That is why they are pulling it, pronto:
Under pressure to withdraw an advertisement that describes Judge John G. Roberts Jr. as “one whose ideology leads him to excuse violence against other Americans,” an abortion rights advocacy group announced Thursday night that it would replace the advertisement, which had drawn widespread criticism as being false and misleading.
The advocacy group, Naral Pro-Choice America, announced its decision in a letter to Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and a longtime supporter of abortion rights. Earlier in the day, Mr. Specter urged Naral to withdraw the 30-second spot, calling it “blatantly untrue and unfair.”
In the letter to Mr. Specter, Naral’s president, Nancy Keenan, said that the debate over the spot had “become a distraction from the serious discussion we hoped to have with the American public.”
Seppuku is such a distraction.
The advertisement had prompted intense criticism from Republicans, a handful of Democrats, an independent watchdog group called Factcheck.org, and even some supporters of abortion rights, who said they felt it was hurting their cause. Mr. Specter made that argument in his letter to Ms. Keenan.
The senator wrote, “When Naral puts on such an advertisement, in my opinion it undercuts its credibility and injures the pro-choice cause.”
Some prominent Democrats said they agreed with Mr. Specter. Lanny Davis, a top official in the Clinton administration, said in an interview Thursday that he had been making phone calls to liberal advocacy groups urging them to denounce the advertisement, which he called “inaccurate, filled with innuendo and shameless.”
No kidding.
I should add that Mark Kleiman has about the best defense possible for what I consider a pretty indefensible ad, but even his spirited defense includes the following:
As far as I can tell, the only statement in the NARAL spot that is actually false is its implication that Robert’s ideology leads him to “excuse violence.” The ad also uses images of a later clinic bombing and the face and voice of one of the victims of that bombing, which might lead an unwary viewer to think that Roberts’s intervention had been on behalf of the bomber in that case, which it wasn’t.
Ok, then. Other than the outright falsehood and the attempt to link Roberts to a bomber, the ad is just A-OK.
*** Update ***
Can we please come up with a better way of arguing about Supreme Court nominees?
Fellow liberals, face it: The advertisement created by NARAL, the abortion rights group that opposes John Roberts’s nomination to the Supreme Court, is outrageous. It ties Roberts to people who bombed abortion clinics. If this isn’t guilt by association, I don’t know what is.
KC
This is good to see. Why they’d want to put out such trash, I don’t know.
Bruce Moomaw
Kleiman actually provides a lengthy (and, to my mind, rather convincing) argument that Roberts — and the Bush Sr. Administration he was working for at the time — actually DID file an amicus brief (which they had no obligation to do) in order to curry favor with the more extreme part of the anti-abortion movement by, to a very large degree, “excusing their violence”. Remember what the 1992 GOP Convention was like? (As Kleiman also points out, Operation Rescue is enthusiastic about the Roberts nomination.)
Admittedly, one can make the same argument about the disgusting tendency of all Democratic Presidential candidates to kiss Al Sharpton’s fat rump — but since Kleiman has called Sharpton “the most evil American politician of our time” (and, specifically, worse than Jesse Helms), one can hardly accuse him of defending that.
DougJ
Maybe the members of NARAL should stick to practicing witch craft and refusing to shave their legs.
Mike
“DougJ Says:
Maybe the members of NARAL should stick to practicing witch craft and refusing to shave their legs.”
And wearing comfortable shoes.
nyrev
Don’t be fooled, Mike. Easy Spirits are the devil’s shoes.
Mr Furious
Equal to or slightly worse than the Cleland ad. And that’s from a rabidly pro-choice, Bush-hatin’ Democrat.
They are doing the responsible thing.
BUT, it is nowhere near as bad as the Swift Boat bullshit. And I hope you Righties can pay attention to what actually denouncing an irresponsible ad is. And not just from me, but from the Dems quoted above. When in the last six years have you ever heard a Republican say anything close to “inaccurate, filled with innuendo and shameless” about anything from their side.
Bush’s lame pleas against 527s don’t cut it.
Mr Furious
Kleiman makes a better case than I expected. I have to say that the ad, as currently constituted, is over the line. But that doesn’t mean Roberts and the first Bush Administration are exonerated. Kleiman’s points are valid, as is NARAL’s objections to Roberts.
So yeah, dump this ad, but they shouldn’t give up the fight. If they shot a new ad more along the lines of what Kevin Drum suggests here, I’d have to say it’d be clean. Tough, but clean.
neil
I don’t see any outright falsehood or any fraudulent attempt to link Roberts to a bomber. He filed a brief in support of a bomber, which is supporting a bomber even if he wasn’t directly supporting his bombing.
Zifnab
I’ve yet to see the ad, so I don’t know. What I do know is that people in the Democratic party came out against it in good faith and NARAL promptly backed down apologetically.
I mean, the answer is fairly simple. NARAL thinks Roberts is anti-choice and wants to scare the judge out into the open about it.
That said, no one claimed Democrates have been above sleazy tricks. We’re still dealing with politicians here, on both sides of the line. It’s just refreshing to see people handle their bullshit responsibly. I can just imagine a Republican response. Something along the lines of “We have undisclosed evidence that supports us” “Roberts is a douce anyway” and “We at the GOP aren’t familar with the term ‘lie’ and therefore cannot be connected to it in any way”
Rocky Smith
“BUT, it’s nowhere near as bad as the Swift Boat bullshit.”
