Strawbaby

Photo by birderboy

Hooray! Ross Asshat, er, Douthat, has finally figured out the one single thing which caused the GOP to lose the last election: It’s the abortion, stupid!

AN iron law of recent American politics dictates that any Republican setback at the polls will be quickly pinned on the pro-life movement. You might think that the Republican Party’s 2008 debacle would be an exception to this rule….

…Pro-choice Republicans, in particular, know exactly whom to blame for their party’s showing. As Christie Whitman, the former New Jersey governor and Bush administration E.P.A. chief, explained after the election, it lost because “the party was taken hostage by ‘social fundamentalists,’ the people who base their votes on such social issues as abortion.”

The conservative columnist Kathleen Parker made the same point more vividly: “The evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy branch of the G.O.P. is what ails the erstwhile conservative party.” The neoconservative writer Max Boot was diffident about the matter (“I don’t think Republicans need to panic,” he wrote, but “one area where I do see some room for adjustment is on the issue of abortion”) and the right-wing humorist P. J. O’Rourke was blunt (pro-lifers should “give the issue a rest”). The message is clear: If the Republican Party would only jettison its position on abortion, it would be back on its feet in no time.

Douthat then goes on to tell us how unfair this is, because the anti-abortion movement has become oh-so-reasonable and willing to compromise and "emphasiz[e] poverty, the environment and other non-abortion ‘life issues’ more consistently than an earlier generation did."  Yeah, that was news to me too.

In addition to the dishonesty of pretending that the pro-life lifers have become kinder and gentler in their opposition, Douthat also wilfully ignores the larger context of Whitman and Parker’s quotes, which make it very clear that it’s the intolerant entirety of the religious right that’s the problem, not just its pro-life stance.

But hey, if Asshat wants to encourage the religious right to keep right on doing what they’re doing, and just softpedal abortion a little bit, I’m all for it.  I’m sure that will work out very well for them.  And the corporate cons can continue to go full speed ahead with their brilliant hug-the-rich, fuck-everyone-else strategy, and the neocons can hang onto their bomb-everybody gameplan, because those were both so hugely successful and popular.

Good luck with that.