By Dave Andrusko

Part Two is a reprint from the Robert Powell Center for Medical Ethics. Please send your comments to daveandrusko@gmail.com. If you'd like, follow me at www.twitter.com/daveha

Alas, most of my day was spent at the eye doctor. But with my eyes closed shut much of the time, I had lots of opportunity to think. A number of items popped into my head, including a message I'd heard last Saturday at a conference. (I'll address that last.)

Stop me if you've heard this before, but it is both so outrageous and (at some level) so funny that I can't help returning to it: the Washington Post's coverage of the race for governor of Virginia. On Sunday the Post ran an editorial endorsement of R. Creigh Deeds, the pro-abortion Democratic candidate, that was so long I had to check to make sure that the computer hadn't gotten stuck and just repeated the same sentences over and over.

Pro-life Republican Robert McDonnell (right) and Pro-abortion Democrat R. Creigh Deeds

The exact words hadn't inadvertently been repeated, but the sentiments were the same boilerplate we've read both on the op-ed page and in the advocacy pieces that have run under the misnomer of news stories--only cooked at a rhetorical temperature of about a thousand degrees Fahrenheit. Creeds, who has run a campaign the incompetence of which has been matched only by the Post's enthusiasm for his candidacy, has further morphed into a man of "good sense" and "political courage." Indeed, the Post tells us, Deeds will "maintain the forward-looking policies of the past" which just happens to coincide with the tenure of the last two pro-abortion Democratic governors, also enthusiastically embraced by the Post.

By contrast there are not words dismissive enough for the pro-life Republican candidate, Robert McDonnell. His proposals are "a blizzard of bogus, unworkable, chimerical proposals, repackaged as new ideas that crumble on contact with reality." Not to be too obvious, but the same could be said (and with much more accuracy) about the Post's recycled criticisms of virtually any Republican running for state-wide office in the Commonwealth. The truth is McDonnell is a highly-qualified candidate, almost ideally suited to run in Virginia.

The tell-tale sign is the conclusion where McDonnell's ability to put coherent sentences together (as opposed to Deeds' perpetual search for a matching subject and predicate) is not evidence of a sharp mind but of a "silver-tongued embrace of ideas" that, if embraced, would send Virginia back to roughly the 13th century.

I had actually forgotten about the endorsement until I read a column today attacking the pro-life Republican Ken Cuccinelli, who is running for Attorney General. The lead sentence is that Cuccinelli makes McDonnell "sound like a mealy-mouthed moderate"--which, in case you haven't guessed, is not meant as a compliment. From there on, in singing the praises of pro-abortion Democrat Stephen Shannon, columnist Robert McCartney bashes Cuccinelli mercilessly.

I always wonder if anyone edits these pieces. Didn't anyone notice the obvious irony that by comparison McCarthy's hatchet job on Cuccinelli makes the editorial slash-and-burn attack against McDonnell seem like a loving embrace? That compared to McCarthy's frenzied assault on Cuccinelli, the editorial page diatribe against McDonnell seems almost like the words of a "mealy-mouthed moderate"?

Of course, the reason for the vitriol and the hyperventilating prose is that Deeds and Shannon are endorsed by NARAL (the Post's ideological soulmate), and because McDonnell and Cuccinelli are currently ahead in the polls. The election is a week from Tuesday.

As I waited in the optometrist's office for the solution she'd dropped in my eyes to settle in, I thought back to the remarks I'd heard October 17. They were both hugely amusing and deeply moving.

Our speaker talked about how she and her husband had gone to dinner recently and that she'd difficulty reading the fine print on the menu. She told him she must be suffering from some eye problem. Not thinking first, her husband blurted out that it was the product of growing older.  Her optometrist, far more careful in her language, judiciously attributed our speaker's difficulty to a "time thing." After we all got through laughing, she told us how once she got new glasses she could see little things.

This was her transition to inspiring us to pick up the gauntlet on behalf of the poor and the powerless. Being who I am, I immediately thought who is more powerless, who has less, materially or otherwise, than the unborn child?

The abortion debate is over 40 years old, but it generates the same passion and intensity and commitment that it did back when it was young. Every generation sees the loss of life through different eyes, a reflection of all that has gone before, and of all the lessons that the loss of 50 million lives can teach.

While the truth itself never changes, in a real sense your job and mine is to help the American public see the unborn child and her mother through fresh eyes. I could offer my suggestions how to do so, but it would be much more productive if you would take a few minutes and write me with your suggestions.

Please send your ideas to daveandrusko@gmail.com.

Thank you.

Part Two