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Dear patent,

You make lots of excellent points. My problem is that I don't know enough about Sen. Frist to judge him quite as harshly as you do. You may be right about him.

However, it appears that his current official position on abortion is that it ought to be illegal except in the Great Exception cases. Xzins has produced some documentation attesting to this fact, that is posted at least twice herein.

Xzins, you may wish to comment where you got this info.

It appears that, unlike Mr. Gore, and Mr. Clinton, Rev. Jackson, Mr. Kennedy, and Mr. Nunn, Sen. Frist has gone from a mostly pro-abort position to a mostly pro-life position. I'll take that any day.

"Well, I believe Lott should go, but that doesn’t mean I want Frist to replace him."

I'll agree with this. Now that Sen. Lott has stepped aside, I have read that at least one other Senator is challenging for the position. I think that's a very good thing. Much will come out in the wash of this election.

But, if Sen. Lott had not stepped aside, practically speaking, it would have been either Sen. Lott or Sen. Frist. Given that choice, I'd prefer Sen. Frist.

"You mention stem cell. I don’t recall anyone whose efforts and comments disturbed me as profoundly as Mr. Frist’s did at the time that debate was raging."

I recall one. Sen. Hatch. I was quite bitterly disappointed in his failure to support life in this area.

"I disagree. You seem to forget that you are much more reasonable than I am. I am much less willing to compromise on this issue. Had Bush the elder won again, or had Dole won, they would have led the Republican party farther and farther down the pro-choice road."

I can't agree with any of this. Especially the second sentence of this paragraph. ;-)

I don't know where we would have been led in a Bush second term, or a Dole presidency.

"We didn’t say much when Rove/Bush started appointing pro-abort, pro-gay ambassadors. Then it was various department heads. Then it was cabinet positions. Each step along the way, we are told “the position doesn’t have anything to do with abortion, don’t worry about it.” Well, now we are talking about the Senate majority leader. We are talking about a man who pushed the nomination of an abortionist to be Surgeon General. We are talking about a man who owns $5 million worth of an abortion providing hospital, not to mention what his family owns. Do your really think this man will work to make abortion rare? I see no evidence he will.

"Yet, we are still being told to hush, you silly one issue voters. Sorry, you can be reasonable. I’m off the res."

Well, I may not be as reasonable as you think. I used to give a modest amount of money to Republicans each year. In fact, early in the 2000 election cycle, I gave Mr. Bush enough money to get a lot of really nice invitations to give even larger sums of money to Republicans of all kinds. I still get several of these gracious invitations each week.

But my disenchantment with the party on precisely this issue has caused me to cease all financial support. And I have written them to tell them why.

Also, as to his HCA holdings, I haven't seen yet evidence of much more than incidental involvement in abortion. I've been googling around looking for smoking guns, but haven't found much one way or other. I found something cryptic about a hospital that spun off from HCA. It alluded to the fact that the new hospital administration would continue to abide by the court order legally obligating the hospital to permit abortions to be performed in it. I wish I could have found more.

As to whether Mr. Bush does right by us or not, the jury is still out. You can say what you want about ambassadors and such, but many of his judicial nominations have been quite good on this issue. The real test comes when he must nominate Supreme Court justices.

And, we'll see what happens with PBA.

Nonetheless, the pulling of a lever marked (D) will not occur through the efforts of my fingers.

"Who could forget Clinton?"

Precisely why I will not pull that (D) lever.

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