJon is thinking Democrats are focusing way too much about domestic terrorism? Particularly where it concerns the 1/6 insurrection? Wondering what that fucking imbecile is worried might shake out of a proper investigation in the subject?
waspuppet
@Mike G: That he wouldn’t end up in the trunk of a Russian mobster’s car.
Boris Rasputin (the evil twin)
@Mike G: Asylum?
hueyplong
@Hilbertsubspace: You probably don’t put a story like that out there (begging to incur the wrath of FoxNews) unless you have actual concern about the consequences of your actions during Trump time.
Which should be a tiny balm to those here who are certain that no one will ever face any consequences.
Boris Rasputin (the evil twin)
@Splitting Image: Considering that we’re still finding new dirt on Nixon, the book you propose would come out in 2121.
Searcher
I have mixed feelings here because, on the one hand, fuck Trump; on the other hand, generals making policy is bad.
It’s like shoving pennies in the fuse box to keep the heart & lung machines running.
Baud
Hahaha. Trump’s hatred of Obama led him to not withdrawing the troops and now Biden gets credit for ending the war.
danielx
@Jerzy Russian:
I’d have used Dalmatian or Irish Setter, from my observations they’re even flakier than cocker spaniels. Even without the controlled substances…..
Jerzy Russian
@hueyplong:
Weird Al used “running around like a constipated wiener dog” in one of his songs (Albuquerque, from his album Running with Scissors). That is one hell of a visual.
mrmoshpotato
Fuck you Axios for creating that disgusting graphic.
Amir Khalid
@Jerzy Russian:
The alliteration in “coked-up cocker spaniel”, of course.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: There are lots of little Easter eggs like that for us schadenfreude aficionados to enjoy! Even if the orange fart cloud had won reelection (and thank sweet merciful FSM he did not!), we’d have made progress on the vaccination front, albeit with a slower, stupider, politically targeted and chaotic rollout. We know that chaps Lumpy’s ass because he spent February demanding credit and dispatched minions to float the absurd notion of calling it the “Trump vaccine.” Hahaha, stew in bile forever, loser!
Betty Cracker
@Amir Khalid: I’d have gone with Corgi myself. :)
mrmoshpotato
That really sums up the past four years of the Soviet shitpile mobster conman’s bastard administration.
VOR
@hueyplong: You take that back! Senator Ron Johnson is from WISCONSIN, not Minnesota.
However, Minnesota did contribute Michele Bachmann to the national scene so is not entirely without blame.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
Zero sympathy here. He and his party were happy taking credit for Obama’s economy. Besides that, they are just awful people.
patrick II
@danielx:
Irish Setters are one example of the terrible outcomes that breeding dogs to dog show standards has for dogs. If you look at bulldogs from the beginning of the 20th century until now their noses weren’t so flat, but dogs with flatter noses one dog shows, so here we are with dogs that can barely breathe.
In the Irish setter’s case, they wanted a dog with a clean line from nose to tail when it pointed — and that bump in the forehead got in the way, so the dogs with smaller forheads (and smaller forebrains) won competitions. Fortunately there are places that are breeding english setters back into the Irish setters and making them useful for hunting again, and not the dumbest dog on earth.
It seems to me that there is a broader principle here — one that I can’t figure out how to express. Something amount artificial construction without a useful purpose.
Anyhow, poor dogs.
hueyplong
@VOR: Yikes. Very, very sorry. If it helps, I own a Gophers tshirt and know who Sandy Stephens was.
mrmoshpotato
@hueyplong: Ron “Russki” Johnson “represents” WI.
hueyplong
@mrmoshpotato: Yeah, go ahead and pile on with the badgering. I’ve got it coming.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Betty Cracker:
@Baud:
I have an aunt on my mother’s side, her sister, who used to hate Trump very much. A few months ago, I heard from my mother (via my grandmother) that she was complaining about how Trump didn’t get any credit for the vaccines! Her husband is a right-wing Trumpist who worked at American Standard which was a union shop.
I was pretty shocked at the time and still am. I hadn’t really talked to her in over a year so I don’t know what the hell happened to her
mrmoshpotato
@hueyplong: I didn’t see VOR’s comment. :)
Lacuna Synecdoche
Patrick Chovanec via Anne Laurie @ Top:
I always thought Trump sounded like a chihuahua simultaneously afflicted with both a sinus infection and a deviated septum.
