Note: This post was revised on July 20, when I added several additional links and some clarifying and enhancing language.

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What is it with the so-called “conservative” establishment’s support of Mitt Romney?

Given what is known about the guy, it’s utterly amazing — and, as I’ll demonstrate in the coming days, disgusting.

Kathryn Jean Lopez has had a hankering for Mitt Romney ascending to national office since the primaries. She’s got it real bad.

Her most recent column at Townhall should be an embarrassment to her bosses at National Review, but unfortunately, I’m fairly confident that it isn’t.

Behold one of the most disgraceful exercises in excuse-making — ever (see the notes below):

….. The “flip-flop” accusation label hit former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney hard during the Republican primary earlier this year. By the end of the cycle, most citizens knew only two things about Romney: that he was good looking and used to believe things he no longer does. What most folks didn’t consider was the narrative. Did Mitt Romney change his position on gay marriage? He sure did. (1) Did Mitt Romney go from defending legal abortion to opposing it? Absolutely. (2) But consider how it happened:

Successful multimillionaire businessman Mitt Romney runs for governor of the Bay State to fix the economy there, a job he knows something about. Other issues, at the time, paled in comparison for him. (3) Fast forward, he’s in the statehouse. The legislature decides it’s going to fund an unprecedented human cloning effort with Harvard University, his alma mater. So he seriously studies what’s going on, he brings in experts. He didn’t let himself get swept up by the snake oil salesmen (remember John Edwards announcing that Christopher Reeve would be alive if not for George Bush’s refusal to fund embryonic stem-cell research?). He realizes that “Brave New World” is not just a novel, but something his state is about to budget for in a whole new way. When Romney actually took the time to figure this out, he changed his mind about abortion, cloning and other destruction of innocent human life. (4) Ditto for gay marriage. Once forced to confront the issue, once realizing the lengths activists will go to make sanctified same-sex unions legal, once the supreme court of Massachusetts instituted same-sex marriage there, he changed his mind. (5)

Good for him. They say it’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks. Well, it’s even harder for a grown man in public life to say “I was wrong.” He has. (6) Good for him.

It’s not a disingenuous flip-flop for me to take that point of view ….. (7)

Some “flip-flops” aren’t, in other words. As long as your core is clear — as long as you have one — a mature leader can learn. (8) Both presidential candidates would be wise to do so here and there. At least one of them isn’t going to take the beating Romney did during the primaries. And it helps that the other one’s middle name with them is “maverick.” (9)

(1) - Mitt Romney promised the Log Cabin Republicans before the 2002 gubernatorial election that he would not get in the way of what everyone pretty much knew was an imminent ruling in favor of same-sex “marriage” by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court — specifically that “I’ll keep my head low.” It’s right here in the New York Times, in an article that was complimentary towards him about his former Log Cabin Republican-supporting stance, and critical of his alleged move towards being again same-sex “marriage.” I blogged on it here in December.

(2) - Mitt Romney claims to have experienced a prolife “epiphany.” Oddly enough, the person in front of whom he supposedly had his “epiphany” doesn’t recall it occurring that way. It’s dishonest, bordering on libelous, that Romney tried to make his prolife flip-flop more palatable by asserting that Ronald Reagan was “adamantly” pro-abortion while he was California governor, and that Henry Hyde had once been proaboration. Both claims are demonstrably false; this was proven beyond doubt here back in December. Where has everybody who gets their jollies by invoking and defending the Gipper daily been?

(3) - Mitt Romney’s stewardship of Massachusetts’s economy was singularly unimpressive, and he was originally against the 2003 Bush tax cuts. See here, here, and here.

(4) - If he “changed his mind,” Mitt Romney had a strange way of demonstrating it. AFTER his “epiphany,” he signed into law Massachusetts’s state-run health-care law, aka CommonwealthCare, aka RomneyCare. That law enshrined the statutory right to $50 state-subsidized abortions in the Bay State for the first time.

(5) - See (1). I’ve yet to see an explanation as to how someone who “changed his mind” on gay marriage nevertheless responded to a court opinion he did not have to obey (because the court had no constitutional jurisdiction to even take he case), and in the absence of required enabling legislation, nonetheless mandated that gender-neutral “marriage certificates” be issued and that town clerks and justices of the peace issue them. The fact is, as has been explained many times, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts did NOT institute same-sex “marriage” in the Bay State. Same-sex marriage is still illegal there.

(6) - It’s not just “I was wrong.” It also requires “I am sorry.” First, I don’t think he is sorry, and second, I don’t know how anyone can be confident that Romney, after all those years of seeing things otherwise believes in anything he claims. The right has justifiably piled on Barack Obama for changing his mind about certain things after 20 years. Mitt Romney, an allegedly thoughtful, religious man, somehow took 40 years to get a grip on the sanctity of life and the societal importance of one-man, one-woman marriage.

