I've recently come across this fact because of an online discussion going on elsewhere. First the history.
When previously running for President, John McCain twice stated on the record that abortion law would not be changed in his stewardship because banning all abortions would force some women into "illegal and dangerous operations".
That fact still remains online, and can be seen here.
The NRLC (National Right to Life Committee, a group devoted to taking away a woman's right to decide for herself) were livid. Their press release in response to McCain's remarks said "A candidate who argues that legal abortion is 'necessary' is not a pro-life candidate".
A press release that no longer appears on the NRLC website. From what I have seen, this one page has been quietly removed within the last month.
Why their attempt to re-write their own history has already failed, below the fold.
As I say, I first discovered this today. In replying to a fellow poster regarding Bob Casey's future appearance in Denver, the subject turned to one of abortion. And I was able to use a letter I had written to the Scranton-based Times-Tribune newspaper (Bob Casey and his family still live in the Hill section of the city), stating how McCain was for the right to choose before he was against it. This letter was written on July 7 of this year and was published on July 12 under the title "Imperfect Fit"...
Editor: I have seen a number of letters regarding the issue of abortion in the coming election. Some have said they would never vote for someone who ever held a pro-choice opinion.
Never one to vote on a single issue when there are so many to choose from (a war started under false pretenses, the bad handling of the economy, a health care system that ensures millions live and die in poor health), I decided to delve into this issue. I discovered that neither of the candidates can claim to be a true ally to the pro-life voter.
When previously running for president, John McCain twice stated that abortion law would not be changed in his stewardship because banning all abortions would force some women into "illegal and dangerous operations." This prompted the NRLC to issue a statement saying, "In contending that legal abortion is ‘necessary’ and that Roe v. Wade should not be overturned because it would ‘force’ women to undergo dangerous illegal abortions, McCain parroted arguments of the pro-abortion movement."
They added, "A candidate who argues that legal abortion is ‘necessary’ is not a pro-life candidate." It said McCain later used muddled "clarifications."
Nobody truly knows what another person is thinking. So given a choice of a candidate that is saying what he truly believes, and one that says things because he’s expected to say them, give me the truly honest person any day.
America can do better.
At the bottom of the email to the editor, I had included two links to support the facts. Here's what the bottom of the email said...
Sources:
McCain softened his stance on abortion as seen in www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/campaigns/wh2000/stories/mccain082499.htm . Senator McCain used the words "illegal and dangerous operations" both for the San Francisco Chronicle and CNN.
The NRLA press release that states McCain is not a pro-life candidate for holding these views is still on their website, at www.nrlc.org/news/1999/NRL999/mccain.html .
As a side note: I understand this is a largely Catholic, largely elderly population in Scranton. So I understand this letter, if published, would result in a monumental effort (by those that have voiced their assertions that they can see if a person's soul is black or white) to write in more. But I cannot allow people to cast aspersions without letting people know more of the facts as they directly relate to this election, even if it does result in you receiving thousands of letters (from one or two people) on this issue.
That first link to the Washington Post still works. The second one, more importantly, does not. In the space of a month, the NRLC has cleared this press release from their own records.
I had to be sure that it wasn't just an innocent case of lost data. The article's parent folder, http://www.nrlc.org/... still works. And sub-pages to it (this one, for example) still exist too. In fact, if you look at their news letter at http://www.nrlc.org/... and scroll down, the link to the McCain story is still there. On the left-hand side.
But the link does not work any more.
And the picture of McCain is gone too. It's just a broken link.
I tried every other link on that page. They all work fine. I then chose one of the other newsletter links and tried all those links too. They all work fine too. I invite anyone else to do the same, to confirm this is the case. All the other links work.
Except the link to their press release that damns John McCain.
So that's it. It's gone, into the void, never to be seen again...
...well, not exactly. You see, there's the Internet Archives Wayback Machine. It's an archive of 85 billion web pages. If someone changes content, or takes down a page, it's never gone forever if the Wayback Machine has a copy.
So I searched for an older version of the newsletter, and here's the picture they had used.
In fact, here's the newsletter as saved in the archives. And the link works from there to the saved version of their McCain press release.
What we have here is a Republican-friendly website that has tried to send history down the Memory Hole. As George Orwell wrote in "Nineteen Eighty Four":
As soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of The Times had been assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its stead. This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs -- to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance. Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct, nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.
It would seem the NRLC isn't clever enough to totally eradicate proof of their past views of Senator John Sidney McCain (although I applaud them for using such a transparent and literary-inspired method). But thanks to the Wayback Machine at archives.org, even a successful purge by the NRLC of their own history could not result in what Orwell wrote next:
In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place.
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The website recently received a lot of money to continue their good work:
Thanks to a generous grant from the Mellon Foundation, Internet Archive completed a 2 billion page web crawl in 2007. This is the largest web crawl attempted by Internet Archive. The project was designed to take a global snapshot of the Web.
It's work I applaud. And it's proof that the [f]right[ened] wing of American politics is trying to clean house. It's obvious that the Republican Party and their supporters would rather re-write history rather than accept their past mistakes or present hypocrisies. I, for one, refuse to let them.
Pass this information on: with the large Catholic voter base, it could be the issue to decide the race in Pennsylvania.