Jeffro
Delusional madman deludes himself into thinking he’s going to turn things around by abruptly bringing home American troops from all sorts of places and oh, also overthrowing the government.
I used to just want the orange moron marched across America at the point of a pitchfork, dripping tar and feathers. Not so much anymore…
A Ghost to Most
Huh, many people told me that the election was everything, and that all the work would be done Nov 3?
But, they also told me that “Defund the Police” was a good campaign slogan, so …
Jeffro
Wait…so you’re saying he’s not the “father of the vaccine”?? Unpossible! He told us so himself!
Baud
@A Ghost to Most:
It was. Had we lost it would have been all over.
Absolutely no one said this.
Baud
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Morning Joe was pushing that line this morning in an effort to convince America to come together and get vaccinated.
Trump could probably get a little more credit for the vaccine if he were gracious toward Biden, hadn’t mismanaged the pandemic in so many other ways, and was out there affirmatively urging his supporters to take it. But he’s not, so fuckem’.
zhena gogolia
@A Ghost to Most: no one ever told you that
Jerzy Russian
@Baud:
Also, if he wasn’t such a vile asshole.
Gravenstone
@Baud: DNFTFT
Gravenstone
@zhena gogolia: The voices in its head did. They tell it all sorts of things…
Cameron
I must have missed something in the news – I thought USA was trying to get out of Afghanistan. Didn’t we already have a treaty with the Taliban in February-March of last year?
mrmoshpotato
@Jeffro:
And the Kremlin’s bitch was going to do all this in under 3 months. Was he planning on becoming super competent during the lame orange fuck session?
Gravenstone
@Jeffro: I honestly believe TFG thought he could repurpose as those recalled troops for his personal defense. Figured they would be “grateful” to him for getting them out of those hellholes.
Raoul Paste
@Hilbertsubspace: Taking the logarithm of trump administration chaos was a clever jest Kudos
Peale
@Baud: The problem is that everyone knows that Dolly Parton played a more important role than Trump ever did and there’s no way he’d start taking credit without slamming on Dolly and we will not stand for that.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Gravenstone: Germany is such a hellhole.
Gravenstone
In today’s humorous aside, Rudy Colludy’s brat apparently claimed he had decades more political experience than the time he’s actually been breathing. A chip off the old brick(head), that one.
Peale
@Baud: if Trump starts to get credit for it, I’m going to return my vaccine to the health center, microchip and all.
Ken
Yes, but you have to know the right clubs.
Gravenstone
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Given they kicked TFG’s grandad out of the country, I wouldn’t be surprised if he did believe that. Plus, Chancellor Merkel was mean to him.
mrmoshpotato
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Fuck their universal healthcare and awesome public transit.
NotMax
The Moving Finger snorts, and moves on.
//
SiubhanDuinne
@hueyplong:
What you did there has been noticed.
Ken
@SiubhanDuinne: Yes, though some of us didn’t reply, lest we encourage the behavior.
Baud
@Ken:
I bet there’s a club in Germany called Hellhole.
dmsilev
@danielx:
The vet that my parents brought their dog to liked to say that there was something fundamentally wrong with the idea of breeding for spots.
Peale
@Gravenstone: Honestly, the whole “Germany Ripped us Off” was probably just related to the fact that Trumps own edition of Cadillacs didn’t sell 30 years ago. He resents that Upper Middle Class schumucks don’t buy Cadillacs any longer and thinks the Germans cheated him out of something.
Mike in NC
In Novmber we stepped on a coked-up cockroach.
artem1s
@Boris Rasputin (the evil twin):
not likely. Putin will never put his assets at risk for TFG. Asylum would mean even the most deplorable of the deplorable won’t be able to stop an investigation of who and who isn’t compromised in the Pentagon and National Security agencies if TFG flees for Moscow. Putin was always going to throw TFG under the bus.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Gravenstone: Grandad left the country to avoid military service and then wanted to go back, they said no.
