It is worth quoting in relevant part:

The voters in their infinite wisdom have just given a huge boost to perhaps the only GOP candidate who could shift the spotlight from President Obama to himself, alienate virtually all independent voters, lose more than 40 states and put the House majority in jeopardy.

We’d be looking at four more years of Obama’s economic policies, four more years of strained relations with allies, several new Supreme Court justices and an unprecedented power shift to the executive branch.

While straining credulity a bit with its rhetorical excess — Ms. Rubin is apparently unaware that there are fewer than forty states in the Northeast and on the Pacific Coast — her point is fundamentally valid. Newt Gingrich will mop the floor with Barack Obama in the debates, only to have his head handed to him in November. Informed voters might want to consider this a more intellectually satisfying form of the 2008 debacle, without the electric excitement Sarah Palin brought to the ticket.

(Not to worry: Newt Gingrich has compared himself to so many electrifying leaders that it seems reasonable to assume he will give one heck of an acceptance speech as he selects himself as the vice presidential candidate, too.)

I don’t want to dwell on Newt, who has Newt to do that for him, and better than I ever could. I want to dwell on the cause for this calamity, the source, the problem, the sticky wicket if you will, the mote and beam we must remove from our own eyes before seeking emergency treatment for punctured eyeballs.

I am speaking, of course, of Willard “Mitt” Romney, who, coincidentally enough, is like a mote and a beam in the sense that his physical composition and bearing are remarkably similar.

Newt Gingrich got his turn as not-Romney, then blew it. Done. Gone. Buried like an obscure thing of which Newt would probably insist on telling you at length as you tried to hide behind the coffee service and escape out the back door. By rights, we should be down to Mitt Romney versus my great aunt, a late entrant in the field who would catch the world by storm by insisting that every back yard have its own subsidized shine still.

Instead, we are back to Newt v. Mitt, which sounds like a fantastic name for a spell in the upcoming Fifth Edition of (Advanced) Dungeons and Dragons, but is instead a depressing reminder that we will likely look at four more years of Obama, regardless of the nominee.

And it is all Mitt’s fault.

I do not mean this in the sense that he “failed to put away” Newt. You can’t stop him, you can only hope he falls asleep after talking to himself in containment. I mean this in the sense that Mitt Romney managed to turn himself into even more of a walking caricature in just a handful of weeks. His hamhanded handling of his own corporate past — not to be confused with his hamhanded handling of his political past, which is a given — and his wealth have given voters who were preparing hemlock pies and resigning themselves to voting for a blob of clay with fantastic hair a reason to say, By God, no, I’m not going to eat that hemlock, and I’m not going to vote for this idiot.

Consider that the man who doesn’t even respect the electorate enough to lie to them in a consistent manner about his political beliefs, political formation, policy choices, gosh, the list goes on, does respect them enough to openly condescend to them by telling them that three hundred thousand dollars is basically a pittance.

You, Mitt Romney, and your cheerleaders in the press and Republican establishment (but not sainted Jen Rubin) are why there is a decent chance Newt, and not you, will cause the destruction of our party downticket in less than ten months’ time. (Think of this as being like what you did to the Massachusetts GOP, but on a grander scale, with more arson afterward.) You convinced the voters to run to a man who couldn’t even stay the head of the caucus he brought to power a mere four years before. You’re a Mormon with an all-American marriage who managed to get a guy with three living wives, I assume seven hundred mistresses, and the real love of his life rounding it all out in his mirror every morning to the point where socially conservative Republicans would chew off their own earlobes to vote for him over you.

AND THAT DOESN’T EVEN MAKE SENSE.

You are the problem, not Newt. You, not the voters. You, not poor Jennifer Rubin.

Now, Rubin is nothing if not intellectually honest and consistent. I therefore join in her implicit call — and call on her to make explicit her call — to reject the politics of fear, and to demand that you terminate your political campaign now, today. Well, after you read this, and talk Justin Hart off a ledge. But right after that.

And then. God willing, then. Then we will have someone else, someone more credible, someone — let us be honest — with worse hair, step forth to defeat the amphibian, with the chameleon out of the field. That person will then go on to lose to Barack Obama, but the downticket races will be saved.

God bless America. Erick-Woods Erickson for President, 2012.

This ad is not paid for or endorsed by Erickson for President, Ulrickson for President, or any other campaign group. No one at RedState is responsible for the content of this ad, and indeed, will probably hurt me the next time they see me.

So with New Hampshire behind us (and with any luck, never again in front of us), and with my tendency to be overloaded with life to the point at which I catch up on things I meant to write two to fifty-two weeks after they are timely, I wanted to say something about the controversy which was and is best described as “National Romney Online.”

For those of you who don’t keep up on conservative tendencies to engage in circular firing squads, a summary is in order; for those of you who couldn’t give a rat’s anus, best just to skip this diary altogether.

In short, National Review — which backed Mitt Romney in 2008 after months and years of not-so-coyly talking him up — and which has not, in fairness, endorsed anyone as a publication yet, is perceived to be carrying water for the Mittster this time around. The battle was joined when Ramesh Ponnuru — arguably the brightest of National Review’s lights, and the editor with the greatest credibility among mainstream conservatives — endorsed Romney, albeit not without qualifications; the battle escalated when the publication as a whole went full-metal William Foster on Newt Gingrich for a thousand and one sins against conservatism and electability. In passing, the magazine took shots at Ron Paul (who hasn’t?), Michelle Bachmann, and Rick Perry; then took time to praise Jon Huntsman, Mitt Romney, and Rick Santorum, whose only apparent problem was a lack of executive experience. The didactic tone at the end of the piece seemed almost calculated to irritate any reader not yet enraged by the closing of the piece.

