Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson decided to double down on the growing liberal attack aimed at Rick Santorum’s family for their 1996 decision to bring their son Gabriel home, after his birth was induced early, and he lived only two hours outside the womb.
Even after Alan Colmes’ disgusting comments on the matter provoked a firestorm, and Colmes felt obliged to apologize to the Santorums, Robinson decided he still wanted to go there. As transcribed by RealClearPolitics, this led the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist to say:
"He's not a little weird, he's really weird," Robinson said of Santorum. "And some of his positions that he has taken are just so weird that I think that some Republicans are off-put. Not everybody is not going to be down, for example, with the story of how he and his wife handled the stillborn child. It was a body that they took home to kind of sleep with it, introduce it to the rest of the family. It's a very weird story."
"And his positions on gay people and gay marriage are just offensive, objectionable and so totally wrong. It is, you know," Robinson said of Santorum's social conservative values.
"This is a guy who should never become president, in my view," Robinson said at the end of the segment.
(Emphasis mine.) Well, at least he wasn’t quite as offensive as Colmes, who described the incident as the Santorums “playing with” Gabriel’s body.
As with Colmes, it’s revealing how quickly Robinson jumped on the “weirdos and their dead child” bandwagon. It was the first thing that popped into his head to illustrate “positions Santorum has taken” that would leave “some Republicans off-put.” The manner in which the Santorum family handled the tragedy of their son’s death is not a “position” Rick Santorum has taken. He’s not pushing a bill to subsidize, or require, parents to take their dead infants home to meet the family. It’s not surprising that liberals would confuse personal behavior with political positions, but normal people understand the difference.
Robinson turned up on MSNBC’s Morning Joe and offered a very tepid, general apology, of the sort where he regrets how people who misunderstood what he was really trying to say might have taken offense:
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He still thinks the Santorum family’s behavior with respect to Gabriel has something to do with Rick Santorum’s fitness for the Oval Office, even though it conforms quite closely to the American Pregnancy Association’s guidelines for dealing with stillbirth. Thus, Eugene Robinson is another blowhard who makes an ass of himself on national television by offering strong opinions based on complete and total ignorance. He could have Googled all this before he began shooting his mouth off. Don’t Pulitzer Prize winners understand the value of research?
Comically, Robinson also assures the audience that “we all appreciate someone of deep faith” – but apparently deep faith disqualifies you from holding high public office, unless it’s deep faith in government.
None of this is happening by accident. People like Colmes and Robinson get a lot of their Really Deep Thoughts by scouring nutroots blogs, and the intolerant Left is clearly convinced they can milk the death of Gabriel Santorum for political advantage. Notice how creeps like Colmes and Robinson never mention Karen Santorum’s role in all this, or make any attempt to fairly describe what actually happened when Gabriel was brought home to meet his family. They make it sound like Rick just swung through the front door with a dead child and surprised the hell out of everyone. They want you to think about how you would feel if that happened, and shudder.
Eugene Robinson, by the way, was a big proponent of holding conservatives responsible for creating the “Climate of Hate” that led to the shootings in Tucson. Appearing on Keith Olbermann’s MSNBC show in January 2011, he said it didn’t even matter if conservatives wanted to inspire violence with their rhetoric:
Well, I think this is a case in which intent doesn't obviate the crime. No, I think most of these people who say these violent sounding things about how evil your government is and what it's doing to you and who quote Thomas Jefferson about democracy needing to be watered by the blood of patriots and that sort of thing, I don't think they actually intend people to take this seriously, but it can and there are people who are unbalanced who have access to guns who do take it seriously, and we should know that by now.
And so we should, frankly, temper our rhetoric, all of us, to take into account the fact that we're not supposed to have this sort of hatred in us for a different political view. We can argue and we can argue vociferously and strenuously and filibuster and everything else, but there are people out there who do take it seriously, and we see it again and again, and we don't seem to learn that lesson.
(Transcript from NewsBusters.) But if you disagree with Eugene Robinson’s politics, your family is fair game, including your dead children. What a cheap, hypocritical hack.
Liberals love to congratulate themselves for “compassion” and “tolerance,” but as with everything else they do, this language is deployed in the service of accumulating power and crushing dissent. Both of those words simply mean “agree with leftist politics and you’ll be treated well.” The hard work of understanding and respecting people who are different is completely beyond them, even when they’re professional writers. That’s even more true when people of sincere religious faith are involved, whether or not the behavior that prompted liberal intolerance is explicitly religious in nature. If you’re a social conservative who goes to church, anything out of the ordinary that you, or your family, does is fair game for slander by the Left.
Harping on the death of Gabriel Santorum, which happened fifteen years ago, and trying to bludgeon Gabriel’s father with it – prompted entirely by his sudden rise in the polls – is a supreme act of intolerance. If Santorum was a Democrat and one of his kids went trans-gender 16 years ago, with Dad’s enthusiastic support, Robinson would be howling at the ceiling over the slightest insinuation that it had any bearing whatsoever on his fitness for office. He, and the rest of the Left, would be red-faced with rage at the mere mention of the incident in a negative context, even the most tactful suggestion that some voters might consider the whole affair a bit odd.
You’ll hear more about the tragedy of Gabriel Santorum’s brief life, and its aftermath, because obviously the liberal hive mind thinks this is working for them. They don’t even mind offering a tepid apology or two after the dirty work is done, because the important thing is getting the meme started. A few more mentions on talking-head shows should do the trick, and then late-night comedians can pick up the ball and run with it.