M31
@Baud:
Hölle Hole
Roger Moore
@Hilbertsubspace:
I’m not going to give him an ounce of credit. Until proven otherwise, I’m going to assume his only objection was that he couldn’t meet the ludicrous deadline, not that he objected to the goal.
hueyplong
Hey, Trump thinks Germany got it right for about 12 years (shoulda been a thousand)
Betty Cracker
@Baud: Oliver Willis tweeted something recently about Dems “kicking the can down the road” by first telling people we had to win GA to have nice things (survival — that’s the nice thing!) and now saying we’ve got to hold the House and make Manchinema irrelevant by adding more Dems to the Senate to have nice things, and that voters lose patience and tune out when you do that.
Maybe he’s right, but it’s so goddamned frustrating. Sometimes I think the overwhelming majority of our fellow citizens are spoiled, whiny-ass babies and that the abundance of puling infants really is a “both sides” problem.
Ruviana
@?BillinGlendaleCA: I’m sorry. {{{hugs}}}.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Ruviana: Thanks.
Bluegirlfromwyo
@Betty Cracker: Trump wanted credit for a vaccine that he got in secret so his supporters would continue to refuse it. Such a mystery why that didn’t get off the ground.
Cameron
@Betty Cracker: That’s why it’s so important to have some genuine achievements to point to: “Here’s what we’ve done – here’s what we’re going to do.” I think Democrats could be in a decent position to make that argument. Doesn’t hurt to hammer hard on Republican malfeasance, either. And Republican bullshit, of course.
catclub
I don’t think a coked up rottweiler would be adorable.
mrmoshpotato
@Bluegirlfromwyo: That’s also a vaccine for a virus that the orange shitstain called a hoax for months on end.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
The checks, the coming child tax credits, expanded unemployment payments, Obamacare expansion, and vaccine rollout are all nice things IMHO.
If he’s right, then you are right, and we may have to accept that it’s not only the GOP base that lives to look down on Democrats.
The Golux
@mrmoshpotato:
I’ve taken to calling it the Toonces Adminitstration.
Mike in NC
Fat Bastard’s business model: all chaos all the time. Not a great way to run a country not named Somalia.
Kay
There it is. That’s the abortion ban. Four years ago “heartbeat laws” were considered extreme even on the Right. Ohio’s largest anti-abortion group wouldn’t support one at that time – too radical. Now they’re all just going for it.
It will be a de facto ban on “medical abortions” because how could they possibly manage them? It could go from legal to a crime with the passage of 24 hours.
I’ll say it once again- conservatives have not grappled, at all, with the repercussions of these laws. They are operating as if they can go back to 1972 and they really can’t. This is nightmarishly complicated and American women have not been subjected to it- ever. There is no US woman of any age who has ever had this level of state interference in reproduction. This will be a brand new regulatory scheme for pregnancy. Incredibly intrusive, not just for women seeking abortions but for all pregnant women. Conservatives did no work at all to prepare for this and they certainly haven’t prepared the public.
Kay
So in Texas, a pregnant woman who goes for emergency treatment in the course of a pregnancy will now be subject to the “heartbeat law”, where her treatment for a potential miscarriage will turn on whether there’s a heartbeat.
It has to. They can’t possibly draft this so it applies only to women seeking abortions. There’s no way to do that. It won’t take long either. There are a lot of complicated miscarriages.
If they insert themselves in this area, and they are inserting themselves, they will not be able to put a fence around it. It’s all the same thing. Anti-abortion laws will be part of every pregnancy.
Roger Moore
@patrick II:
If you breed excessively for a single trait, you tend to get a really bad overall result. It’s the same thing with a lot of crops that are now tasteless and have poor nutritional value because they’ve been bred so heavily for appearance and shipping convenience.
Kay
This is a heartbeat law:
“On 21 October 2012, Halappanavar, then 17 weeks pregnant, was examined at University Hospital Galway, after complaining of back pain, but was ultimately discharged without a diagnosis. She returned to the hospital later that day, this time complaining of lower pressure, a sensation she described as feeling “something coming down,” and a subsequent examination found that the gestational sac was protruding from her body. She was admitted to hospital, as it was determined that miscarriage was unavoidable, and several hours later, just after midnight on 22 October, her water broke but did not expel the fetus.[9]:22–26[9]:29[10] The following day, on 23 October, Halappanavar discussed abortion with her consulting physician but her request was promptly refused, as Irish law, under the influence of the Catholic Church, at that time forbade abortion if a fetal heartbeat was still present.[9]:33[11] Afterwards, Halappanavar developed sepsis and, despite doctors’ efforts to treat her, had a cardiac arrest at 1:09 AM on 28 October, at the age of 31, and died”
No discussion or thought about this at all on the Right. They just don’t grapple with the repercussions of these laws at all.
