Left Jabs

  As I personally digest the possible consequences of this election, I expect to be writing more sporadically through the end of the year. This will surely involve several repeats of previous posts, starting with this one. I wrote this piece in July of 2022 — just as the shock of the Dobbs decision was setting in — and I think I unintentionally creeped some people out. It was, by a wide margin, my least-read post, even as it offered a highly practical workaround for women wanting to end a pregnancy. Now, with the abortion landscape likely to deteriorate — and with the availability of abortion pills under threat from several directions — I am quite sure this workaround is worth another look.  There is no reason why a safe, dirt-cheap, non-medical procedure that’s in widespread practice worldwide shouldn’t be part of the abortion discussion. So here, with light edits, is my case for menstrual extraction.   I am quite sure most Americans have never...

Late afternoon on Election Day, before the dismal returns began coming in, I was copied on an email from a friend of a friend, a guy I’ve never met in person, but who has been a reader of this blog for several years. John’s story was terrifying when I first read it, but as that unhappy evening wore on, it grew into a sort of metaphor for what was happening to the rest of us. Trust me, John’s night was worse than ours. He and his wife Julie spent it in fear for their lives. They had been living their dream retirement in the wilderness of Western Montana, on a mountainous property four miles from town, but two miles from their own mailbox. To them, this was an idyllic lifestyle, a home in the woods, exactly what they wanted. But in recent months, it had all turned dark, and the blame is entirely Trump’s. As long as a year ago, John had written privately to several friends, including me, about the extreme Trumpy-ness of his adopted region. There was trepidation,...

Nothing mattered, in the end. Not the probable dementia, the unfathomable ignorance, the emotional incontinence; not, certainly, the shambling, hate-filled campaign, or the ludicrously unworkable anti-policies. The candidate out on bail in four jurisdictions, the convicted fraud artist, the adjudicated rapist and serial sexual predator, the habitual bankrupt, the stooge of Vladimir Putin, the man who tried to overturn the last election and all of his creepy retinue of crooks, ideologues and lunatics: Americans took a long look at all this and said, yes please. —    Andrew Coyne , Globe and Mail   Leave it to a Canadian columnist to give voice to my utter disgust. Canadians, of course, had no say in our election, but they’ll be hugely affected by it, and not in a good way. The same goes for Mexico, most of Europe, Ukraine, and — come to think of it — just about every country in the world. We just told most of them to go to hell. Shame o...

  As you probably know, I publish this blog on Tuesdays, so I’ve written this piece with no knowledge of today’s election outcome. Under the circumstances, I had to think more than usual about what I wanted to write.  With everyone’s anxiety levels turned up to eleven, I’m quite sure I have neither illumination nor comfort to offer at this late date, least of all to myself. So I’ve decided to talk about the heroes of the election, win or lose: women. If the American Experiment is to be extended for at least another four more years, it will largely be because women willed it to happen. Yes, the Dobbs decision made it easy for them to turn rage into votes. And yes, the rise of Kamala Harris made it easy for them to fall in love with a candidate. But I like to think they’d have stepped up anyway. It was only two weeks ago, though it seems much longer, when Harris dared to appear on Fox for an interview with Brett Baier . Remember? Nobody expected her to ...

  It took a full eight years to indelibly etch the word ‘fascist’ into Trump’s forehead, but better late than never. It needs to be called what it is. Fascism is not a popular pastime, anywhere in the world. Just in the last two years, in countries where more-or-less free elections are still conducted, overwhelming numbers of voters stared into the abyss of institutional fascism, and said hell no. In Poland , a fascist regime had been in place for ten years, yet against all odds it was emphatically shown the door. In France , a dozen famously fractious parties came together to give a collective middle finger to Marine LePen and her far-right minions. In the UK, the ongoing catastrophe of Brexit finally led to the overwhelming rejection of the Conservative party — not exactly fascist, but close enough — which had been corroding the underpinnings of the nation for decades. The common denominator in all three of these electoral thumpings was massive turnout, dr...

  There are those who would have you believe that Trump has “softened” his position on abortion. This is, of course, ridiculous. It presumes that he actually has a position to soften, which would require an actual thought process, something no longer in his skill set. Trump, we can safely say, has no fixed position on anything. He’ll tell whatever lie he thinks might get him through the next news cycle, and you can practically hear the hundreds of recent lies clanking against each other in his brain. His abortion stance, if you can call it that, is not a reliable indicator of future performance. Trump cares nothing about abortion, and as long as his friends can get one, he doesn’t mind if you can’t. If he can use the issue to rally his dwindling base, his personal beliefs will be immaterial. But if you want to know how Trump is supposed to feel but doesn’t, look no further than JD Vance. Whenever you need the language bent to accommodate whatever lie the ant...