This is also a fight much larger than “culture.” Culture is something that defines art and common belief. Culture is something that changes with the times and can actually be defined as you wish. Much of our culture today is not what it was 50, 100, or 200 years ago. What I think is culture, may not be what you think is culture. Yes, there is an “American culture, and I believe I know what it is, but I certainly don’t trust the media or this President (who would probably see me as a “bitter” American who “clings to guns and religion”) to tell me what it is.

The Constitution doesn’t work that way, certainly not the First Amendment which guarantees religious liberty and expression. I would like to think the Constitution would define our culture, but sadly that is not always the case. For the media to call this a “culture war” greatly diminishes its value, this is a battle over the First amendment of the US Constitution. Obama wants the Constitution circumvented to pander to his base, I would hope that most of us would be united with the Catholic Church in wanting it protected.

The new part of the ObamaCare law (that nobody read before they voted on it) says that churches that provide health care and insurance, must also provide contraceptives. The Catholic Church opposes contraception.

“The White House insists this achieves a balanced approach that respects women’s health care and religious liberty, but that’s not how the Republican candidates see it,” said Jake Tapper of ABC this morning. Jake, this does nothing to protect religious liberty. It tries to destroy it.

Thankfully, the presidential hopefuls joined in the fight.

“We must have a president who is willing to protect America’s First right, a right to worship God according to the dictates of our own conscience. This is a violation of conscience,” said Mitt Romney

Rick Santorum says Obama has been “hostile to people of faith particularly Christians and specifically Catholics.”

Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul have also been avid opponents to Dear Leaders actions on this. Not just because they want to be seen as opponents, they all believe what he is doing in inherently wrong.

The Catholic Church sees it as our Founders saw it. “Never before, unprecedented in American history, for the federal government to line up against the Roman Catholic Church,” said Catholic League head Bill Donohue.

The media, the bastain of safety that says it will be there to protect our babies from dangerous high chairs and deadly car seats, will not be there to protect us when our Constitution is under attack. They just won’t. They will think they are picking sides and they certainly will not pick sides against Dear Leader. In fact, they will call it something else to water it down and make a fight over the First amendment the same as a battle over an art fair downtown. Well, actually, now that I think of it, if there is a battle over an art fair downtown the media will invoke the First amendment to get it done—yes they will. But in this case, a battle to the core of the our freedom to worship, it is just culture.

Yes, this is a battle, it is a fight. It is a fight between all Americans who believe in the God given right to worship as we please and express our religious preferences, and this White House, that believes it has the right to tell Catholics how they should worship. You don’t get closer to Ground Zero in a Constitutional battle than this. This is a Constitutional War, and the media should call it that.

Image credit: Corey Wilson, Green Bay Press-Gazette

Let’s shower this POS with our calls. I have left a message. So should all of you. Maybe this is a distraction, but much is at stake-a woman’s right to choose. And not to mention the poor and their hunger are being used as political chips by the callous right. Pro-life. Bullshit.

The Planned Parenthood location posted an item on their Facebook page. A scroll down the page indicates they were very active in the campaign to intimidate Komen over Planned Parenthood funding.

Paul’s Pantry refused our food donations collected by our area health center to help combat local hunger. This level of extremism impeding individual access to essential health care and now food is outrageous and must be stopped.

As best as can be ascertained for now, Paul’s Pantry claims this has always been standard policy. Evidently, that’s not enough for Planned Parenthood and the left. Now, to operate as a private charity in America, it would seem any organization must support abortion and Planned Parenthood in particular or risk attack.

Below is contact information for Paul’s Pantry, if you wish to offer your support to counter the left’s attempt at intimidation.

920-433-0343
Paul’s Pantry 1529 Leo Frigo Way Green Bay, WI 54302-1163
info@paulspantry.org
Craig Robbins – Director

Ari Fleischer, former press secretary for George W. Bush and prominent right-wing pundit, was secretly involved in the Komen Foundation’s strategy regarding Planned Parenthood. Fleischer personally interviewed candidates for the position of “Senior Vice President for Communications and External Relations” at Komen last December. According to a source with first-hand knowledge, Fleischer drilled prospective candidates during their interviews on how they would handle the controversy about Komen’s relationship with Planned Parenthood.