But they’re going to have to, because it’s going to happen.
Roger Moore
@Kay:
The key is that abortion laws will be selectively enforced. There’s approximately zero chance of prosecuting a rich white woman who suffers a miscariage*, but poor BIPOC will be prosecuted mercilessly.
*Unless, of course, she’s gotten on the prosecutor’s bad side for some reason.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: We’ll see if going really big, as the Biden-Harris admin has, will buck the usual cycle. I really don’t there’s a significant portion of Dems or left-leaners who live to own the party. My guess is people like the Bruenigs, Krystal Ball, etc., are far more vocal than they are numerous. But millions of people are just impatient babies by nature. That, our need to entertain literally all serious policy debate and lack of focused messaging hurts us more than the anti-Dem left assholes, IMO.
dww44
@Searcher:
Agree. but I’m grateful that the less bad choice carried the day here. I suspect we’re gonna find many more incidences where some civil servant or military person saved the day for the country.
Kay
@Roger Moore:
“The prosecution” is just the end of the process though. Abortion laws will inform and drive pregnancy treatment. When a woman presents at a provider for treatment or pre pegnancy care the abortion laws will be one of the laws providers MUST consider.
You’re making the same excessively legalistic analysis they are, except in the other direction.
They’re inventing two categories of pregnancies because that’s how the legal analysis works.But that’s a fiction. There is no such division. There’s just pregnancy. In real life.
What happened in Ireland was the states and the Catholic Church’s ban on abortion ran right into a pregnancy. The invented partition, where one is about “abortion” and the other is about “pregnancy” didn’t hold, because it can’t. It doesn’t exist. It’s all pregnancy.
Roe doesn’t say “go get an abortion”. Roe is a wall and that’s all it is. It says “the state may not go this far”. We’ve never had to deal with the practical repercussions of the state going “that far” because they were walled out. Now they’re in and it will be next to impossible to limit their intrusion.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: Amen. This is nightmarish.
Kay
@Roger Moore:
The abortion law in Ireland dictated the treatment of her pregnancy. That has to happen. There’s no “intent” analysis, even if one were possible, which it isn’t. It’s just pregnant women seeking care. All of them.
Don’t start with the law. Start with the status quo- no state interference allowed in this stage and pregnancy- and then add the abortion law. But apply it to all pregnant women and all pregnancies, because that’s how it has to be.
Calouste
@Kay: And further down the line is requiring all women of childbearing age to file a monthly report of their cycle and/or a pregnancy test. And they will go there, because they are extremists, and extremists always go further and further.
opiejeanne
@Roger Moore: Tomatoes and strawberries.
J R in WV
@Betty Cracker:
It is a waking nightmare. My mom died of Pall-Mall created COPD, a long drawn-out course of being mostly bed-fast for several years. Dad kept her alive for far longer than her doctors expected her to live. 4 or 5 years past the “a few months, perhaps as many as nine…” diagnosis.
Fortunately I got to spend a lot of time with her. One of the many things she told me was that she, a life-long Republican with strong beliefs about freedom and integration, and it turned out, abortion rights. She said “Don’t tell your father, but I’ve been cancelling his votes out for years, ever since the Republicans made abortion a dividing measure. That was over the line for me, that and the segregation hate!”
We had a long conversation, and afterwards I felt sure that mom lost a close friend or relative to the aftereffects of a back-alley abortion, in the long ago when they were as illegal as the Republicans and Theocrats want to make them again today. Just as I feel as close to some of my cousins as I ever did to my brother or parents, Mom had a lot of cousins, and was very close to some of them.
dww44
Kay, this is the best and simplest defense of Roe v Wade I’ve ever come across. My sister, a lifelong liberal otherwise, is a converted committed Catholic and she’s absolutely opposed to abortion. Considers it evil in the extreme. My efforts to convince her that it is about a woman’s right to control her own body have long fallen on deaf ears. She sees the issue as a black and white one about human life.
Betty Cracker
@J R in WV: Bless her for canceling those votes!
My granny was apolitical but small “c” conservative to the core. She lost a sister to a botched back-alley abortion in the 1940s. She rarely talked about it, but when she did, she was as angry and sad in 2015 as she had been 70 years before.
