Never one not to stick his fingers into the political winds in order to tell us what’s good for “the folks,” Fox News’ longtime fake conservative and mind-numbingly stupid populist Bill O’Reilly joined with many establishment GOPers (who themselves followed a groundswell of erstwhile anti-same sex marriage Democrats) in the Republican Party’s “rebranding effort,” which evidently is meant to alienate constitutionalists, classical liberals, and the socially conservative portion of the party base.
That is, the vast majority of the Party.
Which suggests to me that the GOP has determined that it is satisfied playing minority party in an ever-expanding federal government — a move that expands their power as well as the power of the Democrats, the idea being that the pendulum swings of national politics will eventually bring them back to supermajority status, and when it does, they’ll be able to control the purse strings and divvy up the spoils to their cronies — and to affect this posture, they’ve determined to rebrand themselves as enemies of the “fringe,” “extremist,” “homophobic” base, or, as President Obama called them, the “bitterclingers.”
Which is precisely what Bill O’Reilly does when he suggests that conservatives are losing the debate on same-sex marriage — their only defense for rejecting the federal courts trying to impose its will on the states being “Bible thumping”. As if there can be no other rationale, from a fidelity to the process of republicanism, to the fears that opening up the definition of marriage to things that have never been marriage will effectively (from the point of view of law) deconstruct marriage permanently, to the very conservative impulse not to allow five or six Justices — that is, citizens — to compel a mandated change to thousands of years of established marriage doctrine on the remaining 300+ million citizens.
Now, it’s long been clear that O’Reilly understands loofah and sex-scandal protocol far better than he does the Constitution, so it’s no major surprise that his understanding of DOMA, which merely by way of federal statute (and with a majority of both parties in support) underscored a previous SCOTUS ruling regarding the Full Faith and Credit Clause that disallows certain states to impose their will on other states by making those other states abide by policy decisions that the people of the state have voted against (policy decisions that are not unconstitutional per se), is at best shallow, and at worst completely confused.
Nor is it surprising that O’Reilly would flow with what he reads as the social tide — much in the same way contemporary GOP legislators are, hoping that SCOTUS will rule in a way that relieves them of the more politically troubling duty of repealing the constraining federal statute, in this case, DOMA.
The fact is, the federal court has no business adjudicating matters that are left to the voters of the states. That is, unless one believes that denying recognition of same sex marriage — or, perhaps better put, denying states the right to determine for themselves how to define marriage (which liberals celebrate when it happens in NY, eg., and which I as an opponent of same-sex marriage too celebrated as the proper way to change the law) — is a violation of the civil rights of homosexuals, which it clearly is not. It is merely denying them the label of marriage, with what comes to count as marriage determined separately by the states and, in the case of DOMA, the federal government.
Both the states and the federal government are free to allow their definitions “evolve” if they so choose (and if they can get the votes). And because this is not a civil rights issue — homosexuals can marry, they just can’t marry people of the same sex, a condition of law in some states that doesn’t prevent them from coupling or enjoying other legal rights, and is no less a check on marriage than age restrictions, which also differ among states — the same-sex marriage issue is an issue that needs to be determined by the people, the political process, and republicanism.
To claim you are a federalist means to recognize that it is up to the states and the people of those states to determine policy questions. Interference by the federal courts in policy questions that don’t redound at all to, in this case, the 14th Amendment, as its proponents suggest (at least, not under any conceivable originalist meaning) is a repudiation of federalism. Which in turn is a repudiation of republicanism and an embrace of federal supremacy — and that, taken wherever it can be gotten, be it through Executive fiat, legislative misconduct (ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank), or through the Supreme Court, is the real aim of the statists.
At which point, we no longer live in a constitutional republic. We just pretend to, because doing so gives cover to those times when we decide to bracket the process for political expedience. For progress!
How we get there matters.
Congress could repeal DOMA and redefine marriage for the purpose of federal law. But that’s a risky political fight — as blue state California made clear, public sentiment is simply not there for same-sex marriage in the way politicians of late like to pretend — so the DC pols are doing what they always do: posturing, positioning, and punting, and hoping that SCOTUS does the hard work for them.
Even if the very idea that it is SCOTUS’ work to do fundamentally weakens a republican system of representative government built around the idea of federalism.
that’s a little reductive but I think I know what he means
the gay marriage debate is over in a for reals way not a climate change way
So sayeth O’Reillyfeets. Children hardest hit.
Levin rips into O’Reilly … says he sounds like Obama
i dunno Mr. Pablo not a single anti-gay marriage meme is showing any sign at all of gaining any traction
and them ones is trying their hardest I think
And yet people just won’t seem to surrender to their fate without a lot of squackering.
Imagine!
And O’Reilly saying the homosexuals have “the compelling argument” is a malpractice of the English language … there is nothing substantive about the SSM argument, it is pure emotion.
Because memes! Let’s just not talk about the majority of states that have defined hetero marriage into their laws/Constitutions.
Fucking children. Mewling, petulant children.
not a single anti-gay marriage meme is showing any sign at all of gaining any traction
because your beloved fascists are controlling the microphone
sheesh
The important thing here is to be on the same page with Meghan McCain and Jeffrey Toobin. Unless you’ve got hairy feet.