The backlash was intense. It was so severe that Jim Geraghty, whose Morning Jolt newsletter is one of three to which I voluntarily subscribe, has remained defensive since. Jonah Goldberg, of whom we all thought only the death of a near relative could bring him low, sent out a G-File (the second to which I subscribe) that basically sounded like a particular Megadeth song.

Before I go any farther, I’d like to explain why I’m writing this. I was not one of the founders of RedState, and my position was nebulous from early on. I am not now affiliated with RedState. I still love the site and its denizens, but like almost all of the original staff — Josh Trevino, Ben Domenech, and roughly 783 out of the 785 initial Editors who came on board in July 2004 — my only link to the site is a past about which most current readers could not give two running leaps. (Or a rat’s anus.)

But I was there in the sandbox basically on day one, and after the first 680 or so editors quit, there was this great feeling of solidarity as we tried to become relevant in the 2004 elections. As I’ve noted before, we weren’t flush with resources — the Founders handled the whole thing out of their own pockets — and so we really appreciated any helping hand we got.

Jim Geraghty’s was one of those helping hands. To this day, I hold a warm spot in my heart for him just on the strength of sitting on some email threads with us, plotting, talking, conniving. I’ll always remember a phone call I had with the Swede after one of those email exchanges, talking about how amazing it was that we were actually being treated seriously by Jim Geraghty of all people. (We also discussed other things, like pie. Erick likes pie.)

And then there’s Ramesh. I think I spoke for the entire Contributor staff, or pretty darned close, when I said nice things about Ramesh when I resigned, and by the Kraken’s third head, I was sincere. It was my hope to write as well, as cogently, and as honestly as Ramesh when I grew up, a goal I hold to this day. I got one of the first run of his Party of Death, and read it cover to cover, enjoying every word, appreciating the serious, deliberate, intelligent, measured tone. (I don’t do serious, deliberate, intelligent, measured tone.)

And Jonah? I’m basically doing a poor imitation of Jonah Goldberg as I write this. Without any disrespect to its current leadership, I believed and believe that his departure as editor of NRO is one of the greatest losses the publication as a whole has ever experienced.

So, as I try to explain to people at National Review who will never read this, I want them to understand as they don’t read this that I’m saying what I’m saying out of gratitude, admiration, and affection. I’m being sincere because I think a gulf has opened, and I don’t think they understand it. I say this as a friend not a single one of you has ever met.

You have lost your way.

The editorial that sparked all of this is metonymic of the greater problem. Newt Gingrich has his share (my share, and about forty other people’s shares) of problems, in terms of record, temperament, executive experience, self-regard, this list could go on for forty more lines. The vast majority of those offended by the editorial were not passionately leaping to Newt Gingrich’s defense; they were leaping to attack what National Review has become.

Consider that in one fell swoop the publication managed to dismiss the longest-serving governor in the nation, with a record of conservative governance unmatched by any governor current or recent past, linking him unsubtly to a crank known for conspiracy theories and Ron Paul; praise Mitt Romney, who while apparently a model conservative (the sort who helps get abortion funding in state-run mandatory health insurance) has failed to seal the deal with conservatives for some unknowable reason; praise Jon Huntsman, whose entire campaign was a John Weaver special from tip to tail (this is not a compliment); and praise Rick Santorum, one of the greatest (if dimmest) champions the pro-life movement has had, and who was so conservative he went to war for massive increases in federal spending almost every day, and whose greatest knock is not his loss to an anodyne nobody by a margin that made even the rest of 2006 look like a joke, but rather a lack of executive experience.

You praised, in other words, a man whom only Kathryn Jean Lopez and Justin Hart could describe as carrying any sort of conservative record, a man who has spent his entire campaign shooting at conservatives, and a man who did more than anyone other than George W. Bush and Tom DeLay to stain the Republican image of fiscal austerity. In the very same piece, you treated a man with actual, real, conservative accomplishments over the course of a decade of governance as a tongue-tied embarrassment.

(Full disclosure: I like and support Rick Perry, but I believe and believed he shouldn’t run this time, so close to George W. Bush. At any rate, I’m pretty sure Obama wins on the strength of incumbency, so I feel like we’re having this battle for principle’s sake.)

To many of us out here, that seemed like the same sort of tone-deaf water-carrying for milquetoast Republicans we’ve seen for over a decade now. To many of us, National Review’s fighting spirit — against Republicans, that is — took crippling hits under the Bush Administration, to the point where we’d expect to see Roy Blunt on the cover as the Greatest Conservative of this Decade (Runner Up: Mitch McConnell; Second Runner Up: Charles Grassley) if Mitt doesn’t already have that award sewn up, too. At a time when the activist portion of your readership is hell-bent on stopping a fiscal nightmare and destroying Obamacare, your response is to praise a man known for a gigantic government program (incidentally, the model for Obamacare), a governor with a legitimate record of fiscal sanity who thought the stimulus wasn’t big enough, and a senator whose fiscal accomplishments all echo Medicare Part D.

