www.faDoes the left seem even more hysterical than usual nowadays?
NARAL, for example, has launched an outrageous ad campaign to portray Supreme Court nominee John Roberts as a supporter of abortion clinic bombings.
This is so ridiculous that it’s NARAL’s allies, not John Roberts, who are running for cover:
“Within the larger liberal coalition of which Naral is a part, there was considerable uneasiness about the advertisement, although leaders of other groups generally refused to speak on the record. One who did, Frances Kissling, the longtime president of Catholics for a Free Choice, said she was ’deeply upset and offended’ by the advertisement, which she called ’far too intemperate and far too personal.’
“Ms. Kissling, who initiated the conversation with a reporter, said the ad ’does step over the line into the kind of personal character attack we shouldn’t be engaging in.’
“She added: ’As a pro-choice person, I don’t like being placed on the defensive by my leaders. Naral should pull it and move on.’
“Walter Dellinger, a former acting solicitor general in the Clinton administration and longtime Naral supporter, sent a letter on Wednesday to the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and its ranking Democrat, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, respectively. Mr. Dellinger said he had disagreed with Mr. Roberts’s argument in the [case in question] but considered it unfair to give ’the impression that Roberts is somehow associated with clinic bombers.’ He added that ‘it would be regrettable if the only refutation of these assertions about Roberts came from groups opposed to abortion rights.'”
Meanwhile, the ACLU, another stalwart of the left coalition, has decided (as the Wall Street Journal sums it up) that cops are more dangerous than terrorists.
The ACLU is filing suit to halt the random inspections of New York subway riders that were instituted in the wake of the London bombings.
As Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Dorothy Rabinowitz notes, there’s just one problem here:
“Most of those entering the subways these days are, it seems, unperturbed by the prospect of a bag check, and not a few have made clear their approval of such precautions. Indeed, in its latest war on the security search, the NYCLU has entered on decidedly iffy terrain: one close to home, psychologically, for masses of Americans (and not just those who take city trains and buses), all in a good position to weigh the sort of argument which holds that government security methods are a greater threat to them than terrorism.”
Rabinowitz admits that the issue of profiling lurks in any discussion of searches–but here, too, the lesson is likely to make the left squirm:
“Among other lessons of 9/11, we have learned the cost of squeamishness that prevented closer scrutiny of young Arab men entering the country even when their behavior raised suspicions. In an exceptionally powerful series airing on the National Geographic Channel on Aug. 21 and 22, titled ‘Inside 9/11,’ an airline ticket-taker recalls being stunned by the strange look on the face of customer Mohamed Atta–particularly the unsettling fury the man exuded. Still, he could not bring himself to raise any alarm: indeed, when he heard later that the plane Atta was on had been one of those that crashed in the terror attacks, the agent felt terrible. Terrible because he had been suspicious of the passenger and thought he could be a terrorist and now the poor man was dead. It was a while before the ticket agent grasped that the man he suspected was, in fact, hijacker-in-chief and pilot of the plane.”