Hey, here’s a tractiony meme!
not a single anti-gay marriage meme is showing any sign at all of gaining any traction
Here’s a meme for you, you stupid retarded backward cupcake-addled cocksucker.
To revisit a remark made yesterday by someone on here: Where is the demonstrable “need” or even a want for homosexual marriage? It’s not like one of them got in trouble and they need to make it legal. No shotgun homo weddings that I’m aware of.
I know a lot of queers and none of them are married or want to be.
Ignorant yellow fucker probably can’t even remember that Prop 8 happened right on top of him not very long ago.
As for O’Really?, it should come as no surprise that he has about as much respect for people who rely on the Bible for guidance as he has for those who rely on the Constitution.
The Democrats in the Wisconsin Senate (fleeing the State in order to thwart the process of legislation), the Democrats in the Indiana House (fleeing the State in order to thwart the process of legislation), the California Executive (refusing to defend the law of the State in Court) and now the Federal Executive (refusing to defend the law of the Nation in Court) — all these have committed by deed a disregard of their Constitutional duties. And surely these will not be the last. But as they go, so also will we, since more than one can play at this arbitrary game of disregard.
Smart people rely on O’Reilly for guidance because he’s always looking out for the folks over there where the spin stops. Next up, Culture Quiz!
How we get there matters.
in the big picture how we get there is just that old people have this tendency to die
Because only old people could possibly stand for republicanism, representative government, and the process that protects us from democratic or judicial tyranny.
You’re a fucking embarrassment.
That you think your little barbs hurt anyone with conviction is what marks you as pathetic — a wannabe bully who launches his broadsides in baby talk. The process is what protects us. It is what guards against shortcuts and political expediency based on trends or effective demagoguery.
Stop pretending you’ve anything but utter contempt for the Constitution. You may want to get the deficit and spending under control, but that just makes you a fiscally sane liberal. To you, the ends justify the means.
You’re like many a prosecutor in that way.
grieferfeets does the precious Ezra schtick that anything over 100 years old is, at best, of no consequence … It’s the NOW and how we FEEL that is most goodly good
Aaaaand ‘feets keeps imitating a poo-flinging monkey, substituting what he imagines to be bon mots for substantive points.
(Yeah, using “imitating” above probably stretches the benefit of the doubt beyond the breaking point.)
Glenn Beck has been working on O’Reilly for years, showing him fact after video after solid evidence that Barack Obama is an effing Marxist whose definition of “fundamental transformation” is exactly what the Left has been pushing for decades.
To. No. Avail.
O’Reilly is hypnotized by Obama’s pants crease and is loath to “be one of those extremists.”
In thrall to The Opinion Of His Betters, in other words.
Moron.
Jeffy,
RE saying “bye-d-bye” to a Constitutional Republic, a student of China’s method of development would recognize that same method at work in America today.
As I put it at Sultan’s blog a month back, the country feels like Hungary, tenderized and prone, right before the Soviet invasion.
Just go down the list: Speech codes? Check. Unwarranted trespass and investigation by government agencies? Check. Capricious and arbitrary law-enforcement? Check. Degraded elections? Check. A concerted media/government attack on the Peoples’ Congress? Check. Deliberately-exacerbated and irreconciliable civic divides? Check. Private contract rights abridged or nullified? Check.
I could go on.
But I’ll round this up with: A PRC apparatchik from Beijing could fly into most California, Washington or even Arizona cities, and be pleasantly surprised at these places’ resemblence to his party-run campuses in Hubei, Guangzhou.
(My dad encouraged me to study Mandarin in college. Did he know something we don’t?)
What’s Mandarin for “I, for one, welcome our new Chinese Overlords. ¡Viva el que vence!“?
Depends what one means by “compel.”
” in the big picture how we get there is just that old people have this tendency to die”
That demographic change everyone is hollering about and fist pumping, so they don’t be called racists, isn’t very friendly to gay rights and is majority catholic and not US catholic either. Enjoy the backlash when it comes. And you’ll have to shut your hate hole and bow your patriarchal colonialist head in collective group shame when it does because it will be coming from people who are designated as browner than you and besides, your hands are covered in the blood of all of Columbus’s victims you genocidal heap of sick murderous fuck spew. Then everyone will have to play musical closets for a while. LGBT will end up in the cold politically as it stops being a hot victim class and becomes a normal “who cares, where’s your dues”” victim class. But Forward!
Meanwhile, Harry Reid is dying. Nancy Pelosi is dying. Soros is dying. ‘Big Democrat’ as we know it, is dying. The press is a lot of grey hairs. And best of all, we’ll all get to fight over the rubble of a whole continent of Detroits.
I’ve tried out several alternate handles for him, but Nishifeet seems the most apt in this thread.
“Depends what one means by “compel.””
They have the “cajoling” argument (be cool like Fonzie) and the “guilt” argument (why do you not want me to be your equal?).
“Pablo says March 28, 2013 at 9:56 am
Smart people rely on O’Reilly for guidance because he’s always looking out for the folks over there where the spin stops. Next up, Culture Quiz!”
