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| Sure Dr. Kermit Gosnell deserved national attention. But so do the New Orleans Mothers Day shooters. Let’s get it for them… |
The man in the picture above, Dr. Kermit Gosnell, is on his way to jail for the rest of his life.
Yay.
Normally, I would put an exclamation point after that yay, but when you’re talking about a man who is going to be in jail for the rest of his life because he killed babies born alive in cold blood because he didn’t want to give back the money that their mothers paid to have their late-term, unplanned pregnancies aborted, an exclamation point doesn’t seem quite appropriate.
I last wrote about Dr. Gosnell, and again, I’m only calling him a doctor because the Associated Press Stylebook demands it, in 2011 when he was indicted on four counts of first degree murder (for killing three babies that were born alive by snipping their spinal cords) and one count of third-degree murder for killing one of his patients, Karamaya Mongar.). Mongar came to the clinic for an abortion and wound up dying in the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania of cardiac arrest after being administered anesthesia by either a high school student or Gosnell’s wife, a hairdresser, I can’t remember which.
(In any case, neither was a doctor…)
I remembered looking through the Grand Jury report and seeing the bodies of babies frozen in jars, stuffed into boxes, and jars filled with little babies feet (why he saved them, I don’t know…). The clinic itself was so filthy that if it were a restaurant bathroom, not only would I not be eating there, a picture of the place would be put on the restaurant review site Yelp! so that no one else would either.
He got convicted on three counts of first-degree murder (for the babies), one count of third-degree murder (for Mongar), and a myriad of other offenses, none of which included being a total douchebag, unfortunately.
Thankfully, he decided not to appeal, thus saving the taxpayers the money needed to execute his dumb ass. Sure, we still have to feed and clothe him, but we don’t have to pay what would surely be some massive legal fees as he appealed his case, so that’s a win. He’s been sentenced to three life terms, which at 72 actually means maybe 10 years max.
I’m pretty sure that’s not enough. You kill three babies because your greedy ass doesn’t want to give up the money you’d lose because these five to seven month pregnant women have changed their minds about terminating their pregnancies, I’d like for you to do a lot more time. In a small cell. With a dude named Raheem. Who just lost a child.
But since this is the best I’m gonna get, okay.
Now the Gosnell case became a national cause celebre’ for anti-abortion activists who thought that the proceedings should be televised on C-Span so that they could get on their soapboxes and say “See! This is what happens when you give women the right to an abortion! This is what all abortion providers do!”
(That’s not the case of course. But why let the facts get in the way of some time honored scare tactics?)
So to shame the national media into coming to Philly and covering what was essentially a local story (because we local reporters doing our jobs was just not good enough), these activists and their media partisans got together and demanded that the Gosnell trial be a staple on networks like CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and others.
They got their way. And that’s okay. It’s not like what Gosnell did wasn’t going to end up on Investigation Discovery at some point. But I can’t help but think that the hearts of these folks were so far away from being in the right place here that it’s ridiculous. You want to make abortion illegal. I get that. But you also want to make making sure the child stays healthy, gets educated, and is allowed to live without the fear of someone rolling into his or her elementary school with a Bushmaster rifle for target practice next to impossible.
Which is why I refer to you as Pro-Birth instead of Pro-Life. If you were Pro-Life, you’d want to make sure that all these kids you want to force women into having by restricting their access to birth control and making abortion so hard to get that they have to go to butchers like Kermit Gosnell had what they needed to truly live. Instead, you want to see them born…so that you can tell them to go kick rocks.
Now I know that some of you are looking at that last sentence and want to tell me I’m wrong.
I’m going to give you a chance to prove to me that you’re not exactly what I said you are and it involves your favorite thing: forcing the news media to focus on what you want it to focus on through fear and intimidation.
On Mothers Day in New Orleans, a second-line parade was going in in one of the neighborhoods in the Seventh Ward. Folks were enjoying their day out, celebrating Mom, checking things out.
Then, this happened…
Happy Mothers Day! It’s time to start shooting up a poor neighborhood in New Orleans!
By the time the three people who went all OK Corral on this Second Line parade got done, 19 folks were wounded, some of them critically.
And believe it or not, it went unnoticed by a lot of people, many of them hard core news junkies like myself.
So here’s your assignment: make this go viral.
Now the video above would tell you that a story about this has been done on MSNBC and good for them. But it probably would have escaped their notice as well were it not for the fact that it happened in MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry’s neighborhood.
Need some incentive? Two of the 19 victims clinging to life in a New Orleans hospital are 10-years-old. You know? Kids?
And you all like kids, dont’cha? You may not like to feed ’em or make sure their teeth aren’t falling out or make sure they know how to read, but you do like ’em, right?
Then man your phone trees. Call your representatives. Get on CNN News Director Jeff Zucker’s nerves…
Oh, wait. That’s right. These kids were shot with a gun.
And people getting shot with a gun means we might have to talk about gun control, right? Can’t have that can we?
That’s what I thought.
The Mad (Political) Scientist 