Ted Cruz said: "Buzzfeed — the leftwing site — y’all know Buzzfeed?"

"Yesterday they did a whole series of graphic pictures basically showing that I was promised one thing on Obamacare and here is what I’m left with.... Look, when Buzzfeed is turning on him, this thing isn’t working."

He was talking about this.

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"To adapt H.L. Mencken, nobody ever went broke underestimating the cynicism and self-dealing of the American political class."

"Witness their ad-libbed decision, at the 11th hour and on the basis of no legal authority, to create a special exemption for themselves from the ObamaCare health coverage that everybody else is mandated to buy."

... The lesson for Americans is that Democrats who passed ObamaCare didn't even understand what they were doing to themselves, much less to everyone else.

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"On Obamacare, Republicans test the definition of insanity"/"Buyer’s Remorse from ObamaCare Backers?"

Headlines paired at Real Clear Politics.

The first one is from Dana Milbank at The Washington Post. The second one is from Seth Mandel at Commentary.

I figure I can move on, they cancel each other out/I don't need get my head scrambled up and my brain dragged about.

“It’s all been designed,” he said, “to make you lose your mind
And when you go back to find it, there’s nothing there to find
Every time you look at it, your situation’s worse
If you feel it grabbing out for you, send for the nurse"

It = TV, in that old Dylan song, but let's interpret it to include the internet, there being no Dylan song about the internet. Not explicitly, anyway.

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"How can you have a right to something that would require another human being to do something with his/her body, when the other human being has a right over his/her body?"

I asked in yesterday's post about about "The developing status of sexual surrogates for the disabled, as part of a right to health and well-being." Reader MDT (who can email me if she wants her full name on the front page) writes:

But this is a problem with all "positive rights." If you have a right to shelter, then someone else has a duty to supply you with shelter. If you have a right to food, then someone else has a duty to grow it and supply it to you. If you have a right to health care, then someone has a duty to treat you. Contrast with the rights in (say) the Bill of Rights, which are almost entirely concerned with what the government can't do to you. (The Sixth and Seventh Amendments, dealing as they do with jury trials, do involve compelling other people to act in order to secure the right.)

If there is, in crude terms, a "right to get off," I don't see how it could rationally be confined to the disabled.
Even if it were limited to people suffering from named medical conditions, erectile dysfunction is one such, and therefore Viagra, Levitra, and the like would be a patient's right. And, outside the medical sphere entirely, there are any number of people who simply find it difficult to get laid. What to do about them? More surrogates? Maybe a government-employed squadron of them?

And I agree that Hamblin's conflation of love and sex is idiotic. There are people who are physically incapable of having sex who are loved. Lots of them.

So Laetitia Rebord wants to be a blonde dominatrix. She will never be that now, whether the French Government decided to spot her a gigolo or not. That is what fantasies are for.

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"The developing status of sexual surrogates for the disabled, as part of a right to health and well-being: So wrong?"

"Surrogacy involves paying a professional who engages in intimate contact (broadly defined, though certainly not always intercourse) with a patient."

In March, the French National Ethics Committee decided that sexual surrogacy was an "unethical use of the human body for commercial purposes."Anne-Marie Dickelé of the National Ethics Committee justified it to Rousselle: "The sexuality of the disabled cannot be considered a right."

But some French people like Laetitia Rebord, who is confined to a wheelchair due to spinal muscular atrophy, are campaigning passionately against the committee's decision. She's 31, a virgin, and wants to have sex -- "In her sexual fantasies, she is a fit and impetuous blonde who dominates her male partners." As she told Rousselle, "Eventually, one has to address the issue and understand why we are demanding this. I can't move. I can't masturbate."...

As the world increasingly sees health care to be a human right -- Kathleen Sebelius and Barack Obama understand health care to be "not some earned privilege, it is a right'' -- it might seem a leap to not only fail to address sexuality in caring for people with conditions like Rousselle's, but to go the additional step of precluding them from procuring it for themselves. Holland, Switzerland, Denmark, and Germany agree.

