August 25, 2016
Chicago police need to be “very much tougher than they are now”
August 22, 2016
Hillary Clinton on guns, in her own words.
August 17, 2016
Does Hillary really want to destroy the 2nd Amendment? Maybe not.
July 9, 2016
Let’s look at the things that our presidential campaigns from both parties have actually said about gun control, dating back to the earliest days of this bizarre season. Readers can decide for themselves whether such language is tendentious, partisan, gratuitously inflammatory, or just plain right or wrong.
The last two still standing
Clinton on the Dallas carnage
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Trump on the Dallas carnage
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Hillary Clinton on Orlando massacre
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America, Grate again!
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Assault weapons designed to do one thing … to kill people by the dozens
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Trump claims Hillary wants to make vulnerable grannies defenseless
In late May 2016, Donald Trump accused Hillary Clinton of seeking to destroy the Second Amendment and to render “single women and vulnerable grandmothers” helpless in the face of armed and dangerous evil across America. Rebutting this dark image of life in a nation armed further to the teeth and any other in the world, Mrs. Clinton cites actual research, focusing on the real pain having deeply and irretrievably afflicted American families as they’ve lost their loved ones to gun violence.
In September’s CNN GOP presidential debate, Carly Fiorina tendentiously claimed that videos on Planned Parenthood published by the so-called Center for Medical Progress included footage of “a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain,” suggesting that the footage depicted a PP operation, which fact-checking has proven it did not. Speaking on Fiorina’s behalf, her deputy campaign manager declared that “Planned Parenthood doesn’t and can’t deny they are butchering babies and selling their organs.”
This man would be President
Setting aside facts to the contrary regarding Planned Parenthood‘s “sales for profit,” Marco Rubio declared, “Now what you’ve done is [to create] an industry, now what you’ve done is [to create] an incentive for people to be pushed into abortions so that those tissues can be harvested and sold for a profit … ” This charge is not only flat-out false, it’s an affront to women and people who respect facts. Rubio is an intelligent enough man. He’s not kidding; he’s not deluded. He’s lying and he knows it.
Raising deception to an art form, Donald Trump is a loud, non-stop machine of bluster. About the Colorado Springs shooting, the shooter and Planned Parenthood, Trump opined that “I think he [shooter Robert L. Dear is] a sick person…. He was probably a person ready to go.” When reminded of Dear’s statement about “no more body parts,” Trump dug deeper into the septage by declaring “Well, I will tell you there is a tremendous group of people that think it’s terrible, all of the videos that they’ve seen with some of these people from Planned Parenthood talking about it like you’re selling parts to a car.”
Ben Carson considers gun rights more sacrosanct than human life. In October he indicated that “[he] never saw a body with bullet holes that was more devastating than taking the right to arm ourselves away.” Is he serious? Following the Planned Parenthood shooting he declared, “I think both sides should tone down their rhetoric and engage in civil discussion.” Both sides? Really? Where and when, on the “other” side have we heard phrases like “selling body parts,” “vast for-profit industries,” equating abortion with selling “car parts,” “butchering babies?”
Ted Cruz is now gaining better traction with his bid for the presidency. Cruz has trashed Planned Parenthood as a “criminal enterprise” (it is anything but). He has outlandishly suggested that the shooter is a “transgendered leftist activist.” This is from a man who has also said, without a touch of irony, “Now, listen, here’s the simple and undeniable fact: the overwhelming majority of violent criminals are Democrats.”
“Establishment candidate” Jeb Bush must, despite his woeful campaign performance, be considered a viable GOP aspirant for the presidency. Although his rhetoric does not rise to the rant-rate of Fiorina, Trump or Cruz, he nevertheless boasts about shutting off Planned Parenthood funding in Florida while Governor, claiming that PP is “not actually doing women’s health issues.” Tell that to the nearly three million women and men nationally who annually receive PP care.
Fully legal abortion service comprises roughly 3% of all health services provided by Planned Parenthood. Among these services are cancer screening and prevention, STD treatment, contraception, adoption referrals, pre-natal care, pregnancy testing, and family practice to men and women.
We could go on, down the baleful list of GOP candidates. For all its pro-life rhetoric, the Republican Party seems pro-death to us. Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee and Bobby Jindal recently accepted prominent speaking roles at an event organized by a pastor who stridently and publicly advocates the execution of gays.
As a party, the GOP routinely trots out hate targets for demonization; Mexicans yesterday, Planned Parenthood today, “transgendered leftist activists” (whoever they are, Ted Cruz) tomorrow, women 24/7. By sliming whole populations of Americans with such gleeful venom, the Republican Party is not simply playing to the most bigoted elements of its voting base, it singles out victims for all manner of violent abuse outside the formal boundaries of electoral politics.
From the violence of extremism, children, spouses, family members and friends are left bereft of the figures they love and who care for them. The slain never come back, but the scars remain with their loved ones forever. What does this matter when there are political points out there to be plucked for partisan advantage?
End the Madness Now 