Fleischer’s relationship with Komen and the Planned Parenthood controversy was previously undisclosed.

A slick move, to blame the other team for your side’s transgressions in order to deflect. Sources close to the Komen Foundation tell me Fleischer wasn’t involved in any way with Komen’s Planned Parenthood strategy. The person Komen did bring in to lead the effort is none other than Brendan Daly, Nancy Pelosi’s former press secretary, who is heading a team from Ogilvy PR. While Fleischer was assisting Komen CEO Nancy Brinker in finding a qualified PR person, Fleischer wasn’t directing decisions in the resulting Komen/Planned Parenthood debacle; it was Daly.

So Think Progress is accusing Ari Fleischer for Brendan Daly’s decisions. Don’t they have an editor fact-checking such things over there?

In fact, Fleischer’s job of finding Komen a reputable PR person is arguably now more difficult due to the current PR efforts headed up by Daly.

Think Progress needs to correct their story and offer an apology to Fleischer.

*UPDATE: After publishing the initial article and blaming Fleischer for Daly’s decisions (they spelled it “Dailey” on Twitter), Think Progress spoke with Komen CEO Nancy Brinker who discussed the scope of Fleischer’s advice to the organization. After the proverbial trash hit the fan Brinker had asked Fleischer of his opinion on the matter. Think Progress, eager to avoid a retraction, pounced on this to justify their earlier smear, done before speaking to anyone at the foundation. They probably feel as though they just escaped the guillotine. Unfortunately for them, my point still stands, and yes, they still blamed Fleischer for decisions made by a former Pelosi aide. Komen asking Fleischer’s opinion after the fact has no effect on the validity of my accusation made against Think Progress. It does however, place greater significance on how hard they’re working to deflect any and all blame towards a former Pelosi aide.

When the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure made a decision to sever its ties with America’s number one seller of abortions, Planned Parenthood, the media went to war. The media coverage was slanted in such a way that “mainstream” reporters like Andrea Mitchell and Lisa Myers of NBC News were openly advocating for a point of view—pressuring Komen to reverse course and give in to Planned Parenthood.

Why would the media go to war over something as seemingly insignificant as a policy change regarding funding at Komen, a private cancer charity? Part of the answer lies in the fact that, for the media, “women’s rights” take precedence over all other rights, including the rights of children. This is what “feminism” has become and this is what the Komen controversy was supposed to be about. In reality, it had nothing to do with breast cancer because the fact is that most Planned Parenthood affiliates don’t even provide mammograms. That money from Komen was used to refer women at risk of contracting the disease somewhere else.

So the issue was something else as well. While there were references to Planned Parenthood being an “abortion provider,” there was no explanation of what this “service” actually “provides”—a procedure that destroys a human life. This is why the annual March for Life against abortion is mostly ignored by the major media. It is a sad fact that even some conservative women still think that Planned Parenthood is simply an organization that provides information about voluntary family planning.

You saw very little in the mainstream media from pro-life people who supported Komen’s initial decision. The bias is so pronounced that the media long ago adopted the language of the Left. The term “pro-life” is never used. But “pro-choice” is. Newspapers use the term “abortion rights” to describe the political process of terminating the lives of the unborn, but use “anti-abortion” when referring to those of us who value human life. We are “against.” They are for “rights.”

So we made it a point to tune into the Big Three network newscasts on Friday night—hours after Nancy Brinker of Komen had caved. We wanted to see if this story would be treated in a neutral manner, or if the stories would be written from the standpoint that Brinker did the right thing—and, why did it take her so long? We did receive a shock, though it was a mild one. One of the three networks actually did a fairly nice job.

NBC was first. Brian Williams handed the story off to Lisa Myers. She had a packaged piece in which she featured several pro-abortion video bites, but no sound-on-tape from any pro-life people. She provided one very short pro-life quote, as a throwaway. It was advocacy journalism, pure and simple.

On ABC, Diane Sawyer did not hand off to a field reporter and did just a brief rundown of the story. But she was giddy about “people power.” There simply was no thought that anyone in the audience might have disagreed with her viewpoint.