How can you have a right to something that would require another human being to do something with his/her body, when the other human being has a right over his/her body? I suppose you could frame it as a right against criminalizing the activities of sex service providers who restrict their business to the disabled. This reminds me of medical marijuana as a leading edge in the movement to legalize marijuana. It seems like a steppingstone to the legalization of prostitution for anyone who wants to buy it, because who will count as disabled enough for the authorization to buy what is criminalized for everyone else?

The public will be drawn in with empathy for people like the young virgin Laetitia Rebord, who will be like the emaciated, elderly cancer patients who were the face of the medical marijuana movement. Once you define a category of persons who may partake of the forbidden activity, others will cadge their way into the category. It will involve so much stretching and lying that pragmatic, flexible folk will cave in and say: It would be better to legalize it for everyone.

But as long as we stay in the medical framework, as we talk about legalization, we're also talking about health insurance coverage. Will we be paying for the select group of medical marijuana users and disabled consumers of sex services? The pragmatic, flexible folk may say: All the more reason to legalize it for everyone, so that it's not a health care service, just something people with the cash are able to buy. But that step is crazy — unless your agenda all along is to legalize marijuana and prostitution — because the most sympathetic consumers are least likely to have the money to buy the product/service. What's the point of using the Laetitia Rebords of this world to leverage policy change only to leave them unable to benefit from the new policy?

That's the practical problem, in my view. I don't want to pay for prostitutes for everyone with a medical condition — obesity?! depression?! — that impedes the pursuit of sexual activity.

Oh! But I'm saying "prostitutes." Was I supposed to say "surrogates"? But why, really? More from the link — which goes to a piece by The Atlantic's health editor James Hamblin:

Surrogacy does not replace a loving relationship, and it should't [sic] be expected to. We don't refuse the help of a physical therapist because it won't be as good as having never gotten hit by a bus to begin with. When real love is on the table, take it. When the table is missing, or someone's axed the legs, then there are surrogates.

Axed the legs... What a harsh metaphor! And right when you're trying to teach us to say "surrogate" and not "prostitution." And are prostitutes/surrogates really the alternative to "real love," deserving of the presumption that anyone who could get real love would surely go for the real love? People opt for prostitutes over real love all the time.

And why are we prompted to use the term "real love" to mean sex with someone you are in love with? I think it's because we're being lured into thinking that disabled people are denied something more than sex. They are denied love. Give them professional sex, because they are denied love and sex. They are denied a "right to health and well-being." That's supposed to make sense to you.

You're being softened up. Have you noticed... are are you so squishy for Laetitia you're too numb to tell?

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"Of all the stretches of executive power Americans have seen in the past few years, the president's unilateral suspension of statutes may have the most disturbing long-term effects."

"As the Supreme Court said long ago (Kendall v. United States, 1838), allowing the president to refuse to enforce statutes passed by Congress 'would be clothing the president with a power to control the legislation of congress, and paralyze the administration of justice.'"

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"A somewhat dismissive response."

Instapundit says, somewhat dismissively. 

I suspect he wouldn't want to hear my truly dismissive response, but if you search the comments at my somewhat dismissive response... and over here... you can extrapolate what it would be. I'll cherry-pick some clues as to what I would say if I chose to go hard-core on this subject.

Quoting a commenter who said — about my proposal that health insurance pay for vasectomies and men freeze their sperm in order to provide males with reproductive autonomy — "Point of order, the woman has a right to seek an abortion. There's nothing about anyone having to provide it to her or having Other People pay for it," I said:

That's true, and that is something that makes the proposal in my post not neatly about equality.

But there really can never be equality about pregnancy and childbirth. It is the woman's special burden, and the policies have to be arranged to make sense around that basic inequity. I'm not trying to punish men by imposing a corresponding inequity, I'm just not impressed by the whinings of males who were profligate with their sperm. They are not the backbone of society.

The backbone of society is the married, committed couple who channel their sexuality into making and growing the next generation. Those who do other things are free to make choices, but we as a society have no reason to facilitate their choices, especially their destructive choices.

I know people like their free sex, but the expectation that the rest of us will save them from consequences is pathetic. I heartlessly laugh in their face. 

Quoting a commenter who said, "Your logic is correct for our pathetic society, but that doesn't rob from how pathetic it is," I said:

Yeah, but that's my point. My real prescription isn't [the vasectomy/frozen sperm proposal]. This is a fall-back now that we've become pathetic.

