What Happens When An Editorial Board Goes Down The Far-Right Gravity Well

Take a look at today's editorial at the once proud left-of-center Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

Soon the president will send to the U.S. Senate a nominee to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court of the United States.

This is a moment for law and not ideology.

It is a moment to lower voices.

The right model is the Neil Gorsuch nomination.

And so on. The board has been pulled so far to the right that the nomination of Neil Gorsuch is seen as "the right model" of "a moment for law and not ideology."

Neil Gorsuch - who only sits in Merrick Garland's seat because of more than a few moments of raised voices on the right who succeeded in twisting the rules in order to gavage their own politically acceptable nominee into the Supreme Court Chambers.

So yea, Gorsuch is a moment for law over ideology. Sure.

The editorial's next two (rather oxymoronic, in a way) sentences further crazy glue in teh crazie:

Mr. Gorsuch is not a zealot. He is a conservative constitutionalist.

Have you ever met a "conservative constitutionalist" who was, I dunno, timid about it? No, for better or worse, our nation's conservative constitutionalists are nothing but zealous of what they see their defense of the original intent of the Constitution. Trying to portray Gorsuch is misleading.

Then there's this part of the editorial:

The Gorsuch confirmation hearings were also a model we should employ now. They were orderly and civil.

Really? The  NYTimes reported:

Judge Neil M. Gorsuch presented himself on Monday as a creature of consensus during a sharply partisan Supreme Court confirmation hearing, clouded throughout by the bitter nomination fight that preceded it over the past year.

That was the first sentence of the Times' coverage.

What actual news (if any) about the Gorsuch nomination were they reading in Toledo?

Where was the civil then?

As for the civil now the editorial board pleads for it this way:

Let’s not make the hearings that will soon commence on a Supreme Court nominee another zoo riot.

The message, however, as to the source of the riot is clear by the examples used in the previous paragraph of previous riots: Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas. It'll be the democrats' fault if it gets noisy!!

The board goes on with their definition "centrality" here:

Hence the president, for his part, should avoid nominating a firebrand, who, for instance, wants to totally roll back Roe v. Wade.

Can I ask, why the need for the adverb? Let's take it out and see, by it's absence, what the editorial board really wants us to understand.  Here is the previous sentence without the adverb:

Hence the president, for his part, should avoid nominating a firebrand, who, for instance, wants to...roll back Roe v. Wade.

See how the inclusion of the word "totally" changes the entire meaning of the sentence, um, totally? By rejecting the nomination of a firebrand who wants to totally roll back Roe, they're allowing (indeed they're advocating) the nomination of someone who'd want to partially roll back Roe.

See how the politic-speak goes?

And if you speak up against it, you're creating a another zoo riot that'll put ideology above the law.

Indeed, let's unpack more of the whole "abortion" paragraph:

Certainly the nation could use a fresh and an honest debate on abortion and just what our citizens want the law and public policy to be. And there may be points of popular consensus. For example, most Americans find partial birth abortion an abomination.

What sort of "fresh and honest debate" are they thinking?  And why is it "certain" that the nation could use it?

Pew Research shows that in 2017, 57% of Americans believed that abortion should be legal "in all or most cases."  The number in 1995? 60%. The number hasn't changed much and the percentage of those who believe that abortion should be illegal "in all or most cases" has never been above the percentage of those who favor choice.

Never.

So why does the editorial board assert that "certainly" a fresh debate is needed?

There just doesn't seem to be any actual facts presented to support that "certainty."

Then there's this sentence:

For example, most Americans find partial birth abortion an abomination.

True, Gallup found, in 2011, that 64% of those polled opposed so called "partial birth abortion." But here's the important detail conveniently omitted by our editorial overlords from Toledo - they oppose it "except in cases necessary to save the life of the mother."

So when would an "intact dilation and extraction" procedure (the proper medical term, by the way)  take place if not "to save the life of the mother?" How often is that not the case?


They're not saying - and by leaving the argument ambiguous, they're misleading their (diminishing) readership.

And so it goes. This is now the editorial policy of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

I can't wait until they doubt climate science. Or evolution. Or Obama's birth certificate.