Why Blumner should worry everybody

My last broadside at Robyn Blumner, that official pinata of The St. Petersburg Times, offered a bit of a preview of her Sunday column this week, titled "Why McCain should worry women."

Fresh from her previous week of worrying about the risk of having more than one child per family, Blumner turns to her worry that McCain will damage what Blumner calls "reproductive freedom."

What scares me most about McCain, beyond our 100-year presence in Iraq, his itchy trigger finger relative to other foes, and his enthusiasm for tax cuts for the rich, is his fiercely conservative record on women's reproductive freedom.
(The St. Petersburg Times)

The uninitiated among us might think that "reproductive freedom" has to do with being able to reproduce freely. That isn't really what Blumner has in mind. Reproductive freedom isn't being able to reproduce freely, even though Blumner calls it the ability to control the size of your family. She has small family size in mind more so than large family size.

The next president will be the decider on whether women's emancipation from the slavery of the womb will continue in this country. We are on the cusp of losing the right to control our bodies and determine our family size. McCain promises as much.

Slavery of the womb? I suppose a hysterectomy should cure that. Blumner's language hints at a certain degree of dislike for her sisters whose fondest wish is to bear and care for a large family. Apparently they have a slave mentality in her eyes.

I suppose we'll all be slaves of one sort or another until we have attained freedom from the consequences of our actions.

But I don't want to send this post down essentially the same path as my last one on Blumner. Having fewer kids is good, having more is bad. If you have to kill a few fetuses to achieve those fine ends, what of it? We get it, Robyn.

Her focus here is the danger of McCain. Her personal vision of the better society is just part of the vehicle for attacking McCain.

Blumner is scared of our "100 year presence in Iraq." She must be going gray from our continued military presence in Cuba (Guantanamo Bay), Germany/Japan (since WWII), and South Korea.

She's even more terrified of McCain's "fiercely conservative" record on abortion rights. Doesn't the word "fiercely" scare you all by itself? What is McCain's record on abortion?

According to Blumner, he's as radical as someone from "Operation Rescue." Except she provided no photos of McCain protesting outside an abortion clinic. Perhaps she should specify which member of "Operation Rescue" she has in mind. Maybe one of the office secretaries?

John McCain believes Roe v. Wade is a flawed decision that must be overturned, and as president he will nominate judges who understand that courts should not be in the business of legislating from the bench. Constitutional balance would be restored by the reversal of Roe v. Wade, returning the abortion question to the individual states. The difficult issue of abortion should not be decided by judicial fiat.
(Johnmccain.com)

Sounds like yet more of that patented Blumner hyperbole. Even liberals (not counting Blumner among them, so far as I can tell) acknowledge that Roe v. Wade was bad law. They like the outcome but realize that the legal reasoning was out in left field.

But Roe received equally harsh criticism from the academic community. Perhaps most strikingly, the opinion was lambasted by John Hart Ely, perhaps the leading liberal constitutional theorist of the century. Although he dedicated much of his work to supporting the Warren Court rulings, Ely denounced Roe as lawless. He termed Roe a “very bad decision” because it was “bad consti-tutional law, or rather because it is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.” Roe was, he thought, uniquely open to the charge of being utterly constitutionally ungrounded, “a charge that can responsibly be leveled at no other decision of the past twenty years.” He found no legal basis for the decision.
(Missouri Law Review)

That's blasphemy in the Church o' Blumner, where Roe v. Wade is supposed to receive consideration as a super-duper-uber-precedent. Higher, perhaps, than the Constitution itself since the latter is a "living document" that may be freely interpreted by the courts. Sacrosanct, in effect.

Yes, McCain votes solidly pro-life. The comparison to "Operation Rescue" is uncalled for since even many liberals agree that Roe v. Wade constitutes bad law.

Blumner's funniest gaffe this week is her argument to the effect that voters misperceive McCain as a moderate voice on abortion. The evidence? Well, pro-choice voters in the primary went to McCain 45 percent to 19 percent. Could that have been mostly due to the fact that Giuliani was poised to be counted out of the race? Keep those blasphemous thoughts out of the Church o' Blumner.

To my amusement, Blumner's argument tracks directly to NPR. Neither Blumner nor NPR offers any evidence in favor of the supposed misperception other than the primary voting in Florida. I voted for Giuliani in the primary because I judged him as more in the mainstream of the GOP than McCain despite the mayor's weakness on social conservatism. No matter who got the GOP nomination, even Giuliani, Blumner would be making essentially the same argument. She would tell readers to fear Giuliani because of his pledge to nominate strict constructionist judges in the mold of Scalia. Blumner would write something like:

The next president will be the decider on whether women's emancipation from the slavery of the womb will continue in this country. We are on the cusp of losing the right to control our bodies and determine our family size. Giuliani promises as much.

Here's a fishy one:

He told the American Conservative Union that one of the three most important goals that he wants to achieve as president is to promote "a nation of traditional values that protects the rights of the unborn."

It's easy enough to find the exact phrase Blumner quotes, but not with "American Conservative Union." It comes from Blumner's column and McCain's Web site for the most part.

OK, I see what Blumner did.

The American Conservative Union sent out a questionnaire. The McCain campaign sent back a stock answer from the campaign Web site and Blumner didn't bother to note that McCain's answer consists of five points in the portion she quotes rather than three.

See for yourself:

I believe our nation’s best days are ahead and remain committed to an America with a strong national defense; a smaller, more accountable government; a robust economy with abundant opportunity for all who seek it; a judiciary that interprets the law and does not make it; and a nation of traditional values that protects the rights of the unborn and the traditional family.
(www.conservative.org)

Compare it to the McCain campaign Web site (actually an op-ed authored by McCain). It's pretty much the same statement. Subsequent to that five-point introduction, McCain offers a three-point paragraph apparently representing his three top priorities and goes on to devote an additional paragraph to each--without bringing up his pro-life stance.

In short, Blumner either blundered or lied, and her editor(s) (I assume she isn't given free reign to publish without having her facts checked) trusted her too much.

There are more errors and spin to mine from this Blumner column. While one could make a day of it, I've got other things to do at the moment.

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