Lie Down With Anti-Choice Dogs, Get Up With Repug Rabies

I still say the midterms are gonna be a wash: lots of seats changing hands, but the numerical result the same. If we get out the Democratic vote, I say five more dems for Nancy and at least one for Harry.

But the real victory might come even if Democrats lose a dozen or two seats in the house and three or four in the Senate. Why? Because the most vulnerable Democratic members of Congress are the anti-choice Blue Dogs who consistently vote with the repugs and sabotage every real Democratic initiative. And now they are getting paid exactly what they've earned.

Digby:

I wish I could feel sorry for these anti-choice Dems who are being hounded out of office by anti-choice groups, but I just can't. Apparently, they didn't realize what it was like to be in the cross hairs of anti-abortion fanatics who are drunk on their own deluded sense of reality before. Well, now they know:

On a chilly January morning in Erie, Pa., members of the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony List stood outside Rep. Kathy Dahlkemper’s office to thank her for opposing a health care bill that didn’t include stringent abortion restrictions.

Ten months later, Dahlkemper and other anti-abortion Democrats are at risk of becoming an endangered species in the House.

She and others eventually signed on to the health reform law, endorsing an executive order that barred federal funding of abortions. But SBA List and other anti-abortion groups opposed the executive order, contending it was too weak.

Now, SBA List is engaged in a multimillion-dollar attack on its former allies, replete with bus tours and billboards alleging that members “voted for taxpayer-funded abortion.” The group invested $1.5 million in its “Votes Have Consequences” bus tour in August, targeting anti-abortion Democrats who supported health reform. Just last week, SBA List spent $55,000 on 32 billboards dotting the districts of three vulnerable Democrats.

[...]

“It’s been extremely frustrating at times,” Dahlkemper told POLITICO. “All along, I have donated. I have marched. I have been an unmarried pregnant woman who chose life. I have lived this. Now I’m 52, and in the last six months, all of a sudden, people are questioning who I am.”

Really? And they are doing it based on utter bullshit too? How uncomfortable that must make her. Not quite as uncomfortable as it is for young girls who are harassed on their way into a clinic or for a doctor's family when he is murdered by anti-abortion zealots, but uncomfortable nonetheless.

SNIP

I suppose it's too much to ask that the press explain that the anti-choice lobby's complaint is total nonsense and that the health care bill actually restricted access to abortion. (That would be considered rude and beyond the pale, I'm sure.) But the fact is that these anti-abortion Democrats did vote for an anti-abortion bill --- all the Democrats did. What these people are getting stabbed in the back for is failing to derail a bill that the GOP (though its mendacious social conservative faction) desperately wanted derailed. It is simple political payback for refusing to fall on their swords for the Republican party over a completely made up issue. Lie down with dogs ...

As far as I'm concerned, it's good riddance to bad Democrats. These people work against something that I consider fundamental and the leadership ends up using women's bodies as a negotiating chip whenever they need something to throw to the Republicans. The parties breaking down on lines that more clearly show who is and isn't for women's autonomy will make it far less likely that they'll consider it a useful "bipartisan" chip to use whenever they hit a stalemate.

Moreover, these anti-choice Democrats have been willing dupes of a social conservative movement that is far more concerned about its political clout than it is about principles or honesty --- and that political clout resides in the Republican Party. If they lose, they should run as liberal anti-choice Republicans next time and see how anxious the GOP really is to find "common ground." Somehow, I don't think even they can be so deluded as to think that was ever a two way street.

It's just a shame that Wire Hangar DINO Ben Chandler, who managed to fuck over women's rights twice by voting FOR the medieval Stupak amendment and then AGAINST health care reform, is unlikely to be among the ranks of the beaten.