I wasn’t aware that ANY of those ads had been proven false. This NARAL one has.
RW
“Equal to or slightly worse than the Cleland ad.”
Here we go again. Some talking points never die, do they?
DougJ
“I wasn’t aware that ANY of those ads had been proven false. This NARAL one has.”
And the Swift Boaters were all war heros. NARAL is a bunch of America-hating lesbians. There’s a world of difference.
Zifnab
Just Factcheck it.
adk46er
Can’t we get past the shooting Mrs Lincoln and just talk about the play.
RW
Thanks to those who pointed to Kleiman’s post. It was good to see a lefty put forth his own “objectively pro-Saddam” musings (except, you know, this is the “good” kind), thereby quashing about two years worth of outrage and talking points.
That link will come in quite useful in the future.
Rocky Smith
Zifnab’s link does not prove the Swift Boat ads as false. It goes into a he said/ he said squabble which proves nothing either way. Nice try though.
Bruce Moomaw
Er, Ricky. The main question is whether an amicus brief filed on behalf of Operation Rescue — not exactly an anti-violence outfit, as Kleiman says, and in fact one fond of getting supposedly “peaceful” demonstrators as close to abortion clinics as possible in order to suddenly turn violent — against using an anti-Klan statute against anti-abortion demonstrators is or is not “supporting violence”. One can make a fairly strong argument that it is, as Kleiman did. Particularly when:
(1) As the NY Times points out in its (anti-NARAL) editorial tonight, the law that was struck down was intended to “be invoked by federal courts to support injunctions against the increasingly frequent and violent demonstrations being staged to block access to abortion clinics”. Note that little key word: “violent”.
(2) It’s pointed out (as John Tierney does in his anti-NARAL Times column tonight) that “Mr. Roberts argued (and the Supreme Court agreed) that the law didn’t apply to the protesters at abortion clinics because they weren’t discriminating against all women, just the women seeking abortions.” An interesting piece of legalism on which to support the White House’s argument — and not one having a thing to do with the distinction between “violent” and “non-violent” demonstrators.
(3) Now let’s quote Kleiman: “Operation Rescue was then engaged in a violent, and largely successful, attempt to deny access to abortion to as many women as possible by closing down the clinics. The attorneys general of Virginia and New York both filed amici arguing that their states lacked the [police] capacity to fight off Operation Rescue’s efforts.
“The Solicitor General’s office was under no obligation to file an amicus in a civil lawsuit. Ask yourself whether the SG’s office would have intervened similarly in a case involving violent protesters against U.S. support of the Contras, or Earth First, or the Animal Liberation Front, or Al Sharpton’s shake-down crew, whatever the legal merits. No, I don’t think so either.
“If the Bush I Administration had in fact opposed anti-abortion violence and merely doubted that the anti-Klan law could properly be made to apply, it could have offered legislation making interference with the clinics a federal matter; such legislation was in fact passed under the Clinton Administration. But of course the administration did no such thing.”
So. Was Roberts’ brief “pro-bombing”? No — and that’s what was wrong with the NARAL ad (as agreed to by Dionne and by the NY Times and Wash. Post editorialists). Was Roberts’ brief (on behalf of the Bush Sr. White House), by any sane standard, “pro-violence”? Yes. Now, anyone care to comment on that part of the issue?
RW
Sure: Some folks are still spinning that the Rather memos were “fake but accurate”. Almost everyone else recognizes spin when they see it (thus NARAL pulling the ad and firing the director behind it) but go ahead and spin away. We’ll ask if the USSC, that agreed with Roberts’ argument, is also “pro-violence” after we finish laughing over this one.
Until then, just remember: objectively pro-Saddam.
Bruce Moomaw
Please, Ricky. Kleiman didn’t say — or hint — that the US Supreme Court was “pro-violence” because of its legal decision. He said that the Bush Sr. White House was, as proven by its combination of that amicus brief with its failure to propose any actual new laws that would make it possible for the Feds to control that violence (after the Attorneys General of two large states had said they didn’t have the police capacity to carry out all the needed prosecutions). The Clinton White House, of course, did quickly correct that situation. To repeat myself: what was wrong with the NARAL ad was that it accused the Bush Sr. White House of supporting abortion bombings. It didn’t; but it clearly had a very large soft spot for violent demonstrators harassing and threatening patients.
(Incidentally, the really interesting thing about the Burkett memos is that — fake though they were — when they were shown to Bush himself by Dan Bartlett, he flatly refused to say that there was anything at all incorrect about their contact. Indeed, CBS told the Washington Post that it was precisely that nihil obstat from Bush that finally decided them to run the “60 Minutes” story, since that show’s producers were the ones who had requested that Bush take an advance look at the memos and see whether he wanted to accuse them of being fake. All of which very strongly suggests that Burkett’s earlier story was the true one — that is, he saw the real memos to that effect being destroyed by the Guard officials, and then later decided to stir up the pot by incorporating his memories of the content of said real memos in his new fabricated ones.)
Bruce Moomaw
That’s “incorrect about their content”, not “incorrect about their contact”.