Digby: Wonk who urged Dems not to alienate anti-choice women is a wanker

Melissa Henneberger, who wrote an op-ed in the NY Times on Thursday, never gave away that she shared the anti-choice position of the "liberal" women she talked to "around the country" who she said swung anti-Dem in 2008 based on Kerry's pro-choice position alone.

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2007/06/all-american-girl-by-digby-ms.html

All American Girl

by digby

Ms Henneberger ventured out into the wilds of Middle America and, lo and behold, found a bunch of women who think just like she does:

So it turns out that the columnist who thinks the Democrats' pro-choice position is hurting the party, who presents this as objective advice based on empirical observation, who does not mention her own position on the issue, is in fact anti-choice. And the column is doubly wankerrific: it's hopelessly wrong and dishonest.

Color me shocked.

This, of course, is how it's done in the exciting fast-paced world of professional columnizing. David Broder goes out among the Common Folk and finds a deep yearning for bipartisan compromise. Tom Friedman takes a taxi and learns that globalization is a force for good. And Melinda Henneberger talks--no, 'listens'--to women and discovers, amazingly, that they agree with her on abortion. They go out with an agenda and 'hear' whatever confirms it.

And even though the self-serving nature of their 'observations' is laughably transparent, they all maintain the fiction that they are doing no more than reporting the facts. That's what makes them wankers.



That is exactly why I don't trust this stale and silly convention of DC insiders and elite pundits making anthropological forays into Real America and "reporting" back on the thinking of the electorate. They just reinforce their own preconceived notions and come back to their perch at the top of the political power structure secure in the knowledge that they are just like small town, hard working, regular folks after all.

Give me cold poll numbers any day --- and if somebody wants to follow up with interviews of a sample of that sample for an article in the paper, then fine. But the notion that DC pundits have some special way of talking to strangers that translates into something meaningful about the population at large is ridiculous.

Newsweek.com, I think, and Chris Cilizza

they ALL agreed that dems are doing great damage to their appeal to "independent" voters with this hardline pro-choice stance!

amazingly mendacious, disingenuous 'discussion' amongst these three, and tweety, who all claimed that prochoicers are FAR LEFT.

had to have seen it to believe it

that show was one of the all time worst of Matthews, including Melanie Morgan, and some other stuff, but featured Matthews at his most obnoxious, really coming down hard on 'liberal-left' democrats.

I think it may have cured me of watching him

I hope

thanks for that link, as I was too lazy to follow up on the sneering cretin you expose, who definitely didn't mention her biases on the show, either

and community and most of them tacitly support choice. And no, they're not going to shout it from a rooftop but yes, they will support it in the privacy of their own minds and in the privacy of their own vote. Catholics.

I just don't get the utter, dirt munching STUPIDITY.

:shrug:

:kick:

:hi:

:hi:

If she can't tell us her position straight up in her argument, she's totally untrustworthy. But her argument was also full of holes to begin with. Her main point was that this swing bloc went for Gore in 2000 and switched to Bush (or away from Kerry, in any case) in 2004. That's just not believable. If abortion was so important to them in 2000, why did they vote for Gore? What happened in the four years that made them swing away from the Dem on that issue? It doesn't make sense on the face of it.

How very valiant of her.

shows to grieve the weekend after the theft.

It was WORSE than 2000 because there was the DLC, providing COVER for the theft.

The Values are whatever we program them to be!

But that's just me.

grassroots group that uses that name? Not Miraculous Bigots but values voters? I caught one of their hate fests on CSPAN one weekend and it was clearly fakery.

Fuck that noise. How about wooing the let-people-make-their-own-damn-decisions-about-their-own-damn-bodies crowd? How about wooing the Church-and-State-are-separate-from-each-other-for-a-reason crowd?

You're absolutely right. The DLC "conventional wisdom" waterheads are WRONG about where the American People's sentiments lie. The VAST MAJORITY OF AMERICANS ARE PRO CHOICE. The American People are far more socially libertarian than the punditocracy wants to admit. This is why they led the GOP into the Terri Schiavo fiasco, and why the Talibornipublicans were so shocked- shocked!- when the American People's response on that was MIND YOUR OWN FUCKING BUSINESS!

How about appealing to the millions of Americans who want the government out of their bodies, bedrooms, and bloodstreams? How about appealing to the millions who want the Bill of Rights restored along with our civil liberies and privacy rights? How about appealing to the hundreds of millions in this country who see the "drug war" for the idiotic and wasteful, failed sham that it is? How about appealing to the libertarian wing of the GOP, that has been thoroughly alienated by the Fundy Nutjobs who have taken over that party- not with economic libertarianism, but with the social kind?

No, no, we have to "court the values voter". More great advice from the folks who think the best way to beat a widely reviled Republican Party is to imitate it as much as humanly possible.

:eyes:

That sort of applies to everybody. On all sides.

at the convention a few years ago, because he was pro life

the REASON he wasn't allowed to speak is because he REFUSED to endorse his own party's candidate.

pro life dems are NOT one issue voters. if they were, they'd be......republicans

too bad that liar wasn't challenged to support her allegations by ANYBODY on that panel

how cool would it be for Digby, or GLENN GREENWALD (is that his name?) to get some airtime

they'd EAT those liars in one big chunk

:kick: