NOONAN AS SERGEANT SCHULTZ

Peggy Noonan, at the tail end of a column about Jon Huntsman, looks at her own party and declares that she sees nothink! She knows nothink!

Mitch Daniels was knocked for calling for a social issues truce some months ago, but only because he put a name on what is happening anyway. There is an informal truce on social issues in the GOP, but no one likes hearing potential leaders mention it, because then the other leaders have to take a side. But almost everyone in the party is focused now on economic issues, in part because a strong economy fosters everything else, including American compassion.

Do I really have to explain how absurd this is?

In the first legislative session of 2011, however, GOP lawmakers introduced an unprecedented number of bills restricting abortion rights for women....

A number of major legislative trends have emerged so far in 2011, including gestational limits on abortions, bans on insurance coverage for abortions, mandatory ultrasound bills, and attempts to defund Planned Parenthood, America's largest family planning services provider.

These bills are moving rapidly in the states, and they severely limit women's access to and ability to pay for abortions. So far this year, three states -- North Carolina, Indiana and Kansas -- have defunded Planned Parenthood. Thirteen states have blocked abortion coverage in their public health care exchanges to be set up as a part of the Affordable Care Act. Iowa advanced the nation's first 18-week abortion ban in early June, and five other states have passed or are considering laws banning abortions after 20 weeks....

State lawmakers introduced 22 so-called "personhood" bills this year that would legally define one's status as a "person" or "human being" as beginning from the moment of conception, which could outlaw abortions altogether....

And, of course, it's happening at the federal level as well.

Unless, of course, I'm misreading Noonan's use of the word "truce." Maybe she means there's no battle between those Republicans who publicly proclaim that social issues are paramount and those who publicly emphasize economic or other issues -- it's true that they aren't really fighting. They seem to have agreed that they'll say whatever they prefer to say, and then do whatever the anti-abortion movement wants the minute they get the chance.