Death Panel Truck
As the owner of three cocker spaniels, I can tell you authoritatively it is not necessary to coke them up. They come from the womb pre-coked.
Soprano2
But before this, they’ll go after safe and easily-available contraception. They want to make contraception either illegal or hard to get. Gotta punish those sluts for having sex, doncha know! Mark my words, if they get Roe overturned Griswold is next in their sights. They’ve got 6 Catholics on the court too, and 5 of those are conservative enough to make it happen.
stinger
@Kay: Thank you so very much, Kay. The subject makes me so angry I become inarticulate. It’s a PERSONAL attack on ME, on MY sex life, on MY medical care. I’m too old to get pregnant now, but this will never NOT be an attack on me.
At the same as it is a personal attack, it is also a policy/law that reduces me to something less than a person.
Soprano2
That’s because they deny that it can happen here. They think they can write the law so that it has exceptions for this kind of thing, but they really don’t. They think saving the mother’s life is a loophole! It’s ironic that so much of the rest of the world is going in the more liberal direction about abortion, while many of our states are going the opposite way. Also, all these wealthy Republicans know that their wives and daughters and mistresses will always have access to safe, legal abortion, and that’s what they care about the most. It’s those other sluts who need to be punished, not their loved ones. That’s one of the things I remember about Susan Faludi’s book Backlash; these Republican women who had careers telling all other women they didn’t need one saw themselves as different, almost as honorary men. It was safe for them to have high-powered careers, but those other women just couldn’t handle it because they were just too fragile.
Kristine
@dww44:
Or, which life is considered more important.
My mom worked in Catholic hospitals in the 40s and 50s, and she told me more than once that the unwritten rule was that if given a choice between saving the mother or the child, they were to save the child. It seems as though we’re heading back to that, if we’re not there in some places already.
We really are just incubators to them.
hotshoe
@dww44: There’s something I will never understand about people who claim to be faithful god-believers and yet who believe they have a mission to be anti-abortion. Why? If you believe in god as they claim to, you believe that god is in charge of each soul’s fate. IF that soul is somehow within the cells of a fetus which gets aborted, then god gets that soul back again. No harm. Baby soul goes to heaven, no harm. (And of course god can deal with the “sin” of the mother, if you call it sin, in due time … ) No harm.
Why under god’s blue heaven do these folks think they have a right to interfere with god’s plan for that woman to abort? God sent his messenger specifically to tell them “Judge not lest ye be judged”. How can they claim to be faithful believers while they insist they are the better judge of a woman’s behavior than god is?
Jay
Ksmiami
@Kristine: abolish Catholic ownership of hospital systems. They should not be allowed to exist
Jay
@hotshoe:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bzVHjg3AqIQ
if memory serves me right, both the bible and the torah, have instructions on how to induce an abortion and don’t condemn abortions.
I guess the god-botherers think they are better than God.
Eunicecycle
@Kristine: This happened to a friend in the 80s. She had a difficult pregnancy and delivery, and a priest that was called told the family the “right” thing to do was prioritize the baby. Luckily the father told him to fuck off and told the doctor to save his wife. Luckily both were saved. But my friend never forgot how the Church was ready to let her die and leave her baby without a mother.
Kristine
@Eunicecycle:
I didn’t believe things had changed, but didn’t have the info to back it up. Looks like things haven’t changed a whit.
Kristine
@Eunicecycle:
My possibly bs opinion is that the primary concern, which is seldom if ever voiced, is the ability and duty to create little Catholics. Frex, a woman who has a difficult delivery may have more difficult deliveries, or may never be able to conceive again. But a baby can be cared for by the man’s female relatives until he can marry a younger, stronger woman who is expected to be more capable in the childbearing department.
Incubators.
I admit that as a somewhat bitter lapsed Catholic, my judgement may be skewed.
Ruckus
@Lacuna Synecdoche:
OK now I am laughing out loud!
Ruckus
@Kay:
They never work out details, because the people involved in making the rules never have to live by the rules, their money and power buy them privilege to lord over everyone else. And that’s why they scream when they get caught, they lose that privilege.
dopey-o
Which is why many life-long Catholics don’t take advice from celibate gynophobic weirdos in long black dresses.