The ultimate hypocrisy of being anti-abortion and anti-Obamacare

I feel the need to get something off my chest on what is just about the liveliest third-rail topic in any country's politics.

One of the things that has bothered me for a very long time (amid a very long list) about those who scream from the rooftops that the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare") is going to destroy civilisation and America's health care system ("the greatest in the world" unless you use pretty much any metric used to measure the quality of health care systems) is the fact that very, very many of them identify as being anti-abortion (or "pro-life" as they would like to put it).

Watch The Daily Show's Asif Mandvi render a Fox News correspondent speechless while covering "the greatest health care system in the world (if you are outside the US you are going to have to Google the video and try and find it yourself this time!)

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Now, there are of course all sorts of arguments to be had about when life begins and if and when abortion should be an appropriate option for a woman to have, but we don't need to go into that here.  What we do need to do is to take, at face value, the beliefs of people who call themselves pro-life, that they believe that abortion is murder.  Not only murder, but the most wicked and nefarious form of murder: the murder of a totally defenceless child (so defenceless that it couldn't even survive outside its mother's womb).  And to make matters worse, the person instigating this heinous act, is none other than the child's own mother.

Viewed from that perspective and holding those views, abortion really is a very wicked thing.

Biden Launches his Bid on the Daily Show

Senator Joe Biden launched his bid for the Democratic Presidential nomination on Wednesday. Unfortunately, it was accompanied by the most awful series of gaffes about his Democratic opponents, in particular a few very badly chosen words that were meant to compliment Barack Obama. You can see more below in what has now become the de rigeur 'Daily Show' interview that accompanies any figure in the Democratic Party when they have something to say.

I have to say I like Joe Biden, and think he could well make a good president. He also has a lot of the superficial qualities needed to win the nomination and election - he is telegenic, handsome, good hair, a sense of humour, interviews well, has three decades of experience in the Senate (he was elected to it aged 29!), strong foreign policy credentials. I'd vote for him over John Edwards any day of the week.

On the down side, 'Joe' is from Delaware, a state whose main handicap is its size and where 100,000 votes gets you elected. He also has an occasional scatter-gun approach to things, quite often particularly his mouth, which will undoubtedly land him into more hot water between now and the convention in '08.

I am unsure about Biden's plan for Iraq, which involves turning Iraq into a loose confederation, combined with more regional diplomacy. If the political will in Iraq existed for such an arrangement I could be persuaded of its merits, but at the moment I am just concerned that confederation is the last stop on the way to partition and the break-up of Iraq, and the regional disaster that would entail. But to his credit, long before the Bush administration, or indeed most of those within his own party, had a plan of action for Iraq, Biden had the cojones to get out there with Leslie Gelb and put something forward.

But as I said. I like Joe Biden, and while I don't think he has much of a chance of getting the nomination, or even successsfully positioning himself as the 'Neither Hillary nor Barack' candidate (for which there is room for only one - currently Edwards), he will bring something to the campaign that is to be welcomed.