Ever heard the theory about the probability of a monkey at a typewriter eventually producing a Shakespeare play through sheer chance, given an infinite amount of time? Sometimes it seems like we’d have to wait just as long for pro-aborts to produce a compelling argument.
Now they’re ganging up on Ken Buck, a Colorado Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, for saying this in a radio interview:
Yes, I am pro-life. While I understand a woman wants to be in control of her body.–it’s certainly the feeling that I had when I was a cancer patient, I wanted to be in control of the decisions that were made concerning my body–there is another fundamental issue at stake. And that’s the life of the unborn child. And I hold that life dear and precious and believe we have to do everything we can to protect the life of the unborn.
Colorado journalist Jason Salzman (linked above) characterizes this as hypocrisy: “he wants state control over women’s bodies but not his body.” Salzman also did a write-up for RH Reality Check, quoting Karen Middleton of NARAL’s Colorado affiliate as calling Buck “out of touch” and threatening to a woman’s “fundamental right to have control of her body.” Salon’s Elias Isquith says it sounds “stupidly and overtly sexist.” According to Adam Peck at ThinkProgress, this is somehow “going after women’s reproductive rights” and “comparing a woman’s pregnancy to his own cancer.”
Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
First, the critics are acting as if Buck conjured this out of nothing, when in reality it’s the pro-choice movement who insists on defining abortion as a “medical procedure.” “Health care,” “reproductive care,” “women’s medicine,” and various variations thereof are their, not our, chosen euphemisms for killing the unborn. It’s their world where pregnancy is a disease. “Care. No matter what” is Planned Parenthood’s motto. Women’s “health care decisions” are what they accuse us of opposing. Buck didn’t chose any of this terminology; he simply took his opponents’ own formulation and responded to it.
And his response brings us to this manufactured scandal’s second bit of inanity. Buck expresses sympathy with the desire to control one’s health decisions, but then points out that abortion is not analogous to cancer treatment because the woman is not the only interested party in pregnancy; the “life of the unborn child” is also present and must be considered.
Now, to those unscathed by overexposure to abortionism’s mind-altering properties, a procedure killing someone other than the patient is kind of a big deal requiring quite a bit of discussion. But the aforementioned freakouts by Salzman, Isquith, and Peck don’t even discuss it – even though they printed that part of Buck’s quote right in their pieces.
The very remarks they’re criticizing contain the counter-argument to the criticism. They publish that counter-argument, which presumably means they’re aware of it because they had to read it at least once…and proceed to editorialize as if Buck never uttered the words or the words weren’t readily visible on the very same page.
It’s as if you reported that a murder suspect was on video six states away at the time of the crime, then went on to predict that he is guilty. Or claimed there is no evidence of somebody’s racism three paragraphs after reporting his publicly admitted membership in the Ku Klux Klan.
Fortunately, this idiocy was too much for the Colorado Springs Gazette to put up with:
Those who disagree should feel free to have at it. Take Buck on for his view of the unborn. That discussion would at least have a nexus with Buck’s point.
But that’s not what we do in a political idiocracy that gets stupider by the day. A majority of the mainstream media won’t allow an honest discussion on the merits of Buck’s point. They’ll prefer to incite hostility about a deliberate distortion of what the candidate said. It’s just a little white lie, and it goes like this: Buck compared pregnancy to cancer.
Of course, Buck did precisely the opposite by explaining that one condition involves another life. But don’t let facts stand in the way of an opportunity to mislead. The audience, assumed ignorant by the messenger, is supposed to respond with outrage. By golly, a pregnancy is not cancer. This is an insult to pregnant women and cancer patients alike. Bad, bad Ken Buck […]
What Buck said and what he meant are perfectly clear in the absence of dishonest messengers who assume low information and vulnerability on the listener’s part.
Hit “reset” before this campaign proceeds. Stop stupefying the audience by dumbing down and distorting honest political exchange. We should value thoughtful statements above the surplus of safe political platitudes that teach us nothing.
(Of course, some of the critics’ commenters managed to out-dumb even that by equating living, unborn human beings with cancer – the sort of anti-scientific sloppiness that the late atheist thinker Christopher Hitchens called “nonsense” which the findings of modern embryology “seem[ed] to have stopped.”)
Come on, guys. I get that it’s cathartic to hate those of us who defend the unborn. I know that it gets you a lot of page hits from people who want their indignant perpetual victimhood stoked. But if you want to actually shame or discredit us, you have to at least try.