It was a different story on CBS. Anchor Scott Pelley put the story later in his broadcast, opting for some national/international stories that he considered more important. When he handed off to Nancy Cordes, she presented a more balanced report with on-camera reaction from both sides of the issue. We suspect Pelley is influencing the CBS Evening News, and taking it down a more journalistic path. This may have to do with his journalism background in Texas.

Pelley is a native Texan who started his TV career in Lubbock and then moved to the Dallas-Fort Worth market where he eventually landed at WFAA-TV. This station is well known as one of the country’s premier news operations with virtually every reporter on staff having a fine journalistic reputation. Pelley worked there for seven years. As a correspondent for 60 Minutes, he has helped move the CBS Evening News into a more serious direction.

It is significant that the CBS Evening News employs investigative correspondent Sharyl Attkisson, the recipient of one of the Reed Irvine Investigative Awards at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference. Attkisson is not afraid to offend the Obama Administration by pursuing stories such as the Department of Justice cover-up of the officially-sanctioned “Fast & Furious” arms trafficking from the U.S. to the Mexican drugs cartels. Such reporting would not be tolerated at NBC News or ABC News.

It seems unlikely that any network, however, would do an investigative piece on Planned Parenthood. This is truly a taboo subject for much of the media. Not only does Cecile Richards’ organization sell abortions to young women in trouble, but it also promotes the anything-goes sexual attitude that often leads to abortions. Baylor University economics professor Dr. John Pisciotta, in his role as head of Pro-Life Waco, has documented the despicable outreach of the local chapter that he calls “Planned Promiscuity.” The implication is that Planned Parenthood is a racket that victimizes young women and then exploits them for profit.

Meanwhile, Keach Hagey at Politico and other so-called liberal media watchdogs are assigning credit to social media for the Komen cave. We understand that liberals by the thousands got on Facebook and Twitter to complain. But what is it they were complaining about? The issue for the media was that the Komen decision could have snowballed, leading to more scrutiny of what Planned Parenthood is actually doing with the money, including federal dollars, it receives. And some of that money goes into the coffers of liberal Democrats running for office this year.

When Nancy Brinker dared to offend the leading organization behind the “sacrament” of abortion, the lines were drawn. That meant all the minions of the Left dropped what they were doing. It was time to go to war! The lives of women facing the risk of cancer were not the issue. They get their mammograms at other places anyway. The issue was the human lives already being lost at the Planned Parenthood clinics. This was the scandal that stood to be exposed, if Komen was not beaten down and put in its place.

It was an onslaught of savvy PR tactics yesterday that brought the Susan G. Komen Foundation to its knees, apparently prompting the organization’s retreat today from its initial decision to cut its funding to Planned Parenthood.  As Politico reported this morning:

On a day when the breast cancer charity’s top official made the rounds with the national media, insisting the organization’s decision to stop giving grants to Planned Parenthood wasn’t political, the firestorm only got worse. Top Democrats piled on; the head of the Komen chapter in Los Angeles quit; and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is giving a $250,000 matching gift to Planned Parenthood.

The Atlantic Wire reports that the Susan G. Komen foundation’s website was even hacked, for some period displaying a banner that had been changed from “help us get 26.2 or 13.1 miles closer to a world without breast cancer“  to read, “help us run over poor women on our way to the bank.”  And the long repeated myth that the current Komen CEO takes home a half a million dollar salary was brought back to life yesterday – even though the truth is that Komen’s current CEO, Nancy Brinker, takes home $0 in annual salary.

But hey, breast cancer isn’t supposed to be political, right?

Officials with the Susan G. Komen foundation had insisted the initial decision was never political, that it was about providing more direct mammography screening services for women, according to Nancy Brinker, the charity’s founder and CEO.  From Politico:

“We’ve always had the right to cancel contracts if a group was under investigation,” Brinker said on a conference call with reporters. “We simply extended that right to organizations who apply for funding. Three of the 19 Planned Parenthood affiliates will continue to receive funding, and there will be no gap in services for any woman who needs care.”

Brinker said there was broad consensus from Komen’s board over the new policies. Additionally, she said the charity was trying to refocus grants on providers that are able to perform mammography services rather than just breast screenings. Planned Parenthood does not have mammography equipment and refers women to providers for the service.

