I, for one, am happy with a perfect first family. Aside from all the obvious stuff, I was really sick of the dry drunk with the daddy problem, his enabling wife, and their sorority brats-turned-Stepford-Wives (also heading for a lush life, I'm sure).

Sorry, I don't think the Obama girls, on the other hand, are going to come home with tattoos and piercings. They seem too well-adjusted. I know the area well where they were brought up and the kind of people who live there, and you know what? There are a lot of people there like the Obamas. When you live in a city, in a neighborhood where there's a major research university and a lot of Section 8 housing and everything in between, you have to be well-adjusted.

And when I was about six, Amy Carter was my hero for bringing a book to a state dinner. (Maybe that's the problem the lipstick feminists have with her.) And in retrospect she really was a cute kid, and the Carters were, actually, nearly close to perfect themselves, as families go. Character is everything, and they had it in spades.

I guess the dark undercurrent of all this is that, well, their public perfection has to be airtight...like Jackie Robinson's. Jesus, you should have seen the crazies crawl out from under a rock over at the Washington Post in response to a Robyn Givhan article on Michelle Obama's staffing changes. If there's no visible flaw, those people have to make s--t up.

Oh, wait, they're here too. I'm not sure why Michelle would be jealous of any other world leader's wife. That would suppose that statesmanship was like high school. I suppose if you never got much farther than that, you might think it was.

http://www.labdepotinc.com/c-480-homogenizer.php

I remember seeing an advertisement for a similar piece of equipment--a blender-like device that could essentially puree a whole mouse in thirty seconds. (The mouse, I assume and fervently hope, had been quickly and humanely dispatched.) This is used to pulverize once-living, animate, complex small mammals for research and training purposes.

I'm not an anti-vivisectionist, exactly, although I suspect that a lot of animal experimentation probably isn't necessary. I do, however, appreciate that a lot of important treatments for life-threatening diseases and other research that contributes significantly to human welfare involves animal suffering, to a certain extent.

These small animals are living and breathing. They have eyes and paws and prehensile tails. Their brains aren't as complex as those of humans, of course, but they do have intelligence which other creatures in the animal kingdom do not have. They can learn. They are capable of affection of a sort. They even seem to have a bit of personality.

What makes it all right to pith a mouse (impale its head on a sharp spike) and then stick it in a blender and grind it into tissue indistinguishable from that of the rest of its litter but not to destroy an embryonic human long before it's capable of pain or fear?

For that matter, why is it all right to cheer on the destruction of living children in faraway countries but to wax melodramatic, hysterical, and stalkerlike over the termination of offspring who are still largely theoretical?

I suspect that it does, indeed, have less to do with respect for all life as sacred and more to do with the expectation that the chief responsibility and purpose of women should be to reproduce. If men could get pregnant, the right to a prompt, safe, and private abortion would have been the second amendment, with the right to own guns a distant priority.

I expect all anti-abortionists forthwith to join PETA, become vegetarians, and refuse to pay their taxes until we pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan, dismantle our Department of Defense, and ban the federal death penalty.

If those who are anti choice really and truly believed that abortion is murder then among their demands there would be a demand that women who seek an abortion be charged with attempted murder.

Because deep down, they want that option too. Anyone who hasn't seen this article (linked to my signature, below) about pro-lifers who go so far as to curse the clinic staff performing their own abortions really should--my jaw hit the floor and stayed there when I read it.