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If RNC Chairman Reince Priebus thinks nasty, petulant interviews like this one with MSNBC's Thomas Roberts are going to win his party some support back with women voters, I think he's sadly mistaken. Last week, Priebus appeared on Bloomberg TV's Al Hunt and claimed that the "war on women" was as fictional as the "war on caterpillars."

This Wednesday, Priebus was asked about those remarks and decided to double down:

On Wednesday, MSNBC host Thomas Roberts gave Priebus a chance to revise his remarks.

“I’m not going to walk back,” the RNC chairman insisted. “I’ll double down on it. This war on women is a fiction that the Democrats have created. And the real war on women is the war that this president has put forward on the American people by not following through on his promises, by having women disproportionately effected by the Obama economy.”

“How can you say that it’s a fiction, though, if you stand of the record of what the Republican Party has said and done?” Roberts wondered, noting that all of the remaining GOP presidential candidates had promised to eliminate funds for family planning and Republican-controlled state legislatures had pushed through 90 anti-abortion bills in 2011.

“Because it is a fiction, Thomas,” Priebus replied. “It’s a fiction because, number one, there is no war on women. … The fact of the matter is that the real war on women, the actual thing that I think most women in this country are most concerned about, which is a good job, a good family, being able to live the American dream, provide for your kids and your family, that war on women is being perpetrated by President Barack Obama.”

Thomas actually did a pretty good job of pushing back at Priebus' arguments and pointed out the record number of anti-abortion legislation passed by the Republicans and their attacks on Planned Parenthood.

“You can’t discount the fact that we almost took the government to the brink of closing Planned Parenthood,” Thomas pressed.

“The world will continue,” the RNC chairman quipped. “I don’t buy your argument. I happen to believe that you can be pro-women and pro-life. You don’t. That’s the problem, Thomas.”

Sadly, Thomas did not point out to Priebus that their forced birth agenda is not necessarily "pro-life" when it means forcing a woman to choose between her life and the life of a fetus that's not viable when there's a problem pregnancy with some of these extreme laws they've been passing -- or the fact that abortions are only a small fraction of the services provided by Planned Parenthood and that life-saving cancer screenings are "pro-life."

Planned Parenthood has done more to prevent abortions than the current Republican Party. All the Republicans want to do is to restrict access to birth control and dumb down our kids by refusing to teach them sex education at the appropriate age and pretending they're never going to have sex until they're all adults and married.

It's been pointed out repeatedly by those on the left that if you actually want to limit the number of abortions in the United States, then make sure everyone has access to affordable contraception and educate people on how to prevent unwanted pregnancies. The right would rather demagogue the issue and pander to the religious right.

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Over the weekend, C-SPAN aired the president of Planned Parenthood, Cecile Richards lecture from March 28th at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. The topic was “Keeping Politics out of Women’s Health” and Richards discussed the importance of getting accurate information out there to the public and to teenagers in an age when sadly our politicians are using women's health and access to birth control as a political football, and what her organization is doing to circumvent that obstruction in the age of social networking and smart phones.

You can watch the entire event at Princeton's site here or at C-SPAN here and I've got more of Richards' lecture below the fold.

And here's more from one of the media links at Princeton's site on the event -- Richards Defends “Basic Human Right” Of Access to Reproductive Health Care :

Describing the past year’s “unrelenting attacks” in this country on women seeking reproductive health care, Planned Parenthood of America President Cecile Richards spoke last week to a packed auditorium at the Woodrow Wilson School about “Keeping Politics Out of Women’s Health.” Her appearance, which was cosponsored by Princeton University’s Office of Population Research and the Center for Health and Well Being, was part of the Wilson School’s “Leadership and Governance Program,” which brings prominent policy makers to Princeton for a two to three day visit so that students can meet and learn from them.

Ms. Richards, who has led the 95-year-old organization since 2006, said that a confluence of events and issues have made this a “critical moment” in Planned Parenthood’s history. She cited the public outcry in response to Susan B. Komen For the Cure’s attempt to discontinue funding Planned Parenthood, the debates in Washington regarding contraception and religious organizations, and the current discussion about health care reform.

Social networking using texting, chatting, email, tweets, and Facebook, promises to be a powerful challenge to some politicians’ interest in limiting access to information and services, Mrs. Richards suggested. The current “revolution about how people access information is nowhere more visible than in reproductive health care,” she said.

With four million online website users, half of whom are using their cell phones to connect, Planned Parenthood’s has been a “living digital laboratory in recent years,” noted Ms. Richards. Statistics are only part of it, though. Ms. Richards described the almost palpable relief reflected in a young woman’s text response to a Planned Parenthood staffer’s answer to her question about birth control.

Currently, she reported, 15-to 24-year-olds represent over half of this country’s reported cases of sexually transmitted diseases. “This is pretty frightening,” she said, adding that a disproportionate number of them are young people of color. A smartphone represents “freedom” and is one of the most important tools being used “to keep young people from becoming statistics.”

