“The short life of Gabriel Santorum would seem a curious priority for political discourse at a time when the Brokest Nation in History is hurtling toward its rendezvous with destiny,” Mark Steyn writes in his weekly column. “In 2008, the Left gleefully mocked Sarah Palin’s live baby. It was only a matter of time before they moved on to a dead one:”
There is something telling about what Peter Wehner at Commentary rightly called the “casual cruelty” of Eugene Robinson. The Left endlessly trumpets its “empathy.” President Obama, for example, has said that what he looks for in his judges is “the depth and breadth of one’s empathy.” As he told his pro-abortion pals at Planned Parenthood, “we need somebody who’s got the heart – the empathy – to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom.” Empathy, empathy, empathy: You barely heard the word outside clinical circles until the liberals decided it was one of those accessories no self-proclaimed caring progressive should be without.
Indeed, flaunting their empathy is what got Eugene Robinson and many others their Pulitzers – Robinson describes his newspaper column as “a license to feel.” Yet he’s entirely incapable of imagining how it must feel for a parent to experience within the same day both new life and death – or even to understand that the inability to imagine being in that situation ought to prompt a little circumspection.
AdvertisementThe Left’s much-vaunted powers of empathy routinely fail when confronted by those who do not agree with them politically. Rick Santorum’s conservatism is not particularly to my taste (alas, for us genuine right-wing crazies, it’s that kind of year), and I can well see why fair-minded people would have differences with him on a host of issues from spending to homosexuality. But you could have said the same thing four years ago about Sarah Palin – and instead the Left, especially the so-called feminist Left, found it easier to mock her gleefully for the soi-disant retard kid and her fecundity in general. The usual rap against the Right is that they’re hypocrites – they vote for the Defense of Marriage Act, and next thing you know they’re playing footsie across the stall divider with an undercover cop at the airport men’s room. But Rick Santorum lives his values, and that seems to bother the Left even more.
Read the whole thing.
In this latest round of hypocrisy from the left, I’d just like to add that if anybody significant had mocked John Edwards for climbing into the bed with his dead son back in 2008, do we have any doubts about how it would have played out? My memory, if I recall correctly, was that when Kerry told the story attention focused on Edwards’ seeming to be disingenuous with revealing this deeply private moment–and wasn’t being attacked for the act itselfoverly much. So we need to go see what, if anything, the usual suspects said at the time.
These people have simply got to understand that in the modern digital age they cannot support the mountain of double standards forever, and when the fall comes, it will be swift. America is the history of discredited elites, and those if the left should understand that I think people intuitively know the left is in charge of the culture and drives things in politics. If there is still an American middle class–and there is–eventually no threat from some GOP boogeyman is going to make the American middle class overlook the fact that to the left has some very serious issues, and because the left has never had to discipline itself the way the right has to (thanks MSM), it is very unlikely the Dems will be able to do so once the meme really becomes prevalen in the public mind.
My guess is that the true leftists understand that, and have opted for the “newspeak” strategy we are increasingly seeing, where brazenness will get what logic and reason cannot. If one cannot rule by the middle class, rule by the mob.
Thanks for the pointer. Great essay by Steyn.
Just stating the obvious; were Santorum a Democrat and a tragedy like this had happened, there would have been reams of sympathetic columns and TV reports about their actions from the big media outlets (and we already have somewhat of a precedent from 49 years ago, in how the media treated the death of John F. Kennedy’s newborn two days after Jackie delivered).
Since Santorum’s a conservative Republican, the dead newborn and the family’s actions in their eyes are as up for attack as Gingrich’s divorces from his wives or Herman Cain’s alleged affairs. Death at birth is just another piece of grist for the attack mill. Eugene would have been more honest with his readers about his true unrepentant feelings — and some of them probably would have enjoyed it more — if he had just run a column today of nothing but Rick Sanatorium dead baby jokes.
It trumps everything for them, even common decency. See Maher, Bill.
It’s why Booooosh was a war monger who was “wiping his a** with the Constitution”, as I had it screamed in my face by a moonbat “friend” of mine, while Obama can get his Kinetic Military Action groove on in Libya just as open-ended as he pleases, and bypass Congress on just about everything under the sun — you know, for the GREATER GOOD.
Nothing is off limits in the service of their ideology. That’s why pushing granny off the cliff in that anti-Ryan ad was mere projection. It’s why the Occu-filth are peaceful and the Tea Party is inherently violent. It’s why Sarah Palin’s emails are crowd-sourced at the behest of the in-the-tank MSM, while giant chunks of Barry’s backstory — his grades, his associations, how he obtained his Social Security # — are of no interest whatsoever.
Feelings are all-important. Just not those of Republicans, because they’re “weird”, you see.
It’s easy to throw rocks…for the stoners.
As the father of two special needs children, you get used to callous, insensitive, reckless remarks. It comes with the territory and you understand it and move on.
When it goes completely into intentional serial assaults on spouses, children, …intent on nothing more than shock value cruelty, the assailant is exposing a character flaw so deep, it should remain with them forever.
No matter how much one wishes their “side” to win…stooping to ridicule and assault on special needs children, children who dies, deeply personal grief…is simply a show of what “by any means necessary” truly means.
Robinson and Andy Sullivan for me…are persons of such low character that I don’t care to agree with them on anything. It would make me feel soiled by association.
in tears.
mark steyn is a national treasure. thanks, canada. we’re very grateful.
I’m stunned. again. by the liberal comments. what world do these people live in? a family was expecting a new member to join them. the children knew about and loved this new child. the child was cared for and loved, before his funeral. they were grieving. how is any of this foreign and inexplicable? are they not loved members of a family? do they not dream about their children, before they are born? do they not have more than one child?
My friend didn’t even go that far in her pregnancy. Her children saw ultrasounds- just like their own. When the baby died, and she had a D&C- thus no body- the kids went looking for pictures of fetuses at that age, and told stories to that picture, and made paper baby blankets, for the ultrasound photo, since that’s all they had. They still talk about the baby, as if it is still their little brother. They don’t know the song “will the circle be unbroken” but they live it as if it were true. I cannot imagine her grief. She was in a black despair for nearly two years, after that. Her kids pulled her out. That Mrs Santorum is still walking in grace is a great testimony to her soul, and to her family.
I believe the formal term psychologists use to describe this habit of the left is “sociopathy,” isn’t it?
What Robinson and those like him have done will have its way with them.
I don’t know how popular laying out a body out at home for a wake is these days but it used to be a common practice. We still do it though and in a sense we ‘play with them’ by embalming them, dressing them up, putting makeup on them and laying them out in satin lined boxes so the friends and family all come and look at them. Some dead people are laid out beneath glass boxes for eternal viewing. How many times in movies have we seen a bereaved character kiss the dead person or lay down next to it? Do people do that in real life? I suppose they do. But no one seems to think that any of that is sick or weird. What is sick is Alan Colmes’ claim that the Santorums took their dead baby home and ‘played’ with it. Apparently everyone else in the world is allowed to ‘play’ with the dead body of their loved one, but not the Santorums.