Dem leaders should listen more.

[DKW 86 7,948]

Link

Dem silence is deafening

The rancid attack ad against Supreme Court nominee John Roberts shows, in a nutshell, what's wrong with the Democratic Party. Emphasis on nut.

The $500,000 TV ad, paid for by an abortion-rights group, so viciously distorted Roberts' record that nonpartisan watchdogs and even some liberals called for the ad to be withdrawn. Missing from the voices of reason was any Democratic official or party leader. New York's senators were conspicuously silent.

Sen. Hillary Clinton's earlier call for "common ground" on abortion would have more credibility had she condemned the ad's false claims.

Sen. Chuck Schumer would have proved himself more than a partisan had he done more than brush off Roberts' ads from both left and right as "just trying to stir the pot."

Neither Clinton nor Schumer even mildly rebuked a group that is part of their party's base. It took Pennsylvania's Sen. Arlen Specter, the pro-choice GOP chairman of the Judiciary Committee, to blow the whistle. He called the ad "blatantly untrue and unfair" and said it was hurting the pro-choice cause. It was then withdrawn.

But the damage remains to the sponsor, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and, more important, to the quisling Dems. Their silence puts them in lockstep with the demagogues driving the party over the ideological cliff. Instead of speaking up for decency and integrity, they chose appeasement, if not agreement. Shame.

If anything is out of bounds in politics, the anti-Roberts ad was it. The ad showed a woman who had been injured in a 1998 abortion clinic bombing, then showed Roberts and a brief he had filed seven years earlier in a separate case. The narrator says Roberts "filed court briefs supporting violent fringe groups and a convicted clinic bomber" and that his "ideology leads him to excuse violence against other Americans."

None of that is remotely true. What Roberts did, as a lawyer in the first Bush administration, was argue that an 1871 Ku Klux Klan law being used to protect clinics did not apply. That was hardly a radical legal position, and Congress later passed a law specifically to protect clinics.

But facts don't matter to radicals. Under the logic of the smear linking Roberts to clinic bombers, any lawyer representing a murder suspect is guilty of murder. Dems should try that one at the Legal Aid Society.

For those who support abortion rights - myself included - it is distressing to see NARAL sink to such a level. But it's not the first time. Its Web site has been boiling with anti-Roberts distortions since his nomination. Each twist includes a call for contributions. Nothing fires up the donor base like scare rhetoric about "radical right groups." In fact, as the whole episode shows, it's Democratic advocacy groups that have become the real radicals. From Michael Moore to Moveon.org, and now to NARAL, the left has taken a turn toward the extreme that is as vitriolic as anything on the right.

It was a phenomenon I saw in last year's presidential race. When a host on Air America radio advocated violence against Bush, I was shocked that some liberals applauded. One call from a 78-year-old Connecticut woman still gives me chills: Speaking of Bush, she said: "Osama Bin Laden had it right: His throat should be slit."

A New York Times reporter who dared write something nice about Bush got an E-mail from a California man who said he hoped the reporter's child would be killed by a terrorist bomb.

Such ugly views are hardly typical of every Democrat or liberal. But there is no denying that the fringe is starting to dominate the party. Leaders who have the courage to say "enough" need to come forward. Where are they?