That Ramesh’s mark was all over the editorial — writing styles are like fingerprints — stung even more, because it suggested a closer confluence of the pro-Romney forces of National Review and the nominally independent ones. It also felt like Ramesh was being deployed as a weapon against National Review’s readership.

Not only that, but your collective response to the Bain issue — which, remember, is going to get just the teensiest airing from Obama’s merry crew in the general election — has been like the sound of a thousand scalded cats screaming in pain and fear, but without the silence that comes after. Instead of understanding that a significant portion of the conservative movement is currently unemployed, has long had a streak of populism, and is vaguely certain that the words “hedge fund” mean “Wall Street” (and “Wall Street” means “bailouts”), so that Bain Capital is now symbolic of everything that has plagued the country for the last five years, you accuse everyday conservatives of being like Huey Freaking Long.

You are defending a rich guy, who was born into money and made even more, who is running as a job creator who cannot identify a single job other than his own that he created in a field that is known for chopping up companies to extract equity, running on the strength of that inherited and earned money, as if he is the same sort of exemplar of the free market as a mom-and-pop meat market. You are doing this in the middle of the worst economic environment of the last several decades. You are staking your collective credibility on a man who governed to the left of every Republican governor before him, for a single term, before he bailed to run for the Presidency, and who left his state’s Republican apparatus in ruins, but not before he created the monstrosity that became the model for the abomination that is Obamacare. You have done all of this while pretending not to endorse the man.

I am desperately afraid that this makes sense to you.

You have alienated yourself from your readership and your movement to the point where many of us read Ramesh Ponnuru’s work — Ramesh Ponnuru’s work! — to learn what the Republicans in Congressional leadership are thinking and saying among themselves at any given time. You have missed the flavor and tone of the Tea Parties and their impact on the wider conservative movement. You seem to believe that a continued (and admirable) devotion to the pro-life cause, not even always in words alone, is sufficient to excuse a politician for his manifold sins. You have forgotten that one of the founding creeds of the modern conservative movement is A Choice, Not An Echo. You have mistaken the art of the possible for resignation to the good-enough. You are, as I write this, conflating pro-market with pro-business.

You are supposed to be a beacon of what is best in us, not a reminder that some days, you just can’t win.

In the end, I suspect I’ve wasted two billable hours (give or take) writing this when I should be feeding my family, because I also think you’ve given up on understanding your customers. I canceled my own damn subscription something like five years ago because you insisted on publishing that perverted, paleocon, racist John Derbyshire against all sense and reason, but I still read NRO religiously until not very long ago at all. It’s sad to see the online site — that I read while a student in law school, surrounded by lefties during the Clinton Administration — descend so far, and the magazine go even farther. Given the complete absence of any change in your direction, I have to imagine you’ve seen no fall in your advertising revenues; as good believers in the free market, I have to believe you think you’re doing it right.

It’s a shame, and we’re all poorer for it. We’ll miss you, and hope you come back to us some day.

So, a big welcome to Think Tanked! If we’re lucky, we’ll hardly know you.

The ridiculous part is that, as with the Post‘s prior additions to its cutting-edge online site — now redesigned to look more like a failing newspaper, but I repeat myself — there is simply no way to disguise the fairly clear left-wing advocacy at work here. Let’s start with the press release:

Allen McDuffee is a New York-based politics writer. Part reporter, part investigative journalist, part blogger, Allen has written for The Nation, Huffington Post, AlterNet, Raw Story, New York Observer, In These Times and Truthdig, among others.

Now, I know that to a lot of Post print readers, these must seem like Sunday supplement sections to the local newspaper, sort of like Parade, but with fewer personal massager ads. Anyone living in the 21st century, however, would know that these are left-of-center publications much like Pravda was only a pro-Soviet Union newspaper. (The analogy was deliberate.)

But! The worse part, by far, is that anyone with access to Mr. Google, Think Tanked‘s old site (warning: hate site), and Allen McDuffee’s (the author of Think Tanked) Twitter feed can see that this is just the same old song and dance again. In other words, the Post’s editors either don’t know about these things — given the quality of their site these days, a real possibility — or they think we don’t, which, again, given the quality of their site, is a real possibility.

So let’s walk it through.

There’s the Twitter feed. Oh, what a gold mine that is.

The GOP should be put to the noose.

The Bush Administration benefited from not killing Bin Laden.

Andrew Breitbart should lose a Grammy. (Hey, it probably made sense when he wrote it.)

The Iraq War “catastrophe” was “caused” by the party that “needs proof” Bin Laden is dead.

He hates Erick Erickson.

Rachel Maddow is dreamy.

He hates Frank Gaffney.

He hates Paul Ryan.

Paul Wolfowitz’s position on Libya is like Bill Clinton’s on cigars.

Did he mention he hates Paul Ryan?

He hates Sarah Palin.

The Muslim Brotherhood is awesome.

Did he mention that he hates Sarah Palin?

Dear crazy lefty, have I introduced you to my friend? She’s not fat! (Sorry, just thought that was funny.)

Koch Brothers opening a lobbying office in Madison, Wisconsin, makes him sick to his stomach.

