Cashill: Sebelius Must Share Blame for Tiller Murder
Sebelius Must Share Blame for Tiller Murder
by Jack Cashill
On Sunday morning, regrettably, a kind of crude frontier justice caught up with late abortionist George Tiller. He was shot and killed in the foyer of his Wichita church.
For the left, Scott Roeder, the accused killer, had alchemized the unholy dross of a corrupt late term abortionist into martyr’s gold.
In the entirely apt words of Dan McLaughlin, “Even before anything was known about Roeder, the left side of the blogosphere reacted to Dr. Tiller’s murder as if it was Christmas morning and they just got a pony.”
If so, then Santa Claus was none other than Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius.
For the six years that she governed the state of Kansas, she enabled Wichita abortionist Dr. George Tiller to flout the state’s tough abortion laws and get away with it.
Tiller was no ordinary abortionist. He specialized in late term abortions and performed them for any reason whatsoever.
In the clip that follows you will hear Tiller telling a 1995 National Abortion Federation gathering that his clinic had performed 10,000 late term abortions in the last five years, only 800 of which involved fetal anomalies.
Listen to 1995 Tiller audio clip. (mp3, length: 37 seconds)
As to the anomalies in question, those included cleft pallet, Down’s syndrome and healthy twins, the twins because of their presumed economic impact.
In 1997, Kansas toughened its laws to close the loopholes that Tiller had forced open. The new law stated that a late-term abortion could be performed only if two doctors found that the mother would otherwise suffer death or “a severe and irreversible impairment to a major bodily function.”
The new law required the abortionist to report to the Kansas Department of Health and Environment the “reason and basis” for the late-term abortion. The annual summaries can be accessed here: http://www.kdheks.gov/hci/absumm.html
As the reports show, in ten years not one single late term abortion has been performed to save the life of the mother. This life-saving hokum was pure liberal media myth.
The reports also show that of the 192 late term abortions on healthy babies performed in 2008-98 percent on women from out of state–none were performed for a legitimate “medical emergency.”
Every single late-term abortion involved a temporary mental health diagnosis, made, of course, by Tiller, who is no one’s idea of a mental health expert.
Dr. Paul McHugh is one such expert. He served as Chair of the School of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University for 25 years. After reviewing Tiller’s files, he concluded that none of them showed a sufficient medical or psychological concern to justify an abortion under Kansas law.
Dr. McHugh taped a video discussing the files that can be accessed on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mviFMpy_sBU.
McHugh reveals that Tiller would perform a late-term abortion for reasons such as a mother not wanting to hire a babysitter when she attended rock concerts, a mother not wanting to miss the prom, and other “severe and irreversible impairments.”
(Above video: Dr. Paul McHugh)To keep his practice alive, Tiller had learned to game the system. His money worked well enough until Republican Phill Kline was elected Kansas Attorney General in 2002 and attempted to enforce the state’s abortion law.
Tiller needed help. He would find it not in the courtroom but in the proverbial back room where then Kansas governor Kathleen Sebelius engineered the deal that kept Tiller in business.
Sebelius persuaded Paul Morrison, the popular Republican district attorney of the state’s most affluent county, to switch parties and run against Kline.
Kline had proved deadly serious in bringing Tiller to justice, a move that had the potential to throw a major wrench in the Democratic fund raising apparatus.
With Tiller’s massive financial support behind him-some $1.2 million indirect dollars–Morrison ousted Kline. Before leaving office, however, Kline had filed 30 counts against Tiller for performing illegal late-term abortions.
In other words, Tiller stood accused of taking the life of fifteen fully viable unborn babies whose mothers were equally healthy in utter disregard of Kansas law.
While Morrison was reviewing these charges, Sebelius honored Tiller and his staff at an elegant but extremely discreet soiree at Cedar Crest, the governor’s Mansion.
Among the more revealing of the photos taken at the event is one of Sebelius holding a T-Shirt presented to her by Tiller, which reads, “Trifecta 2006: Sebelius, Parkinson, Morrison.”
In the photo, Sebelius points at Tiller as if to acknowledge his contribution to the Democratic sweep.
