Bonnie Erbe Urges GOP to Abort Alliance with Religious Conservatives

The line of liberal journalists waiting to give the GOP free advice on its future is longer than the queue for Jonas Brothers concert tickets and at least 100 times more petulant than the 'tweens lined up for same.

U.S. News & World Report contributing editor and PBS "To the Contrary" host Bonnie Erbe, for example, has been on a tear in recent weeks. Whether it's hyping Meghan McCain as a fresh voice for the GOP or praising Bristol Palin as more mature than her mother, Erbe has done little to hide her disdain for social conservatives in the Republican Party that can actually form their arguments without coming off like a vapid valley girl whining about, like, creepy old guys like Karl Rove.

Well, in an April 30 Thomas Jefferson Street blog post Erbe urged GOP chairman Michael Steele to abort the Republican Party's coalition with religious conservatives:

I agree with [former Bush OMB director Jim] Nussle, but we probably come to the same conclusion for very different reasons. The GOP's main problem is it is stuck in the 1950s as long as it is controlled by the Religious Right. When the party realizes that the Christian Right is yesterday's Chevrolet, and decides to return to fiscal conservatism, that's when the tent doors will open wide once again.

For someone obsessed with the Republican Party's need to show tolerance of ideological diversity, Erbe sure has little use of it, included in her own profession of journalism.

On April 27, Erbe practically foamed at the mouth about pro-life citizen journalist Lila Rose's efforts at chronicling legal abuses by Planned Parenthood clinics. Yet as NewsBusters contributor Matthew Balan noted, the liberal media has done similar sting operations aimed at discrediting pro-life crisis pregnancy centers:

So Erbe wants Rose to be prosecuted for something that her colleagues in the mainstream media do all the time with investigative journalism. In fact, the Big Three networks, like Rose, used hidden camera footage from pro-life crisis pregnancy centers in “exposes” in 1991.

It’s something that even left-wing politicians have dabbled in to target crisis pregnancy centers. For example, a 2007 front-page article by the aforementioned L.A. Times detailed how Representative Henry Waxman “asked undercover investigators to contact 23 crisis pregnancy centers.” According to a press release, Waxman’s investigators “posed as pregnant 17-year-olds,” and were supposedly “misled...about the medical risks of abortion...that abortion leads to breast cancer, infertility, and mental illness.” One would guess that Erbe had no problem with these hidden camera videos, since pro-lifers were the subject.