If Obama had an Uncle...

Don't tell me the left doesn't survive primarily on luck. On Friday, April 12, the legacy media was on the ropes. A spectacular uproar, of a type never before seen, had erupted over media refusal to cover the trial of Kermit Gosnell, the serial killer lucky enough to own an abortion mill. The story they were attempting to bury involved his trial for a homicide by medical malpractice (one of several such), the murder of four healthy infants (out of hundreds of similar killings), the abuse of human remains, and assorted associated felonies. Gosnell had been enabled by official malfeasance on both the metropolitan and state levels. As a lagniappe, most of the victims, both infants and adults, were poor blacks. In any other circumstance, the story would have been blasted nationwide. But Gosnell was an abortionist (as well as being black himself), and therefore protected. Though it had been proceeding for nearly a month, the trial went utterly unmentioned in national media. The Philadelphia Inquirer and local TV news covered it as a matter of course, but apart from new media, nothing at all was reported outside southeast Pennsylvania.

The dam broke the second week of April, largely thanks to Kirsten Powers in USA Today ("We've forgotten what belongs on Page One") and Conor Friedersdorf of the Atlantic, who on April 12 published a lengthy piece, "Why Dr. Kermit Gosnell's Trial Should be a Front-Page Story," attacking the media for its conspiracy of silence concerning the trial. Friedersdorf's piece led to widespread comment across the media sphere, thanks in large part to the Atlantic's cachet. It simmered further over the weekend. (Another early entry -- so to speak -- was Friedersdorf's onetime colleague Megan McArdle, who wrote a piece apologizing for not writing about the case, which she had been aware of, because "it makes me ill." An understandable excuse, but still a disappointment to those of us who admire McArdle's incisive economic coverage. Car crashes, house fires, and child abuse are all difficult to think about, but they somehow get covered.) Then came Monday, the moment of truth for the media, when they would need to face up to themselves, to start doing their jobs as they were supposed to be done, and telling the story whether they wanted to or not... Which turned out to be the same day that the two jihadi morons, the Tsarnaev brothers, decided to blow a hole in the Boston marathon. Back went the Gosnell trial on the shelf, the already written mea culpa stories were put on the spike, and further coverage was handed over to stringers and wire reporters. Gosnell coverage has been barely acceptable since that date -- not the blackout of previous weeks, but nowhere near the amount it deserves. A similar chain of events enmeshed Monday's guilty verdict. It came in the middle of two interrelated news cyclones involving a long-belated release of the facts concerning the Benghazi scandal and the revelation that the IRS has been persecuting conservative activists. On the horizon, two more funnels could be seen approaching -- the fact that the Justice Department was spying on AP reporters, and mounting indications that Joe Biden's inability to control his mouth led directly to the demise -- or should we say assassination? -- of members of SEAL Team Six in Afghanistan. Amid all this, media figures will sigh, wipe their brows, and shove the Gosnell story well into the shadows. That's the way it will be. But that's not the way it should be, because the Gosnell story is no simple one-off, but one of those rare events that indicts an entire system. The Gosnell story has tendrils going off in all direction, reaching into every level of society, including the Oval Office itself. Tracing them will be a matter of months and years. The individual who takes up this task will be a towering figure in the journalistic profession. No such figure is visible at this moment. The first order of business involves Gosnell himself. The Ripper of South Philly was accused of the manslaughter of one patient and the murders of four infants (he was found guilty of three). This is not even the tip of the iceberg. Gosnell is likely to be the worst serial killer in U.S. history, and he may even take the international title from Gilles de Rais, the Breton nobleman who murdered six-hundred-odd children in the 15th century. We have no clear idea of how many children this individual killed through the medically authorized procedure of severing their spines -- only that it is in the hundreds. I for one would like a more solid figure, and I find it a little sardonic that nobody in the media shares my curiosity. If somebody were to sidle up to a reporter and whisper, "Y'know, John Wayne Gacy owned two houses," you would hear multiple sonic booms as reporters raced each other to the site in question. But of course, standards are different for abortion. On a slightly higher level, we have the city and state officials who looked the other way as the slaughter proceeded. In the late '40s, there was a name for such people: "Gute Deutsche." Here was a building filled with jars full of human body parts, with infant feet kept as trophies, with hacked-apart human remains flushed down toilets, with every conceivable rule of sanitation and safety developed since the medieval era openly and blatantly flouted. The poor and desperate who were directed there were exposed to the possibility of serious infection and even death. How many succumbed? We don't know. We don't know because nobody has bothered to look into it. Every public official in the city of Philadelphia from the mayor on down, every state official reaching up to the governor's office, every federal health or medical official active in that area for the past two decades shares guilt in this matter. Gosnell's abattoir remained uninspected deliberately and intentionally, after a decision to overlook all abortion facilities in the state of Pennsylvania. The people responsible for this are enemies of the public welfare. They are thieves of the paychecks and pension payments they receive. They need to be exposed and punished. Who are they? That remains unknown, because nobody has looked. The records are there; it would be easy enough to work out, if Tiger weren't playing this week or Kim hadn't bought a new bikini. (One name we do know is former governor Tom Ridge, an abject RINO of a politician, who first canceled inspections in the '90s as a purely political gesture. Ridge, of course, set up the original homeland defense system. Let's hope the jihadis don't figure out that the best way to infiltrate the country is through the abortion industry.) We come to Planned Parenthood. That organization is on record as making regular referrals to Gosnell's "Women's Medical Society." The staff of Planned Parenthood knew exactly what was going on there. How many times did some woman step into Gosnell's building, smell the stench, see the blood and the dirt and rust, and flee with a shudder to make a return call to PP to urge them not to send anyone else to that place? How many medical doctors heard stories and warned them? How many times did they hear of women being taken straight from Gosnell's to a local ER? People involved in any industry know who the bad apples are. And yet, Planned Parenthood kept shoving 'em onto the treadmill. Who were the supervisors and staffers responsible? Any good reporter could find out in short order. Too bad we've run out of those. The American health-care system is in the process of being turned over to the control of the same people who did so well in overseeing and assessing Kermit Gosnell. Within a year, the national health-care system, in all of its complexity and vastness, will be run by the same bureaucrats who allowed Gosnell to reign in Hell for a decade and a half. That is what they think of as medical care, that is what they think of the patients, and that is what they think of you. This is neither hyperbole nor speculation. ObamaCare is being constructed by Kathleen Sebelius, former governor of Kansas and friend and collaborator with the late George Tiller, who was assassinated by a distraught anti-abortion activist in a case well-covered and widely publicized across the country. Tiller, another specialist in late-term abortion, was no different in essence from Gosnell. It is claimed that he destroyed the lives of his victims while their heads were still in the vaginal canal, making the process legal (according to Justice Ruth Ginsburg, among others). His premises were cleaner, and he had superior methods of disposing of the remains, not finding it necessary to mince them and flush them down the toilet. But he was a Gosnell in whiteface all the same. A photo exists of Gov. Sebelius carousing with Tiller in the Kansas governor's mansion following a banquet. She is holding up a celebratory election t-shirt, apparently a gift from Tiller, and pointing directly at him. As far as is known, this is the sum total of Sebelius's involvement with the medical profession, and apparently all that was required to qualify her for control of the entire health system. An alert media would have asked why. The question, needless to say, remains unvoiced to this day. We'll jump a few steps to the Oval Office. Not even the president is immune to the touch of Gosnell. Far from it; if any greater supporter of the Gosnell method and mystique exists than Barack Obama, we're not aware of it. There exists one crusade in Obama's political career. As is well-known, he skated through his early electoral offices by voting "present," making no waves, doing what he was told. One exception to this lassitude exists: his campaign to derail the "Born Alive" act of 2002, an Illinois effort to extend the law's protection to infants who survived abortion. At least one major Illinois hospital dumped these infants in a storage room, unfed and uncared for until they died, which in and of itself proves that the Gosnell philosophy is not limited to Philadelphia. (It must be added that a nurse, Jill Stanek, used her spare moments to hold and comfort these abandoned children as their lives ebbed away. The saints have not vanished, nor does Gosnell define us completely.) By all reports, the bill was scuttled by the work of one man alone: Barack Obama. He put real and serious effort into destroying the last chance of these most desolate of all our fellow beings. What his motive was remains a mystery. With Gosnell's actions, it easy to trace hatred, contempt, a lust for blood and destruction. But Obama's reasons remain opaque. Why on earth would a man accept this as a high point of his public career? Obama is accused of many sinister and unwholesome actions -- some of them sheer nonsense -- but this truly does chill the blood. Particularly since he has doubled down on it. This April 26, even as interest in the Gosnell trial was rebuilding, Obama took it upon himself to attend a banquet celebrating one of Gosnell's partners and enablers: Planned Parenthood. He knew about Gosnell. He knew about the public uproar. He knew that there was no way to spin this. He knew that any normal politician would keep his distance. He knew, furthermore, that he was in for serious trouble on other fronts, that Benghazi was set to explode, that the IRS story would break out sooner or later. But he went anyway. He couldn't lay his mantle across Gosnell, so he did the next best thing. He committed the gratuitous act. He stood before the entire nation and said, "God bless you" to Planned Parenthood.

