Who Is With Jane Galt?

I note here that Al Gore’s pre-war remarks hold up rather better than the predictions of the war’s cheerleaders, despite attempts to claim that everyone was equally wrong. Atrios does us the favor of collecting some of the contemporaneous reaction to Gore’s speech(including Neal Pollock’s dead-on Michael Kelly parody.) I particularly enjoy this from Andrew Sullivan, who after upbraiding Gore for not being terrified of the nuclear weapons Saddam was about to send to the U.S. on the wings of armor-plated unicorns said:

He says we have “squandered” the good will generated by the attacks of September 11. Really? A liberated Afghanistan, where women can now learn to read, where a fledgling free society is taking shape? No major successful terrorist attack on the homeland since the anthrax attacks of last fall? Growing support among Arab nations and at the U.N. for enforcing U.N. resolutions that Gore’s own administration let languish? Signs that Arafat may soon be sidelined on the West Bank? Squandered? The only thing that’s been truly squandered is what’s left of Gore’s integrity. At least Lieberman has been consistent. I must say, as a former Gore-supporter who was appalled by his campaign lurch to the left, that there are few judgment calls I’m prouder of than having picked Bush over Gore two years ago. Now I’m beginning to think we dodged a major catastrophe in world events.

Yeah, that holds up really well today, especially the claims about Bush’s competence.

Meanwhile, while we’re doing flashbacks just for fun I thought I’d bring up my favorite example of McArdle’s use of personal anecdotes as an all-purpose trump card. In explaining why John Roberts was right to claim that the government should use civil rights laws designed to prevent terrorists from obstructing the exercise of constitutional rights shouldn’t apply to anti-abortion terrorists trying to prevent women from exercising their constitutional rights, McArdle said:

Similarly, Mark Kleiman’s attempt to excuse NARAL’s ad by calling Operation Rescue a terrorist group is an abuse of the word. Is Operation Rescue attempting to keep women from having abortions by making them feel shame and public humiliation at an extraordinarily vulnerable time? Undoubtedly. Have they attempted to physically block women from entering clinics? Indeed they have. But speaking as one who used to form a human chain in front of clinics to help women through the protesters, I’ve never seen anything from Operation Rescue that even remotely qualifies as terrorism, nor seen anyone physically threaten a woman (shoving a picture of a fetus in her face does not count).

I suppose it would be too uncharitable of me to wonder if McArdle’s activism took place in front of the A. Pocryphal Health Clinic. But even if this is true, let’s remember that in 1991 alone there were “2 cases of murder or attempted murder of abortion providers, 9 bombings/arsons (or attempted bombings/arsons), 83 cases of invasions, assault and battery, vandalism, death threats burglary or stalking, and 3,885 arrests at blockades. To take one example, by the end of a seven-week Operation Rescue operation in Wichita that summer, “police had arrested 1,734 people for 2,657 acts of trespassing, resisting arrest and violating injunctions against blockading.”” But I’m sure none of this was intended to intimidate abortion patients and providers, because McArdle didn’t witness every one personally! Or perhaps she looked into the heart of every vandal, obstructionist, and issuer of death threats and saw that frightening women was the last thing on their minds. (Just as she can tell in advance that anti-war protesters deserve a good, swift, but non-intimidating 2×4 to the head.)