Posts with the tag 'agenda'
You probably don’t know this, but Nick Hornby is my favorite fiction writer. If you haven’t read him before, you should. If you’ve seen the movie High Fidelity, he wrote the book it was adapted from.
Anyway, his most recent novel, Slam, is about a teenaged boy (who is obsessed with Tony Hawk and skateboarding) who gets his girlfriend pregnant — that’s a short way of explaining the story. Anyway, Nick Hornby has a blog, and a while back he wrote a blog entry that I thought may be of interest to you.
[Another] article in the Guardian [link] about how movies depicting pregnancy are somehow anti-abortion: after ‘Knocked Up’, it’s the new (and very charming) ‘Juno’ that is in trouble […] “Hollywood heroines who don’t consider abortion are of a generation taking its rights for granted,” is the misleading subtitle of Hadley Freeman’s piece. Actually, sixteen-year-old Juno does consider abortion. She goes to an abortion clinic and then changes her mind. I suspect that considering abortion isn’t enough, though – Juno needs to go through with an abortion, if she’s going to keep columnists off her case.
My book ‘Slam’, which is about a sixteen-year-old father, also got attacked on these grounds in at least one American review, so I have a special interest in this debate. Alicia, the boy’s ex-girlfriend, is determined not to have an abortion because she read pro-life propaganda on the internet, and can’t be persuaded to rethink her decision. I would like Hadley Freeman, my critic and all the others to explain, patiently and carefully, to Judd Apatow (the writer of ‘Knocked Up’, Diablo Cody (‘Juno’) and myself how we can write about pregnancy and unplanned parenthood without causing offence.
Nick Hornby is liberal, and obviously supports abortion, so I couldn’t help being amused by his blog entry. I remember thinking when I read Slam, or saw Knocked Up or Juno that some pro-abortion groups or individuals would take issue with the fact that in each of these stories which involved unintended pregnancies the mother-to-be made the conscious decision to keep the baby. Hadley Freeman, who wrote the Guardian article says, “It is surely no coincidence that these films are emerging from a country that has had eight years of ultra-conservative Republican rule.” Ahh, yes, how Republicans have such an impact on Hollywood!
Continuing in his blog entry, Hornby further refutes Freeman:
Should ‘Slam’, ‘Knocked Up’ and ‘Juno’ all end a third of the way through, with a visit to a clinic? Are these people really saying that you mustn’t write about pregnancy because you’re somehow letting the side down
Now, I’ve recently been reading a lot of fiction, and seeing movies more often than I have in the past. I expect that sometimes books that don’t even have an agenda will have things in them I don’t agree with. I’ve never gotten hot and bothered over a book or a movie because a character had an abortion. Neither of the two movies or the book had an agenda against abortion. Their stories were still entertaining and I don’t see why anyone who is pro-abortion can’t enjoy them just because abortion was not chosen by the characters involved.
If abortion is really about “choice” (as the left says it is) then the choice of life shouldn’t be seen as a setback to the movement be it in life or in entertainment. Though I guess some people think it is. Can the pro-abortion movement not find happiness in the “choice” of life? Apparently not, if they get so worked up over the choice of life in fiction.
Tags: abortion, agenda, debate, Nick Hornby
February 15th, 2008
As improvements in Iraq continue, the anti-war left have failed to force us to retreat, and thus are changing their strategy…
After a series of legislative defeats in 2007 that saw the year end with more U.S. troops in Iraq than when it began, a coalition of anti-war groups is backing away from its multimillion-dollar drive to cut funding for the war and force Congress to pass timelines for bringing U.S. troops home.
In recognition of hard political reality, the groups instead will lower their sights and push for legislation to prevent President Bush from entering into a long-term agreement with the Iraqi government that could keep significant numbers of troops in Iraq for years to come.
Remember what the Democrats a claimed they’d be able to do if they were in the majority. They said they’d get us out of Iraq. But they couldn’t. In the end, defeatism lost. It was their main priority as the majority. And they failed… as they’ve failed with so many other things on their so-called agenda… and it’s not just because Americans reject their liberal platform. It’s also because of their lack of leadership and incompetence.
Tags: agenda, defeatism, Iraq
January 17th, 2008
John J. Pitney Jr., writing at National Review, explains how Barack Obama’s “message of unity” and calls for change are neither new, or genuine.
As I explained on NRO nearly a year ago, Obama is echoing what George W. Bush said in the 2000 campaign. In fact, if Obama’s speeches were term papers, I’d report him for plagiarism. “Our country has unlimited potential. But our politics is broken — at least in Washington,” Bush said in California on October 30, 2000. “You know what’s wrong, Washington is obsessed with scoring points, not solving problems.” In another California swing a month earlier, Bush said: “I’m going to reject the ugly politics of the past, where people felt like they could get ahead by tearing down their opponents.”