And from the Princeton Patch -- Planned Parenthood Head: Keep Politics out of Women's Health:

Sex is everywhere, from music to movies to television, yet when it comes to sex education and reproductive health, there is a lack of credible information, says Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood.

“I don’t have to talk about sex for young people to think about it,” Richards told the crowd at Princeton University on Wednesday. “I think of my own kids who grew up watching Gossip Girl, One Tree Hill, let’s just go down the list…and yet somehow we don’t want to teach sex education or provide access to good information." [...]

“The single biggest struggle is dealing with the politics of it all,” Richards said. “It’s the barrier that politics are putting ahead on the wellbeing on young people in this country and of women. Every time we take two steps forward, we take another step backwards. Partisan politics rather than public health interests are driving healthcare policy in America.”

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Ed Schultz spoke to Salon's Joan Walsh and Obama Super PAC head Bill Burton about John McCain's statement that the GOP needs to "get off" of the war on women and start focusing on other issues if they don't want to be badly damaged in the upcoming election. As Schultz noted, it doesn't appear the state legislatures around the country are listening to his advice, with Tennessee just being the latest example.

Joan Walsh rightfully pointed out McCain's hypocrisy on the matter when he just voted for the Blunt amendment which would allow any employer and not just religious institutions to deny contraceptive coverage to women. They also discussed the "tell your boss why you're on the pill" bill making its way through the Arizona legislature and McCain now saying he doesn't want to see that bill pass either.

As all of them noted, Republicans like McCain or more than happy to appease their base with support of these kinds of laws, until they start backfiring on them politically as we're seeing now.

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Sandra Fluke has a compelling op-ed at CNN.com today, the title of which appears above, and the full text is below the fold, but Fluke's abilities as a spokesperson have impressed all, all except for the haters of course.

By now, many have heard the stories I wanted to share thanks to the congressional leaders and members of the media who have supported me and millions of women in speaking out.

Because we spoke so loudly, opponents of reproductive health access demonized and smeared me and others on the public airwaves. These smears are obvious attempts to distract from meaningful policy discussions and to silence women's voices regarding their own health care.

These attempts to silence women and the men who support them have clearly failed. I know this because I have received so many messages of support from across the country -- women and men speaking out because they agree that contraception needs to be treated as a basic health care service.

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This has to be one of the more pitiful segments that I've had the unfortunate circumstance of watching for a while now. Anderson Cooper really should be ashamed of himself for allowing Mary Matalin and Ari Fleischer get away with this ridiculous defense of Rush Limbaugh where they decided to start attacking Arianna Huffington for a satirical piece posted at her web site, The Huffington Post.

Here's the offending piece that apparently had Fleischer and Matalin worked into a tizzy -- The Jesus-Eating Cult of Rick Santorum.

And here's his response which was also posted there as well where he explains what he wrote and why he wrote it -- Dear Catholics: I Am Heartily Sorry, etc.:

Actually, I'm not sorry at all, but I suppose an explanation is in order.

Last week, I wrote a piece with the somewhat provocative title "The Jesus-Eating Cult of Rick Santorum." The purpose was to take Santorum to task for his persistent and opportunistic attacks on the faith of others, in particular his dog whistle references to President Obama's "phony ideology" and his assertion that it is impossible to be a Christian and liberal. My criticism took the form of a ridiculously over-the-top broadside against Roman Catholicism, a demonstration of the type of vicious religious ignorance and intolerance I too often see coming from too many so-called Christians, especially Santorum. [...]

I won't say that Catholics need to lighten up or learn to take a joke, because the piece wasn't intended to be light-hearted or funny. It was satire, meaning... well, you can look that up. (It was probably a mistake to put it in the Comedy section; the editors wanted readers to know it was not to be taken literally.)

It's traditional at this point for me to half-apologize, to say that I'm sorry if anybody was offended, but I really don't mind if anybody was offended. I hope they will now think twice before they question the faith of progressive Christians, or Mormons or Muslims. I doubt they will.

Apparently that was completely lost on Matalin and Fleischer as well, or maybe not and they know full well the piece was satire and their only defense of Limbaugh is to distract, attack and lay it on thick with the false equivalencies. And note to Maria Cardona here, the correct answer for Fleischer when he ambushes you with a question about something you haven't read is to say you haven't seen it and won't comment on it until you do and you'd be happy to discuss it later after you look at what he's talking about instead of ceding ground to their attacks.

A writer that most people have not heard of at Huffington's site writing a piece of satire and his response after the fact explaining what he did and why is in no way the same as Rush Limbaugh's nasty, personal attacks on Sandra Fluke and Fleischer and Matalin know it.

And speaking of Ari Fleischer, why is anyone listening to anything this man has to say about women's reproductive rights or contraception after that sage advice he was paid to give the Komen foundation?

And one last note to Cooper and Cardona, someone needs to call Matalin out when she conflates contraception with abortion like her buddy Rove did a little while back.

h/t Digby

Transcript below the fold.

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