June 16, 2009

Joan Walsh’s Warped Mind Rationalizes George Tiller’s Butchery

“Warp. to cause to judge, choose, or act wrongly or abnormally.” Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary.

The mind of Joan Walsh, Editor-in-Chief of Salon, is warped. Like many supporters of late-term abortions, she’s lost all touch with reality.

Ms. Walsh – who blames the murder of late-term abortionist George Tiller on repeated harsh attacks by cable host Bill O’Reilly – was confronted by the ratings king in a televised slugfest last week. Four times, a woofing O’Reilly hounded Ms. Walsh to concede that fully developed babies within weeks of birth are deserving of any protection under the law.

Four times, the warped Ms. Walsh could not find it in her clearly two-sizes-too-small heart (not to mention her equally shriveled reasoning) to do so.

Like all abortion apologists, Ms. Walsh was Joannie-on-the-spot with “tragic” examples of nine-year-old rape victims, endangered mothers-to-be and horrific birth defects. But she proved less eager to acknowledge that patients undergoing Tiller’s gruesome procedures may not have met Kansas’s legal standard of “severe and irreversible impairment to a major bodily function.”

O’Reilly aired a clip of Johns Hopkins University psychiatrist Paul McHugh revealing that authorities had found how the deeply caring Tiller sacrificed babies to prevent health emergencies and other “tragedies.” Like mothers having to put a child up for adoption, missing the prom, or – horrors! – having to hire a babysitter to go to rock concerts.

Ms. Walsh’s response? “I don’t necessarily know what makes those men any better judges of these women’s psychiatric condition than Dr. Tiller . . . You believe your experts, I believe mine. I’ve talked to dozens of women who support what Dr. Tiller did.”

Hmm. On one side, the Harvard-educated, 25-year psychiatry chair at one of America’s top medical institutions. On the other, an abortionist who collected millions scalding and mutilating viable babies, plus “dozens of women” who “support” what he did. Sounds perfectly even to me.

Recognizing that she had traversed the small step from the subhuman to the ridiculous, Ms. Walsh tried another tack. “Bill,” she lectured, “(Tiller) was acquitted of everything he was ever accused of . . . It was legal . . . He was running a legal facility . . . It was legal, Bill.”

Is Ms. Walsh referring to the prosecution that was interrupted, with most charges dropped, when Tiller bankrolled a hand-picked candidate to displace the attorney general who brought the case? In the succeeding trial on the lesser charge of, essentially, purchasing the second opinions required to proceed with abortions, the now-reluctant prosecution’s main witness was the corroborating physician – who Tiller, in a slipup under oath, admitted had “worked for me.”

Can’t get any more impartial than that.

Nevertheless, let’s concede Ms. Walsh’s point that Tiller was not found to have broken the law. Anti-abortion organizations and activists – as well as O’Reilly – couldn’t have been quicker or more strident in their denunciations of Tiller’s murder by a lone assassin. I’ll join them. The killing was wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

So why can’t Ms. Walsh and her fellow travelers bring themselves to admit the same about Tiller’s atrocities?

Because that admission, though grounded in simple common sense, would involve drawing, somewhere, a line where a baby’s life outweighs the mother’s convenience and the state’s interests. To raise a trivial point, Roe v. Wade did just that, putting the line at “viability” – a moving target that, inconveniently for their side, keeps getting earlier and earlier.

Yet Ms. Walsh, under intense pressure, ultimately abandoned her obfuscation and admitted, “I believe (abortion) should always be the decision of the mother.” And that she in fact agreed with “pro-choicers” who consider George Tiller a “hero.”

Perplexed, I returned to Mr. Webster to find a definition of “hero” that could by any stretch of the imagination be applied to a butcher like Tiller. I briefly considered: “noun – a large sandwich ….”

But nah. That’s too far-out even for a warped mind . . . and heart . . . like Ms. Walsh’s.