Abortion Should Be Mandatory for Pregnant Teens

You don’t need a rich imagination to picture the scene. In the Alaska governor’s mansion, a pair of parents and their visibly pregnant teenage daughter sit on a dead bear sprawled across a couch they had to have shipped because there isn’t an Ethan Allen in Anchorage. On a second sofa, on the opposite side of a glass coffee table festooned by the exoskeleton of a giant crab, fidget a second set of parents and their son, a.k.a. The Extremely Nervous Boyfriend. Heads of dead animals line the walls.

“Levi, Levi, Levi.” The governor pauses, reveling in the others’ discomfort. Moments like this are how she earned the sobriquet Barracuda.

She leans in. “You little s—. You knocked up my daughter. Do you know how close your little sexcapade came to screwing up my plan for global domination? Now you’re going to do the right thing.”

A few days later, Extremely Nervous Boyfriend blinks under the bright lights of a stage in St. Paul, elevated to the even more challenging role of America’s Unhappiest 18-Year-Old. I met a guy the night before he was executed. Levi Johnston had the same look in his eyes.

Sarracuda’s 17-year-old fry was nearly as miserable. “Bristol Palin made the decision on her own to keep the baby,” the McCain-Palin campaign claimed in its press release. Did the daughter of the mother of all anti-choice governors really have a choice? Well…

By pro-life standards, Sarracuda is an extremist. Parting ways with five out of six Americans, she’s against abortion even in cases of rape and incest. For Bristol, doing the “right thing”–carrying the baby to term, getting married, being paraded across 37 million TV sets–was the path of least resistance.

In reality, Bristol is doing the wrong thing. She’s having the kid. She’s marrying the father. Three lives will likely be destroyed.

Even pro-choice liberals are afraid to speak the truth: teen marriage and parenthood are disasters for everyone concerned. I have serious problems with well-off married couples who decide to terminate their pregnancies for frivolous reasons. Conversely, abortion ought to be mandatory for people under 18. Twenty-five would be better. Teen marriage should be banned.

Anyone who went to high school knew a student couple where the girl became pregnant. What the unlucky couple decided to do about it would determine their future. The girls who had abortions went on with their lives. They graduated from high school and, if they were headed that way before the dipstick turned pink, continued with college and careers and all the other stuff young people are supposed to go on to do.

Then there were the girls who kept their babies. With few exceptions–I’ve never heard of any, but I imagine they exist–it was the wrong decision. Their lives were ruined.

Many never graduated from high school, much less college. Their futures were grim: low educational attainment doomed them to dead-end jobs in the low-wage service sector. Married too young and under pressure, most wound up divorced. Many never remarried, or married stepfathers who barely tolerated their children. Their kids, raised in poverty in families led by single, stressed-out young moms, were themselves likely to repeat the cycle of downward mobility by getting pregnant in their teens.

Obviously, there are exceptions: teen pregnancies leading to lifelong partnerships with high school sweethearts, loving stepparents, daughters of 15-year-old parents making $1 million a year. But in most cases, studies confirm the anecdotal evidence.

Having kids and getting married too young are a prescription for unhappiness.
Teen moms are more than twice as likely to drop out of high school. “The National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy reports that less than 40 percent of women who have a child before the age of 18 will graduate from high school, compared to a high school graduate rate of 75 percent for those who delay parenthood until their early twenties,” law professors June Carbone and Noami Cahn wrote in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Teen brides are ten times more likely to plunge into poverty. In 2005 University of Rochester economist Gordon Dahl found that “that a woman who marries young is 28 percentage points more likely to live in poverty when she is older.” A 1993 study by the Annie E. Casey Foundation determined that only 8 percent of women who finished high school, married before having a child, and married after age 20 became poor. 79 percent of women who didn’t do these things wound up poor.

As the daughter of a possible future president, Bristol Palin probably won’t be poor. (Although prominent figures, like Bill Cosby and Alan Keyes, do disown their children.) Even setting aside Levi’s famous MySpace page (“I don’t want kids”), his pending marriage to Bristol is probably doomed.

