Newsweek has an article up called, The GOP’s Abortion Anxiety: The pro-life movement is on a roll. So why are the Republican Party’s top guns suddenly so shy on the subject?
I operate on the theory that the real bigwigs in the Republican Party, the people that run mega-corporations and immense defense contracting networks, people that want cheap labor, low taxes, no environmental regulation, and an imperialistic foreign policy bent on gaining access to global mineral wealth…I operate on the theory that these people do not care about conservative Christian issues. They just use the issues of homosexuality and abortion to gain the majority voting bloc that they need to win elections.
And, if this theory is correct, the GOP bigwigs do not want to overturn Roe. They want to keep it a federal issue, so they can win federal elections by mobilizing an empassioned base that is opposed to anything other than straight married missionary sex for the purposes of procreation.
What does RNC chief Ken Mehlman think about the South Dakota law?
When South Dakota approved a law sharply restricting abortion last week, many pro-life Republicans around the country sounded a loud hallelujah. But at least one very senior Republican did not seem at all eager to join in the chorus. As Ken Mehlman, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, flew to Memphis to attend the first gathering of potential GOP presidential candidates for 2008, a NEWSWEEK reporter asked him if he had anything to say about the South Dakota law. “No,” he said. Did he plan to make a statement on that topic at the Republican gathering in Memphis? “No” was the answer. Would he ever be willing to comment on the topic, other than to say that it’s up to the states to make their own choices on abortion? Again, the answer was “no.” The look on his face was more expressive. It appeared to ask, “Are you kidding?”
Are we kidding? No, we’re not kidding, but I bet you’ve been kidding all along. Kidding with people’s lives, kidding with their sense of security. I think this man puts it best.
By a roughly two-to-one margin, polls show, people want to uphold the basic abortion right enshrined in Roe v. Wade, even if they approve of some restrictions, like parental notification. “I’m pro-life, but you can’t wear the thing out,” says Clarke Reed, the legendary architect of the GOP in Mississippi. “I’m worried about it.”
That’s right. You can be pro-life all you want, but never, ever, ever, wear it out. Which really means, “Never let it come to a head, never actually win with the issue.”
Some of the Republicans’ most ardent right-to-lifers are not embracing the South Dakota law. “It could backfire,” says Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana…
Riiiight. It could backfire. In fact, it will backfire. They either succeed in having the Supreme Court uphold a law that takes no heed of the health of the mother and makes her carry the baby of her rapist, or her father…or they lose and Roe is upheld again.
The term for this strategy is “stupid mutherfuckers”. And they know it.
Virginia Sen. George Allen, a former governor, is firmly anti-abortion. But he told NEWSWEEK that if a similar bill had come through his own state’s legislature, he would have vetoed it.
Poor George Allen. I guess he wants to run for President. He’s as dumb as a mute, but it ain’t that dumb. Neither is McCain.
Other presidential hopefuls are squirming a bit. Asked whether he supported the South Dakota law, Sen. John McCain riffled through his mental notecards and said he didn’t know the “technical” details of the law. But he said he would support the measure if it were consistent with his long-held view that abortion should be banned except in cases of rape or incest—or to protect, as he put it, the “health” of the mother. His aides had to scramble to correct the record: he meant, they said, the life of the mother.
It’s all a scramble now. A scramble from the top to put a lid on the monster they’ve created. All that talk about scary Arabs scuttled their ports deal. All this talk about the sanctity of the zygote may just scuttle Reagan/Bushism into the scrapheap of political coalitions. It can’t come a day too soon.
