Another Susan Smith Moment for Conservatives
It was just nine months ago that McCain campaign volunteer Ashley Todd manufactured a hoax in which a African-American attacker supposedly carved the letter "B" in her face. Now the conservative faithful have again been duped by one of their own. For the last two months, 26-year old blogger Beccah Beushausen won over anti-abortion activists nationwide with her heartbreaking accounts of her unbelievably difficult pregnancy. Unbelievable, it turns out, because it simply never happened.
Just days after the assassination of family planning physician Dr. George Tiller, one of the few remaining providers of late term abortions in the United States, Beushausen's readers were forced to come to terms with the fraud she had perpetrated upon them. As the Chicago Tribune reported, her tall tale about "giving birth to a child diagnosed as terminally ill in the womb" came crashing down for the woman who called herself "April's Mom" or simply "B":
By Sunday night, when "April's Mom" claimed to have given birth to her "miracle baby" -- blogging that April Rose had survived a home birth only to die hours later -- her Web site had nearly a million hits.
There was only one problem with the unfolding tragedy: None of it was true.
Not the pregnancy, and not the photos posted on the blog of the supposed mother and Baby April Rose, swaddled in white blankets. The baby was actually a lifelike doll, which immediately raised the suspicion of loyal blog-followers.
If "B" had emerged as an icon to those who reject either catastrophic fetal conditions or who like John McCain scoff at the "health of the mother" as the basis for terminating a pregnancy, those days are over. But like Ashley Todd and Susan Smith before her, Beushausen will join the ranks of right-wing story tellers conservatives briefly used to shine a spotlight on the supposed ills of liberal American society.
Just ask Newt Gingrich.
Fourteen years before Ashley Todd, it was Susan Smith who drew Americans' initial sympathy - and subsequent scorn - for her invention of a black bogeyman to conceal her heinous crime.
On October 24th, 1994, as the New York Times recalled, Smith killed her young sons, killings for which she was eventually sentenced to life in prison:
That night, investigators say, Mrs. Smith pulled her car to the edge of a deep lake, stepped out, put the gearshift in drive and let it roll down the boat ramp into the black water. Her two little boys, buckled snugly in their safety seats, died under the lake...
..."I believed her, right up to the end," said Juliaette Kerhulas, of Mrs. Smith's story that a young black man had ordered her out of her burgundy 1990 Mazda on the night of Oct. 25, then driven away with 3-year-old Michael and 14-month-old Alexander in the back seat.
Ms. Kerhulas wasn't the only one who believed in her. None other than future House Speaker Newt Gingrich rushed to the defense of Smith, whose step-father ironically happened to be a prominent Republican fundraiser and member of the Christian coalition. Even after her confession, Gingrich insisted the Smith murders showed the decay of American society under Democratic Party rule:
Enter Newt Gingrich, who rushed into action on election eve with another reliable generic culprit: society. He said the double murder "vividly reminds every American how sick the society is getting and how much we need to change things," expediently adding that "the only way you get change is to vote Republican."
As Frank Rich recounted in August 1995:
Asked later by Tom Brokaw to elaborate, the Speaker-to-be cited "a direct nexus between the general acceptance of violence" and "the pattern that the counterculture and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society began in the late 60's."
(Mercifully for him, Gingrich has been too busy bemoaning the "paganism" of America society to comment on the Bonnie Sweeten case two weeks ago. Sweeten is the Pennsylvania mother who with her 9-year old daughter recently turned up in Disney World after having called 911 to tell police they had been abducted by "two black men.")
None of which is to suggest that this species of politically-tinged fraud is solely the province of the right. The 1987 Tawana Brawley affair is a case in point. The 15-year old African-American girl falsely accused former Dutchess County, New York assistant district attorney Steven Pagones and other white assailants of a rape and abduction which never occurred. As it turned out, her advisers led by the Reverend Al Sharpton, were ultimately forced to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for defaming Pagones.
Despite this and other despicable episodes, Al Sharpton is sadly still taken seriously as a political player in the United States. Of course, so is Newt Gingrich, a man mentioned as a contender for the Republican presidential nomination in three years.
Which can only mean it's time for Newt to weigh in on the subject of the mythical mom, Beccah Beushausen.
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Unfortunate and pitiable women, all.
And those who use their troubled antics to climb the big propaganda stairs to the stars--they're something else entirely.
Anyone have a teeny bit of suspicion watching a young woman on O'Reilly who claimed she had an end of term abortion in Dr. Tiller's clinic at the age of fourteen? Something about no one ever telling her what "was going to happen to her," being in a room with 15/20 (I forgot) other women, and grisly details that echoed the anti abortion websites and handouts, seemed a little too facile. Then there was her demeanor--not appropriate to a woman who at the age of fourteen was subjected to trauma, accompanied, allegedly by her mother. She sported a fair amount of 'tude; her tone was more akin to her crusading, loose with the truth host.
Sorry to be vague about the details --who, what, when, where and why. I'm clear on the claim and my suspicion. The segment was on O'Reilly, within the last ten days. If you've got time for investigative reporting, this is worth a quick look. See what you think. The segment only lasted 5-6 minutes.
Posted by lapeche on June 13, 2009 8:22 PMNewt Gingrich is the Man of La Mancha.
Posted by Barry Schwartz on June 13, 2009 10:04 PM