No, not that Newt. The other kind...
Leonard Pitts ties the vaccine issue to the rest of modern truthiness.
I call it the Secret Knowledge. ...
don’t know when the mania for Secret Knowledge began. Maybe it was when King and the Kennedys were killed and some of us could not shake a gnawing suspicion that the stories we were told were not the whole truth. Maybe it was when a man walked on the moon, and it was so amazing some of us refused to believe it had happened. Maybe it was when Watergate shattered public trust. Maybe it was when The X-Files fed a shivering unease that we inhabited a world of lies within lies.
But if we can’t say for certain when the mania began, the fact that it’s here is beyond dispute. Indeed, it has spread like, well... measles. ...
Authorities say much of this resurgence is due to the refusal of a growing number of parents to vaccinate their kids. The parents think the shots are dangerous, citing a 1998 study by a British doctor who claimed to have found a link between vaccinations and autism. As it turns out, that study was debunked and retracted, and the doctor lost his license. But the alleged link lives on, fueled by Jenny McCarthy, who has become a front woman of sorts for the anti-vaccination movement.
Bad enough the Secret Knowledge drives our politics (Barack Obama is a Muslim from Kenya), our perception of controversy (Trayvon Martin was a 32-year-old tough with tattoos on his neck), our understanding of environmental crisis (there is no scientific consensus on global warming) and our comprehension of tragedy (9/11 was an inside job). Apparently, it now drives healthcare, too.
Actually, it was always Secret Knowledge that drove healthcare. Modern medicine is a modern invention, and it's still pervaded by "alternative" practices (homeopathy, I'm looking at you) that are based on active ignorance and direct opposition to science.
So maybe we shouldn't be surprised that an area of our lives so deeply drenched in vapors and humors would be so hard to drag into light. That doesn't mean we shouldn't stop dragging.
Now drag yourself inside and see what everyone else is talking about.
Ross Douthat naturally has something to say about the president's prayer breakfast speech.
President Obama, like many well-read inhabitants of public life, is a professed admirer of Reinhold Niebuhr, the famous mid-20th-century Protestant theologian. And more than most presidents, he has tried to incorporate one of Niebuhr’s insights into his public rhetoric: the idea that no society is innocent, and that Americans in particular need to put aside illusions about our own alleged perfection. ...
These comments were not well received by the president’s critics — as, indeed, his Niebuhrian forays rarely are. In the past, it’s been neoconservatives taking exception when Obama goes abroad and talks about our Cold War-era sins. This time, it was conservative Christians complaining that the president was reaching back 500 or 1,000 years to play at moral equivalence with people butchering their way across the Middle East.
The funny thing is that, having read Douthat's entire article, it's hard to tell that he said anything at all. He's proud of his construction of "Niebuhrian" and uses it a lot, and... um, yeah. That's about it.
Ruth Marcus examines not the President's speech, but the reaction.
Such is the daggers-drawn state of political discourse in Washington these days that President Obama could go to the National Prayer Breakfast, call the Islamic State a “brutal, vicious death cult” — and still end up being assailed by conservatives.
Obama’s offense? He dared to note that Islam is not the only religion to have been perverted to justify violence and atrocity. ...
Thus, former Virginia governor Jim Gilmore’s (R) over-the-top reaction to Obama’s remarks as “the most offensive I've ever heard a president make in my lifetime.” Obama, Gilmore thundered, “has offended every believing Christian in the United States.”
But wait, that’s not all. More Gilmore: “This goes further to the point that Mr. Obama does not believe in America or the values we all share.” Okay, if you’re one of the hordes of 2016 presidential hopefuls, maybe you’ve got to ramp up the rhetoric to have your voice heard, but really, this goes too far.
See! It turns out that Christian crusades aren't all in the distant past. We've got one going on right now. It's just that the target isn't Muslims.
Nicholas Kristof on the vaccine issue.
In a few backward parts of the world, extremists resist universal childhood vaccinations. The Taliban in tribal areas of Pakistan. Boko Haram militants in Northern Nigeria.
Oh, yes, one more: Some politicians in the United States.
