Tuesday, August 09, 2005
First Low Blow of the Fight
NARAL, the pro-abortion right group, is currently running an online ad regarding Supreme Court Justice nominee John Roberts. You can go here to see it. It is a very dishonest ad, I think, and so say the Annenberg Fact Checkers here.
Summary at the fact checking:
An abortion-rights group is running an attack ad accusing Supreme Court nominee John Roberts of filing legal papers "supporting . . . a convicted clinic bomber" and of having an ideology that "leads him to excuse violence against other Americans." It shows images of a bombed clinic in Birmingham, Alabama .
The ad is false.
And the ad misleads when it says Roberts supported a clinic bomber. It is true that Roberts sided with the bomber and many other defendants in a civil case, but the case didn't deal with bombing at all. Roberts argued that abortion clinics who brought the suit had no right use an 1871 federal anti-discrimination statute against anti-abortion protesters who tried to blockade clinics. Eventually a 6-3 majority of the Supreme Court agreed, too. Roberts argued that blockades were already illegal under state law.
The images used in the ad are especially misleading. The pictures are of a clinic bombing that happened nearly seven years after Roberts signed the legal brief in question.
Despite the lack of truth to the ad's charges, Matt Drudge says here that CNN has agreed to run the add on its cable channels. We're not even a third of the way through August, the hearing before the Judiciary Committee doesn't start until September 6, and already the Democrats are lying about the nominee in mass advertising. Long, hot summer indeed.
UPDATE: NRO's Bench Memos has more here. Just scroll down to the several things Edward Whelan has written about NARAL in the past few days.
Summary at the fact checking:
An abortion-rights group is running an attack ad accusing Supreme Court nominee John Roberts of filing legal papers "supporting . . . a convicted clinic bomber" and of having an ideology that "leads him to excuse violence against other Americans." It shows images of a bombed clinic in Birmingham, Alabama .
The ad is false.
And the ad misleads when it says Roberts supported a clinic bomber. It is true that Roberts sided with the bomber and many other defendants in a civil case, but the case didn't deal with bombing at all. Roberts argued that abortion clinics who brought the suit had no right use an 1871 federal anti-discrimination statute against anti-abortion protesters who tried to blockade clinics. Eventually a 6-3 majority of the Supreme Court agreed, too. Roberts argued that blockades were already illegal under state law.
The images used in the ad are especially misleading. The pictures are of a clinic bombing that happened nearly seven years after Roberts signed the legal brief in question.
Despite the lack of truth to the ad's charges, Matt Drudge says here that CNN has agreed to run the add on its cable channels. We're not even a third of the way through August, the hearing before the Judiciary Committee doesn't start until September 6, and already the Democrats are lying about the nominee in mass advertising. Long, hot summer indeed.
UPDATE: NRO's Bench Memos has more here. Just scroll down to the several things Edward Whelan has written about NARAL in the past few days.
# posted by Roger Fraley @ 6:29 PM 
