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David Brooks, the right-wing NY Times columnist that non-thinking liberals mistake for an intellectual, is the latest to pick up and run with the far-right talking point that Roe v. Wade is to blame for the "cycle of political viciousness and counter-viciousness that has poisoned public life".

What a crock. Brooks should go back to inventing color-coded political divisions for those who find their best political punditry on the back of cereal boxes.

Brooks is so wrong so often (despite his nifty east-coast pink shirt and purple tie) that we'll take the trouble to go line-by-line with his heap of nonsense:

"When Blackmun wrote the Roe decision, it took the abortion issue out of the legislatures and put it into the courts."

Yes, well, that's where issue of rights belong, no? Would Brooks have preferred the issue of slavery been left up to the states?

"If it had remained in the legislatures, we would have seen a series of state-by-state compromises reflecting the views of the centrist majority that's always existed on this issue. These legislative compromises wouldn't have pleased everyone, but would have been regarded as legitimate."

Oh--apparently he would leave slavery up to the states. So much for the courts' role in interpreting the Constitution--not to mention guaranteeing equal protection.

"Instead, Blackmun and his concurring colleagues invented a right to abortion..."

Oh, my, the language of the radical right creeping into the New York Times.

What the court found was a right to privacy that extended to matters of personal and sexual freedom. Brooks has a problem with that, obviously. Polls consistently show that a majority of Americans do not--thank goodness.

"Religious conservatives became alienated from their own government, feeling that their democratic rights had been usurped by robed elitists."

Yeah! And just remember how they felt about Abraham Lincoln!

"Unable to lobby for their pro-life or pro-choice views in normal ways, abortion activists focused their attention on judicial nominations."

Ah, we're getting to the crux--sneaking back around to attack the judiciary. To do so requires forgetting that the court found that the Constitution protected a woman's right to choose--meaning the real problem is the crazed right-wingers who refused to accept it, and who've mounted a relentless attack ever since. Blaming "liberals" equally for defending against those attacks is like blaming the Christians for defending themselves against the lions.

"Dozens of groups on the right and left have been created to destroy nominees who might oppose their side of the fight. But abortion is never the explicit subject of these confirmation battles. Instead, the groups try to find some other pretext to destroy their foes.

Each nomination battle is more vicious than the last as the methodologies of personal destruction are perfected. You get a tit-for-tat escalation as each side points to the other's outrages to justify its own methods."

Not exactly. What we've had is an endless parade of stealth anti-choice judicial nominees from Republican presidents. These nominees have gone before the judiciary committee and bobbed, weaved, and all but lied to hide their views. Most recently they've adopted the strategy of flatly refusing to answer questions on their potential decision-making.

Meanwhile Democrats and liberals--protecting a woman's legal right to choose have had to mount ever-vigilant defenses against these stealth candidates who would remove that right.

"At first the Senate Judiciary Committee was chiefly infected by this way of doing business, but now the entire body - in fact, the entire capital - has caught the abortion fight fever."

...by an extremist anti-choice minority whose views do not mirror those of most Americans but who control the Republican party and are obsessed with turning back the clock to a time when women had no control over their own bodies.

"Up until now, minorities have generally not used the filibuster to defeat nominees that have majority support. They have allowed nominees to have an up or down vote. But this tradition has been washed away."

Up until Clinton's term, the majority didn't refuse to send the president's nominees to a vote in order to keep pro-choice judges off the bench. Once again it is the right that is on the attack here. Now, faced with a president who is in the pocket of the far right and who refuses to compromise, Democrats have their backs against the wall and are forced to take extreme measure to protect what a majority of Americans support--a woman's right to choose.

"The fact is, the entire country is trapped. Harry Blackmun and his colleagues suppressed that democratic abortion debate the nation needs to have."

Shall we vote on slavery while we're at it?

"Unless Roe v. Wade is overturned, politics will never get better."

Ah, now we see. As long as we do things their way, the divisiveness will go away.

That tedious trip down hooey lane over, let's look at the house of twigs underlying Brooks' column: that abortion rights should been left to the states. Then, he suggests, everything would be ok.

Bull crackers. Look what happened with gay marriage and civil unions. The gay marriage decision in Massachusetts and the civil union laws in Vermont and Connecticut drove the right bananas and they immediately launched an effort to repeal them at the federal level with a Constitutional amendment. Same thing with the right-to-die laws, medical marijuana laws, etc.

Brooks, like the rest of the far right, is simply full of it. The right isn't upset that decisions were taken away from the local level, they're upset when decisions anywhere don't go the way they WANT. And they've proven over and over they'll do whatever it takes to reverse them.

Here in Massachusetts we were up to our armpits in right-wing activists bussed in from the south during the gay marriage debate. One memorable moment involved a woman from Alabama shrieking into the TV camera, "we've got to stop the judges from taking over our state." We know she was from Alabama because it was the local news--not CNN or FoxNews--so someone asked her where she was from.

In fact the main point-man for the anti-gay marriage debate up here was a right-wing reverend transplanted from Georgia. He even ran for the state legislature in the next election cycle. One local news commentator responded to an inquiry from 201k regarding him and the vast number of non-Massachusetts citizens being quoted on the air opposing gay marriage thusly:

This guy Ron Crews is a "transplant" (see Tuesday's Boston Globe for a profile) from Georgia, but he apparently lives here now. It was a smart move by the group to bring in someone new, since the local media have dismissed most of the other anti-gay spokesfolk in town as the lunatic fringe.

In other words, without the national right-wingers, there'd be no credible opposition.

Who's kidding who? Apart from the numb-skulledness of suggesting that matters of civil liberties be left up to the states (hello, slavery, etc?) the fact is that the right immediately goes on the warpath to reverse any STATE decisions they don't like--even if it's in someone else's state.

Brooks's claim that the "political viciousness" would never have arisen had a woman's right to choose been left up to the states is pure malarkey. He's closer to the truth when he says the viciousness will go away when the right gets their way--every time--freedom and Democracy be damned.