The Party of Life Now Measures Itself by How Many Children it is Willing to Kill

The toxicity of the anti-abortion-but-not-prolife party on full display:

“We’re talking about ruthless things tonight,” said Hewitt, “carpet bombing, toughness, war. And people wonder, could you do that? Could you order air strikes that would kill innocent children by not the scores, but the hundreds and the thousands? Could you wage war as a commander-in-chief?” After Carson replied with an anecdote about his experience as a pediatric neurosurgeon, Hewitt pressed: “So you are OK with the deaths of thousands of innocent children and civilians?”

In this line of work, if you do it long enough, you tell yourself that you’ve seen everything. Nothing can surprise you. It’s a comforting fiction, a callus on the soul that allows you to observe and report without being subsumed by it all. Nothing is more unnerving than being deprived of context, to arrive at a moment when you can’t say, “Well, I’ve seen that before.” I have no metric for what I witnessed last night.

A debate moderator sought to test a candidate’s qualifications on the basis of how many children that candidate is willing to kill. This wasn’t some basement-born hack-ass radio show that only reaches three blocks. This happened on CNN with banners flying and theme music to boot. The audience, to its credit, had the decency to boo Hewitt. Nevertheless, it happened. That is where we are. That is who we are.

Carpet bombing. Toughness. War. Fairly encapsulates the night. I stopped counting the instances when a candidate said the words “Kill us all” after 50. This was a fear festival that puts the darkest Stephen King nightmare in deep shade. It was also, make no mistake, a big hug for ISIS. One can imagine them huddled around a television, laughing, saying to each other, “Look how frightened they are. Look how they are frightening others. This is more than we could have hoped for.”

Committed to protecting human life from conception to birth, except for unborn children who need a bomb abortion to show we’re tough.  Carpet bombing for Jesus.