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Redstate...
No
Girls Were Harmed During the
Production of This Executive Order
Posted by Erick Erickson
Tuesday, September 13th
From
Ben Domenech’s most excellent
Transom comes this, backing up what I think ends this as an issue for
Perry:
The
attacks on Perry’s HPV vaccine
actions five years ago have now taken up roughly 15 minutes in both the
MSNBC
debate and the CNN debate. Perry’s message on this has been
straightforward:
that he made a mistake on the way he did the approach, that he’d
approach it
differently if he could do it over again, and that he listened to
opponents and
took his chiding from the legislature. He’s defensive about the fact
that he
did add a parental opt-out (Santorum’s assertion that all vaccines
should be opt-in
indicates that he has zero understanding of herd immunity), but that’s
the rule
for all of Texas.
But
here’s the real reason this is a
silly debate: the policy never went into effect. Not one girl was
vaccinated
under the policy. Not one shot was given. Demanding apologies from
Perry for a
policy that never went into effect gets tiresome after a while –
particularly
when Mitt Romney has never apologized for his namesake health care
reforms, in
effect in Massachusetts still today.
Now,
you can still say that Perry
shouldn’t have done it, but the attacks diminish when, in fact, no one
was
affected by a policy then undone — compare that to Romneycare.
More
so, Michele Bachmann today has
crossed a line she should not have crossed in expanding the attack —
going
anti-vaccine. The “morning after pill” comparison last night has people
riled
up too. I missed that comment last night.
Bachmann
claims the vaccine causes
mental retardation, which is not only factually not true, but also puts
her
into a fringe category of anti-vaccine crusaders convinced of links to
autism
and other ills that again and again again major studies show are
baseless.
In
other words, in twelve hours,
Michele Bachmann went from a serious win on an issue to, as of 11:23
a.m. this
morning, crossing a line that loses her real credibility.
Read
it at Redstate
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