By now most people have heard about Hilary Rosen’s terrible choice of words in reference to Ann Romney on CNN Wednesday night. Rosen is a White House adviser and a PR consultant which makes her choice of words all the more impactful.

If you didn’t, here’s the clip.

CNN has a complete transcript here.

When discussing Romney’s campaign and how/whether it’s reaching women, Rosen said,

What you have is Mitt Romney running around the country saying, well, you know, my wife tells me that what women really care about are economic issues. And when I listen to my wife, that’s what I’m hearing.

Guess what, his wife has actually never worked a day in her life. She’s never really dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing in terms of how do we feed our kids, how do we send them to school and how do we — why do we worry about their future?

The statement was pretty bad, though she may indeed have not meant to come across the way that she did. But many people understood her to be attacking Ann Romney’s decision to be a stay at home mom and suggesting that is wasn’t real work. On the contrary, raising five children is more work than many many people are willing to do, as evidenced by widespread intentionally low birthrates.

Add to this that Ann Romney comes across as a lovely person and that she’s battled cancer and MS and you’ve got a major PR crisis.

But it gets better. (-Depends of course on what you mean by “better.”) The Catholic League responded with the following tweet:

Lesbian Dem Hilary Rosen tells Ann Romney she never worked a day in her life. Unlike Rosen, who had to adopt kids, Ann raised 5 of her own.

Ouch. Not only is this not Catholic in any way, shape, or form. It’s simply unnecessary. With whom Rosen chooses to share her bed has nothing to do with her statement on Ann Romney and her experience with economics. Additionally, are we now suggesting that there’s something unCatholic about adoption? If so, then we’re going to have to revisit the core of our theology which is divine filiation…which is to say a type of adoption.

The Catholic League has done a good job defending the Catholic Church on many issues. But the type of response exemplified in the above tweet makes the same fundamental communications error that Rosen made. It’s completely off message and ad hominem (ad mulierem, to be precise).

It also sounds hateful/spiteful, not unlike Rosen’s comments. And that’s another sign of bad communications strategy. When you start spewing negative emotion, any constructive (even if critical) message is lost.

To a casual observer, the takeaway from CL’s tweet is that the Catholic Church doesn’t like people who are attracted to the same sex. And that the Catholic Church doesn’t support adoption. Neither of these conclusions are true. Meanwhile, any commentary on Rosen’s remarks about Ann Romney is completely lost.

Some other thoughts on Rosen’s remarks -

1. Why does she assume that someone without professional experience can’t have valid opinions about economics? Plenty of women who are not economists and financial advisers do a fine job of managing family finances. And plenty of professionals (economists and others) have been terribly wrong about the economy.

2. I continue to meet interesting people who have a depth of knowledge beyond their professional or day-to-day occupations. Some of the smartest people I’ve known never went to college. It’s the height of just about every -ism to judge someone’s intellectual understanding based on a few outward assumptions about them.

3. As I wrote/tweeted yesterday, “Will someone with 5 small children at home please offer Hilary Rosen the opportunity to babysit for 24 hours? And let her pay your bills etc.”

The New York Times has a review of the new movie October Baby that fails to tell the reader anything about the movie as a film, but it sure tells us a lot about the author’s attitudes on abortion. More precisely, it tells us a lot about her views of pro-lifers.

Take a look at the first paragraph:

More slickly packaged than most faith-based fare, “October Baby” gussies up its anti-abortion message with gauzy cinematography and more emo music than an entire season of “Grey’s Anatomy.” But not even a dewy heroine and a youth-friendly vibe can disguise the essential ugliness at its core: like the bloodied placards brandished by demonstrators outside women’s health clinics, the film communicates in the language of guilt and fear.

And then there’s this:

But this G-rated road trip is only an appetizer: the film’s pièce de résistance arrives in the haunted form of Jasmine Guy, playing the clinic nurse who assisted at Hannah’s birth. Her pivotal speech, a gory portrait of fetal mutilation and maternal distress, conjures a vision of medical hackery that is clearly intended to terrify young women — and fits right in with proposed state laws that increasingly turn the screws on a woman’s dominion over her reproductive system.

If you want to know anything about the film, forget NYT and check out the Los Angeles Times review. Check out this first paragraph:

James Capretta over at NRO has a good piece on the latest “accommodation” on the HHS Mandate. National Catholic Reporter has an incredibly biased report, but they offer links to the relevant documents at the end of the article.

But I can’t pass up the opportunity to point out the bias from a so-called Catholic outlet.

According to NCR:

Taking a conciliatory tone and asking for a wide range of public comment, the Obama administration announced this afternoon new accommodations on a controversial mandate requiring contraceptive coverage in health care plans.

There’s nothing conciliatory about this. They’re just punting until after the election so that this won’t be an election issue and President Obama can keep his majority Catholic vote while wooing single women who won’t vote unless they’re worried about something really important like their birth control.

[In the meantime, there's apparently nothing to accommodate individual business owners who for reasons of conscience or religion might not want to be forced to buy insurance that covers contraception.]

Here’s another messaging attempt:

On Wednesday, the leadership of the U.S. bishops’ conference dialed back its vehement opposition to the Obama administration with a statement released at the end of a two-day meeting of the bishops’ administrative committee.

“Dialed back”? If the Bishops were going to “dial back” they would not have issued the very statement in question, which included language like, “Government has no place defining religion and religious ministry.” That doesn’t sound dialed back to me, nor does the rest of the document.

But here’s the kicker in the NCR article:

News of the changes came as a senior White House official told NCR in an afternoon phone interview unrelated to the new proposed rules for the contraceptive mandate that while the Obama administration and Catholic leaders may have “some points of disagreement” over a number of concerns, the president has “dramatically expanded” the federal government’s connection with Catholic organizations.

Yes, NCR has every right to be talking with the White House and vice versa. But to present the story according to the White House talking points violates every principle of ethical journalism.

Capretta’s opinion piece is closer to journalism than that of NCR, a Catholic publication or Reuters, an official news outlet.