Why Obama’s Would Be VP Won’t Be
© Jack Cashill
June 5, 2008
Published in WND.com
Until recently, for all Kansans knew, Kathleen Sebelius was the best thing to happen to the state since ethanol.
Their “moderate” Democrat governor—there are no liberals in Kansas—had taken major national wall space as a bonafide political pin-up.
VogueMagazine did a feature on the handsome, 60 year-old in designer gowns. Time Magazine named Sebelius one of America’s five best governors, and the Democrats tapped her to give the party’s response to the president’s state of the union speech.
More impressively, Barback Obama had reportedly put Sebelius at the very top of his short list for his vice-presidential running mate, a strategic crumb for both soft-core Catholics and surly feminists.
And then—da noive!--Archbishop Joseph F. Naumann of the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas went and spoiled it all.
In May, Naumann publicly chastised the conspicuously Catholic governor for helping make Kansas “infamous for being the late-term abortion center for the Midwest.”
As one insider told me,“It’s cheaper to buy Kansas than California.” Sebelius is just one of many Kansas politicians to have taken money directly from Tiller and his various PACs.
Although this revelation came as news to most Kansans, Archbishop Naumann actually understated the problem. Incredible as it may seem, Kansas has emerged as the late-term abortion capital of the world.
In the past two years alone, women have come from 48 states and sundry points beyond to have late-term abortions in Kansas.
The state’s most methodical executioner of this dubious art, Dr, George Tiller of Wichita, has accurately boasted on his website of having “more experience in late abortion services with fetuses over 24 weeks than anywhere else in the Western Hemisphere.”
Planned Parenthood’s clinic in Johnson County, a Kansas City suburb, cannot match Tiller’s numbers, but that it contributes to the totals at all has come as a surprise to its supporters.
Local CEO Peter Brownlie has frequently claimed that Planned Parenthood did not perform any abortions past the 22 nd week of pregnancy, the legal definition of “late-term,” but recent revelations prove otherwise.
Why Kansas? As one insider told me, “It’s cheaper to buy Kansas than California.” Sebelius is just one of many Kansas politicians to have taken money directly from Tiller and his various PACs.
In 2002, Sebelius’s run for governor called for more discretion. She was promoting herself, after all, as a faithful Catholic. “I am not pro-abortion,” she swore in a mailer. “I will not, and never have, promoted abortion.”
This likely accounts for the $100,000 mid-campaign donation by Tiller’s clinic not to Sebelius directly, but to the Democratic Governor’s Association, his first and only gift to that association.
That same year, however, intrepid pro-life Republican Phill Kline was elected Kansas Attorney General, and he promptly began to investigate the abortion clinics’ inexplicable prosperity.
What Kline found is that both Tiller and Planned Parenthood simply ignored the state’s rigorous abortion laws. They were both aborting the viable babies of perfectly healthy mothers with little or no documentation as to why.
For more than two years Tiller and Planned Parenthood kept Kline’s investigation at bay with the help of aggressive lawyers and a Sebelius-friendly judiciary. When Kline kept plugging, the abortion industry decided to get political.
In October 2005, after some serious backstage scheming by Sebelius, popular Johnson County District Attorney Paul Morrison, a moderate Republican, announced that he would switch parties to run against Kline in November 2006.
To help Morrison unseat Kline, Tiller spent $1.2 million through his various PACs and cut-outs. The war on Kline also enjoyed the full-throated support of the media, most notably The Kansas City Star, which won the 2006 “Maggie Award,” Planned Parenthood’s top national honor for editorial writing.
Morrison won the 2006 election handily. A month later, however, the largely conservative Republican precinct captains of Johnson County shocked the abortion cabal by choosing the now widely scorned Kline to fill the remaining two years of Morrison’s term as district attorney.
Despite the crushing indictment of the media, Kline refused to roll over. Just before he left office as attorney general, he had managed to secure redacted patient files from both Tiller and Planned Parenthood.
Kline promptly filed 30 counts against Dr. George Tiller’s Wichita clinic for performing illegal late-term abortions. Morrison promised to continue to investigate Tiller’s practice “inside out, backwards and forwards, and under a neutron microscope,” but as was well understood, he had been elected to do otherwise.
In April 2007, while Tiller was still under investigation, Sebelius honored the good doctor and his staff at an elegant but extremely discreet soiree at Cedar Crest, the governor’s Mansion. (The photos are priceless.)
Back in Johnson County meanwhile, new District Attorney Kline continued his investigation of Planned Parenthood’s abortion clinic, Comprehensive Health. What he found was disturbing.
"It was visually obvious that some documents had been manufactured," Kline would later relate to the Supreme Court. Supervising Judge Richard Anderson would tell the same court, “Somebody may have committed a felony in an attempt to cover up a misdemeanor.”
None of this seemed to faze Governor Sebelius. In May 2007, a month after her party for Tiller, she attended a gala Planned Parenthood fundraiser timed to celebrate her birthday.
At evening’s end, according to the Planned Parenthood newsletter, “ Hundreds of PPKM supporters were dancing in a conga line around the concert hall.” Leading the “dancing pack” was Peter Brownlie, the local CEO whose abortion clinic was at the center of this deadly serious criminal investigation.
Later that same year, Sebelius suffered a more immediate embarrassment. After slapping Tiller’s wrist and clearing Planned Parenthood of all charges, her hand-picked attorney general got caught carrying on a two-year affair with a subordinate.
Worse, the woman claimed that Morrison had used the affair to coerce her into securing sensitive information about Kline’s investigation into Planned Parenthood.
Troubled by their state’s descent into abortion anarchy, the Republican-dominated Kansas House and Senate passed the Comprehensive Abortion Reform (CARA) in spring 2008.
Ironically but predictably, just weeks after proclaiming April “Child Abuse Prevention Month,” Governor Sebelius vetoed the CARA bill.
Her defense of the CARA veto—that it “endangers the lives of women”-- was one lie too many for Archbishop Naumann.
As Kline’s investigation had made clear, after ten years of reporting and 5,000 late-term abortions, not one doctor in Kansas had ever cited “protecting the life of the mother” as the reason for the abortion.
To win in November, the radically pro-abortion Obama needs a good chunk of the Catholic vote. To secure it, he needs someone skilled at feigning Catholicism, and that, my friends, is no longer Kathleen Sebelius.
For a comprehensive report on this subject, prepared in cooperation with Kansans for Life, please visit Kansans for Life.
Jack Cashill has also prepared a relevant video, Kline v. Kansas.