When teenage girls become pregnant, eight out of 10 of the fathers never marry them. One can hardly blame the runaway grooms, considering the probable outcomes. A 2002 study by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services indicates that 59 percent of couples who marry before age 18 split up within 15 years. But waiting a few years markedly increases a marriage’s odds: 64 percent of couples who get hitched after age 20 are still married 15 years later.

I’ll say it again: There are exceptions to every rule. Guys smoke two packs a day and live be to be 100. I’ve driven 115 miles per hour and I’m still here. But neither smoking nor speeding are smart choices. One should be illegal; the other is. Society sets rules and regulations and laws to cover common situations and typical outcomes. On the matter of teen pregnancy and marriage, the typical outcome is terrible.

Those who keep silent about Levi and Bristol’s bad decisions–especially those marketing them as examples to be emulated–are doing society a disservice. Levi and Bristol are about to compound one tragedy (unplanned teen pregnancy) with another (involuntary marriage). They’re setting a terrible example for other teenagers who will find themselves in their situation.

Congress should act to protect these kids from themselves–ban teen marriage, mandate teen abortion.

(Ted Rall is the author of the book “Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?,” an in-depth prose and graphic novel analysis of America’s next big foreign policy challenge.)

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

Experience is Overrated. What About IQ?

Until four years ago, no one had heard of our current Democratic nominee. “Who is Barack Obama?” asked CBS News after he was picked to deliver the keynote address at the Dems’ 2004 confab. “Not exactly a household name.” Four years later, that speech remains his biggest achievement. No landmark legislation bears his name. His claim to fame is his gift of gab.

But Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s newly-minted fame makes Obama, saddled with a resume so thin he pads it with the entry “community organizer,” look like an elder statesman. Governor of one of the nation’s least populous states for a mere two years and the ex-mayor of a municipality that’s home to 7000 souls, Palin is now positioned to be a proverbial heartbeat away from the ability to order ICBMs fired at Russia. (On January 20th McCain, a cancer survivor and hardly the picture of health, will be two years away from the average life expectancy for an American male.)

At least Obama went to law school. Along with a solid background in history, knowledge of the law is essential for a president.

Palin is a total unknown. A McCain adviser admits to The New York Times: “The campaign’s polling on Mr. McCain’s potential running mates was inconclusive on the selection of Ms. Palin–virtually no one had heard of her.”

Welcome to the year of the nobody, when people you’ve never heard of can blog or reality-show or, in the case of the political class, schmooze their way to fame and fortune. My favorite nobody of 2008 was a kid named Efraim Diveroli, the fast-talking 22-year-old president of a two-man arms trading outfit by the name of AEY, Inc. (Speaking of thin resumes, his business partner was a masseur by trade.)

On the strength of a charming smile and the lowest bid, the Pentagon awarded this joker a $300 million federal contract to supply munitions to the U.S. puppet government in Afghanistan. Three hundred million dollars!

“By 2005, when Mr. Diveroli became AEY’s president at age 19, the company was bidding across a spectrum of government agencies and providing paramilitary equipment–weapons, helmets, ballistic vests, bomb suits, batteries and chargers for X-ray machines–for American aid to Pakistan, Bolivia and elsewhere,” reported The Times. Alas, all good things end. Diveroli’s firm sluffed off a bunch of repackaged, outdated and substandard Chinese-made shells from Albania to the Afghans, who knew enough about war materiel to complain to their American masters.

Lest I make myself misunderstood, I’m not claiming that experience is a reliable indicator of performance. The members of George W. Bush’s cabinet had collectively spent more than a century of their lives serving in federal government. That didn’t prevent them from bankrupting the treasury or standing by passively as a hurricane destroyed New Orleans. Nor am I impressed by fancy credentials. As many financial services workers can attest, few employees are more poorly prepared for real-world economics than those with MBAs. Journalism schools produce stenographers, not journalists.

