Several left-wing media outlets, various blogs, and even Steve Benen, writing for the Rachel Maddow Show, have orchestrated what appears to be a media hit on Ken Buck, the likely Republican front-runner in Colorado for the U.S. Senate.
As Erick Erickson reports at RedState, Buck, who is staunchly pro-life and suffered through cancer recently, is the victim of a “left wing propaganda machine” that “has taken a quote wildly out of context and driven it to national attention through a series of websites.”
Jason Salzman, writing at the Huffington Post, observed Buck’s response to a question about his stance on abortion during a radio interview earlier in the week:
“I am pro-life,” Buck said. “While I understand a woman wants to be in control of her body – it’s certainly the feeling that I had when I was a cancer patient, I wanted to be in control of the decisions that were made concerning my body – there is another fundamental issue at stake. And that’s the life of the unborn child. And I hold that life dear and precious and believe we have to do everything we can to protect the life of the unborn.”
Salzman then goes on to take Buck’s quote out of context, even wondering whether Buck should be concerned about being compared to Todd Akin:
So Buck is saying that his successful battle with cancer is like pregnancy insofar as they both require decisions affecting a human body. But for a cancer patient like Buck, they are personal medical decisions, and Buck was glad to be able to make them.
But for a woman who is pregnant, difficult as it may be, she shouldn’t be afforded the same freedom to make decisions affecting her body…
Now Buck drives his anti-abortion point home in the starkest of language by saying how happy he is that the government didn’t dictate his health decisions when he had cancer. But pregnant women should have no choice.
Erickson responds to the fabricated dilemma:
Personally, I don’t see what is offensive here at all. And it certainly wasn’t a comparison of cancer and pregnancy as the left is trying to portray it. Any honest person would read what Ken Buck said and find that he was showed the sharp contrast between the two situations while displaying empathy towards both.
The left doesn’t even understand their error because they never stop to consider that “fundamental issue at stake,” which is life. They can’t see the contrast because they can’t, or won’t, see the life.
Erickson observes that author Salzman has serious left-wing credentials:
Jason Salzman, the author, is the former campaign director for Greenpeace, former research associate with the National Resource Defense Foundation, and has written a few books – one on how to get George W. Bush out of office and one on how to help Obama change America.
In addition, and as Erickson points out, the irony here is that the left has insisted for almost half a century that abortion is “women’s healthcare,” and the “cure” for the “disease” of unwanted pregnancy.
“The same left that has diminished the idea of life in the womb for the last 40 years is now trying to project that deviousness onto Ken Buck, regardless of what he actually said,” asserts Erickson.
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