Hot comments: Fred!, Kirsten, and Joel

posted at 10:05 am on May 1, 2007 by Bryan
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Kirsten Powers slams the Democrats and the implacable NOW as “out of the mainstream” on partial birth abortion:

The Democratic Party has made a huge show of reaching out to religious voters, for whom abortion is a central issue. Overtures have been made to acknowledge the moral dimension of abortion, with Sen. Hillary Clinton’s famous remarks that, “we can all recognize that abortion in many ways represents a sad, even tragic choice to many, many women.”

But terrified by the left wing of the Democratic Party, the presidential candidates are aligning themselves with organizations that malign opponents of unrestricted late-term abortions as misinformed hysterics. Yet some of the people who run those organizations are themselves bereft of factual information about the procedure they champion. Recently, National Organization for Women (NOW) President Kim Gandy was asked in a radio interview to describe the procedure she so vigorously supports. She couldn’t. When pressed, she sputtered, “I’m not a doctor.”

When the host cited testimony of a doctor, one Dr. Martin Haskell — the man who pioneered and has performed at least a thousand of these abortions — Mr. Gandy replied “I don’t know who Dr. Haskell is.”

It’s important to know who Dr. Haskell is, since he has debunked a central claim of unrestricted late-term abortion proponents, that they are critical to protect the “health” of the mother. According to an interview in American Medical News, Dr. Haskell said, “I’ll be quite frank: most of my abortions are elective in that 20-24 week range. . . . In my particular case, probably 20% are for genetic reasons. And the other 80% are purely elective.”

She notes that between 60 and 70% of Americans agreed with the SCOTUS ruling that upheld the ban on partial birth abortion, and yet all of the Democrat presidential candidates criticized that decision. Several, including SML Harry Reid, voted for the ban only to turn and scold the Supreme Court for upholding a law that they voted for. Their vote was cynical–they wanted to appear mainstream, but hoped SCOTUS would strike the law down and save them from their own hard left wing. Doing the right thing for the unborn never entered their calculations.

Onward to Joel Mowbray, who finds your tax dollars at work spreading terrorist propaganda in the Arab world:

Testifying under oath recently, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice misled Congress in her strong defense of Al-Hurra, the taxpayer financed Arab TV network. It was unwitting, though. She herself was misled.

During the March 21 House Foreign Operations Appropriations subcommittee hearing, Rep. Mark Kirk (R., Ill.) pressed Ms. Rice on the wisdom of providing a platform to Islamic terrorists, citing Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah’s Dec. 7 speech, which Al-Hurra aired live. The broadcast speech “went on for 30 minutes,” she responded, “followed by commentary, much of which was critical of Nasrallah.”

In fact, Mr. Nasrallah’s speech was carried in its entirety, roughly an hour and eight minutes. The commentary that followed–a 13-minute phone interview with Wael Abou Faour, a member of Lebanon’s governing coalition–was indeed critical of Mr. Nasrallah. He accused the Hezbollah leader of not being anti-U.S. and anti-Israel enough. While Mr. Nasrallah had claimed Lebanon’s governing coalition was aligned with the U.S. and had backed Israel during the war last summer, Mr. Abou Faour said that Hezbollah was actually closer to the U.S and added that any Lebanese faction that assisted “the Israeli enemy” should not be allowed to engage in political discussion because “the only place they should be [is] in prison.”

The secretary of state’s testimony was without doubt delivered in good faith. But the same cannot be said of the information about the broadcast Al-Hurra provided to the State Department.

According to Mowbray, Al-Hurra’s problem centers on former CNN producer Larry Register:

Mr. Register has not, to his credit, changed Al-Hurra’s dedication to showcasing the full range of U.S. politics. The other side of the network, however, has been “gutted,” in the words of one staffer. Even though Mr. Register has made some improvements since the March column, Al-Hurra still produces far fewer stories about Arab government corruption and human-rights abuses.

Register has found plenty of airtime to dedicate to Iran’s Holocaust denial conference, though. Al-Hurra means “the free one,” and its purpose is to be a voice of America and freedom in the Arab world. If Mr. Register can’t allow it to fulfill that mission, he ought to find another job.

Finally, a little red meat from Fred! Only Fred! gets the !, and it’s for this passage of his latest NRO column:

In the meantime, let’s be realistic about the world we live in. Mexican leaders apparently have an economic policy based on exporting their own citizens, while complaining about U.S. immigration policies that are far less exclusionary than their own. The French jail perfectly nice people for politically incorrect comments, but scold us for holding terrorists at Guantanamo.

Russia, though, takes the cake. Here is a government apparently run by ex-KGB agents who have no problem blackmailing whole countries by turning the crank on their oil pipelines. They’re not doing anything shady, they say. They can’t help it if their opponents are so notoriously accident-prone. Criticize these guys and you might accidentally drink a cup of tea laced with a few million dollars worth of deadly, and extremely rare, radioactive poison. Oppose the Russian leadership, and you could trip and fall off a tall building or stumble into the path of a bullet.

The hundreds of demonstrators the Kremlin has had beaten and arrested in the last few weeks alone, we are told, were not pro-democracy activists but common criminals — like world chess champion Garry Kasparov. Demonstrating without a permit is a serious crime and, luckily for the Kremlin, it turns out that pro-government youth groups seem always to have permits for rallies at the exact times and places that anti-government protesters gather.

Oh yeah. That’s how a president writes about world events.

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