Distortion And Venom Wrapped Into One


It's useful periodically to step back and probe the conservative mind. Often ignorant, sometimes dishonest, occasionally valid, the modern conservative is nothing if not consistently crafty.

Blogger Lori Ziganto has posted "WaPo’s Ezra Klein Supports Killing Black Babies" at the venerable right-wing blog RedState and at her own site. She remarks sarcastically "Don’t you realize that a dead child is a cheap child?" and claims

Ezra Klein, writing at the Washington Post, actually proffers that argument in favor of taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood; that abortions are cheaper for the government than having an “unintended pregnancy”. (That’s their euphemism for unborn baby killed by abortion.) His article is filled with predictable talking points, all easily disproved....

Uh, no. "Unintended pregnancy" is a euphemism for.... unintended pregnancy. One might assume, initially, that Klein had written "a dead child is a cheap child" or at least utilized the phrase "cheap child." One would be wrong, however, and she proceeds to quote Klein maintaining (emphasis Ziganto's)

The fight also isn’t about cutting spending. The services Planned Parenthood provides save the federal government a lot of money. It’s somewhat cold to put it in these terms, but taxpayers end up bearing a lot of the expense for unintended pregnancies among people without the means to care for their children.

Ziganto comments

Did you mean among “those people”, Ezra? After all, the majority of babies aborted are minority babies. In New York City alone, nearly 60% of unborn African-American children were aborted.

Read Klein's post once or twice; it's worth it. It's also necessary to confirm that the Washington Post writer and blogger never referred to those people. At the risk of provoking the classic response of victimhood of the right, one needs to consider the possibility of psychological projection, that Giganto herself holds the attitude she is attributing to Klein. (Or perhaps she has fallen prey to the underrated conservative political correctness.) The latter never mentions "blacks" or "African-American children" or "minorities." Nor does he even invoke the concept of minorities or race, though at one time noting that a loss of federal funding for Planned Parenthood would make cancer screening, contraception, and STD testing "less available to poor people." (And "poor people" is not a euphemism, or anything else, for African-American.)

Ziganto is not motivated primarily, or perhaps not at all, by racism or racial animus. (Why, she probably isn't even from Mississippi!) Ironically, though, her piece does bolster Klein's argument that "the fight also isn’t about cutting spending. The services Planned Parenthood provides save the federal government a lot of money." Nowhere does Ziganto even allege that the services provided by Planned Parenthood, including preventing unintended pregnancies, saves the government and taxpayers money. She links to a site citing twelve reasons to support defunding Planned Parenthood- and even that avoids the issue of the burden placed upon taxpayers of supporting a child from an unintended pregnancy.

One solitary blogger on an important right-wing blog site does not the conservative movement make. Still, GOP ideologues appear intent on eliminating federal funding for an effective source of women's health care, even while leaving the military budget untouched. Cost savings from the likes of cancer screening and STD testing, as well as from audits performed by the IRS (an agency the GOP is committed to slash), are well-documented. If the traditional media were paying attention, it, too, would notice, as Susie Madrak notes

And can we drop the political game pieces and get back to reality? Republicans don’t care about the deficit. Repeat after me: Republicans don’t care about the deficit. Did you hear a peep out of them during the Bush years? Of course not. Because Republicans don’t care about the deficit.

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