There’s so much more, including a weird back and forth with some other psychotic lefty about Trig Palin that is hard to summarize and disturbing to read. But that last — like so many others about the Kochs — should have sent eyebrows skyward at the Post, if for no reason other than that Koch funding is the same bete noir on the left as Soros funding is on the right. In other words, if his constant fits over the Kochs are real — and given that he’s cool in making a no-fat-chicks disclaimer in the same space, I think we can safely assume that — then someone at the Post should have said, Huh. Maybe we shouldn’t hire this guy to cover a subject he hates? Maybe? Maybe the whole Dave Weigel thing was an object lesson?

Ha ha, yeah, I know. Even on the internet comedy can come through.

Then there’s his web site — or more accurately, his penultimate site. Search for Koch. Revel. The New Yorker and Mother Jones(!) are treated as objective sources. And so on.

There’s more fun, though — with no fat chicks! That’s important! — in one of his older sites. Behold the now-diagnostic obsession with an adult woman who has more than one child. And Ann Coulter. And Bill Kristol (“Billy”). And Sarah Palin again. (Did you know he hates her?) And Ann Coulter again.

Do you know that before a law firm of any size will hire you, they’ll Google you? True story. I’m guessing the Washington Post company should get hiring tips from its lawyers. Or stop pretending that anyone on the right could conceivably be fooled by this fellow — by any reasonable measure, he makes the sub-literate Sargent look like a Nobel Laureate by comparison.

In closing, a personal note.

Back in the heady days of RedState’s founding — back when everyone, and not just Keith Olbermann and his cat, called us RedState.org — we had a relatively small number of things going for us: A ridiculously large editorial stable; a lot of camaraderie; the Democrats’ insane decision to nominate John Kerry for the Presidency; an up-and-coming, brilliant, and condescending commenter named streiff; and the Washington Post. We were largely a bunch of late twenty-somethings and early thirty-somethings (except Domenech, whom we believed to be eight and the result of a secret government super-writer program), but that didn’t mean we thought that the Post was center-right, or even center, or neutral, or objective. But they were fair. You had the impression that they actually tried to give our side an even shake, for good and for ill.

Of course, Bush had the unmitigated gall to win, and pull a heck of a lot of Republicans into office with him. This had the same impact on the American Left that Sarah Palin has by breathing, thereby proving once and for all that we have not actually eliminated rabies in humans. Not coincidentally, as our side of the aisle degenerated into policy disputes about things that would never come to pass, the frothing animals went into overdrive, becoming the place where all of the energy online was in play, sort of like how your intestines are where all of the energy in your body is in play after chasing a burrito with a shot of hot grease. It was a remarkable descent into madness, and an effective one, for two election cycles.

That the Post fell with them is both predictable — they’re chasing a business model, aping the online left, that petered out three years ago, which is like continuing to publish a newspaper — and more than a little sad. I used to presume that they were playing me as straight as they could. I didn’t think they’d go the New York Times route as full party organ. Kinda sad, but they probably won’t be around much longer anyway.

As a friend of mine recently put it, I join the gentleman from Texas’s remarks, and know that I cannot surpass them. I would, however, like to add something to them.

Any honest reckoning of the budget deal the House GOP appears to have reached must view it as a result of negotiations in which one side — the Democrats — believed they had the upper hand, and the other — the GOP — agreed. From the start, the brain trust that nominally holds the majority in the House made clear that they would brutally knife their own mothers to avoid a shutdown, because the memory of the last is burned into their pathetic neurons for all of time, and they believe they’ll suffer the way the last Republican majority did. I don’t believe that’s an accurate assessment of the likely fallout of the shutdown the submorons on the Hill clearly felt they needed to avoid, and I’ll discuss that, but we all need to remember: This is our fault, yours and mine, and every activist’s and voter’s who helped these clowns get elected.

That’s sort of counterintuitive, isn’t it? It isn’t, if you think about it.

In 2006, most of the same cretins currently patting themselves on the back for convincing yet another Republican constituency not to show up for the 2012 elections were chosen by the House GOP to bravely march the caucus into a giant punji pit. After the bloodletting that year, chastened by their losses, the House GOP promptly … re-elected the same group.

After bumbling their way through the TARP debate — Eric Cantor covered himself in glory by wasting time proposing that TARP be structured as insurance, sort of like selling homeowner’s insurance to the guy whose house is a four-alarm blaze — and taking the Palin-reinvigorated McCain campaign into the toilet with them, thus managing to take more losses in the House and damn any chance at a Presidential win, the House GOP … re-elected the same group.

But! Chastened by their repeated drubbings, shown by the Tea Party that the same-old, same-old could not continue, knowing in their hearts of hearts that they weren’t being given the majority so much as the Democrats were having it taken away, the House GOP boldly set out to forge a new path by … re-electing the same group.

And guess which group of chuckleheads kept working for, fundraising for, doorknocking for, and oh yeah, voting for, the Mensa subset on the Hill? If your monitor isn’t backlit, you can probably see their reflections in the surface of what you’re reading.

So! We sent a group of frightened boys into negotiation with things that look and act like men, including Nancy Pelosi. And look at the results. Show of hands: Who’s surprised?

Oh, they say: No. This is just the first step. Look at these cuts! They’re real cuts! (Sorta.) And now we can move on to important things, like the FY2012 budget and … other stuff, on which, this time, we won’t cave, Honest Injun.

Let me tell you why that’s horsehockey.

