WASHINGTON – An abortion rights group is withdrawing a heavily criticized television ad that linked John Roberts to violent anti-abortion activists, saying its attempt to illuminate the Supreme Court nominee’s record has been “misconstrued.”
After protests by conservatives, NARAL Pro-Choice America said Thursday night it would pull the ad that began running this week.
“We regret that many people have misconstrued our recent advertisement about Mr. Roberts’ record,” NARAL President Nancy Keenan said.
“Unfortunately, the debate over that advertisement has become a distraction from the serious discussion we hoped to have with the American public,” she said in a letter Thursday to Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., who earlier in the day had urged the group to withdraw the ad.
Specter, himself an abortion-rights supporter as well as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee that will question Roberts next month, said the ad was “blatantly untrue and unfair.”
The NARAL ad criticized Roberts and linked him with violent anti-abortion protesters because of the anti-abortion briefs he worked on as a government lawyer in 1991.
Right. NARAL is pulling the ad because we’re all too stupid to understand what they meant. It didn’t have anything to do, of course, with the wildly misleading nature of the ad itself.
I posted previously about this ad here. That post also received some comments from Jeff Lyons, the husband of Emily Lyons who appears in the commercial itself.
Whoever’s in charge of termplates, could they please add the byline code for guest posters to the permalink pages?
They may have decided that that amount of attention that they got is worth the amount they have spent so far and that they don’t need to spend any more money.
Sometimes an ad turns into a catastrophic failure and sabotages the organization and its message. We have just witnessed such an event on grand scale. NARAL has been discredited and it will take time for them to recover. Their overreaching has insulated Roberts from their barbs and has ensured that NARAL cannot mount another successful attack on him. It’s just a shame that such tactics are permitted in the first place since it was such a fraud. Fortunately, the inappropriate marketing of ideas has been exposed and a bankruptcy followed. Now, NARAL won’t even draw interest.
Jon Stewart did a nice bit on this Thursday.
http://www.comedycentral.com/shows/the_daily_show/videos/headlines/index.jhtml?playVideo=17095
Did they attribute that quote to the right person? It sounds like something “The Turban” Durbin would say…