The Forgotten Man, 21st-Century Style

“Do Gosnell’s Victims Matter, Mr. President?”, is the title of a searing post by John Sexton at the Breitbart.com Conversation group blog:

So where is Obama on the 7 infants killed in Philly (really it’s many, many times that number)? Why are there no teachable moments this time? Why no national dialogue about the grim reality of late term abortion? No discussion of the razor thin line between constitutional rights and murder from the First Lawyer. No vow to prevent this happening again by banning scissors or, more to the point, working to eradicate illegal late-term abortions (which like gun crimes are already illegal but still happen). Don’t Gosnell’s victims deserve a vote?

The President will not offer nationally televised words of healing at any of the funerals (complete with souvenir t-shirt). He will not stare into the rafters, pause dramatically and stage whisper something about Kermit Gosnell failing to live up to our best ideals. In short, he will not capitalize on the deaths of these innocent children. And no one in the media seems to have noticed his unusual disinterest in doing so.

I keep returning to this point because it matters. Gosnell is charged with eight murders but it’s likely the true number of victims — over two decades — is in the hundreds. For perspective, consider that Gosnell’s clinic may well have murdered more infants than the total number of people killed in the Oklahoma City bombing. He certainly killed far more than Adam Lanza or Jared Loughner.

Much more from Mark Steyn, including this horrific anecdote:

And so it goes two years on, at “Doctor” Gosnell’s trial:

Medical assistant Adrienne Moton admitted Tuesday that she had cut the necks of at least 10 babies after they were delivered, as Gosnell had instructed her. Gosnell and another employee regularly “snipped” the spines “to ensure fetal demise,” she said.

Moton sobbed as she recalled taking a cellphone photograph of one baby because he was bigger than any she had seen aborted before. She measured the fetus at nearly 30 weeks, and thought he could have survived, given his size and pinkish color. Gosnell later joked that the baby was so big he could have walked to the bus stop, she said.

Funny!

Notwithstanding Dr. Gosnell’s jest, and the fact that newborns delivered alive are generally regarded as “babies,” the New York Times’ only story on the case is punctilious enough to refer to Gosnell’s victims as “viable fetuses,” and its early paragraphs emphasize the defense’s wearily predictable line that this is a “racist prosecution.” Instead of my Arizona comparison, what about Sandy Hook? One solitary act of mass infanticide by a mentally-ill loner calls into question the constitutional right to guns, but a sustained conveyor belt of infanticide by an entire cadre of cold-blooded killers apparently has no implications for the constitutional right to abortion. As one commentator wondered two years ago:

Does 30 years of calling babies “blobs of tissue” have no effect on the culture?

Read the whole thing.

In his post at Breitbart.com, Sexton wrote, “My point is, by any measure this is a national tragedy not a local crime story.” And it simply will not appear in any meaningful way on the overculture’s radar scope. There’s no potential leftist legislation it advances, it doesn’t help the “Progressive” cause, it doesn’t fit the liberal narrative — in oh, so many, many ways. Which is why, as Elizabeth Scalia predicted over a month ago in a post at First Things sardonically titled, “Gosnell Headlines? Gone, Baby, Gone!”

The mainstream media, confronted with a house of horrors that was gestated and born of a single-minded mania for “protecting choice for women” had no choice but to report on Gosnell being charged for the murder of one woman who died while under his dubious “care” (another woman’s death had been “settled” for a financial consideration), and they mush-mouthed their way through his killing of at least seven living, viable babies, but they did not like this story.

They did not want to discuss that authorities had repeatedly received reports of Gosnell’s mayhem and had chosen to look the other way. They did not want to have to mention that Gosnell’s disgusting, “third-world” abortion mill—a place where women were abused, manhandled, disrespected, over-sedated, punctured, infected, sterilized, interiorly ripped, and otherwise treated like pieces of meat—would still be running, unimpeded, were it not for an investigation into illegal drug trafficking.

The Gosnell story—a story that by any measure deserved in-depth coverage, some serious discussion about regulation and responsibility, and a few features forcing the nation to consider just when a “late-term” abortion slips into the category of “infanticide” or what our leadership and politicians really think of all of this—proved too big and too messy for the mainstream media.

The jury is still out on whether the MSM can handle a very different Philadelphia-area story. While the MSM and DNC (but I repeat myself) invariably use psychobabble such as “We want to open up a dialogue on race relations,” a true “dialogue” involves communication following in both directions. Naturally, when that happens, such a “dialogue” must be squelched. Which is why, it’s entirely predictable that “Philly Mayor Thinks Magazine Article Not Protected Free Speech:”

Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter didn’t like an article in Philadelphia Magazine entitled: “Being White in Philly: Whites, Race, Class, and the things that never get said.”

The mayor was so upset about reading an opinion that he didn’t like, he sent a letter to something called the Philadelphia Human Relations Commission.  The letter uses language that suggests Mayor Nutter doesn’t think the article is protected under the first amendment.  In fact, he even uses scare quotes around the word “speech” when referring to the offending article:

While I fully recognize that constitutional protections afforded the press are intended to protect the media from censorship by the government, the First Amendment, like other constitutional rights, is not an unfettered right, and notwithstanding the First Amendment, a publisher has a duty to the public to exercise its role in a responsible way. I ask the Commission to evaluate whether the “speech” employed in this essay is not the reckless equivalent of “shouting ‘fire!’ in a crowded theater,” its prejudiced, fact-challenged generalizations an incitement to extreme reaction.

The totalitarian streak that is found in so many big city mayors is really hard to ignore at this point.  Between Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s strong-arm tactics, to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s nanny state and now Nutter’s flirtation with state-controlled censorship, the pattern is getting hard to ignore.

As a blogger at SDA notes, “Author Robert Huber tried to start an open dialogue about race relations in Philadelphia. The usual suspects already want to destroy him.”