John Kasich’s sputtering and completely hopeless campaign is showing how out of tune it is with conservative voters of today by touting the endorsement of former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge. Kasich is so happy to have Ridge on board, he’s making him national co-chairman of his campaign.

Let’s not beat around the bush here. Tom Ridge and his radical pro-choice policies directly enabled the butcher of Philadelphia, Kermit Gosnell. The reason so many live babies (and women) were killed during Ridge’s term is that he specifically ordered his State Department of Health to stop inspections of abortion clinics in order to burnish his pro-life credentials.

Don’t take my word for it – take the word of the grand jury that indicted Gosnell:

Under Governor Robert Casey, she said, the department inspected abortion facilities annually. Yet, when Governor Tom Ridge came in, the attorneys interpreted the same regulations that had permitted annual inspections for years to no longer authorize those inspections. Then, only complaint driven inspections supposedly were authorized. Staloski said that DOH’s policy during Governor Ridge’s administration was motivated by a desire not to be “putting a barrier up to women” seeking abortions.

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Indeed, in many ways State had more damning information than anyone else. Almost a decade ago, a former employee of Gosnell presented the Board of Medicine with a complaint that laid out the whole scope of his operation: the unclean, unsterile conditions; the unlicensed workers; the unsupervised sedation; the underage abortion patients; even the over-prescribing of pain pills with high resale value on the street. The department assigned an investigator, whose investigation consisted primarily of an offsite interview with Gosnell. The investigator never inspected the facility, questioned other employees, or reviewed any records. Department attorneys chose to accept this incomplete investigation, and dismissed the complaint as unconfirmed.

The entire grand jury report is a damning indictment of the intentional failure of oversight exercised by the Ridge administration. Turn to page 137 of this .pdf, and read for as long as you can stand it about the ways that three different stage agencies, at the direct order of Tom Ridge, were specifically directed to turn a blind eye to literally anything that might be happening in abortion clinics in Pennsylvania. I say “for as long as you can stand” because it goes on for over sixty pages in this vein:

We discovered that Pennsylvania’s Department of Health has deliberately chosen not to enforce laws that should afford patients at abortion clinics the same safeguards and assurances of quality health care as patients of other medical service providers. Even nail salons in Pennsylvania are monitored more closely for client safety.

The State Legislature has charged the Department of Health (DOH) with responsibility for writing and enforcing regulations to protect health and safety in abortion clinics as well as in hospitals and other health care facilities. Yet a significant difference exists between how DOH monitors abortion clinics and how it monitors facilities where other medical procedures are performed.

Indeed, the department has shown an utter disregard both for the safety of women who seek treatment at abortion clinics and for the health of fetuses after they have become viable. State health officials have also shown a disregard for the laws the department is supposed to enforce. Most appalling of all, the Department of Health’s neglect of abortion patients’ safety and of Pennsylvania laws is clearly not inadvertent: It is by design.

Emphasis in original.

No respectable person should be able to favorably speak the name Tom Ridge in public without having rotten tomatoes thrown at them. He is a disgrace and the actions of his administration led to untold deaths, not just at the hands of Gosnell but also Stephen Chase Brigham, Harvey Walter Brookman, and who knows how many others.

When Rick Snyder turned a blind eye to the problem of lead contamination in Flint, Michigan, he became a pariah overnight. Tom Ridge did the same for the abortion business in Pennsylvania, which had the effect of yet more death, misery and suffering (which was also, I might add, almost exclusively inflicted on poor and minority communities).

The liberal media might be willing to brush all this under a rug because the abortion industry is implicated in it, but conservatives and Republicans are not. The last Presidential candidate to receive Ridge’s endorsement was Jeb Bush, who started to tank shortly after. If there is any justice in this world, the fact that Kasich didn’t politely (or impolitely) decline the endorsement of Ridge will be the final nail in his irrelevant campaign’s coffin.