Jon Martin pens the must-read opening act of the Republican Primary's Abortion Wars, which starts with a back-and-forth between a campaign juggernaut and a little yipping dog.
Readers can decide for themselves who is the juggernaut and who is the little yipping dog.
Hint: The yipping dog employs Gary Marx.
Note to Gary Marx - You're like a child who has wandered in during the middle of a movie. You're out of your element. See the above picture. See the movie. And please shut-up.
The second act of the Abortion Wars opened this morning with Alexander Bolton's South Carolina To Test Rudy's Line On Judges.
Four "varied, concerned political operatives" sent GreenMountainPolitics1 copies of the article by 9am this morning.
We're easy to pay attention to when only about 39 other people are paying attention. We're grateful all the same.
Some highlights from the Bolton article:
A speech Rudy Giuliani delivered to an abortion-rights advocacy group when he was mayor of New York City and more recent comments about the Supreme Court could complicate his efforts to woo conservative votes in crucial presidential primary states.
Giuliani, who was an outspoken supporter of abortion rights when he ran for city office in the 1990s, has shifted his position to appeal to conservative voters by promising to nominate conservative jurists to the federal courts if elected president. He has vowed to select judges like Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel Alito Jr., conservative stalwarts on the Supreme Court who are viewed as abortion-rights opponents.
The credibility of that stance is undermined by remarks Giuliani delivered in April of 2001 to the National Abortion & Reproduction Rights Action League, now known as NARAL Pro-Choice America.
NARAL was perhaps the harshest critic of President Bush’s appointments of Roberts and Alito to the high court. NARAL aired the first television advertisement opposing Roberts’s nomination, accusing him of supporting violent anti-abortion groups while showing footage of a 1998 abortion clinic bombing.
“I thank NARAL for taking the lead in establishing freedom of choice for all of us, and as the mayor of New York City, I thank you for being here in New York City,” he said in 2001.
At the NARAL lunch, Giuliani also said he and the assembled guests were “upholding a distinguished tradition that began in our city starting with the work of Margaret Sanger,” a founder of Planned Parenthood and a pioneer of distributing birth control to the poor.
Besides the stupid and vulgar commercial NARAL ran about Roberts, we're OK with what Hiz Honor said about NARAL and Planned Parenthood back in 2001.
GreenMountainPolitics1 is pro-choice. We always have been.
We believe that a woman's reproductive process is between the woman, her doctor and her personal God (we do support Parental Notification with rigorous judicial oversight for girls under the age of 16 and a ban on late term abortions unless the mother's life is in danger).
However, we are able to respect candidates who are consistently opposed to abortion rights. "Consistently" being the key word.
Which is why pro-choice GreenMountainPolitics1 does not have any great problem supporting pro-life McCain and Huckabee.
Which is also why we think Mitt Romney is a joke
.
If he wasn't so sad.
But we simply cannot understand what Rudy Giuliani is doing.
Hiz Honor is pro-choice, has always been pro-choice and everyone knows he is pro-choice.
Does anyone think that a Republican gets elected Mayor in NYC being pro-life? Nope. Hence the NARAL comments. It's not rocket science.
But then Rudy says stuff like this:
“I oppose it,” Giuliani said during a Fox News interview this month. “I don’t like it. I hate it. I think abortion is something that is a personal matter I would advise something against. However, I believe in a woman’s right to choose. I think you have to ultimately not put a woman in jail for that. I think ultimately you have to leave that to a disagreement of conscience and have to respect the choice that somebody makes…”
Have your cake and eat it too, ah? You naughty little panderer.
Well, you're going to need cover. Bring out the judges! More from the Bolten article:
Now that Giuliani is pinning his abortion stance to a promise on federal court nominations, he could be haunted by other public comments.
What?! That's not cover!!! Where's Levinson? Put down that doughnut and get in there girl! Your boss is taking on water!
Still more from Bolton:
In July of 2005, he (Giuliani) said Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg fit criteria that would be important to him when picking a Supreme Court justice.
“[W]hat’s important to me is to have a very intelligent, very honest, very good lawyer on the court,” he said. “Justice Ginsburg fit that category.” Giuliani added that she was a “very qualified lawyer and a very smart person.”
Ironically, Giuliani made his 2005 statements on Fox News’s “Hannity & Colmes,” the same show on which he made an appeal this month to conservative voters.
“I think the appointment of judges I would make would be very similar if not exactly the same as the last two judges that were appointed,” he said. “Chief Justice Roberts is somebody I admire. Justice Alito, someone I knew when he was U.S. attorney, I also admire.”
Giuliani made other statements in 2005 that will make it difficult for him to appease conservatives’ concerns by promising to nominate judges in the mold of Roberts and Alito.
During a June 2005 interview on MSNBC’s “Hardball,” Giuliani said he would not select a judicial nomination based on his or her abortion views.
“I wouldn’t pick a judge based on whether I knew or didn’t know their position on choice,” he said. “I’d pick a judge based on their overall record.”
Perhaps more awkward for Giuliani now is a declaration he made in 2000 during an ABC interview with George Will that Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision establishing the right to an abortion, was good constitutional law. Even many defenders of abortion rights acknowledge that the legal justification behind the case was poorly reasoned.
Jesus, Your Honor, for someone who is known as being solidly pro-choice (and we agree with your stance), you're all over the place on the subject of abortion.
It's not very pretty. Or very clear.
Which is why when we heard this afternoon - for the fifth time - that
your NH campaign has been calling around the Granite State to tell voters all about McCain's desire to overturn Roe v. Wade and all about your pro-choice stance, we have to wonder to ourselves if that's smart?
You're still trying to win the Republican Primary?
Right?