Resume entries aside, history shows that certain personality traits–especially intelligence and open-mindedness–make for better presidents. Also helpful are a variety of life experiences, such as familiarity with other countries and cultures and overcoming tough times.

By most measures, Palin is a weird choice. Like Geena Davis in the 2005 TV series “Commander in Chief,” she could wake up one morning to find that McCain has shuffled off to the great POW camp in the sky. We would probably be in trouble.

As far as we know, Sarah Palin faced her biggest personal challenge a year ago. According to official accounts, she learned that she was pregnant with a child with Down Syndrome. She decided to keep him. It has to be heart-breaking. Still, as a right-wing opponent of abortion rights, however, the decision not to abort had to have been simple to make. Also on the knocked-up front, she and McCain actively attempted to cover up the fact that her 17-year-old daughter has a bun in the oven. Icky, icky. Zero integrity points for sucking up to the Christianist Right.

Palin’s teen daughter intends to carry the child to term–a decision one hopes she was able to make free of pressure from her ambitious mother.

More worrisome is an incurious intellect that dovetails regrettably with Palin’s past as a beauty queen. “Ms. Palin appears to have traveled very little outside the United States,” reported The Times. “In July 2007, she had to get a passport before she visited members of the Alaska National Guard stationed in Kuwait.” Yet Anchorage is a major hub for flights to Japan, Korea and China. She never felt like checking out Canada?

Asked about rumors the Alaska governor was being considered as McCain’s running mate, she told CNBC: “As for that VP talk all the time, I’ll tell you, I still can’t answer that question until somebody answers for me what is it exactly that the VP does every day? I’m used to being very productive and working real hard in an administration. We want to make sure that that VP slot would be a fruitful type of position, especially for Alaskans and for the things that we’re trying to accomplish up here for the rest of the U.S., before I can even start addressing that question.”

“Working real hard”? Doesn’t the University of Idaho require its graduates to learn English? Does she know that she isn’t running for VP of Alaska? Or that the VP presides over the Senate? With the nation facing enormous economic, political and military challenges, do we need another numbnut in the White House?

At least Palin knows something many other Republicans don’t. “We are a nation at war,” she told Business Week, “and in many [ways] the reasons for war are fights over energy sources.” Palin has grammar trouble. But she knows why we’re in Iraq.

Two of Palin’s opponents in the 2006 Alaska governor’s race were baffled at Palin’s lack of substance. “She wouldn’t have articulated one coherent policy and people would just be fawning all over her,” Republican-Independent Andrew Halcro told The Times. “[Democratic candidate Tony Knowles] and I looked at each other and it was, like, this isn’t about policy or Alaska issues, this is about people’s most basic instincts: ‘I like you, and you make me feel good.'”

God bless America. We’re going to need all the help we can get.

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

Obama on the Ropes

Democrats are fired up about Obama. Belying Will Rogers’ adage that as a Democrat he didn’t belong to any organized political party, this year finds the DNC uncharacteristically well funded and startlingly organized. Running against an incumbent likely to go down as this country’s worst leader in history, Democrats couldn’t ask for a more favorable political climate. “Watergate is the last time things were so overwhelmingly tilted against the Republicans,” Duke University political scientist David Rohde tells the Bloomberg wire service.

McCain ought to be a pushover. At a time when Americans are tired of Iraq as well as the “good war” against Afghanistan, the GOP standard bearer’s narrative is military: career Navy, POW, wants to send more young men and women to Iraq.

Yet the latest Gallup poll (conducted August 22-24) has Obama neck and neck with McCain, with 45 percent each, with a two percent margin of error. CNN (August 21-23) yields identical results, a 47-47 tie with a 3.5 percent margin of error. What’s up?

This year’s presidential race, as I’ve been saying for months, is Barack Obama’s to lose. And though he hasn’t committed any major gaffes–no joy rides in any tanks or senior moments when asked how many houses he owns–he hasn’t taken the swings he needs to wallop this thing out of the park.

