Just the schmacks, ma'am (Ellen Goodman Alert)

The Boston Globe ^ | May 13, 2004 | Ellen Goodman

[WinOne4TheGipper]

LET ME BEGIN with a line from that famous social commentator, Homer Simpson: "Facts are meaningless; you can use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true! Facts, schmacks." Homer first uttered that creed in 1997, but his quirky skepticism about the schmacks of facts is now the norm.

The country is polarized over so many issues that we not only assume there are red and blue states and red and blue politics, we also assume there are red and blue facts. I bring this up because of a recent column I wrote on the March for Women's Lives. I referred to the bad old days when 10,000 women a year died of illegal abortions. Ka-boom. The number -- 10,000 deaths -- produced a mother lode of e-mails insisting that it was either a lie or propaganda or an "urban legend." Many said that this figure came from Dr. Bernard Nathanson, formerly prochoice and now prolife, who has claimed responsibility for the bunk which he now debunks.

[WinOne4TheGipper]

I clicked on Auto- Excerpt. Shouldn't that have done it?

[Mr. Silverback]

ProLife Ping!

If anyone wants on or off my ProLife Ping List, please notify me here or by freepmail.

[breakem]

paragraphs

[WinOne4TheGipper]

They're our friends.:) I clicked on Auto- Excerpt, but it didn't do anything but get rid of the paragraphs.

[Redbob]

Pity there wasn't an "Auto-Format" button for you to click on.

[breakem]

ah, the dreaded computer error.

[muawiyah]

Ellen Goodman really doesn't care. Any additional death from any cause is fine with her. Her bona fides as a ghoul are beyond challenge!

[Mr. Silverback]

The whole column is a non-sequitor. It boils down to, "A whole mess of women were dying because of the back-alley butchers. So we legalized abortion, let the back-alley butchers hang out their shingles as 'women's clinics,' and fought any effort to hold them accountable to normal health standards, calling it a 'back-door' effort to take away Roe." It doesn't matter if we were losing 10 or 10 million women a year from botched abortions, the pro-aborts have done everything that can be done to make that problem worse, and then they call themselves the protectors of women's health.

[Alouette]

a prochoice spokesman had to admit that he "lied through my teeth"

We all know Ellen Goodman bites, but who would expect her to admit it so openly.

[Admin Moderator]

The formatting of the original post was not the poster's fault. There's a glitch in the excerpt program that randomly (it seems) removes all the paragraph tags.

[T'wit]

Thanks, but no amount of alerting ever quite prepares one for Ellen Goodman. I count on her to be mean, bad-tempered and wrong, and have not yet been disappointed.