Paul Cooper penned a piece pummeling Dennis Kucinich for selling out his progressive “principles” for rides on Air Force One with the president.
But Kucinich has sold out his “principles” before. Like many Democrats in the post-Roe era, Kucinich — like Dick Gephardt, Jesse Jackson, and Al Gore — reversed his pro-life position as soon as the heat got turned up by interest groups.
Check out this nonsensical reply in 2003 he gave to a debate moderator who wanted to know why he’d abandoned his pro-life position:
I’ve always worked to make abortions less necessary, through sex education and birth control. But the direction that Congress has taken, increasingly, is to make it impossible for women to be able to have an abortion if they need to protect their health. So when I saw the direction taken, it finally came to the point where I understood that women will not be truly free unless they have the right to choose.
Huh? The entire point of the pro-life position, of course, is that women should not be free to “choose” to abort a living being at their convenience. The real turnaround was that Kucinich couldn’t become the progressive icon he longed to be unless he convinced himself that the ability to receive abortions on-demand is an inalienable right.
Much like the myth on the right of Ron Paul’s unwavering purity, Dennis Kucinich has been falsely lionized as a progressives’ Man of Principle. But given his past willingness to sell out, his health care decision should come as no surprise.
