It's no surprise that the Democrats at the 2012 National Convention are loudly supporting women's rights, as they usually do, since conservatives have upped the ante against their health care and their bodies. What I find highly illuminating is how the Villagers inside the Beltway are perceiving it.

We talk about the Village a lot here. You all recall Digby's definition:

It's shorthand for the permanent DC ruling class who have managed to convince themselves that they are simple, puritanical, bourgeois burghers and farmers, even though they are actually celebrity millionaires influencing the most powerful government on earth.

It's about their phoniness, their pretense of speaking for "average Americans" when it's clear they haven't the vaguest clue even about the average Americans who work in their local Starbucks or drive their cabs. (Think Tim Russert, good old boy from Buffalo, lately of Nantucket.) It's about their intolerable sanctimony and hypocritical provincialism, pretending to be shocked about things they all do, creating social rules for others which they themselves ignore.

The village is really "the village" an ersatz small town like something you'd see in Disneyland. And to those who argue that Versailles is the far better metaphor, I would just say that it isVersailles --- a very particular part:

A Picturesque Little Village
Part of the grounds near the Trianon were chosen by Marie-Antoinette as the site of a lakeside village, a crucial feature of picturesque landscape gardens then so fashionable among Europe's aristocracy. In 1783, Richard Mique built this amusement village where the queen played at being a shepherdess.

In 1784, Marie-Antoinette had a farm built, where she installed a farming couple from the Touraine region, along with their two children. They were charged with supplying the queen with eggs, butter, cream and cheese, for which they disposed of cows, goats, farmyard animals.

The Village is a metaphor for the faux "middle class values" that the wealthy, insular, privileged, hypocritical political celebrities (and their hangers-on and wannabes) present to the nation. (And no John, I'm not talking about you. DFHs are definitely not welcome ;)

OK, now we can proceed. Ever since the Tea Party teavangelists took over the GOP in 2009-10, they have masqueraded as champions against government spending and fanatics about federal deficits, but hiding in plain sight has been what they really are about: they are above all else anti-choice maniacs, religious-right fanatics bent on imposing God's will on women's wombs. It took until the final hour of Obama's health-care fight for their true purpose to surface; at that point their surrogates tried to slip in the most anti-woman abortion restrictions this country has seen since Roe v. Wade ended the days of back-alley abortions. And for a reason only the Villagers know (much like Mormon secret ordinances), they are not bothered one iota by this behavior. But if the Democratic party starts pushing back against their assault, well then it's too much for them to handle.

Here's The Politico :

The roster of 2012 Democratic convention speakers offers a snapshot not only of Obama campaign priorities this year, but of some of the party’s key constituencies in the Obama era.

Here’s a guide to what the list of speakers reveals about the Democratic Party:
Uncompromising support for abortion rights

The party platform and the list of convention speakers – which includes NARAL Pro-choice America’s Nancy Keenan, Planned Parenthood Action Fund’s Cecile Richards, birth control activist Sandra Fluke and some of the strongest abortion rights supporters in Congress – makes clear the Democratic Party is now as uncompromising as the GOP on the issue of abortion rights.

It’s not just the heavy presence of abortion rights supporters and the absence of abortion opponents on stage that proves it. Just look at the evolution of the party platform over the past three conventions. The language respecting “the individual conscience of each American on this difficult issue” and that “we welcome all our members to participate at every level of our party” vanished in 2004. The language about making abortions “rare” disappeared in 2008.

The Democratic Party now, in its 2012 platform, “strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to make decisions regarding her pregnancy” and will “oppose any and all efforts to weaken or undermine that right.”

Digby:

The bastards!

If this is actually the case, I say Huzzah! Being willing to "compromise" with people who refuse is the biggest suckers game in town. And abortion rights was the earliest battlefield for the GOP scorched earth strategy. At the time everyone felt that it was just a bunch of whiny beeyotches complaining about the icky and that in order to win we needed to find "common ground." It was one big Sistahood Soljah.

If they've finally learned that this is a very real, fundamental clash of values and worldview, by God it's about time.