Liberal Oasis: NARAL Joins Amnesty's Good Company

[Larkspur]

http://www.liberaloasis.com/archives/080705.htm#081105

Here we go again.

Back in May, Amnesty International called our Guantánamo Bay prison a gulag, prompting Dubya and his right-wing cronies to rip into Amnesty.

The punditocracy lamented Amnesty’s “outrageous metaphor,” claiming it hurt Amnesty’s credibility and would let Bush duck the substance of the charges.

But the opposite was true.

Amnesty refused to back down, seized the spotlight, and kept pounding away at the human rights problems of Gitmo and other prisons created in the terror war.

The pounding was too much to duck. Republicans started talking about shutting down Gitmo to end the PR fiasco, talks which continue to this day.

Then it was Amnesty. Now it’s NARAL Pro-Choice America.

NARAL aired a hard-hitting ad in opposition to John Roberts, pointing out that he was on the same side as violent anti-abortion protesters in a 1991 Supreme Court case.

Again, the Right whined up a storm, accusing NARAL of fabrications, abetted by the misnamed FactCheck.org.

And again, people who should know better are swallowing the right-wing spin.

The head of Catholics for a Free Choice went out of her way to contact the NY Times and attack NARAL, a selfish, short-sighted backstabbing move.
<SNIP>

...LiberalOasis has considerable uneasiness that NARAL is the only group that is going after Roberts with any force.

LiberalOasis has considerable uneasiness that except for the NARAL ad, there are no other hard-hitting anti-Roberts ads on the air driving coverage of the nomination.

David Sirota is (correctly) lamenting that all the Roberts attention is on social issues and not the economic issues that are leading Corporate America to swoon over.

Well maybe if labor, environmental and consumer groups adopted NARAL’s attitude, the discussion would broaden and Roberts would be further on the defensive.

While everyone else seems to pondering how not to upset Fox News and FactCheck.org, NARAL appears to going to the mat to save our Supreme Court from the right-wing.

LiberalOasis advice to NARAL: you’ve already properly defended yourself, so stay on the offense. Take advantage of the spotlight, and get a second ad on the air while the iron is hot.
<SNIP>

LiberalOasis advice to everyone else: NARAL is not the target. Roberts is. Get with the program.

[Tesha]

1. It was pretty amusing watching the spin on "World News Tonight"

First, we had a brief clip from the ad. It asserted several claims;
let's call them A, B, and C.

Then we had an onslaught of Republican Talking Heads telling us how
claims "D, E, and F were outright lies!" And yes, they would be, but
NARAL's ad never made those claims but rather claimed A, B, and C.

And the ABC new-droids let this all slip by and, in fact, supported
the Republican's statements that D, E, and F are lies. But *NO ONE*
mentioned the fact that D, E, and F were made up in whole cloth by
the Republican Noise Machine.

Tesha