What a Difference a Week Makes

What's the difference between a 25-week-old baby and a 24-week-old-fetus? Not a thing as far as I'm concerned. And not a thing as far as most if not all pro-lifers are concerned. But apparently that's the crux of the defense for Kermit Gosnell and his House of Horrors. Via the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Overcoming this pile of evidence may seem insurmountable, but that is the job defense attorney Jack McMahon begins Monday. …

It is not known if Gosnell will testify. The Constitution does not require a defendant to testify or present evidence, and a jury may not consider that fact in reaching a verdict.

But given Gosnell’s past behavior, it would not be a surprise if he does.

From his first court appearance in February 2009, Gosnell has maintained an amiable, courtly demeanor that belies his precarious legal situation and the anger of some antiabortion partisans who have attended his trial.

He has rejected several plea deals from prosecutors, the last before jury selection started March 4. The offer would have let Gosnell serve life in a federal prison rather than the grittier Pennsylvania system and his wife, Pearl, 52, keep their West Philadelphia home.

“You’ll know when I know,” McMahon snapped on Thursday when Assistant District Attorney Edward Cameron asked for his list of witnesses, which he is required to file before beginning his case.

Doesn't sound like Gosnell's defense is too confident in his ability to defend someone who kept baby feet in jars, hmm? No. No, not at all. Honestly, though, how DO you defend a man who did the sort of things Gosnell did? Maybe it's because I have a conscience, but I just don't see how anyone can justify this kind of behavior.

And what about the lack of media coverage? Does anyone have anything to say about that? Jonah Goldberg does:

My fellow Fox News contributor Kirsten Powers wrote a USA Today column last week shaming the media for not covering the Gosnell case enough or, in many cases, at all. She got results. Suddenly everyone was talking about it. Though a dismaying amount of the coverage is about why there was a lack of coverage.

It’s an important issue, of course. But it’s not a complicated one. It seems obvious that most mainstream outlets are run and staffed by pro-choice liberals. But whatever the motivation, The Washington Post’s Melinda Henneberger is surely correct when she says the mainstream media are generally locked into a single narrative about abortion: “reproductive rights under siege.”

Ironically, the same factors that might have discouraged the mainstream media from covering the story in the first place now give them an incentive to turn it into a story about the media. CBS News, for instance, broke its broadcast boycott of the trial by running a piece on the political firestorm over the lack of coverage.

Goldberg is a hundred percent right in that excerpt. The lack of coverage is quite simply a case of "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil." This was obvious to anyone with a brain from the very beginning. Though it is a bit ironic that the lack of coverage has itself facilitated the desire and the need for more such. Streissand Effect at work? You be the judge.

From Willful Blindness to Stunning Admission

Hat tip to The Other McCain for this:

[T]he MSM has barely covered a story that could plausibly be named “The Trial of the Century”. And that demands explanation. So I’ll tell you why I haven’t covered it.
To start, it makes me ill. I haven’t been able to bring myself to read the grand jury inquiry. I am someone who cringes when I hear a description of a sprained ankle.
But I understand why my readers suspect me, and other pro-choice mainstream journalists, of being selective—of not wanting to cover the story because it showcased the ugliest possibilities of abortion rights. The truth is that most of us tend to be less interested in sick-making stories—if the sick-making was done by “our side.”
Of course, I’m not saying that I identify with criminal abortionists who kill infants and grievously wound their patients. But I am pro-choice.
What Gosnell did was not some inevitable result of legal abortion.

This gem of a quote comes from Meghan McArdle at the Daily Beast. Part of a larger column that you can read in its entirety here. Having just finished the column as of this writing, I was ready to pounce. The quote from TOM made it seem as though she was going to start profusely defending the abortion industry that she, by her own admission, supports. And then I read further.

The article from the Beast appears to double as a defense against those who are skeptical of McArdle's motives for not covering the Gosnell story, and insisting that Gosnell isn't the rule, but rather the exception, with a dash of "how could this possibly have gone wrong?" thrown in for neutrality purposes. It's an attempt to be Switzerland while at the same time trying to side with the Viccy French. McArdle admits freely to being pro-choice (itself a biased term that stands in for "pro-abortion") but insists in the same article that Gosnell's practices aren't the end result of making abortion legal.

Obviously if you're reading this, you want my take on the issue. Well, I think Ms. McArdle is simply trying to jump through any hoop she feels is necessary to jump through in order to spin the Gosnell story in a favorable light for the pro-abortion crowd. Her excuses reek of someone grasping at straws and finding nothing to grasp. 

Still, this also appears to be further evidence that the tide against Gosnell is turning. McArdle and her ilk may be rushing to defend themselves and their pro-abortion allies against our cresting wave of truth in journalism, but at least now they're noticing the elephant in the room (even as they try to explain its presence away.)

It also raises another point of interest. McArdle makes clear that the reason she herself did not report on this story is because "it made [her] sick". The idea that these atrocities were occurring out in the open appears to have been utterly incomprehensible to her, and now with Gosnell front and center on the internet news stage, she's having to realize that her crusade to help by relieving women of what she perceives as a burden lead to this. But is she really changing her mind?

I don't believe so.

Another mention of the article that the author makes is that "While legal abortion was not sufficient to create the horrors in Philadelphia, it was necessary.  Gosnell was able to harm so many women and babies because he operated in the open."

This quote made me turn my head and blink for several reasons. The most obvious of which would be the honesty of it all. her tone suggests an apologetic admission, but it may have inadvertently been the most honest statement made in this entire article. She just admitted in one sentence that in order for the sort of thing going on in Gosnell's clinic to be possible, legal abortion is a NECESSARY COMPONENT!

