Politico's Thrush invents Pelosi controversy

Glenn Thrush gets awfully creative in promoting the Right's attacks on Nancy Pelosi over her support for public funding for contraceptives.

Thrush writes:

It may seem like a nothing, but Nancy Pelosi is facing one of her biggest political threats of the 111th thus far over this birth-control-in-the-stimulus thing.

Wow, really? “One of her biggest political threats of the 111th” Congress? Sounds scary. Until you remember that the 111th Congress is about three weeks old. Then it begins to look like Thrush is breathlessly hyping “a nothing” into “a something.”

Thrush continues:

Drudge, along with CNN and others, are trumpeting a House GOP talking point -- ridiculing Pelosi's support of a Medicaid waiver in the stimulus package to reimburse states for contraceptives. And they they think they have a winner, a classic gays-in-the-military, Honeymoon-killing wedge issue.

Nonsense. Thrush doesn't know what House Republicans and Matt Drudge “think.” They might think, as Thrush says, that in 2009, support for contraceptives is as controversial as gays-in-the-military was in 1993. Or maybe they just think they can convince reporters like Glenn Thrush that it is. If the former, they are almost certainly wrong. If the latter, it probably turned out to be easier than they ever could have hoped.

Then Thrush explains:

Third -- and most dangerous to Pelosi personally -- it undercuts her carefully crafted image as a measured centrist, playing into the right wing caricature of Pelosi as a Bay Area liberal who will abuse her power to push her far left agenda.

Thrush provides no polling to back up his suggestion that support for public funding for contraceptives would “undercut” Pelosi's “image as a measured centrist” or that it constitutes a “far left agenda.” To the contrary, The National Family Planning & Reproductive Health Association says such policies are extremely popular. For example, “Eighty-six percent of voters and 85 percent of Catholic voters want the government to fund programs that provide contraception to women without health insurance.” (That poll -- conducted by a polling firm headed by Republican Linda DiVall -- is from 2005. It seems unlikely that public support for public funding of contraceptives has dropped from 86 percent to “far-left” status in less than four years, but if Thrush wants more recent numbers, he can do his own research.)

Finally, Thrush seems to invent out of whole cloth the idea that Pelosi's support for public policy that House Republicans disagree with constitutes an “abuse of power.”

UPDATE: Thrush has updated his post, acknowledging the high public support for contraception funding.