So be it. If that's how he wants it, if he wants to stand on that side of the line, with a man who snips children's spines and chops them to pieces, he can do that, along with Sebelius, and Ridge, and Nutter, and the entire parade. But there's also this: they can't walk away afterward. They can't walk away afterward because the cover is blown. The story is out. In siding with abortion, they are no longer standing for women's rights, or health care, or a medical procedure; they are aiding and abetting Kermit Gosnell, the butcher of Philadelphia. They must be made to become Kermit Gosnell. To wear the Gosnell mask, to wield the Gosnell scissors. The Democrats must become the Gosnell party (and let's not forget Gosnell Republicans such as Tom Ridge). Gosnell must be revealed as a crucial part of millennial liberalism. Like "lynch," boycott," and "Bork," "Gosnell" must become an all-purpose noun, verb, and modifier. It must be used in every case of brutality, cowardice, and hypocrisy by a public figure involving abortion. T hey must be Gosnellized, each and every one of them. The reporter who fails to tell the story will be "pulling a Gosnell." Any pro-abortion law will be a "Gosnell Act." A pol accepting payoffs from the industry will be "Gosnelled up." Any public figure playing the hypocrite on abortion will be "in Gosnell country." The scissors must become their emblem, Photoshopped into each picture, appearing in the hands of protestors and onlookers at each public event. A Gosnell award would not be a bad idea, given out annually in several divisions -- the most cowardly journalist, the most corrupt bureaucrat, the most egregious politician. The first nominees would, I think, be obvious. A problem with the battle against abortion is that it did not have a face. Now, at last, it does. That face must now be fused to the features of his supporters and collaborators, so it can't be taken off. In truth, Gosnell resides in them all. They must be made to acknowledge that fact. When they look in the mirror, they must see Kermit Gosnell gaping back at them: the werewolf who tore living children from the safety and sweetness of their mother's wombs to suffer a few seconds of incomprehensible horror before they were rended into pieces. Gosnell has torn an enormous gap in the left's armor. We need to strike hard, fast, and repeatedly. The media, the officials, the politicians, and that strange and cold figure in the White House will now attempt to turn the page on it. They must not be allowed to do so.