The Supreme Court struck down ROE V WADE today.
Who's to blame?
There's a lot of blame to go around. We need to be sure to blame our so-called friends.
You know the ones, the people who have betrayed us repeatedly. Do not encourage them by being a doormat now.
ROE V WADE on Thursday June 24, 2022 did not mean what it meant when the ruling originally came down. That's because politicians have repeatedly watered it down. Year after year.
It's so important, Joe and Nancy tell us, it's a woman's right. It's healthcare, it's about fairness and --
I believe that.
But if they truly believed that, how do they explain doing nothing to assist working class women and women in poverty? Those were the first women targeted when ROE became the law of the land.
The politicians talk really good but they don't do a damn thing.
They stood by, the entire Democratic Party, year after year, as ROE V WADE was gutted and watered down and they had arguments over trimesters and wanted to look 'reasonable.'
Look, here's one of the liars now, Hillary Rodham Clinton:
Really, Hilly?
Because I wasn't born yesterday and I damn well remember even THE NEW YORK TIMES being shocked by you joining the chorus of the post-2004 election with claims we needed to back off abortion and we needed to do this and that.
"Shared ground."
Did you forget that? Were you too busy last night worrying who Bill slept with to remember what you actually did? January 2005, Patrick Healy's "Clinton Seeking Shared Ground Over Abortions" ran in THE NEW YORK TIMES.
Hillary, you weren't fighting for abortion rights, so don't pretend that you were. You're one of the reasons -- and a symptom of the corruption -- that landed us here.
Don't try to be SHERO when you've been a backstabbing, self-serving shrew.
The Democratic Party knows women think they have no where else to go. Many Republican women began fleeing the Republican Party to go over to the Democratic Party -- that waves began in the 80s -- due to that party's anti-choice stance.
Year after year, women were lied to and we were used.
To the younger generation: Be smarter than we were.
(Which, honestly, won't be that hard to do.)
We believed the liars. We believed that they gave a damn. The liars who showed up at election time to tell us that we had to vote for them to keep abortion legal.
These liars never fought for abortion.
They just wanted our votes.
That's why we have the current make up of the Court.
They voted for these people. The Democrats didn't stop Alito. They could have. I'm not Senator _____'s former lover that he left crying in the halls of Congress after the Alito vote -- and if I weren't biting my tongue right now, I'd throw her to the wolves because she was another one of our 'friends.' Glad you got some senatorial dick _____, shame you didn't do what you were supposed to for abortion rights.
You did it. We saw it. I know what your meltdown was about. You were blubbering, no one else wanted to talk to you and, as usual, someone shoves me and says, "Go comfort her." You were an embarrassment then, you're a bigger one now. This is on you and anyone else in a pro-choice group that saw their role in DC as whoring around with male politicians. You weren't doing what you were paid for -- unless the male members of Congress were paying you, dear.
And let's be clear that I'm not speaking of Cecile Richards.
No, problems with Cecile are that she's a weak ass who never should have been put in charge of a serving line -- let alone Planned Parenthood. "Abortion Barbie," Is that what we're going to remember her for? That turn of phrase. The idiot didn't help abortion rights and wouldn't have known how. She accomplished nothing in her life except for riding on Mommy's coat tails.
Now I loved Ann Richards. But my love for her does not mean I think we need to put her half-wit daughter in charge of a pro-choice organization.
She got a year book credit -- she did nothing -- but Cecile got a year book credit and isn't that enough? Shouldn't we all be happy?
No.
It's not enough.
These are fundamental rights and not only did politicians lie to us and use us but our so-called leaders did as well and we saw so many inept women elevated to positions of power when they had no experience and when they repeatedly accomplished nothing.
We needed a voice, an advocate, not someone slipping into bed with Senator ____. We needed women who knew how to fight not women playing footsie under the table with the senator while they insisted to us that they were focused on our needs.
A lot of liars brought us to this moment.
That does include Ruth. Yes, RBG. Ruth Be Gone.
It's a shame Barack Obama was not Fitz on SCANDAL. Had he been, he could have just taken care of her like Fitz did with Supreme Court Justice Verna.
Ruth gambled. She gambled with our rights. We didn't give her the okay to do that.
And let's stop the nonsense about why she did it.
