McCain's Scumball Moment: The "Health" of the Mother

McCain is such a wiseass that he's virtually certain to get himself in trouble whenever he strays from scripted phrases.  I imagine even his most devoted handlers cringed on Wednesday night when Johnny Mac flashed that ghoulish, creepy grin (kind of like a Jack-O'-Lantern with its mouth closed) and made air quotes of the phrase "health of the mother" in ridiculing a vote of Barack Obama regarding late-term abortion in Illinois.  Intellectually insecure guys like McCain use sarcasm and superciliousness to compensate for a basic inability to grasp subtle arguments because they're fundamentally incapable of discussing details of policy questions. McCain thinks that if he chortles and rolls his eyes we'll get the idea what Barack Obama is saying must be flawed. The real reason McCain operates that way, however, as his academic record shows, is that McCain is just not very bright.  He's bound to go off the rails and look like a dunce if he chooses to argue constitutional law with a constitutional law professor.

So what was McCain trying to ridicule with his air quotes?  He was trying to laugh off the Supreme Court decision by Justice Harry Blackmun in Roe vs. Wade, where Blackmun carved out an exception to the general ban on criminal laws against abortion as follows:  

"(c) For the stage subsequent to viability, the State in promoting its interest in the potentiality of human life [p165] may, if it chooses, regulate, and even proscribe, abortion except where it is necessary, in appropriate medical judgment, for the preservation of the life or health of the mother."

So where the fetus is viable (can live outside the womb), the State has the option, if it chooses, to ban abortion except where the life or health of the mother is at stake.  This is what McCain was making fun of.  Imagine the demented cynicism it requires to put together the following scenario: a state chooses to make a constitutionally-required exception to its general ban on late-term abortions in cases where the health of the mother is at stake.  If the state is choosing to ban abortions at all, why would the state then make the "health or life" exception pretextual, that is, make the exception something that McCain could air quote?  Illinois State Statutes, Sec. 123:  "After viability of the fetus, an abortion is only permissible if the doctor is sure that live birth would strain the mother's back or hurt too much."  If a state wishes to allow late-stage or post-viability abortions, it can do so in a straightforward way.  Roe only limits the right of states to ban abortions where the fetus is nonviable.

McCain's argument implies that a state would pass a law with loopholes which a doctor and mother would exploit in a conspiracy in order to achieve compliance with an abortion restriction. Which the state didn't have to pass in the first place.  Logic tells us, nay compels the conclusion, that the result is precisely the other way: if a state is motivated to ban abortions after viability, then it will narrow the exception for "health or life of the mother" to the constitutional extreme, that is, make the exception as hard to use as possible.

Think this through and maybe you'll see what I mean.  It is yet another example of the many ways that McCain simply does not know what the hell he's talking about.  Like his argument about "Joe the Plumber," which McCain cited as evidence that Obama wants to "redistribute" wealth.  Earth to Dumbass:  the progressive nature of the income tax code does now result, and always has resulted, in the redistribution of wealth from the wealthy to the less wealthy.  That is why the home state of your beauty pageant running mate, Alaska, receives $1.83 from Washington, D.C. for every buck it sends to the capital.  I firmly believe that McCain does not realize that a progressive income tax has this inevitable effect, and that "redistribution" is not a new idea introduced by Barack Obama, but was inevitable once the 16th Amendment to the Constitution allowed an income tax in 1913.  This is because McCain married his income and his places to live and has simply never wondered how money works for everyone else.

If this idiot's elected, you can put away the deck chairs on the Titanic.  As George W. Bush said about the economy in general, this sucker's going down.