Susan G. Komen Foundation paid $46,861,000 overall in 2010 on breast cancer screenings, according to the foundation’s most recently available annual report from 2010.  The Associated Press reports that Planned Parenthood received $580,000 in grants from the foundation for screenings that year, and that Planned Parenthood says it has performed 170,000 breast exams over the past five years as a result of Komen grants.  That would average out to 34,000 screenings annually, a small percentage of Susan G. Komen’s total screenings.  Given that Planned Parenthood merely serves a pass-through and refers women to other providers for mammogram screenings, the foundation could certainly maximize its spending by cutting out the middle man and funding such providers directly, especially those that provide all the screening tests in one location.

But after taking to social media yesterday to whip Planned Parenthood supporters into a frenzy, liberal outlets today are claiming a victory for women’s wellness, calling Susan G. Komen foundation “bullies” who would have hurt low-income women who turn to Planned Parenthood for health care.  Over the course of the day, the fury drummed up $3 million for Planned Parenthood for breast care services – a number that far outweighs what Susan G. Komen was providing annually.

To those who are skeptical that Planned Parenthood is the bastion of women’s wellness with all the best interests of women in mind that its fervent supporters claim it is, Slate points out that there are in fact some legitimate concerns regarding Planned Parenthood.

“…in reading  the report put together by Americans United for Life, which helped launch the investigation, there are some legitimate concerns. Planned Parenthood offices in California, New Jersey, New York, and Washington state have at various times been audited by state and federal authorizes and discovered to have been overbilling state agencies and committing other improper billing practices. Further, Planned Parenthood has a record of not reporting instances of sexual abuse—and I’m not talking about 16-year-old girls who come in with their 19-year-old boyfriends. The AUL report documents a case in which a 13-year-old girl was raped by an older foster brother and was impregnated—twice. Planned Parenthood is required, if it wants to receive federal funds, to comply with mandatory reporting laws.”

In viewing the 181 page report from Americans United for Life, there are a key number of claims against Planned Parenthood that initiated those investigations:

• Misuse of federal health care and family planning funds.
• Failure to report criminal child sexual abuse.
• Failure to comply with parental involvement laws.
• Assisting those engaged in prostitution and/or sex trafficking.
• Dangerous misuse of the abortion drug RU-486.
• Misinformation about so-called “emergency contraception,” including ella.
• Willingness to provide women with inaccurate and misleading information.
• Willingness to refer to substandard clinics.

Meanwhile, before Susan G. Komen foundation had reversed its funding decision today, it had received numerous donations from supporters who are pro-life and do not agree with Planned Parenthood’s business model, which they say is primarily focused on providing abortions.  So the remaining question is, will those people who donated to Susan G. Komen  now demand the return of their donations?  Most legal experts say that unless donations are made on a conditional basis up front, they’re not likely to see that money again, not unless Susan G. Komen voluntarily offers to return it.  But that doesn’t necessarily mean Komen’s new donors couldn’t (or shouldn’t) try.

The photo slide show initially featured seven photos of abortion supporters, such as one of marchers holding signs saying “Family Planning Saves Lives Worldwide,” one featuring women holding signs saying that abortion should be kept legal, and another showing a woman sporting an abortion on demand sticker.

Upwards of 50,000 pro-life supporters turned out in the DC cold to participate in the March for Life, yet apparently CBS could only find the small handful of pro-abortion supporters to photograph.

Pro-life advocates like Jill Stanek were incredulous, and it wasn’t long before the comments section on the CBS website exploded with pro-lifers crying foul. Dozens of unhappy commenters remarked how badly the bias of CBS galled them.

Finally, a day or so later, CBS altered its slide show and added some photos of some of the actual participants of the pro-life march. The slide show now features seven photos of pro-lifers and an equal amount of pro-abortion supporters.

Interestingly, though, there was no notice and no explanation by the CBS affiliate that it altered/added to the slide show and no explanation why the slide show had no pro-life photos for the first few days it was live on the web.