To paraphrase Maggie Thatcher, the story of modern democracies is the left’s consistent turning of a screw into our collective gut, and when the right takes power, we don’t unscrew, we just hold the screw in place while we bleed to death. Each budgetary negotiation is not a discrete act, but is rather a process of setting the baseline for the next round.

In an ideal world, realizing that the public is, for the first time, actually seriously concerned about spending, and knowing that, inter alia, the House GOP would have gone in and told the Democrats that they were welcome to shut down the government to protect funding babykillers and to keep bleeding the Treasury dry, but they’d have the albatross around their necks for it. Would the Democrats have blinked? Good question. Their cretins believe that Bill Clinton won in 1996 because of the shutdown. (The ambivalent effects on Congressional seats are a bit more attenuated in their “minds.”) Would our message have prevailed? Also a good question. The mainstream media would have played this as “Republicans shut down the government to deny women mammograms,” but this isn’t the Nineties. We have different message channels than we used to, and anyone who doubts that need only ask if the words “death panels” would have entered the public lexicon if the New York Times had anything to say about it.

Instead, surprise! We gave up virtually everything for total cuts less than at least some Democrats publicly announced they would have yielded.

(But the troops! The troops wouldn’t have been funded!

Bzzt. No. The House GOP had the option to make their funding a separate bill, decided to play chicken with the troops’ paychecks, and then veered.)

So you say, but we’ll get them in FY2012! Let me ask you a serious question: Why on Earth would you think those negotiations will end differently? The House GOP just put a giant KICK ME sign on its collective rear. This negotiation is the baseline for the next, which unfortunately doesn’t mean bigger-and-better cuts, it means the Democrats know that they need only hold out until the next shutdown looms (or pick your crisis, really) and they know that the spineless weenies will cave in no time flat.

This is a war. We just ceded enormous ground in the first, pivotal battle because we were worried that we may lose other positions. Our troops are going to ask, not unreasonably, if our army couldn’t be bothered to advance the primary goal for which they were sent into the field, why we should think they’d bother with the others.

That is the hill on which we should be willing to die: Getting this monstrosity of a hole we’re leaving our children and grandchildren under control, even if it just means stopping the digging. Making the Democrats take ownership of funding with public money the murder of the unborn. Proving ourselves serious and committed and willing to take a knife in the chest to slice the other guy’s carotid (or femoral or whichever artery you prefer), knowing that knife will hurt but the other guy is gonna be on the edge of death for a long time after.

But: Blink.

Cradle Catholics in this country disproportionately aren’t. Some obscenely large portion of those raised Catholic in this country — presumably “raised Catholic” means “baptized Catholic,” because practice has fallen off so much even among nominally active Catholics I’m not sure there’s a meaningful way to aggregate the practicing ones — no longer self-identify as Catholic. Amazingly, however, some who were raised Catholic keep being Catholic, and somehow instill the Faith in their children.

It’s a funny thing, American Catholicism. Jody Bottum, in his own way one of the two or three greatest Catholic observers of his generation, wrote a deeply moving observation on the shallowness and brittleness of American Catholic culture and practice in the wake of Vatican II and Humanae Vitae . But with due respect to Jody, I think, as often happens to faithful men and women who spend too much time in New York City and Washington, D.C., that Jody came to believe that the terrible state of Catholic practice in those two archetypical sinkholes was indicative of how the rest of us live.

It’s not. Parishes consolidate (this is a nice term for “close”) in the Northeast and Upper Midwest, traditional homes of immigrant Catholicism, and open in the new homes of immigrant Catholicism, American immigrant and variously-legal immigrant alike. Every Sunday, three, four, and sometimes five Masses happen, packed during the holiday seasons, comfortably unpacked during the deepest doldrums of Ordinary Time, and ranging from sparse to packed depending on the Mass time on every other Sunday. For all of Jody’s correct observations that the urban, parish-centered life that defined American Catholicism before the Second Vatican Council is a fading memory, somehow, we struggle on.

That overlengthy stroll through bush and glen, past the broken towers and mills of yesterday, is a prelude to telling you how very much we lost when Bernard Nathanson died earlier this week. Rarely has a man done so much evil in this world; even more rarely has he spent his every waking moment since trying to atone for that evil. The abortion regime owes so much to him; the pro-life movement does, too.

Catholics like to joke that we instinctively believe that the Bible only has about two hundred pages, broken up with hymns and intercessory prayers. It’s a joke to make Protestants feel better about us, to confirm their old cutting remarks after they left Tradition and the Magisterium and adopted sola scriptura . Every Catholic home — by the unqualified term “Catholic” from this point on, let’s assume I mean people who attend Mass weekly and don’t think the Pope is trying to force a theocracy down their throats — has a family Bible, used to record births and baptisms and weddings and ordinations and consecrations and deaths; to clarify not-infrequent arguments over doctrine; and to cover for those days when we can’t make it to Mass because of weather, illness, or unfortunate oversleeping.

A lot of us have a second Bible, one without the Teaching, but which is almost as well-worn. It’s not the Catechism (my family has a copy, but the ending doesn’t have a twist, so it’s no fun to read after the first time through), and it’s not the hagiography of John F. Kennedy Catholics of a certain age would keep on the coffee table to remind themselves of their votes for a man who was neither a very good man nor a very good Catholic. (Nor a very good President.) Because seven men (including a nominal Catholic) decided that it would be a good thing to invent a right to kill babies in the womb, that second Bible all too often involves abortion somehow. And that book was almost always written by Dr. Nathanson.

