Ben Shapiro is lucky that the relentless 24-7 news cycle took him off the hook for some really dumb comments at the recent March for Life in Washington, D.C. Some advertisers immediately bailed on sponsoring the political commentator’s podcast, but fortunately for him, the controversy seems to have died down, as explained below. To Shapiro and his apologists: It doesn’t matter if the fake news media took his use of the H word out of context. That’s what the fake news media does, and the smartest guy in the room should have been aware of that.
The American public appear to be very conflicted over abortion; this sensitive, private issue is a very uncomfortable one even to discuss. While most voters are probably somewhere in the middle, the culture to this point seems to generally seems to favor Roe v. Wade, the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision allowing abortion across the country.
Reproductive Rights Back in the News
Speaking of the current news cycle, it would be difficult for any rational person, regardless of where they find themselves on the pro-choice, pro-life continuum, to approve of the gruesome and barbaric abortion legislation that some extreme Democrats and their abortion-industry masters are currently pushing, however.
Never Trumper Ben Shapiro presumably wants to bring his fellow citizens over to the pro-life cause and change the aforementioned culture. Using the H word could be the worst possible approach to doing so, especially in this media climate.
No political conservative should flippantly throw around the H word under any circumstances. Although Shapiro isn’t running for office, this gaffe is perhaps reminiscent to some degree of foolhardy, pro-life GOP U.S. Senate candidates Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, who snatched defeat from what would have would been certain victory after their ridiculous comments about rape surfaced.
GOP politicians and their handlers must be savvy enough to realize that when “journalists” (which Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds describes as Democratic operatives with bylines) ask leading questions, they are on a search-and-destroy mission rather than a fact-finding mission.
Moreover, when blowback occurs over a remark in politics, and you — or your supporters — are explaining or clarifying, you’re already losing.
The News Cycle Has a Short-Term Memory
The Covington Catholic controversy, which turned out to be essentially another in a long list of contrived media hoaxes leading to manufactured outrage, took Shapiro out of the news cycle. After a massive onslaught via social media, which may result in legal action against various blue-check Twitter luminaries, the Roger Stone arrest supplanted the boys in the headlines.
Parenthetically, Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham, a.k.a. Graham 2.0, wants to the FBI to explain why a deployment of armed FBI agents staged a pre-dawn raid at Stone’s home when a simple phone call to surrender would have sufficed.
President Trump’s decision to temporarily end the partial government shutdown, in turn, replaced Stone as the top national story. And on it goes with the next controversy du jour, usually one that attempts to make Trump look bad.
Parenthetically, while the nuance-incapable media wants to push everyone into either the highly politicized pro-choice or pro-life camp, you don’t necessarily have to be pro life to believe that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided.
At a 2013 University of Chicago conference, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg (whose health status is currently a question mark), a strong supporter of a woman’s right to choose, suggested that the decision was way too sweeping. Instead, the court should have issued a much narrower ruling that focused only on weighing the merits or demerits of the law in the state where the abortion rights lawsuit got its start, according to Ginsburg.
A limited ruling along these lines would have been consistent with the principle of judicial restraint which is generally advocated by conservatives rather than liberals like Justice Ginsburg. Laws vary from state to state under the principle of federalism, and Ginsburg seemed to imply that abortion restrictions or lack thereof should also have been handled the same way.
