Believe It - Or Don't

I haven't posted anything for a few days because I've been (1) working, (2) dealing with stuff that isn't working but still has to be taken care of, and (3) trying to put together a coherent post that will serve as a follow-up to last months "The Rule of Law of Rule - Part the First: Freedom's Just Another Word for Nothin' Left To Lose."

Really, I'd wanted to have finished that post tonight and gotten it up.  There are many things I want, of course.  But as the Stones made clear, you can't always get what you want.  And neither can I.

Anyway, I really did want to be finishing that Rule of Law of Rule thing, but there's this actual work I have to do and then, anyway, my friend Kathy G sent along the news that this guy

was actually elected to office by the people of the Louisiana's 4th Congressional District.

That's not actually the news she sent.  The news she sent is that John Fleming (that's him in the picture), who happens now to be serving his second term as Congressman from Louisiana's 4th, is deeply concerned about the "Abortionplex" Planned Parenthood just opened in central Kansas.

The 900,000-square-foot facility has more than 2,000 rooms dedicated to the abortion procedure. The abundance of surgical space, Richards said, will ensure that women visiting the facility can be quickly fitted into stirrups without pausing to second-guess their decision or consider alternatives such as adoption. Hundreds of on-site counselors are also available to meet with clients free of charge and go over the many ways that carrying a child to term will burden them and very likely ruin their lives.

Here's a picture of the facility.

Here's a picture of Barak Obama's birth certificate.

Which of these is fake?

I don't know what Rep. Fleming would say about the birth certificate.  But we know what he thinks about the Abortionplex because he alerted his facebook faithful (another reason I'm not on facebook) to the horror.

So let's be clear.  If you, like Rep. Fleming, believe in an abortion facility complete with

coffee shops, bars, dozens of restaurants and retail outlets, a three-story nightclub, and a 10-screen multiplex theater—features intended not only to help clients relax, but to foster a sense of community and make abortion more of a social event,

you believe in fantasy.

The Abortionplex story (and therefore the photo of the facility) came from The Onion, a satirical paper.  You know, it makes shit up.  As in, it's not true.  It's a joke.

OK, maybe it wasn't Fleming himself.  Maybe he's got some junior (or senior) staffer keeping up his facebook pages.  So maybe he's not the gullible fool.  Maybe he just hires gullible fools.

Which is perhaps good for the dimwitted (they need work, too), but probably not great for the rest of us.

The real problem isn't Fleming (except to his constituents and to the people of the United States and the world).  The real problem is a willingness to believe stuff that has no relationship to reality and a refusal to accept evidence to the contrary (though the story about Fleming believing the abortionplex story says that he's "obviously deleted" his facebook post).

Which is, of course, why I chose the Obama birth certificate as the counterpart.  Because to birthers, any evidence that Obama was born in the USA is obviously as fake as an Onion story.  But I could have chosen, instead, this picture.

Which kind of makes the same point.

And did I mention, these folks are eligible to serve on juries?