As Republicans search for middle ground on abortion, Arizona's Blake Masters settles on a silly lie

[Brexiter]

For some reason, people don’t like the party of small government telling them their 11-year-old daughters should be forced to give birth to their rapists’ babies. Indeed, one imagines such a message would poll poorly anywhere—though I’m not so sure about Arkansas.

One day Donald Trump will die, and the foremost thought in people’s minds—other than “I can’t believe they convinced both Mayor McCheese and the Hamburglar to be pallbearers”—will be, “There’s the guy who killed the Republican Party.” And the reason—as much as Trump’s slouch toward fascism, his eager embrace of thinly veiled racism, and his theft of highly sensitive government documents—will be his integral role in killing abortion rights.

Of course, now that Roe has fallen, many Republicans who once clung to their pro-life promises like white on Mike Pence are desperately looking for wiggle room as November’s midterm elections loom.

RELATED STORY: Kansas abortion vote should 'send a cold chill up the spines' of Republicans

One of these suddenly wishy-washy forced birthers is Blake Masters, the GOP Senate nominee in Arizona. On Tuesday, Masters claimed he supported Arizona’s new abortion law.

Yet the same time, he totally misrepresented what the law says.

Republicans are worried—with good reason. Help Democrats seize the moment by chipping in $2 to each of these Daily Kos-endorsed candidates.

“Arizona has decided 15 weeks, with all the common exceptions, and I’m not going to mess with that at the federal level,” Masters told the Phoenix-area Gaydos and Chad radio show on Tuesday. On Wednesday’s The Guy Benson Show, he reiterated this meticulously crafted—and spectacularly mealy-mouthed—talking point: “I always called for the repeal of Roe v. Wade. Send that issue back to the states. Arizona’s decided 15 weeks, with all the common exceptions. And I support that law. I’m not going to mess with that at the federal level.”

Except Arizona’s law doesn’t include “all the common exceptions”—unless he’s specifically talking about the most common exception, wherein a (most likely white, and very likely Republican) person who needs an abortion and has the financial wherewithal can quietly travel to a state where basic human rights to health care are protected.

HuffPost:

Republicans know that abortion exceptions in cases of rape, incest and to protect the health of the mother are incredibly popular with the public.


But the Arizona abortion law that Masters says he supports does not have all those exceptions. That law ― which Masters claimed had “all the common exceptions” ― actually allows exceptions after 15 weeks only in cases of medical emergencies. There are no exceptions for rape and incest.

Seems the common exceptions that we common people commonly think about aren’t the common exceptions Masters is discussing here. So one can assume Masters would accept a “life of the mother” exception, but only if the ultrasound reveals the fetus is actively making pipe bombs and shivs.

As HuffPost notes, Masters has been all over the map when it comes to abortion rights. In May, he stated that “at a minimum,” abortion laws should be left up to the states, but he also noted “we should go further than that” and called for a federal personhood law. He also supported Sen. Lindsey Graham’s perfectly timed (for Democrats, anyway) national abortion ban.

Oh, and about that Graham ban:

It’s not hard to see what Graham thinks he is doing with this messaging bill that has no chance of passing in a Congress controlled by Democrats or being signed by a Democratic president. He’s trying to use the deceptive name of the bill to convince voters that Republicans just have reasonable goals when it comes to a national abortion ban. The thing is, Republicans haven’t given voters a lot of reason to trust them on this issue, given the harsh abortion bans in so many Republican-controlled states, and the horror stories coming out of those states of women denied care for miscarriages or pregnancies that threaten their health, or child rape victims forced to travel out of state for medical care. And Graham’s ban wouldn’t reinstitute abortion rights up to 15 weeks in the states with near-total bans—it would only limit abortion rights where they currently exist.

Masters—who currently trails his Democratic opponent, incumbent Sen. Mark Kelly—has also gone out of his way to appear less extreme on abortion.

RELATED STORY: Trump-endorsed Blake Masters steadily working to distance himself from the persona he campaigned on

As Daily Kos’ Laura Clawson wrote in August:

Masters has dramatically scrubbed his campaign website’s abortion policy page, as if someone wasn’t going to be right there with screenshots of the stuff he took out. NBC News has the goods. For example, Masters’ website no longer says, “I am 100% pro-life.” It no longer describes his support for “a federal personhood law (ideally a Constitutional amendment) that recognizes that unborn babies are human beings that may not be killed” or for “the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act,” which criminalizes abortion after 20 weeks, or “the Born Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, the SAVE Moms and Babies Act, and other pro-life legislation.”

He didn’t stop there in what’s gone from a trend to a norm among desperate GOP extremists.

As Daily Kos’ Laura Clawson wrote on Sept. 7:

For some mysterious reason, Masters is not the most credible messenger for the claim that he doesn’t want to make it illegal and punish the doctors, so his campaign is hoping that a woman will help. Masters “would make Arizona so proud,” according to his wife Catherine, in the wake of Masters’ campaign scrubbing his website of extreme anti-abortion language and working to distance him from his own views.

Ohio Republican Senate nominee J.D. Vance’s wife Usha cut a similar ad, saying Vance is “an incredible father, and he’s my best friend,” in an ad. As if being a good father to one’s own children helps pregnant people forced to give birth.

Both the Vance and Masters ads use obligatory footage of the couples’ children.

In Nevada, the ad starring Republican nominee Adam Laxalt’s wife focuses on Laxalt’s “difficult” childhood and being raised by a single mother. “Everything he had to overcome helped to make him a good man,” Jaime Laxalt says in the ad.

And this week, Masters continued to hide his real—and really extreme—views.

Again, he’s not the only one. Republicans in general have been running away from their anti-choice positions like Josh Hawley during his famous 5K Fun Run From Armed, Feral Trump Supporters.

On the heels of the Supreme Court’s radical Dobbs decision in June—and the subsequent impact on polling—numerous Republicans are trying to woo suburban women voters while at the same time clinging to their pro-blastocyst bona fides.

Axios:

• House candidates Tom Barrett of Michigan, Christian Castelli in North Carolina, and Barbara Kirkmeyer in Colorado also removed language from their websites. (Kirkmeyer’s campaign said it “recently completed a complete redesign of Barb’s website. Instead of addressing many issues, we are focused on the three issues in which voters express the most interest.”)
• Minnesota's GOP nominee for governor, Scott Jensen, changed the copy on his website to water down his abortion message, removing lines including, "He believes in the sanctity of human life, from conception to natural death."
• In Oregon, GOP gubernatorial candidate Christine Drazan scrubbed her website's issues page, which had previously touted pro-life bonafides. But her campaign says she’s not “shied away from her views.” Her opponent, Betsy Johnson, recently put out an ad calling Drazan "too extreme for Oregon" because "Drazan wants to make abortion illegal."

And that’s just the tip of a very large iceberg, which the GOP appears to be barreling toward at full speed as we speak.

RELATED STORY: Here's how we stop the GOP from criminalizing abortion and stealing elections

Godspeed this Roevember, Republicans. I’d advise you that it’s women and children first, but you’ve already established that you don’t really care about either.


Republicans suddenly aren’t so confident. Help Democrats seize the moment by chipping in $1 to each of these Daily Kos-endorsed candidates.


Check out Aldous J. Pennyfarthing’s four-volume Trump-trashing compendium, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Or, if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE.