Todd Aiken: Republican Pixie Dust

"And what sort of places do these bottom-of-the-food-chain doctors work in? Places that are really a pit. You find that along with the culture of death go all kinds of other law-breaking: not following good sanitary procedure, giving abortions to women who are not actually pregnant, cheating on taxes, all these kinds of things, misuse of anesthetics so that people die or almost die."

--Todd Aiken, Republican candidate for U.S. Senate

It is not unusual for right wing spokesman from Rush Limbaugh to Todd Aiken to spew forth some free flowing, stream of consciousness invective, but what I tend to do with a paragraph like the one reproduced above is to hear it as a whole and categorize it in my mind and simply label it, "Weird, stupid right-wing stuff," shove it in the trash folder and think no more about it.

But could there be any value in teasing out its parts and trying to see how a mind can get this twisted? We do this with various sorts of diseases, and I imagine psychiatrists or psycho analysts must discipline themselves to do this sort of thing to analyze what this is saying about the person, just as a physician watching a man walking up stairs, stopping, grabbing the banister, wheezing and coughing must think, okay, this is the pathology which all this might signify.

The first thing which strikes you is this is a man talking about something he knows nothing, first hand, about. He is giving you his imaginings of what a doctor who performs an abortion is like, and about what the room in which he works must look like. It is something like the paintings of Hell, or of Dante's rings or levels of hell come from, that dark place in the mind which imagines hideous things. 

So, Mr. Aiken sees an unsanitary pit.  Of course, at least since Roe vs Wade, the black pits of back alleys have been replaced by spotless, stainless steel and tile operating rooms.

And what sort of person would do this sort of work? Well, he'd cheat on his taxes--odd sort of perfidy coming from a right winger, in that right wingers typically do not like paying taxes, so one would expect the offense of not paying them would  be high on their list of bad acts.  Another bad thing Aiken lists, is "misuse of anesthetics."  Again, one might expect this mind to conjure up blood and gore, but no, he talks about anesthetics, which are pretty undramatic sorts of drugs, at least in the pantheon of drugs he might have decided to talk about. Of course, you can anesthetize a patient and rape her, or kill her, so maybe there's more going on in his mind.

The last point, of course, is the most obvious:  How do you perform an "abortion" on a woman who is not pregnant?  But, I'll give him a pass on this, allowing he might have been referring to the procedure itself, a dilation and curettage (D&C), which you could do on a uterus pregnant or not.

Now, coming from a Rush Limbaugh or a Sean Hannity,  or especially a Glenn Beck, all this might be expected. None of these men got past freshman year in college, if I am correct. So they are simply ignorant and they have to create scenarios from their own fetid imaginations, rather than drawing from actual knowledge.  

But Aiken graduated with a degree in engineering from Worcester Polytech. This is not an untrained mind, and yet he drifts off on clouds of imagination, rather than remain tethered to the firm ground of reality. He, of course, has taken flight before, insisting that women who have been "legitimately raped" would not get pregnant because their bodies would shut that down.

But this is a characteristic of the rabid right, through and through: The desire to believe, without any real substantive evidence, despite all contrary evidence, and without actually investigating what the arguments are--well, a woman who really didn't want to have sex won't get pregnant.  The good ones are not punished. Their immune systems protect them.

 And the most amazing thing is it's happening in the internet age, when you can so easily go on line and check out the facts, the arguments.

My personal favorite is the man interviewed on the street, must have been South Carolina, or maybe Texas, who asserted, with utmost certainty, that President Obama is indeed not a legitimate President because he is not a "natural born" citizen because his father was not born in this country. "It's right there in the Constitution," he asserted. "You're not natural born if your father wasn't born here."

You could look it up. 

And, of course, I did. 

It's not in the Constitution. 

I'll save you some time: Article II Section 1. 

But for the right wing, it's all pixie dust. When you wish upon a star, makes no difference who you are, when you wish upon a star, your dreams come true.