It really is that clear and simple. Republican policies lead to women dying of neglect and abuse, and they don’t care. Tom Levenson does the estimates, just using their recent opposition to Planned Parenthood as an example — and that’s a legislative jihad that has a body count.

Planned Parenthood does lots more than screen for gynecological cancers, of course. This is just one example of the real commitment to saving lives, to life, that marks that organization. But this story makes the point well enough: when you cut poor and vulnerable people’s access to health care real harm results.

Which means that Mitch Daniels is presenting his bonafides to the Republican electorate with an action that will lead directly to the deaths of women whom he doesn’t know – whom he and we cannot know. That anonymity, the statistical nature of the crime, means that Daniels will almost certainly never pay any price, let alone a criminal one, for his role in their deaths. But they will be on his hands, and should be on his conscience.

And to go larger than just one politician whose ambition has swamped his capacity for moral reasoning, this is why we must work for more than just an individual electoral defeat for today’s Republican party. Mitch Daniels may indeed by the best they’ve got over there. That’s as damning an indictment as I can imagine.

I know there are reasonable, rational conservatives; I also appreciate that progressive policies are not all certified guarantees of success, so there should be a check on government action. But the current Republican party is a nightmare of stupidity and thuggish vileness, and they must be defeated at the ballot box, even at the cost of some sensible politician’s careers. Shut them down. Do not vote for any Republican, ever. The party has to be demolished, or the adults in the group have to rise up and slap down the idiots, the teabaggers, the Breitbarts and Palins and Bachmanns.