To no one’s great surprise, Morrison dropped the felony charges Kline had brought against Tiller. As Morrison interpreted the law, if a doctor said an abortion was necessary to protect the life and health of the mother, that was good enough for the new AG.
Given the exposure, Morrison had to charge Tiller with something. He resorted to the admittedly “technical” charge that Tiller used a second confirming doctor who was not financially independent as the law required.
After reluctantly axing Morrison for his role in an impressively seamy sex scandal, Sebelius appointed obscure Democrat, Stephen Six the new attorney general.
Six picked up where Morrison left off. He announced he would not conduct any further investigation of Tiller as such was “an invasion of privacy.” Instead, he continued with the watered down case against Tiller that he had inherited from Morrison.
Six apparently was none too keen on conviction. The state put only one witness on the stand, Kristin Neuhaus, a marginal doctor who had no other practice but to rubber stamp Tiller’s abortions.
Although allegedly friendly, Neuhaus proved hostile and answered the state’s questions only grudgingly. The state offered no other witness and no physical records to prove a financial affiliation.
For those who care, here is what really happened at Tiller’s clinic. Neuhaus would sign a form letter claiming the mother would “suffer severe impairment of a major bodily function”-as required by law–if a late term abortion were not performed.
Neuhaus offered no diagnosis. Often she did not even see the patient. All patients were served up by Tiller, and all of Neuhaus’s income came from Tiller except for the limited income she has received as a laser hair technician.
For years, Tiller had used the revenue from these abortions-he boasted of having aborted 60,000 plus “fetuses over 24 weeks”-to buy off the state’s “moderate” establishment, including the sitting governor.
The jurors, to be sure, did not learn any of this. A Tiller conviction would not have looked good on the record of our new Secretary of Health and Human Services.
As John F. Kennedy once said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
In the Tiller case, Sebelius was chief among the “those.”
Related Posts:
- Kansas Liberty: Newspaper highlights the difference a late-term abortion clinic makes
- Tim Huelskamp on Sebelius-abortion veto
- AP on Tiller
- Townhall: Tiller’s Bloody Kansas Redux
- Media covers Sebelius
June 5th, 2009 at 11:44 am
“crude frontier justice”?
Are you out of your law-abiding mind?
This was murder, Cashill. Ugly, cold-blooded, unreasonable, illogical murder.
And in a church, to boot.
and you want to justify it and call it “justice”?
Man, you’re nearly as sick as the perpetrator.
June 5th, 2009 at 4:24 pm
Five Things We Learned From the Killing of George Tiller
by KAREN MURPHY, Contributing Writer
President Obama summed up our reaction to the news that Dr. George Tiller had been shot and killed during worship service at his Wichita KS church: “I am shocked and outraged by the murder of Dr. George Tiller as he attended church services this morning. However profound our differences as Americans over difficult issues such as abortion, they cannot be resolved by heinous acts of violence”
So what have we learned from the death of George Tiller?
1. Killing doesn’t solve anything. I can’t help the sarcasm that creeps in when I ask the obvious question: what does “pro-life” mean, anyway? Dr. Tiller had already been the target of a previous shooting in 1993 when he was shot in both arms by Shelley Shannon, who testified at her trial that there was nothing immoral about trying to kill Tiller. Hello? Nothing immoral? Violence has been a part of the anti-abortion movement since the beginning, with incidents ranging from the outright violence of killing abortion providers and bombing clinics to the covert violence of harassing women attempting to enter clinics to receive reproductive services. The violence hasn’t done anything except to fuel more violence, and this “ends justify the means” thinking is just plain scary and anything but supportive of the sanctity of life.
2. Bill O’Reilly is a social danger. Although the former legal director to the ACLU has agreed with O’Reilly’s denial that his discussion of Tiller on 28 episodes of “The O’Reilly Factor” and his references to Tiller as “Tiller the Baby Killer” and warning of an upcoming “judgment day” was incitement to violence, we have to disagree. If this wasn’t incitement, or at least fanning of flames already present, then what was it?
3. We need to rethink late-term abortions. You can play all the grisly anti-abortion propaganda YouTube videos you want, but you can’t convince me that we should force a 10-year old victim of rape or incest to bear the child that was the tangible result of that horror. Or that women carrying dead fetuses should wait until labor can be induced so they can labor to produce a dead dream. Or that women who receive the appalling news that their much-wanted child won’t survive birth have to go through with a sham pregnancy. These women need support, not condemnation.