Are more of these admissions on the way? Only time will tell.

Kermit Gosnell Finally Being Outed by the MSM?

I'm not sure whether to trust this development or not. According to this link on Hot Air, the baby killer known as Kermit Gosnell, currently on trial for endangering women at his abortion clinic back east, has been called "the worst serial killer in history" by Nightline anchor Terry Moran. Does this mean that the formerly major networks of the near defunct Mainstream Media are finally giving in to public pressure and shedding light on the darkest corners of the West Philly abortion industry?

Don't count your chickens just yet.

The network has, according to that link above, no original content regarding Gosnell exists in the ABC  News archives. All of it is taken from the Associated Press, but there IS some content dating back to late January that amounts to little more than a pen and paper shield against late term abortionists and how they aren't all like the monster currently on trial. There's even a video. The spin on the video and in the article made me dizzy. So dizzy that I don't think I could read or watch either one again. This paragraph from the article pretty much sums up why:

We learned at his knee," said Robinson, speaking of Tiller. "Kindness, courtesy, justice, love and respect are the hallmarks of a good doctor-patient relationship. People tell me every single day, 'Dr. Robinson, you've given me my life back.' For these women it is life or death. Many women try to self-abort. The less available it is, the poor will have the hardest time."

The rest of the article is much the same. In tone, at least. The whole thing reads as a desperate defense of people like Gosnell, based on the idea that women who get late term abortions are "just as desperate" as those who get abortions at an earlier time in their pregnancy. The above quote, for me, was the money shot. This article goes to great lengths to paint these so-called "doctors" as victims just trying to do right by the women that ask them to perform this procedure. Nowhere in the article, except for a caveat somewhere towards the middle, is there any mention of the women who were injured or who died as a result of these botched procedures.

Question: How do you paint these women as victims, while not acknowledging the horrors (well documented horrors at that) that can result from botched abortion procedures?

Sorry if I drifted a bit off topic in that last paragraph, but if you stick with me, I do have a point to make.

My point is that the MSM may be cracking under the pressure, but I don't think so. At least not yet. The ABC News declarations that Gosnell may be the worst serial killer in the history of the nation are a start, but they're more likely the result of  network trying to save what little face it may or may not have among low info viewers whose only source of news is the dinosaur media. Still, even a small beginning is still a beginning, and I'll be watching the net for more developments and updates

Even Death isn't Sacred Anymore

I've just had the most interestingly dismissive exchange on Facebook. As we all know, Margaret Thatcher has passed on. Because the Iron Lady is no longer with us, the Left and their cronies are having a hate-filled field day trying to trash her name and run it through the ringer until nothing is left. I've seen the hate on Twitchy, I've seen it on Hot Air, and I've seen it even on my own newsfeed on Facebook. It's the Facebook post that really got my blood boiling, though, because it shows the true heartlessness of some who opposed Margaret Thatcher. Twitchy has some real gems, but as the Facebook exchange directly affected me, I'm going to focus on that one.

This image has been circulating Facebook for the last 24 hours, in which Ken Loach has declared that Margaret Thatcher's funeral should be as cheap as possible because "it's what she would have wanted." First, how does he even know that? Second, how heartless can you be to deny a human being a respectful funeral, especially one who broke the glass ceiling as it pertains to the Prime Ministry position? The answer, apparently, is as disrespectful as Loach was being when he made that statement..

The real kicker about today, though, was that when I defended Thatcher from that jackal Loach, I was, predictably, best from all sides by liberals wanting to smother me with the idea that Thatcher was a horrible person and that the above comment I mentioned and linked to was "witty". I'm used to being beset by liberals when I open my mouth and shoot it off, but this time it really got to me. Why? Because one of the liberals in question was a member of my own family. I won't say who, because they are family and I don't want to cause any undue stress or trouble for them. However, I will say that this member of my family was trying to justify, though subtly, that Margaret Thatcher did not deserve to be loved because of the supposedly "horrible" things that she did during her time as Prime Minister of England.

What were those horrible things, you ask? Well, let's start with a little history on what Britain was like before Thatcher took the Prime Minster position, shall we?

Before Thatcher became Prime Minister, England's government owned close to 9/10 of all industry and manufacturing in the country. Stagnation was rampant. Economic growth had sputtered to the slowest of crawls, and unemployment was as bad as it had ever been, possibly worse. Fast forward to Thatcher's tenure: privatization of the industries that were in most need of it, scaling back government control of agencies and ensuring less intrusion into the lives of Britain's private citizens. Sounds pretty evil so far, right? No? Well, then maybe this is what they were talking about.

During her tenure as Prime Minister, the Irish Republican Army was still up and running, and they decided to try and take out 800 years worth of frustrations over dealings with England by assassinating her. The attempt failed, and the culprits were imprisoned. Seeing that their attempt failed, the IRA members decided that a hunger strike would be enough to get the Iron Lady to bend. They were sadly mistaken. Tragically, several of these men died during their hunger strike, as Thatcher refused to bend and give in to their demands. Evil? I would have to say no. thatcher didn't force these men to go on hunger strikes and starve themselves, and  the UK and U.S. have always had a policy of not negotiating with terrorists, which is what the IRA were. The hunger strikes did provoke Ronald Reagan to action, however, and he convinced Thatcher to work with the Irish on a peaceful settlement, which she achieved. Top that off with bringing England back from the brink of economic collapse, and I'd say Thatcher was about as far from evil as a human being can realistically expect.