Really, men need to keep track of their genetic material. One way or another.

Don't be a splooge stooge.

Quoting a commenter who said "Women are just as responsible themselves..." I said:

I never said they weren't.

Both are fully responsible.

And, on the earlier post, quoting a commenter who said "Let's try applying your logic the other way. Women are free to freeze their eggs and then have their tubes tied. That way they have perfect choice not to get pregnant. So that does away with the case for abortion, right?" I said:

The fact is, once a woman is pregnant, she has a right to use abortion to get out of the physical process that has begun, but it is too late for the man to exercise a right, because his rights relate to his body, not hers.

The man must take responsibility for himself, not seek to control the woman.

I know you men would like to have your fun and freedom and not be troubled by risks, but your body is yours and her body is hers.

Reacting to all the many, many comments from men who have taken Instapundit's invitation to victimology seriously, I said (punctuation corrected):

There are some really sad beta posturings in this thread.

Where is the self-respect?

Where is the awe over procreation?

Lame little men, whining about their meager money.

No one cares about you, because no one should!

Where is your aspiration? Where is your altruism?

Why do you leave the house?

You have your porn and your masturbation.

The alternative is true manhood, but is that something you are capable of? Apparently not!

I laugh in your scrunched up crying little face.

Another commenter said "You are also forgetting that even if a condom is used and the woman fishes the condom out of the trash and uses a turkey baster to impregnate herself, the man is still held responsible. If a woman takes a used condom from a man having sex *with a different woman* and impregnates herself, the man is held responsible. If a man and woman only engage in oral sex and the woman saves the sperm for later use with a turkey baster, the man is held responsible. None of that means that the man has any actual *rights* in regards to the child." Which made me say:

I am absolutely not forgetting about that.

Men need to value and guard their genetic material.

The lameness of men who throw this stuff around is mindboggling. Don't be [a] splooge stooge.

Now, I think women shouldn't want to invest their reproductive effort in such idiots, but that's the other side of the story.

And (emphasis added):

The men who are saying: I want something because women have something.

You guys...

If you don't have the wherewithal to realize what you are... you are no longer men, and women should be rejecting you. I can't account for all these women, but at least, if they become pregnant, they take on an immense burden. They feel that.

You guys... I wonder if you feel anything at all.

You are unworthy. The reason something ought to save you from becoming fathers is that you are unworthy, but unfortunately, it seems that some women do still choose to have sex with you and even to bear your children.

And that -- THAT! -- is what you complain is your misfortune.

Amazing blindness. Your misfortune is so much worse than that.

And somebody said: "Then there are cases like the one (likely more than one...), where a woman who performed (only) oral sex with a man, using a condom, retrieved the condom and inseminated herself, and successfully sued for child support. IMO if a man does something that physiologically cannot produce conception without the woman's deliberate and willfully deceptive action, he is not responsible in any way for the conception." And I said:

I don't know why a woman would invest her reproductive effort in carrying forward the genes of such a man, but I have no sympathy with him at all.

Your phrase "physiologically cannot produce conception" is obviously wrong, since it did.

I fear for the future of humankind, with such stupidity in our inheritance.

The man is an idiot, and the woman is an idiot. Maybe the child can rise above it.

But sympathy for this man who has no love and no self-respect? Why don't you save your compassion for someone who deserves it?

This men's rights stuff was old-hat in the 1980s. Recycling it now is the lamest thing I've seen in a long, long time.

If you really cared about men, you'd try to do something to elevate them, as I am trying right now. Instead you are inviting them into a downward spiral. This is worse than The Life of Julia.

The whining and crying about what victims men are these days continued way into the night. In the morning I saw a comment that began with the burnt-out old internet expression "sigh": "Sigh. And yet a wife can make the choice to abort her kid without even telling her husband. Shoudnt they be consulting their husband?" I had to take another shot:

Yes, and that's exactly the reason Planned Parenthood v. Casey gave for striking down a statutory requirement that a woman consult her husband.

Think about it.

And stop your sighing.

Picture me singing that last line like this:



UPDATE: Glenn responds to this here, and I respond to that here.

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