Remember this? Who doesn’t? With one out-of-left-field question, the former Clinton hack masquerading as a newsman, George Stephanopoulos, altered the course of the 2012 election, and the “war on women” was well and truly underway.
These people are so predictable. And yet, the GOP, led by its krack kadres of kampaign konsultants (what do these guys do to earn their money, anyway?), is constantly surprised. Let’s check in with the New York Times, the house organ of Upper West Wide liberalism:
The politics of medicine, morality and free will have collided in an emotional debate over vaccines and the government’s place in requiring them, posing a challenge for Republicans who find themselves in the familiar but uncomfortable position of reconciling modern science with the skepticism of their core conservative voters.
As the latest measles outbreak raises alarm, and parents who have decided not to vaccinate their children face growing pressure to do so, the national debate is forcing the Republican Party’s 2016 presidential hopefuls to confront questions about whether it is in the public’s interest to allow parents to decide for themselves.
And there you have it: it really is that simple. The New York Times and other Leftist media outlets have now put the vaccination “controversy” on the table for the Democrats to use as a weapon against various potential Republican presidential candidates.
Gov. Chris Christie’s trade mission to London was suddenly overshadowed on Monday after he was quoted as saying that parents “need to have some measure of choice” about vaccinating their children against measles. The New Jersey governor, who is trying to establish his credibility among conservatives as he weighs a run for the Republican nomination in 2016, later tried to temper his response. His office released a statement clarifying that “with a disease like measles there is no question kids should be vaccinated.”
Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, a physician, was less equivocal, telling the conservative radio host Laura Ingraham on Monday that parents should absolutely have a say in whether to vaccinate their children for measles. “While I think it’s a good idea to take the vaccine, I think that’s a personal decision for individuals,” he said, recalling his irritation at doctors who tried to press him to vaccinate his own children. He eventually did, he said, but spaced out the vaccinations over a period of time.
Crazy talk, right? Let’s hear what another prominent politician, Barack Hussein Obama, had to say about it back in the day:
In 2008, as a senator and presidential candidate, Obama discussed the possible link between vaccines and autism. “We’ve seen just a skyrocketing autism rate,” Obama said in April 2008 at a rally in Pennsylvania. “Some people are suspicious that it’s connected to the vaccines. This person included.”
(Shortly after the comments, Obama campaign spokesman Tommy Vietor supplied a video showing that Obama had pointed to a member of the audience when he said “this person included.”)
Obama continued, “The science is right now inconclusive, but we have to research it.”
Yeah, well that was then and this is now. The Times continues battlespace prep for its Democrat overlords, throwing in evolution and “global warming” into the mix just for the hell of it:
The vaccination controversy is a twist on an old problem for the Republican Party: how to approach matters that have largely been settled among scientists but are not widely accepted by conservatives. It is a dance Republican candidates often do when they hedge their answers about whether evolution should be taught in schools. It is what makes the fight over global warming such a liability for their party, and what led last year to a widely criticized response to the Ebola scare.
Former nude model turned anti-vaccine activist Jenny McCarthy
To cover itself, only late in the story does the paper admit that vaccination crazies exist on both sides of the political divide and in fact may even predominate on the morally relativistic Left:
The debate does not break entirely along right-left lines. The movement to forgo vaccinations has been popular in more liberal and affluent communities where some parents are worried that vaccines cause autism or other disorders among children.
Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, also a possible 2016 candidate, was asked on Sunday about vaccinations on the ABC News program “This Week,” and insisted that the science was clear and convincing. “Study after study has shown that there are no negative long-term consequences,” he said. “And the more kids who are not vaccinated, the more they’re at risk and the more they put their neighbors’ kids at risk as well.”
Let’s be clear: vaccinations should be mandatory; this is not a “lifestyle choice” issue; if you think it is, please read Roald Dahl’s heartbreaking account of his daughter Olivia’s death from measles in 1962.
Olivia, my eldest daughter, caught measles when she was seven years old. As the illness took its usual course I can remember reading to her often in bed and not feeling particularly alarmed about it. Then one morning, when she was well on the road to recovery, I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of coloured pipe-cleaners, and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she couldn’t do anything.
“Are you feeling all right?” I asked her.
“I feel all sleepy,” she said.
In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours she was dead.
Nutbag politicians who endorse or give comfort to the anti-vaccination side — Rand Paul, Michele Bachmann — should be shunned and shunted aside. (Bachmann ended her career with her disgraceful squabble with Rick Perry over Gardasil during the 2012 debates.) Meanwhile, Chris Christie, who put his foot in his mouth over the issue as well, has been attacked by the Times on an entirely different front.
The governor, a Republican now preparing a run for president, shot to national prominence as a cheese-steak-on-the-boardwalk Everyman who bluntly preached transparency and austerity as the antidote to bloated state budgets. But throughout his career in public service, Mr. Christie has indulged a taste that runs more toward Champagne at the Four Seasons.
He has also quietly let others pay the bills.
That tendency — the governor himself says he wants to “squeeze all the juice out of the orange” — has put him in ethically questionable situations, taking benefits from those who stand to benefit from him.
This early on, the GOP simply cannot afford to allow the media to tar it with the brush of yahooism and “hypocrisy,” which of course plays right into the Narrative. But it probably will; we don’t call the Republicans the Stupid Party for nothing. As the Romney candidacy showed, the GOP is only too happy to nominate a pinata for president.
Meanwhile, on the Evil Party side of things, remember this: they never stop, they never sleep, they never quit. And they have people on the payrolls of major newspapers all over the country to prove it.
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