Obama leaves nothing to chance, coolly hugging every twist and turn of the campaign trail with pre-2000 Rovian efficiency. His campaign’s professionalism is a welcome departure from the witless incompetence that has characterized the last eight years of federal governance. But it comes at a price–the same joylessness of inevitability that killed Hillary in the primaries.

Joe Biden is yet another sacrifice to the gods of pragmatism, a chance to boldly seize the moment squandered. Memo to future campaign managers: don’t con millions of saps into telling you their cellphone numbers so they can get a personalized spam telling them about your VP pick an hour after it’s announced on TV. Even better, don’t make a big deal about your VP unless your VP is a big deal.

In 1996 Bob Dole enjoyed a nine-point bump in the polls after announcing Jack Kemp as his running mate. Bush and Gore in 2000 and Kerry in 2004 picked up between three and five percentage points after naming their veeps. The Biden bump was zero. Amazing but true–Joe Lieberman was a bigger asset than Biden. In Biden’s defense, big announcements don’t get much news traction when they break on a Saturday in late August.

Maybe Biden can deliver Delaware.

Obama and his advisers, probably still a little amazed that they got this far with what would normally have been a test candidacy designed to lay the groundwork for a later race, have apparently forgotten how their guy first broke out. Back in December, before the Iowa caucus, Obama was the guy who reminded Americans of a time when politicians knew how to talk and inspire them. He was young at a time when old guys like Dick Cheney were screwing up the world. He was optimistic when voters’ confidence was all but non-existent.

Remember hope? Audacity? Change? Platitudes all, and wonderful marketing for a country that was anything but post-partisan, much less post-political.

Audacity has been in short supply since Obama collected his 2118th delegate on June 3rd. Pandering to racist whites who think black guys are a bunch of child-abandoning layabouts, he delivered a speech slagging them as deadbeat dads. He flip-flopped on domestic spying, voting to grant immunity to telecommunications companies that illegally let the NSA listen to your phone calls. He even changed his mind about offshore oil drilling, which will crap up beaches while prices at the pump remain exactly the same.

There’s nothing wrong with Joe Biden. He’s a safe pick–experienced and smart, he offers foreign policy cred to make up for Obama’s short resume. Biden will be a good attack dog, assuming the campaign decides to use him as such. But he’s an uninspired and uninspiring choice.

Personally, I’m glad Obama didn’t pick Hillary. She would have overshadowed him. John Edwards, my pick for president in the primaries and for veep after he dropped out, has been hobbled by the revelation that he had an affair (with the apparent consent of his wife, but whatever). But either Clinton or Edwards would have been a better choice than Joe Biden. They’re different, they’re controversial, they’re…a change. Unlike Biden, people would have talked about them.

Obama’s politics are neither complex nor internally inconsistent. They are opportunist. Whatever works with voters is good. “His philosophy is ambition,” Cooper Union historian Fred Siegel told the New York Times. “I see him as having a rhetoric rather than a philosophy.”

Obama’s campaign relies on imagery, not ideology. He has fans, not supporters. He won the Democratic nomination by acting like a rock star, not a politician. Turning to traditional politics (as he did by picking Biden) will expose his weaknesses on a playing field on which he has little experience–and could cost him the presidency.

(C) 2008 TED RALL, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Polish Missile Crisis: Bush’s Last War?

The Cold War is over,” Condi Rice said last week. This may be true. She and her lame duck boss seem to be starting up a hot one instead.

Imagine Russian or Chinese military bases in Tijuana or Ciudad Juárez, across the Mexican border from El Paso. Add some more in Toronto and Vancouver. Now imagine that Russia managed to persuade Canada and Mexico to join it in some weird new Eastern bloc military alliance whose purpose was to “contain” the U.S., and then placed a battery of long-range missiles in one or both countries. How long would it take before we went to war?

Of course, you don’t need an imagination. The U.S. didn’t tolerate Soviet missiles in Cuba, and is still trying to overthrow its government.

Given America’s refusal to accept an unfriendly regime in its neighborhood–remember Grenada?–you’d think it would know enough to stay out of Russia’s hair. You’d be wrong.