Pro-lifers can take heart that they were heard by the TV station, causing it to take action to correct the sleight. But the fact that CBS put up a slide show of photos taken at a pro-life rally but didn’t feature a single photo of any pro-lifers pretty much shows the bias from which the TV station came when it initially posted the webpage.

Photo Credit Michelle Fields from The Daily Caller

The best coverage belongs to Judge Andrew Napolitano on his show  ”Freedom Watch” on FOX Business Network. Judge Napolitano is a fierce pro-life advocate and doesn’t shy away from the issue. At the end of every show he signs off with “The Plain Truth” and yesterday it was about abortion.

His guest was Rep. Renee Ellmers who discussed the defense of life. This was the most coverage by anyone in the media. Thank you, Judge Napolitano.

I then went to FOX News and I’ll admit, I was disappointed. The article was written by Shannon Bream and just like C-SPAN she called the protestors anti-abortion. Yes they are anti-abortion, but why doesn’t anyone ever call them pro-life? Why do they have to be constantly addressed as anti? When pro-choice protesters march they’re referred to as pro-choice, not anti-life. She did, however, give a reasonable estimate of people there, tens of thousands. Trust me, that’s much better than some of the others.

The Washington Post had a few sections on March For Life. They even posted a short video of people at the Supreme Court from the AP. Here’s a post with a bunch of pictures from the rally, but of course they have to stick to the “anti-abortion” meme. I was surprised to see this article about the young people involved in the rally. One of Michelle Malkin’s points addressed the way in which the media ignoresthe increasing number of young peopl joining the rallies. But again why all the anti language? These kids are PRO-LIFE. I wonder if Katherine Driessen calls pro-choice kids anti-life kids. I also don’t like how she pretty much only described kids carrying graphic abortion signs. There were so many kids there not holding graphic signs. The Post used the AP article about the rally and didn’t bother to correct the title. More than thousands were there. Hundreds of thousands of people were there. They even stated it’s usually the largest rally in the year in Washington, DC. Here are some more photos from people on Twitter:

Credit Michelle Fields, The Daily Caller

Credit Allison McManus, @allisonelmc22

Credit Michelle Fields, The Daily Caller

Credit Kyle Sanders, @colonel4God

Credit Lizzy Cross, @LizzyC383

The worst belongs to CNN, who said hundreds of people were there. Hundreds?Look at the pictures above. Do those look like hundreds? You have to remember: these pictures didn’t come from just ONE street. These are MANY streets in DC. They also kept the “anti” meme. MSNBC used the AP article and didn’t talk about it on “NBC Nightly News.” ABC News did the same and unsurprisingly didn’t mention it during World News. I’ve been searching The New York Times, but I can’t find anything on it. I searched “march for life” and the abortion topic popped up with what appears to be an article on March For Life, but when I click it I can’t find the article. Well, they didn’t have an article, just a slide show of pictures. Here’s the other thing. You have to look all over the page to find it. So I’m going to say The New York Times completely blew off March For Life. What a shock, right?

I did the media’s job for them. I reached out and interviewed someone who was at the rally, Michelle Fields. Ms. Fields is a reporter at The Daily Caller. I purposely reached out to her because she covered Occupy Wall Street. I emailed her these questions:

• How many people do you think were there?
• Was it anything like OWS?
• Were people kind and cleaned up their own trash?
• What kind of people were there? Races, religions, ages, etc.

Ms. Fields said this was by far the largest rally/protest she’s attended in her whole life. She would call one of her colleagues a few streets away and they would tell her they were surrounded by tens of thousands of people. This fits in with my above pictures.

The young people are the only similarity between Occupy Wall Street and March For Life. Ms. Fields said when she covered OWS she was worried how people treated her. People at March For Life were kind and more concerned with raising awareness. There were some pro-choice protestors at the rally and she said they appeared as though they wanted to fight. They’d yell at the pro-life protestors, but the pro-lifers would be patient and calmly explain their side of the abortion view. This was actually a surprise to her and her cameraman because they were used to the vulgar awful attitudes at OWS.

OWS is known for literally trashing the places they protest. During C-SPAN’s coverage I noticed that one of the speakers constantly reminded people to pick up after themselves. Ms. Fields said everyone cleaned up their own trash. A protestor from Los Angeles told her they didn’t just want to raise awareness, but leave DC in better condition. The protestor also said a group of them were collecting food & other goods in 300 blue backpacks to hand out to the homeless in DC. You can see Fields’s coverage here.