That man’s show is the worst thing I’ve ever seen on TV. He interviewed Alf. The schtick where he has a guy interview people and then edits in short movie clips is awful. Ick. It’s not even his positions that bother me. If I agreed with him totally I would still hate the show. The content alone is awful. The format is awful. The ideas are awful. The guests are awful. Geraldo and Juan having staged arguments is awful. Trivia is awful. The idiotic conspiracy theories about the petroleum markets in spite of real information to the contrary are just awful. Hearing about his “killing ___” book series is awful. Hearing the word of the day that I learned in 7th grade because of marvel comics is awful. Just awful.
Hannity has a shitty show but O’Reilly is just horrific. It’s like a black hole that will someday pull in all of TV.
It’s like a black hole that will someday pull in all of TV.
Oh, I think you can safely argue that’s already happened.
Di,
I’m not evading your question (tho, gotta admit, my Mandarin vocab’s not what it used to be).
A parallel question might be, how do you translate “How Much Do We Owe You” into Mandarin?
This link offers a good-enough facsimile for an answer, so I’ll pass it on.
There will occasionally be some interesting conversation on Hannity, depending on the guests. The Factor is unmitigated garbage.
It’s OK, steveaz. I can’t tell from that chicken-scratch anyway.
What is legitimacy?
Is all legitimacy (we don’t say here “so-called” legitimacy) merely conventional, i.e., ultimately arbitrary at the root?
Or is some manifestation of legitimacy possibly understood as such as deriving “from nature” or from revelation, or at least in this sense as from some standard not arbitrary at the root?
Isn’t this the question O’Reilly’s troubles demand? Or to put it another way, isn’t this the question strictly dividing the Progressives from the Founders?
Yet another way to draw this line of question is to ask, is it possible to distinguish nature from convention, or is convention itself merely another indistinguishable phenomenon of an utterly hollow concept called nature, hollow because inseparable from any particular thing or everything all at once (much as culture is hollow, being applicable to absolutely everything anyone may choose to slap the term upon)?
I have been agnostic on the gay marriage thing in general however, I do understand all the family oriented arguments. I might share those concerns if the numbers of gays in this country was close to the numbers portrayed in popular media.
Saying that, I am getting more against gay marriage everyday due to the complete lack of concern for process. Hard to ally with people who don’t care how they get there.
i heart the constitution more than midget pickles but I can’t control what the pervert Roberts court does any more than a Fox News propaganda slut can.
What I can tell you is that gay marriage is becoming an increasingly accepted idea quite apart from whatever happens in any courtroom.
And most of the whores on the court seem to understand this from what I’ve gathered.
Prediction: The GOP’s plan to lock up 30% of the vote (a/k/a “rebranding”) will be a complete success.
I also have every confidence that people will eventually notice that SSM and an ever-more-intrusive Caesar walk in unison. It’ll be helpful for whoever’s left around to pick up the pieces.
Unfettered individualism is an unwitting friend of the Leviathan State.
Shorter ‘feets: “Since all the other picachus are happily stampeding over the cliff…”
And MANMADE GLOBAL WARMING was once an increasingly accepted idea.
And you should eat a diet rich in complex carbohydrates was once an increasingly accepted idea.
And coffee is bad for you was once an increasingly accepted idea.
And “Fifty Shades of Gray” is a great book was once an increasingly accepted idea.
Fish. Barrel.
Unfettered individualism is an unwitting friend of the Leviathan State.
Dear God Dale, you just summed up my dissertation in 10 words, and did a better job than I ever could. I’m totally swiping that for any future book deals.
Can one have a democracy where one side gets to keep asking the same question without ever accepting “no” for an answer? You’re not convincing people, you’re simply wearing them out with a full court press assisted by the media flooding the zone.
N.B. I noticed that erstwhile zany Today show host Jenna Wolfe announced that she was pregnant with her girlfriend (as we say in the reality based community) and soon to be “wife,” NBC correspondent Stephanie Gosk. Funny thing is that she used to be a local correspondent with WPHL in Philadelphia, where she dated (male) sportscaster Don Tollefson. Stop the H8!
complex carbs are the more better ones they have a lower glycemic index Mr. W
Oh, bullshit. Just go ahead and wave your pompoms.
how funky is yo chicken Mr. Pablo???
Ah, yes. The purveyor of this idiocy:
We know who her mother is. Are you comfortable with telling us who her father is?
Mi pollo es loco.
[…] On a related note, Bill O’Reilly is still a pinhead. […]
And a diet “rich” in carbs, complex or not, causes obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.
Palaeomerus wrote:
-Trouble is, Happy will enjoy it when it happens because he is clearly a Nihilist – and Nihilists loves them some misery…for themselves and everyone else.
-From Jean Raspail’s The Camp Of The Saints, Chapter 40: ‘When everything in society suddenly stops functioning rationally, that’s when the misfits crawl out of the woodwork. And with them their resentments, their utopian visions, their neuroses and psychoses. Mad dogs on the loose. A merry-go-round of feeble minds, free at last of all social fetters.’
Thus Spake Cacklefoot