Driven by its twin original sins of greed and arrogance, the United States began nibbling at Russia’s edges soon after the breakup of the Soviet Union. The Clinton Administration wooed oil-rich ex-Soviet states such as Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan. It’s as if Florida were to declare independence, and crawled into bed with Iran.

Efforts to de-Russify the old Soviet sphere of influence accelerated under Bush, who used 9/11 and the “war on terror” as a pretext to establish permanent military bases in the Central Asian republics of Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Afghanistan. Bush’s CIA even funded a coup d’état in Kyrgyzstan, which overthrew Central Asia’s only democratically elected president.

Central Asia, under Russia’s sphere of influence for more than 150 years, began playing host to CIA “black sites” and other U.S. torture facilities.

The U.S. invited ex-Soviet bloc states–the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, the Baltic states–to join NATO, the Cold War-era anti-Russian military alliance. Recently, it even encouraged the former Soviet republics of Ukraine and Georgia to apply for membership, emboldening Georgia in its recent conflict with Russia.

Now the Bush Administration has convinced Poland to base ten RIM-161 Standard Interceptor Missiles (SM-3) along Russia’s western border.

Republics that were once part of or fell under the influence of the Soviet Union are sovereign states. They are legally and morally permitted to form alliances with any other nation they choose, including the U.S. Still, you have to wonder: Don’t these guys own a map? Doesn’t it make more sense to suck up to the superpower next door than the one an ocean away?

From our perspective: Why would the U.S. think provoking Russia by encroaching on its traditional sphere of influence is a good idea?

For Russia, using newfound oil wealth to rebuild its military, the Polish-American missile deal is the line in the sand. Annual defense budget increases of 20 percent or more, which should bring at least half of its hardware up to modern standards by 2015, have transformed the dying dog of Yeltsin-era “shock economics” back into a growling bear.

“Poland, by deploying [U.S. missiles] is exposing itself to a [nuclear] strike–100 percent,” says top Russian general Anatoly Nogovitsyn. The Russian government stood by his threat.

The U.S. claims the Russians have nothing to fear. “It [the missile system] is not aimed in any way at Russia,” says Condi. Indeed, interceptor missiles are designed to shoot down other missiles, not launch attacks. But the Russians don’t want to see their ability to strike first–a right also reserved by the U.S.–degraded by an anti-missile system. They also worry about the slippery slope: what new weapons will the U.S. place in Eastern Europe later on?

Russia’s concerns are no different than ours would be if they were the ones arming Canada against us. But Condi’s reassurances are too cute by half.

Shortly before signing the missile deal with Poland, she commented: “This will help us to deal with the new threats of the 21st century, of long-range missile threats from countries like Iran or from North Korea.” Sounds reasonable–except for geography.

Nearly 2000 miles separates Iran and Poland. North Korea is nearly 5000 miles away from Poland. But Iran’s longest-range missile, the Shahab-3, can only go 1200 miles–about the same as North Korea’s equivalent. When you factor in the fact that America’s Poland-based SM-3s only travel about 300 miles, it is mathematically impossible for them to intercept anything launched by Iran or North Korea.

The U.S. is occupying two of the largest nations bordering Iran–Afghanistan and Iraq. Wouldn’t building a missile shield there make a zillion times more sense? As for North Korea, well, we have a base in Okinawa, not to mention 25,000 troops in South Korea.

Meanwhile, Condi is trying to recruit more former Soviet republics for NATO. “We are going to help rebuild Georgia into a strong Georgian state,” Rice told Fox News. “The Russians will have failed in their effort to undermine Georgia. And we will be looking at what we can do with the states around that region as well.”

Are the Bushies trying to create a “national emergency” pretext for canceling the presidential election? Are they crazy Christians lusting for the end times? Or are they just nuts? No one knows their motives. But it’s hard to escape the conclusion that, after lying us into two losing wars, Cheney & Co. are using their closing months to try to provoke the mother of them all.

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL