Lefty scribe Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation, goes on a rampage against Republicans who dare to claim that the recent antics of randy San Diego Mayor Bob Filner and rapidly deflating New York mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner are a “war on women.”

The “war on women” rhetoric, you see, is very valuable to Democrats. The territory must be defended!

So vanden Heuvel asserts that, no matter what these rogues do, it is the GOP that is really waging a “war on women:”

To the contrary, the GOP has shown nothing but disdain for the real needs of actual women. Consider what the party stands for: Allowing bosses and insurance companies to discriminate against women; forcing raped women to carry their rapist’s fetus; requiring insurance coverage for Viagra but not for the pill; defunding Planned Parenthood, Head Start, childcare, and services for domestic abuse victims; conscripting doctors to violate women with medically unnecessary (and thus punitive) procedures; and redefining rape so more rapists walk free. That’s an awful agenda, and women know it.

As Steve Benen noted Friday, when we say “War on Women,” “we’re talking less about Republican misdeeds towards specific individuals and more about a systemic issue of GOP policymakers pursuing a radical agenda that affects all American women.”

Indeed, hard-working Americans women are trying to make end meet, and Republicans are doing everything they can to make their lives harder. That’s what they want women to forget.

Where to begin? First of all, hard-working American women who are trying to make ends meet are hampered mostly by a wretched economy that is the product of Obama administration regulations and ObamaCare. The president has been in office five years. This economy belongs to him.

It does not show “disdain” for women to permit employers who have religious reservations to opt out of providing insurance coverage for contraception or abortion-inducing drugs. Government programs, by the way, already make these procedures available for poor women.  What vanden Heuvel desires is a disdain for religious freedom.  

Studies indicate that Head Start providesabsolutely no long-term benefits for children and thus is a very expensive boondoggle. As for Planned Parenthood, can’t an organization that pays its president, well-connected Democrat Cecile Richards, $400,000 a year get along without government handouts?

The “violation” to which Ms. vanden Heuvel refers, as far as I can ascertain must be the ultrasounds that Virginia tried unsuccessfully to mandate for women seeking abortions. Without debating the issue of rape and abortion, let me just say that most GOP politicians, including Mitt Romney in 2012, allow an exception in the case of rape. So much for the GOP’s “forcing” a woman to carry the “fetus” of a man who has raped her.

You know what vanden Heuvel’s hyperbolic and inaccurate piece really says? The Democrats love and need the “war on women” and they don’t intend to surrender it, regardless of the truth.

If conservatives can’t find a way to talk honestly and persuasively to women, they are doomed to being a permanent minority.