Under withering fire from some ordinarily friendly places, NARAL has decided to pull its ad accusing John Roberts of supporting abortion clinic bombers, though a "NARAL spokesman said it will remain on the air for another day or more until the substitute ad is produced and made available."

While many leading Democrats (Edward Kennedy, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi, for example), have distanced themselves from the ad without repudiating its contents,
former Clinton Administration official Lanny Davis has been actively denouncing it.

On the other hand, Barbara Boxer has
embraced the charges, repeating virtually word for word the line about siding with "the nation’s most violent anti-choice extremists." Of course, the speech reveals more about her than about Roberts. While these events were surely awful and demanded an effective law enforcement response, it doesn’t mean, as Boxer (and others) seem to think, that we should simply grab any legal tool at hand, regardless of its appropriateness. Nor does it mean that we should always involve the federal government. On these issues, compared with Boxer, Roberts looks great, which comes perilously close, of course, to damning him with faint praise.

One last point about Boxer’s speech. In this passage, she reveals that she is either ignorant or mendacious:

We can never forget the days before Roe…the days of back alley dangerous illegal abortions when thousands of women died every year. We cannot go back to those dark days.

As everyone ought to know, the overruling of Roe at most simply leaves the regulation of abortion up to the states. If, as she contends, 65% of the American people support abortion rights, what does she have to worry about? Is she not confident about that number? Does she fear that that number includes many who support limited access to abortion (restricted, perhaps, to cases of rape, incest, and threats to the mother’s health)? Hmmm.