By DEXTER DUGGAN
Going down the buffet line to select the 2016 presidential candidate they like best, conservatives immediately encounter a limitation.
If you like Candidate A, you have to put all of him on the tray. You can’t lop off his hand you don’t like, which maybe holds too much free-trade policy in it, and replace it with one hand off a rather protectionist Candidate B.
That’s the enduring issue of trade-offs and compromise in politics. There’s no utterly perfect candidate. But at least don’t buy what’s guaranteed to cause electoral indigestion.
The main idea this time is to avoid splitting the vote among so many conservative hopefuls that — where have we heard this before? — the “moderate,” unmagnetic John McCain or Mitt Romney or Bob Dole ends up with the Republican nomination but loses the general election.
Let’s, for heaven’s sake, see if we can’t settle on a candidate pretty early on, precluding a prolonged contest that keeps fracturing conservatives, even while the media trumpet the supposed inevitability of the “moderate” they don’t really want but consider to be useful in their strategy to throw the November election to the Democrat.
Who can forget the voice of the Michigan woman in 2012 on the radio news who said she didn’t care for Romney that much, but, after all, he was the “electable” Republican — didn’t all the commentators say so? — so she had to vote for him in the primary, to ensure GOP victory.
Blundering along the same roadmap to defeat that dominant media are happy to hand out.
However, one highly hopeful sign recently was that presidential candidate Rand Paul refused to be locked in to the pro-abortion media narrative.
Rather than take the bait and say which exceptions for abortion he’d make — a classic pro-abortion ploy that ignores why the vast majority of permissive abortions are performed, and how casually they’re done — Paul suggested asking Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz “if she’s OK with killing a seven-pound baby” who’s not yet born.
The best Wasserman Schultz could reply was to say this is an issue for “women and their doctors” — a worn-out dodge even older than the Supreme Court’s 42-year-old unconstitutional invention of a sweeping “right” to permissive abortion.
But why should pro-abortion champions be expected to have a better answer to a question they’re practically never asked? That’s about like asking a frequent commercial flier how to strap on and use a parachute to save his neck. It’s a situation he doesn’t expect to face.
Way back in time when Richard Nixon was president, pro-abortionists were saying it’s an issue for “a woman and her doctor” — with the false implication that a patient is doing a serious evaluation with her regular medical professional as to the best course to take.
The regular reality is that she — or someone coercing her — is paying a high-volume abortionist she has probably never seen before in her life to render a lifeless victim. And she’ll probably never see “her doctor” again unless she returns after suffering abortion complications. At which time the abortuary’s reception desk will say we can’t help you, go to the emergency room.
Now there’s an idea Rand Paul could use with his next pro-abortion reporter. Operation Rescue regularly releases videos showing hapless women damaged at abortion clinics being loaded into ambulances, their suffering bodies sometimes hidden behind sheets — often after the abortuary cautioned 911 not to let the ambulance use its lights and siren.
Don’t want a speeding, howling ambulance to scare away more clients. Abortion clients who may be loaded into other ambulances before long.
Rand Paul could say he’d just like to show the reporter a few videos, then encourage the writer to check out why the clinics have such low standards of practice.
This could be an educational tool, too. Unfortunately, some media people are hard-line, cheerleading pro-abortionists who simply don’t want to encounter facts. But other reporters, never having heard serious questions in the newsroom about the other point of view, may be almost incapable of voicing them.
In a commentary posted April 20 by Religion News Service, Trevin Wax noted the slant to media abortion questions, observing, “[W]hen was the last time you saw reporters ask an abortion-rights candidate if they worry about what The Economist in 2010 named ‘gendercide,’ the rise of abortion based solely on the sex of the baby?
“When was the last time,” Wax continued, “a reporter asked a candidate why he or she supports unrestricted abortion access in the second and third trimester, when upwards of 70 percent of Americans do not?
“When have you seen a candidate asked about their implicit support for eugenics and what it says about our society when we screen out and consign Down syndrome children to an early demise?”
Wax said Paul “was merely doing what most reporters won’t.”
And if dominant-media reporters could open their minds to these sorts of queries, they might even start to wonder what kind of suffering babies go through in abortion, where abortionists don’t even do the tiny courtesy of anesthetizing these sentient little people first.
If the reporters knew of a veterinarian who spent his days doing “surgery” by pulling the legs and heads off healthy dogs and cats, it wouldn’t take them long to wonder just what kind of human being he is, even though the dogs and cats never can become human beings.
It seems only when the holy smoke of abortionist obfuscation gets in the reporters’ eyes that they can’t see. Maybe they should start wearing eye protection.
On issue after issue for decades, many GOP candidates have ducked from and deferred to media members who simply disdain everything the Republicans stand for. Choosing to be on the defensive, the candidates don’t sound like winners. And, therefore, often aren’t.
Now we see liberal media licking their chops about how many contortions they can put Republicans through on “same-sex marriage.”
Well, if you say the florist should decline to deliver to the “gay wedding,” how about if the lucky couple stops by his shop and says they’ll drive the flowers over to the chapel themselves? How about if Republicans aren’t invited to the ceremony itself, but are offered cake to eat at the reception? How about if the two grooms get icing on their tuxes and go to the dry cleaner?
It hasn’t taken so long for media to march from fearing “the AIDS scourge” to celebrating unclean, unnatural sexuality.
Media have their favorites, and those favorites don’t tend to be conservatives.
In living memory, conservatives saw media members quickly move from casting U.S. soldiers in the Vietnam War as villainous baby-killers in the 1960s to celebrating intentional baby-killers in the abortuaries in the 1970s.
It’s not a proud page of history for scribes who think they chronicle it.
If many other candidates began following Rand Paul’s challenging example, a lot of people in the newsroom, and out in the wider society that consumes the newsroom’s product, would start to see life and society in a different way.
Because it also would be a better way, who could question that?
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