Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank covered the House hearing on the sales of aborted-baby parts....to blast them as far too impartial to be trusted. This same columnist four years ago acted as a supine publicist for a one-sided Democratic pseudo-hearing to celebrate the feminist birth-control activist Sandra Fluke.
Under the Page A-2 headline "GOP proves its Planned Parenthood inquiry is a sham," Milbank began today’s lecture this way:
Marsha Blackburn isn’t one to worry about appearances.
The Tennessee Republican didn’t make any pretense this week of being impartial with the committee she chairs, the House Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives, commonly known as the Planned Parenthood committee.
On the eve of her panel’s Wednesday’s hearing, Blackburn went over to Georgetown University to participate in a protest against Planned Parenthood, the very entity she is supposed to be investigating. According to the Right to Life organization, she gave a speech at a gathering called “Life-Affirming Alternatives to Planned Parenthood,” part of a series of events in opposition to Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards’s speech at Georgetown on Wednesday.
Now compare that to the opening of Milbank’s hackneyed dispatch on Fluke's "impartial" appearance on February 24, 2012:
If the gender gap becomes a chasm that swallows Republicans this fall, it will be no fluke. It will, however, have something to do with Sandra Fluke.
She’s the Georgetown University law student who was blocked by chairman Darrell Issa from testifying about contraception before his House government-reform committee this month. The result was an embarrassment of a panel in which five men testified against an administration plan to expand birth control coverage.
Now Democrats are turning Fluke into a feminist martyr. On Thursday, the student was surrounded by dozens of cameras as she sat before a pseudo-committee chaired by House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, a rump session designed entirely to exploit the Republicans’ mistake.
Milbank concluded that Mary-McGrorysesque partisan gush with this:
It was just the spectacle the lawmakers had planned. “If we had gone to central casting to find a representative to speak for American women,” Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) told Fluke, “we could not have done better than you.” Moments later, the lawmakers joined the audience in the unusual act of standing to applaud a witness.
It was quite a performance. The question is why Republicans keep giving their opponents so many opportunities to put on a show.
In today’s column, Milbank called the Center for Medical Progress videos “discredited” or “doctored” four times. But he was upset that Rep. Blackburn would keep mentioning "baby body parts" like....that was biologically inaccurate. Perhaps he prefers less humanity in his terminology, like "fetal by-products."
But whatever legitimacy the select panel had left after the videos were discredited has been undermined by Blackburn.
She scheduled the committee’s first hearing for the very day the Supreme Court was holding arguments on the most important abortion case in 24 years. At that hearing, one of Blackburn’s witnesses likened fetal tissue research — a legal practice in the United States — to the experiments of Nazi scientist Josef Mengele, saying the two are “maybe” equivalent. Blackburn, in her opening statement, drew the same comparison and invoked the Nuremberg Code.
Then came Wednesday’s hearing, the panel’s second. Blackburn gave an opening statement mentioning the buying and selling of “baby body parts” no fewer than seven times.
Milbank clearly feels it's illegitimate to compare one's political opponents to the Nazis....unless Trump has "a proposal that has Nazi echoes"....
Or he discovers America's "ugly political environment in 2016 has an ominous precedent in Weimar Germany...."
Or when Trump encouraged his backers to raise their hands like on Inauguration Day, it was “unfortunately evoking the sort of scene associated with grainy newsreels from Italy and Germany.”
This is, naturally, the same Milbank who tore into Rick Santorum in 2012 with this argument:
Nazi comparisons are the most extreme form of political speech; once one ties his political opponents to the most deplorable chapter in human history, all reasoned argument ceases.
