Sarbanes-Oxley, tariffs, NCLB, Medicare Part D, dramatically increased government spending, mark-to-market regulations, TARP, auto bailouts, waging a war against a secular country of no strategic interest and then allowing soldiers to get killed through restrictive self-abnegating ROEs, nation-building, PEPFAR... These things all cost real people their lives or their livelihoods. And the Republicans paid the price for going along with them. But Bush was the leader. He bears responsibility.

If Bush hadn't taken the policies he did, there would be nothing that the progs could do to make the American people disillusioned. He failed because of his own actions.

Katrina

It is rationally undeniable. Obama got elected because Bush's failures disillusioned the American populace. Bush is to blame for Obama's election. Bush is to blame for the financial crisis, Medicare Part D, NCLB, tariffs, faith-based federal funding, Sarbanes-Oxley, TARP, auto bailouts, getting into the Iraq quagmire, the SOFA with Iraq, and increasing the size of government dramatically. No one made him do those things. His legacy was that Democrats won Congress in 2006, and they got 60 votes in the Senate in 2008. And we got Obama.

A fetus is not formed. It does not have a formed brain. Its brain is not capable of functioning; it has no sense perception. It is not a human being. It is a clump of growing cells. The woman may have high hopes for it, but the fetus is only a potential, not an actual human being. There is just no way around this reality. A thing is what it is. The slaveholder argument was Biblical. There was slavery in the Bible, so it flatly did not go against God's will. Secondarily, they argued that slaves were treated well and had good lives.

Mud, unmarried men should not have to pay child support. And yes, the woman should have to pay for her own medical care. If her insurance company foots the bill, fine. If not, she has no right to agitate for laws mandating that they cover it.

Basset, she did not create a "human life" or anything else. She carried a fetus, which is not an actual human being. And she certainly does not owe excuses to the government, either for the sex act or for the abortion. Perhaps the context of the sex was immoral, but that is not the government's business. Earl, I have read the abolitionism literature, and abolition was never called inconsistent with individual rights - that is absurd - it was always the pro-rights position. "Preborn" is not a category of human being. Rationally speaking, fetuses do not have rights. They just don't. They are what they are.

Dave, your argument is inherently dishonest because if I deny that I have had abortions, then it is like I am acknowledging that they are inherently immoral. But you are right that I have a conservative nature. My comments seem "cold" to you because you have crazy ideas on this subject and are unopen to reason. I truly do not understand your mentality. People kill animals all the time for food and so forth. We kill in war. I don't understand this sudden feminine-nurturing mentality in males when it comes to fetuses. Our culture will end if men lose their objectivity.

Excuses to whom? She does not owe anybody an explanation or an excuse. If she wants to get an abortion, she has the right to get one.

I am not concerned about crime stories, either, even though actual human beings died. They interest some people, but they are necessarily small scale. I am concerned with the big picture, and so should Townhall be. And the big picture is that we are in national decline precisely because of the philosophy and mentality of anti-abortionists: Irrational, emotional, rights-violating, putting parasites over humans.