Murphy Brown

I've been thinking about this.  I remember the Murphy Brown kerfuffle and Dan Quayle's moment of glory.  How strange that is, how somebody can be so close to the presidency at one point and how utterly forgotten they are later.  Well not necessarily forgotten, whenever he pipes up something
Guliani gets press, and nobody lets a quip by Mama Grizzly fall to the ground unnoticed.  On the other hand I think they realize that the more outrageous thing they say the more ink they get and that motivates them to go further to the fringe and they just become more clownlike.  Why can't they be like genial old Fred Thompson and hawk something like reverse mortgages and quietly collect a steady paycheck and not be all the time shoving their faces into the media?

But anyway, Dan Quayle and Murphy Brown.  The big controversy was Murphy Brown, a television character, was having a child out of wedlock, and Dan Quayle spoke out against it because he thought tv was setting a bad example.  Kind of crazy thinking that tv is telling us how to live and we are following their example.  But anyway it got him his face in the public eye and there was talk of him getting into the current primary, but he had no follow up, and soon faded away and spent the rest of his life playing golf.  I think he is still alive, but I'm pretty sure he will spend whatever time he has left playing golf.  What is it with golf?  I think it establishes you as a regular rich guy.  Does Mitt Romney play golf?  This sent me to the google where I entered 'Mitt Romney golf,' and out popped that very question, 'does Mitt Romney play golf,' so I guess others have been wondering. The answer is he doesn't.  Poor Mitt, he is not even a regular rich guy, just a peculiar man.

But anyway the Murphy Brown controversy was because there were all these stats about how poor unwed mothers were and how poorly their children fared, and here was Murphy Brown promoting it on tv.  Again I don't know how many of those single women were watching Murphy Brown and deciding that if she had a baby so would they, but that never dampens a good controversy.  Maybe because of Murphy's tv job, something in the media, she became associated with the left and so the left was accused of trashing morality, and the left came back, chiefly through the women's movement (you know the women's movement is a strong reliable component of the left, so the rest of the left tends to back them wherever they go, but we also do that because we all know what comes of crossing a woman.  They have no sense of humor.  Don't let any liberal woman know I said that.), with the idea that Murphy was rich and would do okay with the kid, but the problem with these other women, and of course there is a racial component to this, is not that they are immoral, it is that they are poor.

You know there is this religious thing where having sex is bad, period, regardless of whether it results in pregnancy or vd or whatever.  And it's not enough for you, the believer, to abstain yourself, God wants you to make everybody else abstain too, so you should make laws keeping them from doing it. and punish them for doing it, and certainly having a baby is a punishment.

Except that the punished don't always see it that way, they think, look I have this adorable baby, and now I am a mother, I am somebody.

But when all the work and expense of having a baby becomes apparent, the baby is not so adorable, and soon the mother has to have help, and, since we are not barbarians, that means we, well off guys like you and me, and all those religious people who don't like contraception have to dig into our wallets, so we are the ones who get punished.

You know that Chinese law limiting babies, a lot of people think it is terrible, but I think it was a pretty good idea.  More on that later.