The Mother's Health is a Loophole?

John McCain lost it tonight.

His attacks may have appealed to some of the base, but his comment about allowing abortions in cases where the mother's health is at risk was the shot heard round the world.

Husbands, wives, and mothers-to-be do not regard the mother's health as a cynical political calculation. They regard it as a matter of sacred responsibility.

Buried within that comment, in my opinion, was core misogyny, the inquisitorial Malleus Malefacorum of Rightwing domestic policy.

Underlying that remark was a profound, pretty much psychotic contempt for and distrust of American women, and a tellingly fearful exaggeration of the influence of the Female in shaping American public policy. Here was a male child confronted with the power of his mother, confounding that primal relationship with public discourse about a woman's right to control her own body.

What McCain didn't recognize in making that remark was how revealing it was of the man himself, and how revealing it is of the male-dominated anti-woman's-right posture. What it revealed to me, again, for the umpteenth time, is that this is not someone I want anywhere near the lever of social or foreign policy.

And is it me, or do John McCain's eyes come across on the television screen as exact replicas of the dead, black eyes of devils in TV serials? When the camera closed in on McCain, his eyes dominated the screen, and it wasn't a reassuring picture.