Walter Shapiro did a good recap at The New Republic this week of how, when Dobbs came down in June 2022, top Republicans affected to be absolutely convinced it wasn’t going to have much political impact.
Now it’s clear that some of them, at least — like Kari Lake after Arizona’s loony 1864 anti-abortion law got affirmed by their high court and then defended by their Republican state lege — have been sufficiently freaked out by the avalanche of evidence to the contrary to backtrack on their previous gung-ho anti-abortion rhetoric, a reversal that is pleasing to see, particularly since it’s also clear that everyone — pro and anti — knows they’re lying.
But what I find more interesting are conservatives who absolutely will not give up the ship even as it goes under. I don’t think it’s a matter of principle — as I have frequently shown, they have none. They appear rather to be frozen in the headlights of popular opinion.
Republicans are used to simply bullshitting their way through their least palatable policy choices — like the transparently bogus anti-war patter many Congressional Republicans adopted to justify their failure to fund the Ukrainian resistance to Putin. That usually works, because there’s always a new subject they can swing their klieg lights toward — currently it’s protesting college students, always a popular favorite — to make people forget, with the help of a compliant prestige press, their previous screw-up.
But the Dobbs backlash has been big enough to make that impossible and, their usual evasive tactics being unequal to the task, they find themselves literally defenseless. They don’t seem to be trying anything like outreach toward the large majority of their fellow Americans who oppose them, either. And when they are obliged to publish something of any length about it, it gets bizarre real fast.
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