4. We may never agree, as a nation, about abortion. Clearly, the ideologies of the pro-choice and the anti-abortion movements are just too far apart right now, everything I said in #3 above notwithstanding. What seems clear to me seems very wrong to a good many other people, and I don’t expect to convince anyone otherwise. We may just have to agree to disagree.
5. Instead let’s focus on what’s important: reducing unwanted pregnancies (HINT: abstinence-only doesn’t work) in a way that’s effective and empowering: honest sex education for young people, safe and available contraception, and the provision of health care and other economic supports for poor women who want to have a child.
June 5th, 2009 at 6:01 pm
When reading Cashill, I find it impossible not to think about Lewis Carroll and Alice in Wonderland. Like the Red Queen, Jack has no problem, it appears, believing “six impossible things before breakfast.”
He’s a mind reader as well, perhaps with the Psychic Friends Hotline on speed dial, so able is he to tell us what someone else is thinking, or what motivates them. With his imaginary “facts” in hand, he leaps from one specious judgment to another, once again emulating his role model.
“No, no!” said the Queen. “Sentence first - verdict afterwards.”
Like Cashill, Paul McHugh is similarly not bound in his purported “research” by rules of evidence or scientific inquiry. In fact, he it notorious for concealing the extent of pedophelia in his practice. His public and prohibited disclosure of information in the Tiller case led the Attorney General to caution him that he risked suit and worse, should he continue with that patent breach of ethics.
Kline, Cashill’s hero, was equally brazenly incompetent and flagrantly unethical. He was beaten by 20 points in his attempt at reelection. After being appointed to Paul Morrison’s vacated D.A.’s post by a narrow majority of Neaderthals on the Johnson County Republican committee, voters found his carpetbagging and mendacious ways were beyond even the pale in an extremely conservative community. Kline wound up getting hammered when he ran against an actual Republican in a primary election. Thankfully for Kline, he got a gilded parachute: A professorship at Liberty University, founded by religious hustler and talk show host Jerry Falwell, with that 4th rate school bailed out of bankruptcy by convicted felon and cult founder Sun Myung Moon.
My personal experience with Cashill has been rather nauseating. At the Kansas premiere of “Flock of Dodos,” as a panelist Cashill declared that all scientific advances in the last millenium, I believe, were the product “of Western European Christians.” I was outraged, not realizing that Cashill was simply an imbecile, so could perhaps be forgiven for his idiocy, though not his hubris. I pointed out to him that Christians were burning the world’s foremost scientists at the stake. He countered that Galileo wasn’t incinerated at the Church’s behest. I noted that Galileo in fact was convicted of heresy by a papal court and was only spared burning at the stake by virtue of recanting his legitimate findings. He was held in house arrest for the last 12 years of his life. Afterward I sent Cashill a long list of Jews who had accumulated an extraordinary amount of Nobel Prizes in science, far disproportionate to their numbers, compared to Christians. I included members of many other ethnicities as well, Chinese, Japanese, Pakistani, etc., if memory serves. Cashill promised me a response, but it’s been years and I’m tired of waiting.
June 6th, 2009 at 2:25 pm
My personal experience with Mr. Cashill was when he spoke to my Rotary Club and declared for all to hear that we humanists were “out to get all the Christians” or some such paraphrased drivel.
It was stunning.
Because Rotary is, as most anyone and everyone knows, a non-partisan organization, I nearly walked out.
Thanks for posting, Frank.
June 6th, 2009 at 2:29 pm
Oh, and as for abortions, we could virtually do away with them, given advances in technology and RU486–the “morning after” birth control pill, for lack of a better description. RU486 alone would kill the 2 cell organism (surely you can’t call that a “baby”) before a pregnancy would occur.
But, naturally, the right-wing “pro-life” (unless they want someone killed) bunch want nothing of that.
It would take away their “single-issue problem”, for which they and Mr. Roeder live.
The last thing rabid pro-lifers want is to have their one issue-abortion-taken away.
Then what would they have to be angry about?