Redstate

By streiff Posted in User Blogs — Comments (1) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Voiceover: Seven years ago a bomb destroyed a woman's health clinic in Birmingham, Alabama.

Emily Lyons: "The bomb ripped through my clinic. I almost lost my life. I will never be the same."

Voiceover: John Roberts filed court briefs supporting violent fringe groups and a convicted clinic bomber.

Emily Lyons: "I'm determined to stop this violence so I'm speaking out."

Voiceover: Call your senators. Tell them to oppose John Roberts. America can't afford a justice whose ideology leads him to excuse violence against other Americans.

So begins one of the most blatantly false attack ads in American political history and without doubt the winner as the most odious attack ad ever directed against a Supreme Court nominee.

Read on

The fact that NARAL would launch such a scurrilous attack should surprise no one. An organization dedicated to the worship of abortion should rightfully be expected to be morally cretinous. They perhaps plow new ground here. Usually the call to action is where you take the opportunity to pull out-of-context quotations and visuals back into the realm of putative truthfulness. Here NARAL takes the opportunity to take either correct or semantically loaded statements of fact and transform the ad into a complete falsehood.

Personal attacks such as the grotesque James Byrd ad during the 2000 presidential campaign have become the stock-in-trade of a political movement that has found itself with neither ideas nor power. Again, none of this is surprising.

What is somewhat surprising is how this utter falsehood is being touted by the Washington Post under the guise of balanced coverage.

Ad Campaign Says Roberts Backed Violent Protesters

Judge's Allies Defend His Work on Abortion Case

A prominent abortion rights group launched a television ad yesterday that accuses Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr. of siding with violent extremists and a convicted clinic bomber while serving in the solicitor general's office, an accusation that Roberts's supporters immediately condemned as a flagrant distortion.

The ad, sponsored by NARAL Pro-Choice America, focuses on Roberts's role in a case involving whether a 19th-century anti-Ku Klux Klan statute could be used to shut down blockades of health clinics by abortion protesters. The solicitor general's office filed a friend-of-the-court brief siding with the clinic protesters, including Operation Rescue. The high court ruled 6 to 3 against the health clinics in January 1993.

The NARAL ad, set to begin airing tomorrow on local channels in Maine and Rhode Island and nationally on the CNN and Fox News cable networks, features Emily Lyons, a clinic director who was badly injured when a bomb exploded at her clinic in Birmingham in 1998. The ad ends by urging viewers to call their senators to tell them to oppose the federal appellate judge's confirmation to the Supreme Court.

What makes this article stand out from the borderline deception so beloved of the Washington Post is that they carry water that even the head of NARAL will not carry.

In his oral argument before the court, Roberts said, according to a transcript of the proceedings, "The United States appears in this case not to defend petitioners' tortious conduct, but to defend the proper interpretation" of the statute.

Roberts's allies said his views on violence were clear from a 1986 White House memo, endorsed by Roberts when he served in the White House counsel's office during the Reagan administration, which said violent abortion protesters should not receive special consideration for presidential pardons. "No matter how lofty or sincerely held the goal, those who resort to violence to achieve it are criminals," the memo said.

NARAL President Nancy Keenan defended the ad but said, "We're not suggesting that Mr. Roberts condones clinic violence."

So the real story here is that Roberts did not support "violent fringe groups"  and not only did he not excuse violence he argued against any leniency being shown towards the perpetrators of violence. As an aside, if this Keenan creature really believes her group is not "suggesting Mr. Roberts condones clinic violence" she should take a remedial reading class, to wit:

Tell them to oppose John Roberts. America can't afford a justice whose ideology leads him to excuse violence against other Americans.

He supported the right of each and every one of us to demonstrate peacefully without being personally bankrupted or imprisoned because certain whiney and politically powerful interest groups didn't like their message. It would seem to even a casual observer that anyone who was out in favor of Civil Rights in the 1960s or against apartheid in South Africa in the 1980s could instantly recognize their right to speak was in jeopardy as much as Operation Rescue's.

What's going on here is obvious. NARAL is attempting to recreate the SBVT effect with the ads. They have made a small advertising buy in Maine and Rhode Island and are trying to parlay the libelous of the ad into nationwide exposure. What is equally clear is that while the Washington Post has more than adequate information in this story to declare the ad to be totally false - even to the point of  NARAL's president essentially disavowing the central allegation in the ad --  they cover it as though it is a legitimate story.