Of all the things I'd expected to see in 2021, "the staff of the former Weekly Standard becoming apologists for abortion" was not one. I've said for years that being in professional punditry usually means that you're for sale (or at least constantly open to being malleable) to some extent, but what Jon Last & Co. have done the last couple of weeks has been off the charts.
I blocked these folks on Twitter, but I apparently have impulse-control problems, because I really want to get this out there.
Amanda Carpenter, who briefly wrote at RedState, Townhall, and other places while making buck on being conservative, and eventually joined Ted Cruz's team long enough to help him accuse Middle Eastern Christians fleeing ISIS of anti-Semitism (with press coverage of the whole thing!), has New and Important Thoughts:
Never heard that one before, by which I mean those exact words in exactly that order; the thought, such as it is, is a hoary 1970s cliché that didn't even meaningfully track the pro-life movement then, let alone now. (Ask the Catholic Church about mandatory support for pregnant women and new mothers. Ask most Evangelicals. Ask the women and men praying outside of abortion clinics. Heck, ask anyone but your reply-guys on Twitter.) But she's just putting it out there, offering thoughts that doubtless seem as clever as this one:
(BEE-TEE-DUBS: Based on CDC's reporting (here), the effective mortality rate -- the danger, if one will -- of the prevalent Delta strain is less than half of Original Recipe COVID (.7% against the old 1.7%), measured by deaths and hospitalizations; and the danger for children is even less relative to Original Recipe, with a mortality rate, based on that same, publicly-available and easily-found CDC data, of a whopping 0%, especially when controlling for pre-existing conditions like cancer. But let's not let facts stop us here.)
Anyway, Carpenter's transition from Diligent Water Carrier for Biggest Publicity Hound in the Senate to Righteous Karen Terrified of a Virus Moving in the Usual Way on the Transmissibility/Virulence Axis is surprising, and indeed, moreso than the living senior moment at the Bulwark:
Bill Kristol has been increasingly out on an ice floe for a while, and it ill-behooves us to mock those going senile in the public eye, so I'll simply note that (1) the objection appears to be that nominally pro-life politicians will be required to actually establish some sort of bona fides; and (2) "passing a law that stops abortions from happening is awful for the pro-life movement" is one of those takes so hot that Slate would be yelling, "Yeah, no, thanks, we'll pass."
(I have no idea what Jim Swift thinks because it's remarkably unlikely to be worth unblocking.)
At the core of this is the one in this bunch who doesn't have the ready-made excuse of being dim or daft.
Oh, he doesn't mean all pro-lifers, just pro-lifers who support a bill that explicitly eschews penalties on women seeking abortions and instead tries to destroy the whole supporting apparatus. Just those clod-eaters. The sincere ones (who just keep quietly hoping and praying everything will get better, keep those opinions to themselves, and didn't have the unmitigated gall to vote differently than the man who spent years talking about the danger of the pro-life movement being monopartisan), why, they're fine.
If you'd told 2017 Me that Jonathan Last, of all people, would transform from cynical-but-sincere pro-lifer to mindless reciter of left-wing garbage, 2017 Me would have laughed in your face. 2021 Me has learned some hard lessons about sincerity the last several years -- not about politicians, who'd step over their own mothers for a permanent one-point bounce in the polls -- but about people who get paid to give their opinions. But now?
Worth remembering that once he was free of the ... shackles of conformity ... imposed by being a staffer at one of the more iconoclastic right-of-center publications, he opined that the Alabama abortion law -- designed explicitly as a shot across the Supreme Court's bow -- was terrible politics, too (as were the South Dakota law, the Georgia law, etc.).
The stated point of a pro-life movement is to get protections for life from conception to death enshrined in law. A pro-life movement that explicitly chooses to be toothless, that eschews law and challenges to miserable and a-constitutional decisions like Roe and Casey, that favors Democrats' status quo over a change that might save lives, that would rather simply rail in the darkness with no one listening -- well, it probably deserves a place on The Bulwark's masthead.
