Posted by
Jeff Dubya on Monday, September 24, 2007 6:01:21 PM
First thing I want to get straight is I am not a militant anti-aortion guy. Yes, I think certain rules should be tighened up, and that public funding for abortion should be, shall we say - terminated. However, I believe Abortion should remain legal. Legislating morality is a slippery slope. I believe in God, and I also believe that some people may be in for a rude awakening when called to account for their actions here on earth at some point in time.
OK. That being said, I was reading an article tonight where author and self-proclaimed liberal John Grisham was ripping the Bush administration on Iraq.
"The war is an immoral abomination that we'll pay for for decades to come," Grisham said near the end of a 40-minute telephone interview with The Des Moines Register. "We're paying for it now at the rate of 100 kids a month while Bush plays politics with it."
First, Grisham got his numbers wrong. Like Dennis Prager, I believe in clarity over agreement. So let's have the facts. We're not losing 100 kids a month, U.S. Department of Defense and Iraq Coalition Casualty Count statistics indicate the monthly average for American fatalities in Iraq is about 70 and coalition fatalities average just more than 75 per month.
So 25 - 30% might be splitting hairs to you, but I'm used to that kind of hyperbole from the left. Generally speaking, I tune it out pretty well.
So what prompted me to blog about something political? Well, for an author, Grisham had an interesting choice of words. "We're paying for it now at the rate of 100 kids a month."
Well, abortion is one of the firmest planks in the "progressive" agenda. According to statistics from the Guttmacher Institute (http://www.guttmacher.org), in 2003 (the most recent year of compiled data) there were 1,287,000 abortions in the United States.
That's more than 3,526 per day.
As of the time of this writing, there have been 3,790 confirmed casualtes in Iraq. That's a sad number, of course - but also remarkably low considering this number was linked to a ground war and occupation of a foreign country over a three year period. (Source: US Department of Defense,http://icasualties.org/oif/BY_DOD.aspx)
That's just a hair under 3.5 per day.
And Grisham wants to talk about OUR KIDS?
No, seriously. Our Kids?
All I have to say is that seems to be a bad way to frame this particular argument. Unless the Democratic party wants to really have a look at what is undoubtedly the holocaust of our generation, and consider talking about losing kids, then they must be called to account for the millions that die as a result of abortion.
Refering to our fighting men and women of the U.S. Military as children is nothing but a political ploy to tug at our heartstrings even more than these losses already do. Mr. Grisham knows the dead, although young, are men and women who joined their ranks in a volunteer military without force or duress. They are heroes.
But if he wants to talk about policies that kill children... our "kids," then he better look inward, and talk about figuring out a way to limit abortion. Because legal abortion in the U.S. kills over 1000 times the number of soldiers all of our enemies in the middle east killed during this war, combined.