Immigration and Planned Parenthood Are Social Smoke Screens

As a woman, I am really alarmed at the assault on women's health that has been taking place since January 2011. But, I have to lay aside my emotions, and see things rationally: this Planned Parenthood debate, just like the immigration debate, is a social smoke screen.

Republicans have a pattern: whenever they are in trouble for their obvious hypocrisy, they raise a social issue. Republicans run on platforms -and win elections - based upon fiscal responsibility. Yet, once in office, they do the opposite. When the Right speaks of Ronald Reagan, they can never credit him with balancing the budget. He didn't. As a matter of fact, he ran up the biggest deficit and ran a bigger government than the country had previously known. He just kept saying that government should be smaller. He just kept saying that we needed to balance the budget. He never really did it. Instead, he distracted us with a war on drugs campaign. George W. Bush, who simply re-implemented Reagan-style trickle down economic policies. But in this world, a world with 24-hour news cycles and dozens of political commentary shows on the Right and the Left, he could not get away with it as easily as Reagan. People began to ask questions: how were we going to pay for two wars, tax cuts for the wealthiest 2% of the company, and a gift to the pharmaceutical companies via the Prescription Drug plan for seniors? If Republicans were supposed to be the party of fiscal responsibility, they certainly did not actually govern that way. What did Bush do? Start a roaring debate on immigration.

Remember immigration? Remember the border patrol? Remember the fence the United States wanted between us and Mexico? Yeah. Whatever happened to that? Well, like I said, we live in a 24-hour news cycle society. Some political science professors simply got on some of the television shows and stated the obvious: if we were really serious about immigration reform, we'd simply punish the companies that employ illegal immigrants. Since many Republican lawmakers have financial interests in those businesses, they killed the debate they started. It really died when a camera crew visited Lamar Alexander, a represented from Tennessee and very vocal anti-immigration lawmaker, at a construction site. Yes, he owns a construction company. Who was working there? Illegal immigrants.

But, Planned Parenthood is safe. Those clinics are largely federally funded, and no one has any financial stakes in them. And, since it is illegal to federally fund abortions, this debate and possible defunding of Planned Parenthood, get the base all heated and upbraided without actually affecting abortion anyway. Perfect. And, and...these cuts affect only 12% of the entire budget. We have been focusing so narrowly on this 12% that we haven't asked a pivotal question: what the hell else is contained in the other 88% of the spending?