I was emcee at the “Women for Roberts” press conference this morning at the National Press Club in D.C., right down the hallway from that People for the American Way presser. Here’s how I introduced the group:

So-called women’s leaders have been in hysterics ever since President Bush announced D.C. Circuit Court Judge John Roberts as his choice to replace Sandra Day O’Connor on the United States Supreme Court.
Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women, has likened John Roberts to a Neanderthal.
One commentator referred to Judge Roberts’s “contempt for all things female.”
Eleanor Smeal of the Feminist Majority has assured her troops that the judge will be “a solid vote against women’s rights.”
Well, these women gathered up here with me this morning are about to throw a little much-needed cold water on the August rhetorical heatstroke that’s coming from the Left side of the Beltway–(and also, as it happens right down the hallway from here).
I’m personally happy to be here today as a friendly neighborhood alternative to the Mainstream Media—no offense to those of your present. I’m the editor of National Review Online, which you can find on any computer near you, much to the dismay of anyone who’s working in their war rooms right now to end the Roberts nomination. Whereas the Beltway Hometown Paper gave you the laugh-out-loud ridiculous headline on Friday: “Roberts Resisted Women’s Rights,” nationalreview.com gave you a more grounded read of what the young lawyer actually wrote back during the Reagan administration. John Roberts at the time, of course, did not–as every woman up here with me would agree—”resist women’s rights.” He did, however, speak sense to a lot of comparable-worth nonsense.
These women join me here today, too, to point out what is obvious, I think, to most Americans: That “women’s issues” are America’s issues. That the Supreme Court impacts women in all sorts of ways beyond the one that drives some so mad that one of the loudest “reproductive rights” groups in town would create and distribute and defend a deliberate, disgraceful lie of a television commercial, which has been so thoroughly discredited by now that I need not waste anymore time on it.
Without further delay, I will now introduce you to some women who, after a careful look at the facts available, and in some cases because of personal experience, are encouraged by John Roberts and who are even—yes it’s true–excited to support President Bush’s nominee for the Supreme Court.
Meet your first “Woman for Roberts”—although if she’s the first woman you’ve met who supports Roberts, you really need to get comfortable and stay awhile….

Linda Chavez, and Mary Ellen Bork, Wendy Long, Karen Kerrigan, Connie Mackey, Brigida Benitez all spoke…