(7) - K-Lo, your picture is next to the term “disingenuous flip-flop” in my dictionary.

(8) - Mitt Romney has no core.

(9) - If the “maverick” picks Romney as his running mate, he negates all of the advantage he has built up over Barack Obama for steadfastness and consistency, and creates all kinds of other problems for himself — problems that will be covered in future posts.

The fallout that began a week ago after the publication of the Associated Press’s Tony Snow obituary continues.

Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly took his concerns about it to the top of AP, and didn’t like the response he received. He shouldn’t.

In his column this morning at Townhall.com, he reaches a conclusion about the self-described “Essential Global News Network” that is becoming increasingly difficult to deny.

In their Snow obituary, the AP’s Douglass K. Daniel, with assistance from Jennifer Loven, characterized the former White House Press Secretary as “not always (having) a command of the facts,” questioning reporters’ motives “as if he were starring in a TV show broadcast live from the West Wing,” and turning his briefings into “personality-driven media event(s) short on facts and long on confrontation.” In an especially tacky moment, the pair also felt it necessary to tell readers what Snow’s salary was while he served the president.

Doug Powers, Michelle Malkin, and yours truly (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog) were among the first to decry Daniel’s and Loven’s report. A bit of a blogswarm ensued. Rush Limbaugh made a point to voice his outrage at least twice in Fox News Channel interviews last weekend; NB colleague Noel Sheppard posted one of them here at NewsBusters last Sunday. Rush also brought up the AP coverage during his Monday broadcast (about halfway through at link, which will be accessible until Monday evening).

O’Reilly also took umbrage at Daniel’s and Loven’s report during his broadcast endeavors this week. In his Townhall.com column, he discusses the source of the pathetic pair’s disrespect. He further reports that the head of the wire service has unconditionally defended his reporters’ work, reaches a sad but ever more obvious conclusion about AP’s reliability, and explains why that conclusion should trouble anyone who believes that the public ought to be getting their information served up straight (bolds are mine):

….. Of course, this is all about ideology. The Associated Press has no use for President Bush, and that opinion has crept into its hard news coverage. This is a serious situation. The AP is America’s primary news service; its dispatches go out to thousands of media organizations all over the world, many of which simply print whatever the AP sends them.

And increasingly the AP is sending them opinion, not fact.

The head of the Associated Press, Tom Curley, told my producers he “stands by the obituary,” so we invited him on “The Factor” to defend it. Immediately Curley turned standing into running — as in away. He refused to come on the program or issue a further statement.

I think Curley’s treatment of Snow should be included in his own obituary. And furthermore, the Associated Press may now be dead as an objective news organization.

How ironic that one obit could so quickly lead to another.

How sad that casual news consumers are getting much, if not most, of their national and world news from the likes of Loven and Daniel. The wire service could use some meaningful, fair, and balanced competition. That is showing early signs of coalescing. It cannot arrive fast enough.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

From Afghanistan:

July 6, 2008

Army medic Peter Langhelt didn’t think twice when a bomb exploded under his pal Danny Kay’s armoured vehicle in Afghanistan.

The courageous lance corporal sprinted across the mine-littered ground to give him life-saving first aid and get him on a rescue vehicle.

And when, horrifyingly, THAT vehicle was also blown up by a mine, hero Peter risked his life AGAIN to drag Danny to safety.

Peter, 21, who has now been put forward for a bravery award, said: “At the time you don’t think about what you are doing. It is only afterwards it hits you.”

Hero Peter, of Essex, who is with the 22 Field Hospital, Royal Army Medical Corps, was driving behind Danny in a six-vehicle patrol in the remote Musa Qala - “Doom Mountain” - area of Helmand province when Danny’s armoured vehicle hit the mine.

He said: “The blast lifted the vehicle up and spun it around a whole 180 degrees. Immediately, there were shouts for everyone to stand still. But as Danny was screaming and shouting in pain, I didn’t think about the risk, I just ran over. His legs were trapped under the front of the vehicle. After we got him free I gave him morphine and put a splint on his legs. I think every bone in them had been broken.

“Even then he managed to joke with me. He grinned: ‘You touch my legs again and I’ll thump you!’ A Chinook had landed about 200metres away, so we put him on a stretcher in another vehicle to get him to the helicopter. But as it drove off there was another huge bang. The vehicle was lifted up and came down on its side and caught fire. Danny was trapped and was screaming again.

“I used a fire extinguisher to dampen the flames because the vehicle was full of mines, mortars and ammunition and I was worried the whole lot would go up with Danny trapped inside. More people began to arrive and we got Danny clear.” ….

Go here for the rest of the story.