Senator Rand Paul — a doctor! — told CNBC that he had delayed his own children’s immunizations and cited “many tragic cases of walking, talking, normal children who wound up with profound mental disorders after vaccines.”
After an uproar, Paul walked back his remarks and tweeted a photo of himself getting a Hepatitis A vaccination. After that irresponsible scaremongering, I’d say he deserves to get shots daily for a decade. With really long needles.
I'm happy enough to see the anti-vaccine position associated with idiots like Paul. Though in this case, I'd prefer to see the issue championed by no one at all.
Arthur Caplan has a suggestion on how to handle doctors who voice opposition to vaccines.
Amateurs and hucksters are not the only people telling parents not to vaccinate their children. Unfortunately some doctors — men and women sworn to the Hippocratic Oath — are purveying junk science. They say that vaccines cause autism, as in the famous case of Andrew Wakefield, whose study drawing the link has been retracted. Or that measles isn’t that bad, so your child can skip the shots, as Jack Wolfson, a cardiologist in Arizona, says, adding that “the facts” show vaccines to be full of “harmful things” like “chemicals.” Or that, according to some parents, vaccines cause “profound mental disorders,” as Sen. Rand Paul, an ophthalmologist, warned before he walked the statement back. Or that vaccines cause “permanent disability or death,” in the words of Bob Sears, a pediatrician in California. ...
Doctors who purvey views based on anecdote, myth, hearsay, rumor, ideology, fraud or some combination of all of these, particularly during an epidemic, should have their medical licenses revoked. Thankfully, states have the right tools to do so. It’s time to use them.
In Rand Paul's case, he'd just write himself a new license. Probably in crayon.
Dana Milbank on the GOP's New / Old Obamacare alternative.
Congressional Republicans took a novel approach to announcing their Obamacare alternative this week: out with the old and… well, back in with the old.
On Thursday, the Senate Finance Committee put out a news release announcing “Burr, Hatch, Upton Unveil Obamacare Replacement Plan.” The three men, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (Utah), House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (Mich.) and Sen. Richard Burr (N.C.), are well-regarded legislators, and the press went along with this “news.” ...
Forbes cheered “The Impressive New Obamacare Replace Plan from Republicans.”
“Take a look at the first real Republican ‘Obamacare’ alternative,” suggested The Examiner. ...
But Caroline Behringer, the eagle-eyed press secretary for Democrats on the House Ways & Means committee, was suspicious that this “urgent” and “explosive” new proposal had just been “devised.” So she did some sleuthing and discovered that the Republicans had lifted the thing — right down to quotes in the news release — from the rollout of the same proposal a year earlier.
Well, if you're going to vote for fifty shades of pointless rollback, you might as well paper it over with fifty versions of the same old plan.
Ronald Krotoszynski finds a judge who got things right in Alabama.
William Faulkner famously observed that, in the South, “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Faulkner’s observation aptly describes contemporary events in Alabama, where Chief Justice Roy Moore has been urging officials, including state court judges, to flout a federal court order holding unconstitutional a provision of the Alabama constitution that bans the recognition of same-sex marriages. Moore has denounced the ruling of U.S. District Judge Callie V.S. “Ginny” Granade as an example of “judicial tyranny” and promises that he “will continue to recognize the Alabama Constitution and the will of the people overwhelmingly expressed in the Sanctity of Marriage Amendment.” In his view, “lower federal courts are without authority to impose their own interpretation of federal constitutional law upon the state courts,” and “there’s nothing in the Constitution that allows the United States Supreme Court or federal district courts to redefine marriage.”
Moore’s constitutional logic is deeply flawed. Simply put, under the Constitution, federal law is supreme. It necessarily follows that an order from a federal court that enjoins state officers from enforcing an unconstitutional provision of state law binds all officers of the state. To its credit, the Alabama Probate Judges Association has recognized that it must comply with Granade’s order. Probate Judge Greg Norris, president of the association, said that it is “clear” that Granade’s injunction binds all state officers.
A nice piece that looks into how tactics like those of Moore were used, and continued to be used, to erode civil rights, and how federal judges, in particular Judge Frank M. Johnson Jr. stood up to the threats and actions of George Wallace.