I’ll leave you with some more pictures.

Credit Christine, @CatholicMomVA

Credit Christine, @CatholicMomVA

Credit Catholic News Agency

Credit Telecare TV

Credit Elizabeth Avis @Beth_Avis

Before the march Michelle Malkin wrote a post about the media’s lack of attention. It got me interested and I decided to tune into DirecTV News Mix and the C-SPAN coverage all afternoon. Some people on Twitter, especially Sharon Cabana, helped me out by keeping an eye on CNN and MSNBC. There were a a few seconds of coverage on FOX News & MSNBC, but didn’t see anything on CNN. I’m not shocked, but it doesn’t mean I’m not disappointed. The Old Media was on hand to cover OWS at all times. They knew this was happening and yet no one on stand by. It’s awful how these peaceful, clean, and civilized people were completely ignored by the Old Media while the disgusting and uncivilized people of Occupy Wall Street received so much attention.

Thank goodness for social media like Twitter. Since I knew I wasn’t going to receive anything from the Old Media I knew I had to use the New Media. I reached out to people on the #MarchForLife hash tag and people have been tweeting me pictures. Here are a few:

Credit Elizabeth Avis @Beth_Avis

Credit Catholic Jedi Academy @CatholicJedi

Credit Elizabeth Avis @Beth_Avis

Tomorrow morning I will investigate the after-coverage of March For Life and interview people, including Michelle Fields from The Daily Caller, who were there to see how their observation matches up with the Old Media. Something tells me they’ll downplay this rally.

Let’s get down to brass tacks: Presidential candidate Rick Santorum, Personhood Pledge-signing, Griswold vs. Connecticut-opposing, Mr. Ban Abortion in All Circumstances With No Exception for the Life of the Mother, believes that the actions of his own wife should be treated as criminal. Why? Because, back in 1996, his wife had a procedure that resulted in the deliberate death of her fetus, even though it was a matter of saving her own life.

Karen Santorum’s difficult pregnancy and resultant life-saving, induced early delivery is nosecret; in a 2004 interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, her husband characterized the 1996 procedure as a harrowing but necessary. Karen, in her 19th week of pregnancy, received a risky surgery to save a pregnancy that doctors thought had little chance of survival. After the surgery, she came down with an infection, and doctors told Rick that unless the source of the infection — the fetus — was removed, his wife would die and his already-born children would be motherless. The doctor also told Santorum that his wife’s fetus would not survive outside of the womb. According to Santorum, Karen went into labor as a result of the antibiotics, and then doctors gave her a drug that further induced labor. She delivered, and unfortunately the doctors were right.

Jezebel confuses an attempt to undergo surgery to save the life of her child with procedures a woman undergoes a to end the life of her child.

The Santorums’ child was not going to live regardless, yet Karen Santorum risked her life to take the pregnancy as far as possible. Both she and her husband committed to an early delivery with hope that a miracle would occur and their child would survive. Karen Santorum wasn’t going to live to carry the baby to term and the baby, due to a defect, didn’t have much of a chance outside the womb, but there was a chance. It does happen. The Santorums chose the route that provided the biggest return for the gamble. How asinine and petty for women to politicize the loss of a child for a straw man argument. Doing all you can to prevent the loss of a child you wanted is nothing like planning the execution of a child you don’t want. Of course, I don’t expect a site operated by drunk, self-described “slut machine(s)” who talk about how they don’t report rape (but like to use it as a political issue nonetheless) to understand the elementary difference. Perhaps, like our President, the issue is “above their pay grade.”

The entire Jezebel post, and the illogical post to which Jezebel links, are comprised entirely of bitter partisan rhetoric. The suggestion that all conservatives believe  They want so badly to believe that Karen Santorum had an abortion, when absolutely nothing in the story comes anywhere close to supporting such a claim. Case in point:

Rick Santorum, Personhood Pledge-signing, Griswold vs. Connecticut-opposing, Mr. Ban Abortion in All Circumstances With No Exception for the Life of the Mother, believes that the actions of his own wife should be treated as criminal.

