If RNC Chairman Reince Priebus thinks nasty, petulant interviews like this one with MSNBC's Thomas Roberts are going to win his party some support back with women voters, I think he's sadly mistaken. Last week, Priebus appeared on Bloomberg TV's Al Hunt and claimed that the "war on women" was as fictional as the "war on caterpillars."
This Wednesday, Priebus was asked about those remarks and decided to double down:
On Wednesday, MSNBC host Thomas Roberts gave Priebus a chance to revise his remarks.
“I’m not going to walk back,” the RNC chairman insisted. “I’ll double down on it. This war on women is a fiction that the Democrats have created. And the real war on women is the war that this president has put forward on the American people by not following through on his promises, by having women disproportionately effected by the Obama economy.”
“How can you say that it’s a fiction, though, if you stand of the record of what the Republican Party has said and done?” Roberts wondered, noting that all of the remaining GOP presidential candidates had promised to eliminate funds for family planning and Republican-controlled state legislatures had pushed through 90 anti-abortion bills in 2011.
“Because it is a fiction, Thomas,” Priebus replied. “It’s a fiction because, number one, there is no war on women. … The fact of the matter is that the real war on women, the actual thing that I think most women in this country are most concerned about, which is a good job, a good family, being able to live the American dream, provide for your kids and your family, that war on women is being perpetrated by President Barack Obama.”
Thomas actually did a pretty good job of pushing back at Priebus' arguments and pointed out the record number of anti-abortion legislation passed by the Republicans and their attacks on Planned Parenthood.
“You can’t discount the fact that we almost took the government to the brink of closing Planned Parenthood,” Thomas pressed.
“The world will continue,” the RNC chairman quipped. “I don’t buy your argument. I happen to believe that you can be pro-women and pro-life. You don’t. That’s the problem, Thomas.”
Sadly, Thomas did not point out to Priebus that their forced birth agenda is not necessarily "pro-life" when it means forcing a woman to choose between her life and the life of a fetus that's not viable when there's a problem pregnancy with some of these extreme laws they've been passing -- or the fact that abortions are only a small fraction of the services provided by Planned Parenthood and that life-saving cancer screenings are "pro-life."
Planned Parenthood has done more to prevent abortions than the current Republican Party. All the Republicans want to do is to restrict access to birth control and dumb down our kids by refusing to teach them sex education at the appropriate age and pretending they're never going to have sex until they're all adults and married.
It's been pointed out repeatedly by those on the left that if you actually want to limit the number of abortions in the United States, then make sure everyone has access to affordable contraception and educate people on how to prevent unwanted pregnancies. The right would rather demagogue the issue and pander to the religious right.
