Salon Writer Bashes ‘Vampiric’ Conservatives ‘Exploiting’ Charlie Gard

July 25th, 2017 5:13 PM

Take it from a liberal media expert: pro-life conservatives are really “vampiric” “vultures” who “exploit” “dying babies” to create their own “spectacle.” That’s according to one Salon writer – who seems to be wearing her own pair of spectacles.

She needs a new prescription.

On Tuesday, Salon published a story with the headline arguing, “The sad story of Charlie Gard shows there’s no limit to right-wing political vampirism.” For the piece, politics writer Amanda Marcotte wasted no time getting straight to her point: conservatives are the real tragedy of the Charlie Gard case.

As an infant, British baby Charlie Gard was diagnosed with a rare genetic condition, mitochondrial DNA depletion syndrome, and could be removed from life support any day. Parents Chris Gard and Connie Yates challenged his hospital and the court system for months for permission to bring Charlie to the United States for experimental therapy. On Monday, they ended the legal fight to improve Charlie’s condition, because, as their lawyer put it, “time has run out.”

But conservatives were the culprits in the case, Marcotte urged.

“The story is sad enough by itself,” Marcotte complained, “but has been made exponentially worse by the right wing vultures in the United States who exploited this tragedy in order to push for legislation to strip health care away from millions of Americans — including disabled children.”

Ironically (dare we say, hypocritically), Marcotte herself appeared to exploit Charlie Gard as an avenue to bash conservatives along with the pro-life movement.

According to Marcotte, Charlie “became a propaganda object for opponents of universal health care” in America and thus revealed the “cynicism and sadism that infects American conservatism, even as they drape themselves in the ‘pro-life’ label.

But Marcotte didn’t name or link to a single pro-life conservative as proof. And, if she had done her research, she would have found that while pro-life leaders and politicians referenced healthcare, they placed parental consent and human dignity at the forefront of their arguments.

Arguments, by the way, that Marcotte never addressed.

Instead, Marcotte insisted that “Conservatives are struggling to square their claims to be ‘pro-life’ with the fact that they support Republican efforts to strip millions of people of their health care coverage.”

To use “Charlie’s case to imply that universal health care and government-run programs are bad for disabled children” was “poppycock,” she concluded.

That’s because Charlie “has been receiving professional, compassionate care” while the “hospital’s case for taking him off life support has been a merciful one” and his “doctors are responding to the facts” not the UK’s National Health Services. (Where are the parents in this again?)

Before Obamacare, she continued, “45,000 people a year died from lack of health insurance” (a number PolitiFact has taken issue with). “The situation was so bad that the ACA banned the practice of insurance companies dropping patients deemed too expensive to cover who, unlike Charlie, had a shot at being saved,” she added.

Never mind that Charlie’s parents raised more than $1.5 million to pay for his treatment themselves.

She ranted, “That we’re even having this conversation at all is bonkers.” (This conversation? Couldn’t agree more.) But for her part, Marcotte sniffed malicious intent.

[T]he only reason that conservatives are pushing the Charlie Gard cause is to inject some noise and distraction into the discourse,” she insisted. “It’s a bad faith attempt to make the conversation around the health care coverage law confusing and upsetting in hopes that people just give up in disgust, making it easier for the right to cram through a bill to end access for millions.”

Speaking of noise and distraction… Marcotte left her worst for last.

So not only have conservatives made a spectacle out of this family’s tragedy in order to score cheap and misleading political points,” she concluded, “but they have helped make the suffering worse for Charlie’s parents by feeding them false beliefs.”

Actually, Ms. Marcotte, conservatives supported the parents’ decision. It was never about the parents listening to conservatives. The parents had fought in courts for their little boy long before politicians and pro-life leaders significantly weighed in.

This family’s suffering was made worse and this baby’s tragedy exploited, all so that some right wing nuts could have a cheap ‘gotcha’ moment,” she concluded, “one that doesn’t even hold up under the slightest scrutiny. American conservatism is a vampiric ideology, and this case proves it.”

What a bloody argument.

But can Marcotte be taken seriously on life issues? Does she even want to be taken seriously? In years past, Marcotte has compared abortion to cavity removal while calling babies “time-sucking monsters.” She’s also called pregnancy a “broken leg” and abortion a “cast.” Never mind she found abortion a “perfect topic” for sit-coms.

Talk about exploiting dying babies.

One thing is for sure: the media – including Salon, the Daily Beast, Raw Story, Rolling Stone – don’t mind giving her voice a platform for all to see.