Really?

“I believe that any doctor who performs an abortion — I would advocate that any doctor who performs an abortion should be criminally charged for doing so. I have never supported criminalization of abortion for mothers, but I do for people who perform them.” [my emphasis]

Jezebel is a little late to the game of exploiting the Santorums’ loss; Alan Colmes and Eugene Robinson have both name-called the Santorums over their loss. Instead of asking about Santorum’s record as a senator, media instead makes fun of infant death and trumps up a nontroversy to prove their pipe dream of hypocrisy.

(h/t Mommentator)

Such is the feeling I got when reading Richard Cohen’s latest screed in the Washington Post. I hope you’re ready for this one, it is pretty laughable. The GOP is a cult. You need to take a pledge to join up. Well, no, not exactly, but certain interest groups want you to promise to agree to their causes to get an endorsement. That’s totally like joining a cult, except it isn’t. For the sake of entertainment and to see how oblivious to irony these people are we’ll take a look.

Cohen has to make a silly jab at the memory of Ronald Regan to start things off.

“It is not enough to support the party or mouth banalities about Ronald Reagan …”

It is true there are those in the Republican Party who would use President Reagan’s memory as a political tool without actually believing in any of the principles that made the GOP the party of Reagan. However, the majority of Republicans do not “mouth banalities” about Reagan; they hold the truths that he espoused to be the bedrock upon which the country stands.

What are the pledges that have Cohen so up in arms?

No increase in taxes and any closing of loopholes would be matched by other tax cuts. Right, you can now run screaming into the woods as the mad cultists of the GOP come for you. Just not for your money.

The pro-life pledge is next on the list of bugaboos for Cohen. GOP candidates who want the endorsement of the Susan B. Anthony List must agree to oppose abortion including the opposition of judicial nominees who might decide against the wholesale slaughter of the unborn. Can you smell that? That’s the irony burning. If I could remind the Washington Post editorial staff it is the Democrat party who have for years been using the pro-abortion stance as a litmus test for judges. It is the radical feminists of NOW who have raised the concept of abortion to an inalienable right. A right that trumps every other consideration.  A politician can be the biggest womanizing, sexual harassing scum bag, but if they are a pro-abortion advocate Democrat then they’re good to go. That’s a Pro-Hypocrisy stance if I have ever seen one.

“The hallmark of a cult is to replace reason with feverish belief. This the GOP has done when it comes to the government’s ability to stimulate the economy. History proves this works — it’s how the Great Depression ended — but Republicans will not acknowledge it.”

It is? This is news to me. As a matter of fact, the reason Republicans won’t acknowledge that fact is because F.D.R.’s policies extended rather than ended the Great Depression. The expenditures of the war also didn’t end the Great Depression. What ended it was the post war generation, free from the socialism of Roosevelt and awash with all the savings that had nowhere to go during the rationing of the war era.  Clinging to this thoroughly debunked Keynesian idea might qualify as replacing reason with feverish belief. It has never worked and we see more and more countries moving to austerity as the only way to deal with their financial crises.

The next target for Cohen’s juvenile barbs is, of course, global warming. Even though there has been no noticeable change in average temperatures in the last 10-15 years, this has not stopped Cohen from stumbling headlong into the logical fallacy of Argumentum Ad Populum, a mistake that went out the door back in Galileo’s days. As I’ve asked once or twice before, if it’s all true, why do they need to make stuff up?

What seems to have passed over Cohen’s head as he attempts to smear Republicans as know nothing theocrats that want nothing more than to keep the unwashed masses unwashed, uneducated and unaborted is the silliness of it all. There is not a single Democrat who could pass national muster without paying obeisance to the alter of unfettered abortion, the radical green agenda and the primacy of taxing the producers of society to penury to pay for Cowboy Poetry Slams.

Luckily for us that this has not narrowed the base of the GOP as Cohen fantasizes.  The majority of Americans are pro-life.  The percentage of Americans who think that climate change is an issue is dropping from year to year and is about even at this point. Likewise, most Americans think that tax cuts and reduced spending are the best way to improve the economy. That’s a great base from which to start.