Evening News: Let's Talk About Sex!

• From a Mitt Romney campaign email.
  

  Team Mitt Action Center (TMAC) is HERE!

  We have launched TMAC, an online social networking platform that shares features common to popular social networks like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn. TMAC empowers you to make a direct, positive impact on the campaign.

  
  I'm curious to know what kind of people hang around a Mitt Romney social networking site, but not curious enough to join it and find out.
  
  
• Joe Biden said the other day that "The solution to our situation in Iraq is, quite frankly, more important than who will be the next president," which is why he was focusing on campaigning for that rather than campaigning for president. It's just a coincidence that he happened to be in Iowa. Right.
  
  
• Huckabee is making the same tired, ill-considered abstinence analogy that uncreative, unquestioning religious zealots have been making for ages: promoting safe sex education is like encouraging such-and-such bad behavior through implicit acceptance (in this case, drunk driving and domestic violence). I call bullshit. The obvious response to this is that sexual craving isn't a learned behavior, it's something that your body chooses for you. Sex isn't the same as drunk driving, because an assortment of glands didn't give you the keys to a car, and they sure as hell didn't brew your beer for you. However, an assortment of glands did provide a biological imperative that says "orgasms are fun!" Second, let's deal with the assumption here that sex is a bad thing. Sex can become a bad thing when people are reckless about it: emotionally and physically. However, there's nothing implicitly "bad" about sex, and it is often quite a good thing. Huckabee himself is married and has three kids, so I'm sure he's found it a wholesome, rewarding and invigorating enterprise. And the great thing about condoms is that they can help minimize the physical repercussions of something that, let's face it, people are probably going to do anyway. Finally, this assumption Huckabee is making a value judgment, that sex is a sinful behavior and should be discouraged. However, millions of people across the country are bound to disagree with that value judgment, and aren't going to abide by his value system. What happens to those people who won't be educated as to the options for having sex safely and responsibly, but who will not embrace Huckabee's personal value system? Is God punishing them for their sin by giving them AIDS? Or is it Mike Huckabee punishing them for disagreeing with him by not teaching them how to avoid it? I'm not advocating anonymous mass orgies in the streets, I'm not downplaying the value of monogamy or the safety of chastity. However, this reckless denial of natural human instinct and the very existence of differing value systems is dangerous.
  
  
• During the early parts of his presidency, when he was popular, people used to say how much George W. Bush was like Ronald Reagan. Well, now he gets to be Reagenesque in another way: he's apparently getting Alzheimer's. See kids? This is why you don't scorch your brain with whiskey and blow.