In my house, it was a copy of Aborting America , given to us by my youngest sister’s godfather. It was a later edition, with a cover I can’t find any more, with a foreword by Nathanson that expanded, in terrible detail, on what followed, and how his thoughts had evolved over time. My father and mother both read it cover-to-cover, and after that, it just sat there for months. My younger siblings couldn’t care less about that sort of thing for years, but I had been into politics since I was four. (In my third grade class in a suburb on the outskirts of the People’s Republic of Austin, I was the only kid in the room to stump for Reagan over Mondale.)

And it sat there and mocked me, because I couldn’t bring myself to read it. I was a ten year-old kid, and I knew intellectually that horrible things happened to children at the hands of the very people who are most charged with protecting them; but I didn’t want to read this. I didn’t want a graphic reminder of how awful moms and dads and doctors could be. And I started to get angry, as if this book was literally mocking me. (Hey, I was a ten year-old kid into politics. You’ve gotta figure there were issues.) Why the Hell should I care about this stuff? Why was it forcing its way into my life? Why are all of these people making such a big fuss out of this when there are starving people and people dying from wars and disease?

It says something about the quality of modern thought that so many nominal Catholics today rationalize along the same lines as an angry ten year-old.

The neat thing about being a kid is that you can and usually do talk yourself into doing just about anything. So I got so damned angry, I finally picked the book up and read it. I know I’ll hate this. I’ll say so when I’m done. That’ll show that jerk whom I’ve never met and who doesn’t even know I’m reading this.

Kids cry, even boys, over small things. That was the first time I’d ever sobbed from the gut. Nathanson did not spare details. The enormity of what was happening — and how it had happened, how Americans had accepted glib lies and the destruction of their centuries-old prohibition on the murder of the most defenseless with barely a shrug — shook me to my core. For the first time in my life, I, a child of the Reagan Revolution and all of its simple love of America, a kid whose parents had kicked their rears to make his life as comfortable and sheltered as they could, truly thought that maybe America had some evil in her, or at least a fondness for the cads.

I tell you all of this not to tell you a story of how I came, multiple times, to a John-Brown-at-Harpers-Ferry conclusion in my adolescence or anything as boring, predictable, and ultimately futile as that. I tell you all of this so you’ll understand the incredible work Nathanson did, his whole life after seeing a baby in utero in ultrasound. I tell you this because in the obscenely brief obituaries for this man, who went from a founder of NARAL to a man whose work littered Catholic (and non-Catholic) living rooms and coffee tables and dinner discussions and motivations for decades, you’d never know that he touched the lives of millions. I want you to understand the lesson of a life lived passionately working for evil — by his own admission, willingly and gleefully lying in its service — and then spent desperately trying to atone, to do penance at every turn, to undo the terrible thing he’d done.

The lesson of that life is that words and deeds matter. That something as simple as a book can change, can activate, can drive. That a life spent trying to right a wrong is not in vain, and to the contrary, can make a difference. The Silent Scream changed the terms of the debate on abortion; it made ready the soil that cheap 3-D ultrasounds have seeded and in which the pro-life movement is reaping good harvests.

Votes win elections; boots on the ground win votes; but cultural shifts win both boots and votes. Two generations of the pro-life movement put boots on the ground in elections in no small part because a short, earnest, aging man put himself body and soul into righting an atrocity he’d helped create. That is activism of the highest order, and we are eternally indebted for it.

The Catholic Church, into which Nathanson was received over a decade ago, teaches that almost every sin is forgivable. (Let’s not have the debate about which sin is the unforgivable one; it’s fun, but maddening.) Putting to the side whether his conversion from a detached belief in the absence of God to a belief in a Triune God who suffered, died, and rose again for us all is sufficient to clear that stain from his soul — and based on what we understand from his friends and colleagues, he clearly never thought it was — I feel comfortable saying that if his penance was insufficient, we’re all damned.

God has taken you home, weary warrior. Requiem aeternam.

While trying to drum up business on Friday, between meetings, I took the time to read U.S. District Court Judge Vinson’s decision on the constitutionality of the mandate. (Opinion here.) I have a few thoughts; however, fair warning: I refused to violate my personal ban on doing legal research — that is, free legal work — while blogging. Feel free to skip this on that basis.

It’s worth noting that I’ve been before Judge Vinson before, and even when he kicked my tail (and he has), I’ve found him to be a very thorough, very good, very cautious judge. I mention this because this isn’t the first time I’ve read a Vinson opinion on summary judgment, and while they’re rarely bloodless, they’re never so heartfelt, so earnest as this. It’s pretty remarkable — he obviously cared enough to try to make certain that his rationale was clear for the lawyers in the case and the Eleventh Circuit and Supreme Court. He clearly did the lion’s share on this, rather than merely turning it over to his clerk.

