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John Edwards deserved what they gave Santorum
The Charleston Daily Mail ^ | January 7, 2012 | Don Surber

Posted on 01/07/2012 9:06:51 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet

In researching Wednesday’s newspaper column on the liberals who attacked Rick Santorum for giving his son who died in infancy a decent burial, I ran across some items that show how you can spot the difference between some liberals and most conservatives.

The conservatives are the ones with the heart.

In a profile in the New York Times on May 22, 2005, Michael Sokolove wrote:

The childbirth in 1996 was a source of terrible heartbreak — the couple were told by doctors early in the pregnancy that the baby Karen was carrying had a fatal defect and would survive only for a short time outside the womb. According to Karen Santorum’s book, ”Letters to Gabriel: The True Story of Gabriel Michael Santorum,” she later developed a life-threatening intrauterine infection and a fever that reached nearly 105 degrees. She went into labor when she was 20 weeks pregnant. After resisting at first, she allowed doctors to give her the drug Pitocin to speed the birth. Gabriel lived just two hours.

What happened after the death is a kind of snapshot of a cultural divide. Some would find it discomforting, strange, even ghoulish — others brave and deeply spiritual. Rick and Karen Santorum would not let the morgue take the corpse of their newborn; they slept that night in the hospital with their lifeless baby between them. The next day, they took him home. ”Your siblings could not have been more excited about you!” Karen writes in the book, which takes the form of letters to Gabriel, mostly while he is in utero. ”Elizabeth and Johnny held you with so much love and tenderness. Elizabeth proudly announced to everyone as she cuddled you, ‘This is my baby brother, Gabriel; he is an angel.’ ”

The importance of such a book is more than therapeutic. Thousands of other women may gain from her experience. We all grieve in our own way. Not only was she heartbroken but she also had to break the news to a young son and daughter, who having been prepared for the birth of a baby brother now had to handle his death.

My research led to Washington Post editorial writer Charles Lane’s beautiful post on the death of his son, Jonathan, which had this passage: “I regret that, unlike the Santorums, who presented the body of their child to their children, we did not show Jonathan’s body to our other son, who was six years old at the time. When I told him what had happened, his first question was, ‘Well, where is the baby?’ I tried to explain what a morgue is, and why the baby went there. It was awkward and unsatisfactory — too abstract. In hindsight, I was not protecting my son from a difficult conversation, I was protecting myself.”

As he defended Santorum, Charles Lane felt obligated to kick Rick Santorum in the shin — I guess to show he is still a He-Man Liberal. It was unnecessary.

I have been spared that experience. Apparently, so have Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post and Alan Colmes of Fox News who went on television and called burying a dead child “weird.” Both have since apologized.

Tommy Christopher of Media-ite wrote: “I’m not a particularly religious person (you could call me agnostic), but when my father died, I stayed with his body in the hospital room for a good two hours, talking to him, holding him, and even freaking out a little every time he twitched, convinced the doctors might have screwed it up. After he was cremated, my brother and I scattered his ashes at Sandy Hook, and the wind there absolutely coated me, Big Lebowski-style, in his ashes. It was comical and horrifying, and it wouldn’t be a stretch to call it ‘weird’.”

James Taranto linked the liberal reaction to abortion, a logic conclusion re-inforced by Erin Ryan of the liberal Jezebel site. Wrote James Taranto: “One could plausibly claim that Santorum is extreme in his opposition to abortion based on his actual positions. That Ryan felt compelled to go beyond this and smear him as an extremist shows that she is extreme to the point of utter outlandishness.”

Well, if you believe that a baby should be aborted up to the moment of its birth, why would you not think it “weird” to grieve a stillborn child? Or one who lived only two hours after he was born. For once, liberals are thinking linearly and that is scary, revealing just how evil can rot a mind.

I recalled an old Ann Coulter column from 2004 that mocked the stuffing out of John Edwards for his channeling of babies in utero before juries in an effort to collect millions in the name of “malpractice” for him and the parents of children with cerebral palsy. The theory is weak, but profitable.

From Ann Coulter:

In one of Edwards’ silver-tongued arguments to the jury on behalf of a girl born with cerebral palsy, he claimed he was channeling the unborn baby girl, Jennifer Campbell, who was speaking to the jurors through him:

“She said at 3, ‘I’m fine.’ She said at 4, ‘I’m having a little trouble, but I’m doing OK.’ Five, she said, ‘I’m having problems.’ At 5:30, she said, ‘I need out.”‘

She’s saying, “My lawyer needs a new Jaguar … ”

“She speaks to you through me and I have to tell you right now — I didn’t plan to talk about this — right now I feel her. I feel her presence. She’s inside me, and she’s talking to you.”

Well, tell her to pipe down, would you? I’m trying to hear the evidence in a malpractice lawsuit.

To paraphrase Oscar Wilde on the death of Little Nell, one must have a heart of stone to read this without laughing.

Is Edwards able to channel any children right before an abortionist’s fork is plunged into their tiny skulls? Why can’t he hear those babies saying, “Let me live!”

While making himself fabulously rich by taking a one- third cut of his multimillion-dollar verdicts coaxed out of juries with junk science and maudlin performances, Edwards has the audacity to claim, “I was more than just their lawyer; I cared about them. Their cause was my cause.”

If he cared so deeply, how about keeping just 10 percent of the multimillion-dollar jury awards, rather than a third? In fact, as long as these Democrats are so eager to raise the taxes of “the rich,” how about a 90 percent tax on contingency fees?

If he cared so deeply, how about keeping just 10 percent of the multimillion-dollar jury awards, rather than a third? In fact, as long as these Democrats are so eager to raise the taxes of “the rich,” how about a 90 percent tax on contingency fees?

Millionaire lawyers who profit off human misery deserve such mockery. Parents whose children die in infancy do not.

That’s not exactly an insight so brilliant that I just burned your eyeballs, but seldom is the truth anything but obvious. If you downgrade babies to being just fetuses, you lose that thing inside you that the Tin Man fought so unselfishly to acquire.

UPDATE: A three-point landing on Robinson and Colmes by Mark Steyn.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/287410/left-s-so-called-empathy-mark-steyn


TOPICS: Constitution/Conservatism; Culture/Society; Editorial; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: abortion; enemedia; johnedwards; santorum
Once in awhile, Don hits one out of the park.
1 posted on 01/07/2012 9:07:02 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

Aye.


2 posted on 01/07/2012 9:37:44 PM PST by lightman (Adjutorium nostrum (+) in nomine Domini--nevertheless, Vote Santorum!)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

Santorum??? Doesn’t he mean Herman Cain?


3 posted on 01/08/2012 6:30:28 AM PST by ThePatriotsFlag
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To: 2ndDivisionVet
Millionaire lawyers who profit off human misery deserve such mockery. Parents whose children die in infancy do not. That’s not exactly an insight so brilliant that I just burned your eyeballs, but seldom is the truth anything but obvious. If you downgrade babies to being just fetuses, you lose that thing inside you that the Tin Man fought so unselfishly to acquire.

A chapter in lewis's book entitled "Men Without Chests" speaks of the cold heartednes of lefties'


4 posted on 01/08/2012 8:37:30 AM PST by Donald Rumsfeld Fan ("Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." Richard Feynman father of Quantum Physics)
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