nadine dorries: am I a hypocrite? well, I'm breathing..

New game, everyone. It's everyone's favourite patron saint of political smears, Nadine Dorries, whose understanding of voting patterns can be added to the extensive list marked "blind ignorance." Seeing as Unity has already dealt with the issue of the supposed Catholic vote during the Crewe by-election, it falls to me to deal with the scraps:

And just before anyone takes a sharp intake of breath and thinks that maybe I am making abortion a political issue – may I just remind people that it was Harriett Harman and Gordon Brown who did that by whipping the vote.

First, repeatedly claiming that the abortion vote was whipped by a Harman-Brownite conspiracy doesn't make it true. It makes you look like an idiot, or like someone lurking in the comment section claiming to be a Labour back-bencher.

Secondly, if we're going to play the game of "who politicised abortion first," then I'd direct your attention back to March (i.e several months before the vote) when Dorries decided that abortion should be made an election issue.

Linking approvingly to the Alive and Kicking Campaign to target MPs over the issue of abortion at the next election, Dorries named four specific women in four separate entries on her "blog" during March and April, each titled "Beyond the Limit." Those four were Margaret Moran, Jacqui Smith, Barbara Follet and Laura Moffatt.

Why pick these four? They're all Labour MPs in marginal seats, who all received money during the candidate selection process from Emily's List - allowing Dorries to simultaneously repeat her most embarassingly transparent smear and threaten them with the possibility of electoral defeat if they didn't vote to support her amendment.

The "Gordon and Harriet did it first, nah nah nah" argument doesn't really hold much water when a) they didn't, and b) you've spent several months doing the exact thing that you now think is utterly reprehensible.