This dates to August 21, 2007.

Full disclosure: I have no dog in the 2008 Presidential brouhaha, am unlikely to develop a dog in the immediate future, and frankly, share a sentiment with a commenter/diarist whose handle rhymes with MeveFellBay, to-wit: None of the above. Part of this is because I have a hard time getting enthusiastic about political campaigns (yes, a great guy indeed to have a Director of RedState); part of it is because, with or without Fred! I'm underwhelmed by the current candidate pool, which ranges from a liberal New Yorker to a nativist to a crazy libertarian to some guy named Cox, with not a lot of improvement or fall in between; and part because, as I've said so many damned times, we are taking our eye off the ball of Congress, the State elections, and 2007, and royally hurting ourselves in the process.

Believe it or not, however, all of that was a digression. The point of this post was to say, for pretty much the only time in over a year, Mitt Romney blew my socks off (go to 9:30):

Now, the mandatory carping: I disagree with the old Mittster on a few things, not least of which being that if you're going to put faith in the public square -- an enterprise of which I'm an enthusiastic supporter -- you need to be prepared to discuss and defend it there. I'm fully aware of why Romney isn't interested in that conversation, but Catholics have had to do it for decades; I see no reason why this should be different. There's more, but it's just nit-picking.

With that said, Wow. If you could get him to drop the Ken-doll approach that he insists on adopting when the mike is on, I'd have been on this guy's team for a year now. That you can't concerns me in many of the same ways Al Gore concerned me, and the parallels are disturbing; but if this was how Mitt Romney was 24/7, I'd be a Romneybot too.

I'm loathe to engage in intra-dextrosphere blogwars, but I just wanted to add my bit about Dean Barnett's shots at pro-lifers (which, amazingly, seem to come as shots at John McCain, and appear to be a moral defense of the Dresden firebombing). I cannot hope to surpass Ross's, Mark Shea's (a hero of mine from years gone), or our own Alexham's (here and here). But I did want to add this:

One of the biggest dangers of respectable blogging is walking the line between being good partisans (or boosters for candidates) and good -- for lack of a more precise term -- ideologues. Put differently, if all you're getting is Wales, it doesn't always make sense to sell your soul. I therefore take issue with this:

Murder requires what those in the law refer to as a specific mens rea. That little Latin phrase in this context means you need a precise and knowing intent to kill someone in order to qualify as a murderer. The typical mother who has an abortion and the doctor who provides it have no such intent. They don’t feel they’re taking a life. I feel they’re wrong, and most of the readers of this site probably feel they’re wrong. But because they lack that specific and knowing intent, they’re not murderers.

What drives me crazy about the abortion debate, specifically on our side, is our stridency. There’s little attempt to understand the other side, and little effort to comprehend why a mother-to-be might desperately want an abortion. One of the reasons we toss around terms like “murder” is because they’ll end conversations, not begin them.

Let's just get this out of the way: If I kill a black woman, with the intent to kill her, but honestly believe that because she's black, she's not a human being, have I committed murder? And might -- just bear with me -- pro-lifers call such a thing "murder" not as a means to end debate, but rather as an expression of their honest beliefs?

The post in question is basically a long-winded way of taking a shot at one of Mitt Romney's opponents John McCain, and is apparently a long-winded way of getting there. In the process of traveling that road, it was apparently necessary to take some shots along the way.

I liked you guys so much better when you were just ballplayers.