Dear Ms. Warren,
I will be voting for you in November, so let’s get that out of the way right off the bat. I believe that the party vote is important, especially for a seat in Washington. But I think you are a terrible candidate. You may be a lovely woman (by all accounts you are), but seriously, could you run any worse of a campaign?
Politico even lumped you in with their 2012 “Bevy of Bumbling Candidates,” because of your inability to address the Cherokee heritage debacle in any comprehensible way.
So now we have the Akin thing. To recap, Congressman Paul Akin, running for the Missouri Senate seat currently held by Democrat Claire McCaskill, made some outrageous remarks about rape. Republican Senator Scott Brown, whose seat you claim to want, responded swiftly and strongly. Brown was, in fact, the first of many Republicans to call on Akin to leave the race.
“As a husband and father of two young women, I found Todd Akin’s comments about women and rape outrageous, inappropriate and wrong,” Brown said in a Monday morning statement. “There is no place in our public discourse for this type of offensive thinking. Not only should he apologize, but I believe Rep. Akin’s statement was so far out of bounds that he should resign the nomination for US Senate in Missouri.”
Amen, said I, and thought of Mike Dukakis. You, on the other hand, said this (later that day): “I understand that Scott Brown and other Republicans want to pretend Todd Akin is an isolated individual, but he is clearly in line with the Republican agenda. The agenda of the Republican Party is to limit access to health care services. It’s to deny women equal pay for equal work. It’s to cut funding for Planned Parenthood. And it’s to select as a vice presidential nominee someone who co-sponsored legislation with Rep Akin to redefine ‘rape.'”
NO, Ms. Warren. NO! You should have applauded Scott Brown for his honesty, praised him for his passion, and then called him out as a hypocrite for accepting money from Clayton Williams, another Republican with no understanding of rape, who famously said: “As long as it’s inevitable, you might as well lie back and enjoy it;” and for giving thousands of dollars to the campaigns of those who cosponsored the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act,” “the one that says there’s only really one kind of rape, “forcible” rape, and you can’t get an abortion unless you can prove that you were the victim of rape-rape, not one of those other kinds of rape that you might have really enjoyed. With the added bonus that the IRS would actually have to audit your abortion to determine whether your abortion was because of rape or incest.” (Thanks to the Daily Kos for that info.)
As Scott Brown said, you are running against Scott Brown. There is plenty of evidence that Scott Brown is not as moderate a Republican as he would like folks to think. You have missed an opportunity to share that with the voters of Massachusetts.