She did it for 'female solidarity.'
Not with you. No, she didn't care about you. She didn't care about the average woman.
Ruth refused to take her sick ass off the Court the way Barack asked her to (begged her to) because she KNEW Hillary was going to win and she was going to announce her retirement right after Hillary was sworn in so that Hillary could appoint a woman justice -- the First Woman President!!!!! Appointing a woman to the Supreme Court!!!!!
I hope she got wet vag while she was fantasizing that.
I mean, I hope Ruth got something out of it.
Because we sure as hell didn't.
If you're not getting how politicians on 'our side' played you for years, think of the Global Gag Rule (aka Mexico City policy -- wherein if you take US funds and you're an organization in another country, you are forbidden from discussing abortion). A number of pro-choice organizations spent years whining like little babies about the Global Gag Rule.
'Oh, it's wrong' -- they told us -- 'Donate! Donate! Donate!'
And they never really pushed for it to be outlawed. That would require action. And they were in DC to party and to play, apparently to get some dick, and to play and, honestly, to betray.
These organizations are now using ROE V WADE being overturned to steal more money. (Again, real organizations do not put someone's daughter -- someone's ineffectual daughter -- into a leadership role just because her mother was famous.)
So the politicians in the Democratic Party could have ended the gag rule at any time. They could have passed a law. That is, someone remind Nancy Pelosi, why they are in Congress: To legislate.
But they didn't pass the law.
Instead, what we saw was a never-ending back and forth that treated women and women's rights like a political football while team Dem and team GOP did what they wanted.
Bill Clinton is president!! He'll do an executive order!!!
And he did.
And then Bully Boy Bush undid it.
And then Barack put it back.
And then Donald Trump undid it.
And they told two friends and they told two friend and they told two friends and so on and so on -- as the shampoo commercial used to say.
They did nothing.
The party didn't want to do anything.
They held women hostage each election cycle. (The same way that the GOP uses gun rights to hold people hostage each election cycle.)
At any point, they could have ended the Global Gag Rule on abortion with the passage of a law.
At any point, they could have codified ROE V WADE into law.
But to do so might mean lower turnout. If we can't frighten the women into voting for us, why will they????
They won't. You do nothing for women. You gutted the safety net which doomed families. That effects all children and it effects some men but it effects a huge number of women. Not a lot of dead beat Moms out there (though, if you are one, take comfort in having Melissa Etheridge as your poster gal).
This doomed the lives of many woman. It doomed the lives of their children.
But Bill and the Dems wanted to please big business ('reinventing government was the buzzword) and they wanted to show they were tough -- on the people most in need.
Their actions do not warrant voting for them.
If you're someone on the left, the Democratic Party's actions do not warrant you voting for them.
The last real attempt to help Americans was LBJ's Great Society program.
Look at right now, Biden put a privatization czar on the Social Security on the board that overseas Social Security. We were just noting that in yesterday's snapshot:
Joe Biden has destroyed the economy with his war of choice and yet a lot of idiots will continue to defend him. He is not your friend, he is not on your side. Matthew Cunningham-Cook (JACOBIN) points out:
Last month, President Joe Biden nominated a longtime advocate of Social Security privatization and benefit cuts to a key board overseeing the Social Security system. The move comes as Republicans get ready to push cuts to Social Security and Medicare, if they end up winning control of Congress during the November’s midterms, as expected.
The development suggests that there could soon be a coordinated push in Washington to cut the Social Security program, which provides retirement, disability, and survivor benefits to 66 million Americans.
On May 13, Biden chose to nominate Andrew Biggs, a fellow at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute think tank, for a Republican seat on the bipartisan Social Security Advisory Board, which was created in 1994 to consult the president and Congress about the Social Security system.
For years, Biggs has been a vocal critic of expanded Social Security and workers’ right to a secure, stable retirement free from the vagaries of the stock market. He has dismissed the retirement crisis as a nonissue and as recently as 2020 blamed problems with the Social Security system on “older Americans’ game of chicken.” And two decades ago, Biggs worked on a George W. Bush administration commission that pushed to privatize Social Security.
The fake assery of Joe Biden.
At the end of this month -- which is next week -- the provisions put in place for school lunches two years ago as the pandemic started will expire because Nancy Pelosi didn't fight for it.
