Frank Rich: GOP’s woman problem is that it has a serious problem with women.

[Are_grits_groceries]

At the time, back in January in New Hampshire, it didn’t seem like that big a deal, certainly nothing to rival previous debate flash points like “9-9-9” and “Oops!” But in retrospect it may have been one of the more fateful twists of the Republican presidential campaign. The exchange was prompted by George Stephanopoulos, who seemingly out of nowhere asked Mitt Romney if he shared Rick Santorum’s view that “states have the right to ban contraception.” Romney stiffened, as he is wont to do, and took the tone of a men’s club factotum tut-tutting a member for violating the dress code. “George, this is an unusual topic that you’re raising,” he said. “I know of no reason to talk about contraception in this regard.” The partisan audience would soon jeer the moderator for his effrontery.

Afterward, Romney’s spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom accused Stephanopoulos of asking “the oddest question in a debate this year” and of having “a strange obsession with contraception.” It was actually Santorum who had the strange obsession. He had first turned the subject into a cause in October by talking about “the dangers of contraception in this country.” Birth control is “not okay,” he said then. “It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”
<snip>
The hostilities would break out just weeks after the New Hampshire debate, with the back-to-back controversies of the White House health-care rule on contraceptives and the Komen Foundation’s dumping of Planned Parenthood. Though those two conflicts ended with speedy cease-fires, an emboldened GOP kept fighting. It had women’s sex lives on the brain and would not stop rolling out jaw-dropping sideshows: an all-male panel at a hearing on birth control in the House. A fat-cat Santorum bankroller joking that “gals” could stay out of trouble by putting Bayer aspirin “between their knees.” A Virginia governor endorsing a state bill requiring that an ultrasound “wand” be inserted into the vagina of any woman seeking an abortion.
<snip>
GOP apologists like Noonan are hoping now that Limbaugh and Limbaugh alone will remain the issue—a useful big fat idiot whom Republicans can scapegoat for all the right’s misogynistic sins and use as a club to smack down piggish liberal media stars. The hope is that he will change the subject of the conversation altogether, from a Republican war on women to, as Noonan now frames it, the bipartisan “coarsening of discourse in public life.” That’s a side issue, if not a red herring. Coarse and destructive as sexist invective is—whether deployed by Limbaugh or liberals—it is nonetheless policies and laws that inflict the most insidious and serious casualties in the war on women. It’s Republicans in power, not radio talk-show hosts or comedians or cable-news anchors, who try and too often succeed at enacting punitive measures aimed at more than half the population. The war on women is rightly named because those who are waging it do real harm to real women with their actions, not words.
<snip>
Much More: (a great read)
http://nymag.com/news/frank-rich/gop-women-problem-2012-4/index2.html

Noonan is a hack. She does write great speeches, but they covered up a multitude of sins. She knows it isn't just Limbaugh.

[chknltl]

1. This topic needs to be back on the front burner.

For awhile this nation took a peek at the ongoing war by the republicans against women. Then it found a different thing to distract itself with. I am happy to report that on the limbaugh front, AM 1090, of Seattle, is now airing commercials urging listeners to contact a local station who still airs this pig in order to express our indignation over his remarks.

KnR.

[PSPS]

2. I stopped reading at "whether deployed by Limbaugh or liberals"

GOP apologists like Noonan are hoping now that Limbaugh and Limbaugh alone will remain the issue—a useful big fat idiot whom Republicans can scapegoat for all the right’s misogynistic sins and use as a club to smack down piggish liberal media stars. The hope is that he will change the subject of the conversation altogether, from a Republican war on women to, as Noonan now frames it, the bipartisan “coarsening of discourse in public life.” That’s a side issue, if not a red herring. Coarse and destructive as sexist invective is—whether deployed by Limbaugh or liberals—it is nonetheless policies and laws that inflict the most insidious and serious casualties in the war on women.

I don't know where that came from, but the "both sides do it" canard has long since grown thin.

[freefall]

3. K&R

[no_hypocrisy]

4. Bottom Line:

excerpt from the article:

GOP apologists like Noonan are hoping now that Limbaugh and Limbaugh alone will remain the issue—a useful big fat idiot whom Republicans can scapegoat for all the right’s misogynistic sins and use as a club to smack down piggish liberal media stars. The hope is that he will change the subject of the conversation altogether, from a Republican war on women to, as Noonan now frames it, the bipartisan “coarsening of discourse in public life.” That’s a side issue, if not a red herring. Coarse and destructive as sexist invective is—whether deployed by Limbaugh or liberals—it is nonetheless policies and laws that inflict the most insidious and serious casualties in the war on women. It’s Republicans in power, not radio talk-show hosts or comedians or cable-news anchors, who try and too often succeed at enacting punitive measures aimed at more than half the population. The war on women is rightly named because those who are waging it do real harm to real women with their actions, not words.

If that war were all about Rush Limbaugh—or all about abortion—it would be easy to understand and perhaps easy to file away as the same old same old. But a sweeping edict with full GOP support like the Blunt Amendment, which has nothing to do with abortion, indicates how much broader the animus is. The Republican Party in its pathological reaction to the rise of Obama has now moved so far to the right that it seems determined to turn back the clock to that supposedly halcyon time when Ralph Kramden was king of his domestic
castle. Back then, as Santorum would have it, women just didn’t do things “counter to how things are supposed to be.”

[Quantess]

5. That was a really good read.

Interesting & well written.

[StarsInHerHair]

6. interesting part about Romney being more concerned with an 8 week fetus than his churchmember

with a bloodclot in her pelvis. Fetus are "people" to these GOP not women.