As an initial matter, I now completely understand why the left side of the political spectrum is treating this as one of the worst affronts in the history of law, reaching back to cuneiform: Aside from their usual, knee-jerk, scalded-cat if-we-like-it-it’s-constitutional/if-we-don’t-it’s-treason response to any event that disrupts their view of how the world should work, I think it’s important to remember that most of the geniuses opining on this are either non-lawyers or lawyers and law professors with no real connection to trial court judgments (which means, not real lawyers). This ruling reads like what it almost certainly is: An attempt to explain a decision the court knows will be controversial in a way lawyers (read: subsequent appellate courts) and more importantly, non-lawyers can understand. It fails on the latter count, precisely because it is doing so in the way that people who’ve been lawyers too long imagine is necessary to communicate to non-lawyers.

But the non-lawyers reading this are generally self-identified political experts, and for good and for ill, that means these days, they read a lot of Supreme Court opinions, as well as the odd Circuit Court of Appeals opinion, and they expect all opinions to read that way. Those tend to be written in a mix of aimed-at-lawyers and more informal writing style (in dissent, and sometimes in concurrence) that again, for good and for ill, we now take as a given. This is written like a history lesson, with each step taken seriously, calmly, and in an altogether different voice from an opinion that ends with “Breyer, J., concurring in the judgment.” In other words, it likely seems too informal, too personal, for skinning alive a cat on which so many on the left pinned so many hatreds and hopes. Thus, their reaction is visceral, as well as intellectual.

Also, Ezra Klein is an idiot.

Second, I now well and truly understand that this entire exercise — from the final passage of the bill through briefing — really has been aimed at the Supreme Court. I’m not sure which sub-moron decided this was a good idea, but rather clearly, the removal of the severability clause in the final version of the bill, and the briefs repeatedly making clear that the mandate could not be severed from the main bill — when, as Judge Vinson notes, everyone knew that would be the very first part challenged — are of a piece. Essentially, this is a gigantic game of chicken, aimed at Justice Kennedy: If you discard the mandate, you’re wrecking this giant piece of democratically-crafted legislation. I didn’t appreciate this before, but it now seems pretty clear they’re relying on Kennedy the federal-incrementalist, rather than Kennedy the who-cares-about-federalism-jurist. It’s a remarkable dare. I think it’s sort of stupid — Kennedy is a bit on the dim side, and asking him to decide not to chuck the bathwater with the baby may be beyond his intellectual grasp, though likely not his ego.

Third, I’m surprised Judge Vinson ended up with this case. For a case of this importance, I’d expect an active District Court judge to receive the assignment by hook or by crook. A senior status federal judge is on the rotation for case assignments, but they have a lot of discretion to pass on a case. Judge Vinson is happily in senior status — I believe he goes to flower competitions — I can’t imagine he’s looking forward to the inevitable death threats. I suspect the chief judge didn’t push him to recuse because his case load is so light, and Florida courts (state and federal) are so jammed right now. That’s just a hunch.

Fourth, I have to say I’m amused as Hell to see the port side suddenly so averse to forum shopping and judicial review, problems they don’t seem to register when they get a result they like invalidating a federal law or act out of a District Court in Michigan or California or Massachusetts. I think this goes to a fundamental problem their legislators had when crafting this — they believe that if something (they believe) is so important, so complex, so huge, it must not only be necessary, it must be inviolable. (I’m not sure they believe that the word “constitutional” is relevant unless abortion is involved.) If you look over the government’s briefing, and the amicus briefing, it tends to contain a fairly specific theme: The majority of the bill is constitutional and of critical national importance; the rest of the bill can’t work without the mandate; therefore, it would be judicial activism and a departure from tradition/precedent/deference to strike down the mandate. (Without reading the transcript on oral argument, I infer that they stayed on-message there.) I think this was a terribly bad tack to take with this judge, even allowing for the fact that they’re trying to play chicken with the nine judges who lie at the end of this trail; but more importantly, this insight is the key to understanding the stupid concessions and arguments made in briefing and at oral argument. (Seriously? The government can maybe regulate childbearing?)

Fifth, this was certainly a fairly decently-reasoned opinion. I don’t agree with all of its nuances, but I’m (promise) trying to keep this brief. (No pun.) However, it’s kind of hard to escape the critical question raised in the opinion, the briefing, and the oral argument: If the federal government can mandate this sort of behavior from inactivity, exactly what aggregated activity can it not? I think all of the steam expended to the effect that the government can mandate any sort of activity that in the aggregate impacts commerce (presumably not even substantially) is debatable tactics and worse strategy. If Kennedy votes to toss this, that is what he’ll focus on. They’ve basically supplied the rope, the beam, and the knot-tying directions, and presume Kennedy won’t go through with it because he hates seeing things swing.

In the words of a colleague of mine, “you assume at your peril that Kennedy will decide that this is an issue over which Anthony Kennedy should decline to exercise power. Abortion, racial preferences, Bush v. Gore, the death penalty, punitive damages — there’s no way to make any sense of his jurisprudence other than a desire to have the federal courts resolve the issue, and then nearly 100% of it makes sense. It’s O’Connor who would have been horrified by certain things she saw as judicial hubris, not Kennedy.”

Buckle up, folks. The ride only gets more fun from here.

I will move to Minnesota and become the most despicable, ambulance-chasing plaintiff’s lawyer in history.

That’s right, people of Minnesota. I’m pretty sure I can make “whiplash” and “soft-tissue injury” the most hated words in your vocabulary. How many homeless people do you think I can find who have slipped and fallen in government buildings? I’m betting a lot. You think you have economic problems now? Three words: shareholder derivative suits. Be warned: I can dream up nuisance actions that will apply to every industry that remains in your frozen, weirdly nice state. Are we beginning to get the picture?