Women have many issues to address. But the issue of children falls overwhelmingly on women. And the politicians don't give a damn. In 1980, Jane Fonda produced 9 TO 5. Where are our are onsite day cares? If you can visualize it or dream it, they're supposed to be able to build it. It was dreamed and visualized in the blockbuster film 9 TO 5, so where are they?
Time and again, what we need, we what we can identify as a need, is not delivered.
And time and again, Dems in need of votes talk a good game but, after the election, they deliver nothing.
Nancy, we're still waiting for all US troops to be pulled out of Iraq. We're still waiting. Harry Reid's excuse is that he's no longer in the Senate (and he didn't want to pull them out anyway) but what's your excuse.
Better question: What is your accomplishment?
Nothing.
Another year book credit, that's all Nancy being Speaker of the House was.
Women care about many things. And women haven't been served by Congress. Our needs have been ignored. Budgets have excluded us repeatedly because 'there just isn't money, you understand.'
There's not money for a mother without a job in this market but there's $54 billion to give to Ukraine?
Now some women like war. For example, there's a Hollywood starlet cheering on war on Russia who's married to a man who says he's bi. And maybe he is. But his last female partner noticed the same thing that his current wife endures -- when he drags one man after another into bed with them, somehow, the two men always end up with their mouths on each other. And the woman waits and waits and the men move further and further away from her in bed.
He's not bi, honey, he's gay. But he can't face it and apparently neither can you.
If there's anything sadder than being the beard it must be being the body pillow for a closet case.
At any rate, some women do like war. And some women are against abortion. And some women like women and some women are Queen Bees who want to be the only woman in the room. So speaking in generalities can be iffy. But there are issues that have majority female support and Congress and the White House -- regardless of party id. -- do not meet those issues, do not address them.
The only thing that the Democratic Party had for women was: Vote for us to keep ROE legal.
It's not legal.
It's been overturned.
The issue now goes state by state.
The only thing that would have saved it would be legislating it. But the Democratically controlled Congress refuses to do that.
As November approaches, they'll probably indicate that, if we turn out and vote for them, they'll do it next time -- the political equivalent of "Check's in the mail."
If they wanted to do it, they would have done it already.
Not just this year, but at any time.
Please note, Margaret Atwood wrote THE HANDMAID'S TALE in 1985. That's before many of you were even born.
They could have done it.
They refused to.
Shame on you if, as we did, you take them at their word and don't hold them accountable.
This is a very sad day for a lot of people.
I'm sure if you're a young woman, it's especially disturbing for you. Your whole life abortion has been a woman's decision -- as it should be. Now you're having to fall back to a scary time many of us hoped was in the long ago past and something no woman would ever have to go through again.
I apologize to every woman out there because I was part of the problem. I accepted what leaders said. Don't do what I did. You're much smarter than I am. When politicians start talking their game, make them back it up. And don't listen to your 'leaders' who show up to tell you who to vote for but don't call for action independent of politicians. Those women aren't leaders. They're making bank but they're not fighting for our rights.
I believed women who told me I was unreasonable to think we could end the gag rule by passing a law or that we could do this or that. We had to, these 'leaders' and 'activists' insisted, accept what we were given. And if you pushed back on that, because what they were advocating (silence and non-action) made no sense, you were told that you were being ungrateful.
And if you're dumb like me, you walked off thinking (as Cher would put it), "I am just one ungrateful little bitch."
No.
We should have demanded. I should have demanded. I can't change the past but I can urge you to watch closely for fake assery and to call it out when you see it.
We were betrayed and that's what today is about.
It's been one long betrayal.
Personally, I don't want to hear what the GOP did. By 1991, if you thought the Republican Party was your friend on abortion rights (or much of anything else), you were smoking something pretty powerful. The Republicans did what they said they'd do: Overturn ROE. They apparently got tired of playing football and wanted to go home.
But they couldn't have done it if Democrats hadn't betrayed us over and over and if we hadn't let them get away with it.
Today is a story of betrayal. To the younger generation -- male, female and non-binary -- you're smarter than we were. I don't have faith in politicians, I don't have faith in so-called leaders, but I do have faith in your ability and your strength to take up the fight and make this world what it needs to be.