She's clearly not even trying anymore. Today on her MSNBC program, Andrea Mitchell used words that clearly were meant to paint the Republican Party as retrograde. After insisting that President George H.W. Bush had supported Planned Parenthood as a congressman decades earlier, she posed the question “So how has the Republican Party devolved to the point where we are now re-litigating all of this?” [video available below the jump]
The use of the word "devolved" in this context would be perfectly natural coming from the spokeswoman for a liberal interest group or a partisan Democrat, but is unfitting and inappropriate from an ostensibly objective journalist.
Of course, Mitchell's record of late looks more and more like a partisan actor and less and less like an objective journalist.
The relevant transcript follows below:
ANDREA MITCHELL: Ann Gerhart, President Bush 41, George Herbert Walker
Bush, was one of the strongest supporters of this when he was a member of Congress. So how has the Republican Party devolved to the point where we are now re-litigating all of this?
ANN GERHART: Well you know, it was interesting to go back and read the congressional testimony from 1970. I was struck by how frank it was. People testified in congress in the frankest possible terms about the families having a right to know how many children they could have. Women being able to plan for their pregnancies, and you know, we now have a sort of coded debate in many ways which gets into principals of right to access, personal freedom versus group freedom, Individual conscience versus institutional conscience. I think at the time, of course, the Republican Party was a far different party than it is, as we have been hearing about now for years. The senate at the time, I think was about a 35-65% split. You know, 65% democrats and you know 35%, 38% anytime of Republicans. But there was some common cause made there as to what was best for everyone and interestingly the big fight over birth control at that time, was that elites were going to try to use it as a way to force poor people to limit the size of their families and that was why, you know, the congressman from Texas who became the president, the 41st president said this is an utterly volunteer program, noone is forcing anyone to take anything. But what we have discovered is that when birth control is accessible, people eagerly accept it. So you know, I think that it struck a lot of people and I received a lot of comments from young women who had no idea whatsoever, you know, that in 1970 this had been settled.