Do you think I’m kidding? I began my professional life as a plaintiff’s lawyer. I left that life because I couldn’t look myself in the mirror any more — but I will buy mirrors of platinum into which to gaze with a joyful heart, harvested from the lifeblood of your state, if you send Al Freaking Franken to the Senate.

I know you needed to have your fun, what with having two weeks of spring and one week of summer every year, but guys: This joke is about as funny as Al Franken’s entire oeuvre, which is to say, not at all. And I am as deadly serious as listening to that little troll can be deadly: I will bring so many medical malpractice suits, your doctors will only be employable as experts to testify against other doctors.

Here’s what I’m saying: If Peter Angelos can suck enough money out of the economy to buy and run a bad baseball team, I’m betting I can suck enough money out of your local economy to make you sorry, at least a little. Now, do we have an understanding? Good. Now I know that tomorrow you will do the right thing.

Or else.

The first and most obvious statute that would apply to the interception of virtually any email from an email inbox is the Stored Communications Act, 18 U.S.C. 2701 et seq. This act provides that any person who:

(1) intentionally accesses without authorization a facility through which an electronic communication service is provided; or
(2) intentionally exceeds an authorization to access that facility; and thereby obtains, alters, or prevents authorized access to a wire or electronic communication while it is in electronic storage in such system shall be punished as provided in subsection (b) of this section.

Subsection (b) basically provides that for a first offense, you can be fined or put in jail for a term of less than one year or five years. The five year penalty is authorized “if the offense is committed for purposes of commercial advantage, malicious destruction or damage, or private commercial gain, or in furtherance of any criminal or tortious act in violation of the Constitution or laws of the United States or any State[.]” I’m betting the Government can find a way to make “in furtherance of a tortious act” stick in this case on an invasion of privacy theory. Note that the civil portions of this statute have been used against persons who came by passwords by nefarious means, or merely continued using a password after they should have known that the use was no longer authorized, not merely “hackers.”

That’s right, guys. Five years. I’d get my plea bargains or tissue expanders ready. Your choice.

The second statute which might possibly apply is the Wiretap Act, 18 U.S.C. 2510 et seq. The Wiretap Act is a much more difficult statutory scheme to encapsulate, but it has been interpreted by most courts to apply to the interception of electronic communications (such as emails) only if such communications are intercepted simultaneous to transmission. This is, of course, nearly a technological impossibility, and in any event, appears to not apply to this case, since the hacker apparently retrieved the emails after they had reached Palin’s inbox. There is a minority view that the Wiretap Act should still apply to emails that are held in “temporary electronic storage” such as en email inbox, but there is a persuasive argument (noted by the First Circuit en banc in United States v. Councilman) that the Patriot Act specifically removed electronic communications retained in temporary electronic storage from the purview of the act so as to provide greater latitude to the Government to retrieve things such as voicemails without the strictures of the Wiretap Act. This reasoning would seem to apply to the Wiretap Act as well. However, in the event that a Court did not adhere to this view, not only would all those who intercepted the emails be criminally liable, but also all those who either use or disclose the emails knowing that they had been illegally intercepted. So there’s a nice happy thought for Gawker and all the other websites that are posting the emails right now.

A third statute which might possibly apply (depending upon the method used to intercept the emails) is the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, 18 U.S.C. 1030 et seq. As with the Wiretap Act, the statutory scheme of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is somewhat difficult to navigate, and some Courts require an act of actual hacking or virus spreading before the CFAA will apply. However, a broad reading would apply the CFAA to every individual who accesses a protected computer or exceeds authorized access and thereby either obtains a thing of value or causes loss. Courts have used this statute to find defendants civilly liable for, among other things, using bots and scrapers to obtain unauthorized information off of websites – even public websites – when the person utilizing the bot or scraper knew that they were not authorized to access the website in that manner.

This isn’t even getting into my favorite part: RICO. Magical, wonderful RICO, which catches everyone wrapped up in this little game right now. Because one of the questions working the backend of the internet right now is whether the hackers got Mrs. Palin’s file by asking for her password from Yahoo!, using personal information to answer the security question Yahoo! would ask. Where would they get that? you ask. I can think of one likely source. In point of fact, I can think of several, one of which is largely run by a fellow known for professional grade astroturfing. You can put the pole-like objects together, I’m sure.

And I can think of the enterprise so easily.

The intrusion into Sarah Palin’s email inbox was not merely a scummy invasion of privacy. It was also almost certainly a federal crime, one that the FBI and Secret Service are investigating. (And the Secret Service tends to look at this sort of thing … personally.) This isn’t merely part of “politics ain’t beanbag,” it’s criminal. And anyone encouraging these criminals or utilizing the fruits of their crimes is tossing in with the criminals. I think we’ll see in the next couple of days which side the media and Obama’s campaign (but I repeat myself) stand on.

And guys? All that time being scared of John Ashcroft all those years ago? This time, it’s for real.

Game on, cretins.

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* I once referred to these folks as “ghoulish and deranged,” and another time as “yard apes,” a term I learned from reading Garfield comic strips when a child. I hereby apologize for the slurs I’ve therefore leveled on the undead, the murderously psychotic, and primates who run wild in garden areas.