One could argue that Bush was merely spouting political pap — but that’s the point. The “unity” message has been old for a long time. Here’s another example:”I saw many signs in this campaign. Some of them were not friendly. Some were very friendly. But the one that touched me the most was — a teenager held up the sign `bring us together.’ And that will be the great objective of this administration, at the outset, to bring the American people together.”
That was Richard Nixon, after his election in 1968.
I suggest you read the whole thing, but the main thing you need to get from it is that anyone can claim to be a uniter, and anyone can claim to be the agent of change. But it’s just rhetoric. Those claims don’t mean anything. As Mark pointed out earlier, Obama’s “change” mantra is meaningless because he hasn’t gone into specifics. He doesn’t go into specifics because his idea of “change” is even more liberal and extreme than even Hillary Clinton’s.
Still, even his idealistic calls for change and unity, and his railing against the status quo and politics as usual are lies. Pitney explains,
Like so many politicians before him, he speaks lofty prose while leaving the wet work to underlings. Eisenhower had Nixon, who later had Agnew. Obama has David Axelrod, among others.
Axelrod has been Obama’s chief political adviser for years. In 2004, Obama defeated millionaire Blair Hull for nomination to the Senate after sordid details of Hull’s divorce came out. Obama didn’t talk about it in public. But according to David Mendell, the reporter who broke the news about the divorce papers, Obama’s campaign “worked aggressively behind the scenes to fuel controversy about Hull’s filings.” And says the New York Times, many in Chicago “believe that Axelrod had an even more significant role — that he leaked the initial story. They note that before signing on with Obama, Axelrod interviewed with Hull.”
So let’s recap. Barack Obama is a senator today because his campaign exploited his opponent’s messy divorce. This is a miracle that qualifies him for secular sainthood.
And should I really have to mention Tony Rezko and other questionable deals/actions by Obama?
Obama is getting through this campaign because of the brand he is presenting. He’s not giving an accurate portrayal of who is, what he’ll do, or where he’ll take our country.
Tags: agenda, Barack Obama, blogs, Hillary Clinton, National Review
January 7th, 2008
A Muslim girl was murdered by her father, reportedly for her refusal to wear a hijab.
Where is the outrage in the streets from this woman’s sisters at NOW? A perusal of their website denotes no outrage, not even a mention of this story, nor any other story of oppression and/or torture of women at the hands of male Muslim counterparts!
Oh, they’re having a bloody cow over the reinstatement of Don Imus. But of course, calling someone a “nappy-headed ho” is a much more an egregious offense than strangling a girl to death, or mutilating her genitalia. They’re lobbying Congress for “hate crime” legislation, but I’ll bet not one word is said about the hate crimes that are perpetrated daily against their Muslim sisters.
Where are the demonstrations in the streets? Where are the hoardes at U.C. Berkeley who protested the supposed torture practiced by the CIA? (yes, I know that waterboarding is much more heinous than murder and beheading or lifelong subjugation of women)
Where is the outrage on the Left regarding the murder of Aqsa Parvez?
Could it be that there is no political gain or agenda to be advanced in demonstrating against Islamist atrocities? Could it be that the moonbat left has a problem pointing out that which may actually give credence to the reasons behind our war against radical Islam?
Could it be that the suffering of women isn’t really important to them at all?
Could it be that there must be a political payoff before they’ll demonstrate about anything? Or that any outrage that they do display is contrived and calculated to get the maximum political benefit?
Could. It. Be?
Tags: Acts of Hatred, agenda, Islam, Liberal hypocrisy, torture
December 19th, 2007
Democrats like to talk a lot about there so-called agenda, and some Democrats, try to trump up an alleged record of accomplishment since their return to the majority.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, is one of those Democrats who seems to think the Democratic Majority is actually doing a good job, according to Politico, Hoyer said, “I don’t think you can really point to a failure that we have had in the House of Representatives in terms of legislative policy we wanted to pass.”
Oh, really? Another Politico story (by the same authors even) notes that “Democrats have had no substantive success in changing policy.” Even their “success” in raising the minimum wage wasn’t exactly what they wanted. They had hope for a clean bill raising the minimum wage, but had to settle for attaching it to a war supplemental bill in order to get it passed. It most likely would have died otherwise.
No matter how you look at it, Democrats haven’t accomplished much this year, and their incompetence and lack of leadership is showing… I don’t know what House Steny Hoyer is talking about, but it isn’t the same one the rest of the country is watching.
Tags: agenda, Democratic Majority, incompetence, minimum wage, Steny Hoyer
December 12th, 2007
