Trump’s Republicans are scoring on issues Democrats wouldn’t mention
What goes unmentioned is sometimes as important as what s mentioned. Viewers of the Democrats virtual proceedings heard much less about abortion than viewers of their more conventional conventions, even though it s an issue that, according to dial groups, helped Democrats in previous presidential and vice presidential debates.
One reason is that Democrats have moved way left on the issue. Joe Biden has abandoned four decades of opposing government-funded abortions. And Democratic legislators have delighted in passing laws authorizing abortions in all nine months of pregnancies.
Republicans Tuesday speakers included former Planned Parenthood clinic head Abby Johnson who provided pretty graphic descriptions of abortion procedures. The best a squirming Washington Post fact-checker could do, as National Review s Ramesh Ponnuru noted, was to argue that there aren t that many (actually, several thousand yearly) post-viability abortions.
Left utterly unmentioned by the Democrats were the continued violence and the sharp increases in murders in major cities across the country in Portland and Seattle, Minneapolis and Washington, Chicago and New York, and in smaller places, like Kenosha, Wisconsin, this week.
They may have hoped that friends in the mainstream media (or at least that’s the term employed by the famously libeled Covington Catholic teen Nicholas Sandmann) would continue to shield viewers from uncomfortable footage of rioting, assaults, and arson, as it s been doing. They may hope that they won t notice that reports describing mostly peaceful demonstrations are standing in front of raging fires or when CNN yanked a chyron from the screen and deleted the adjective violent before the noun protest.