Pop quiz: what issue has been bringing hundreds of thousands of protesters to D.C. in the dead of winter for decades?  The answer, of course, is abortion.

A much tougher question to answer is why some Republican politicians are hell-bent on alienating their millennial base by ignoring the most extreme cases of abortion, where the unborn are literally tortured to death.

In late-term abortions, after 20 weeks, the unborn, who at that point can definitely feel pain, are immersed in chemicals that burn them to death, are dismembered while fully conscious, have their skulls crushed with a metal tool, or are given a massive heart attack.

If an NFL player did any of those things to a dog, we’d never hear the end of it, and he’d likely end up in jail.

Yet some Republicans want to make sure that 12,000 unborn can be legally tortured to death each year. Those Republicans are out of touch with the 57% of millennial Americans and 60% of Americans in general who say that except for cases of rape and incest reported to authorities abortions should be illegal after 20 weeks.

A 20-week-old unborn child.  A blob of cells…not.

This is another example of Republicans, once elected, deserting those who vote for them.

The same poll shows that 76% of Republicans want to make it illegal to torture the unborn to death.  Yet a few “cautious” Republicans want to ignore 76% of their base because the liberal media will call Republicans names.

What good is it to elect “conservative” politicians if they’re afraid to vote for conservative principles?  Amazingly, in light of this sort of action, Republicans wonder why they fail to turn out their base at election time.  Given that Democrat politicians desire to turn the U.S. into France and give their supporters lots of tax-funded goodies while Republicans seem only to want to get elected in order to be able to get a government paycheck, why should voters take the time to vote Republican?

The supposed reason for these Republicans to dread ending the real torture crisis in America is that the optics are bad, because for a woman to use the rape exception, she has to report the rape to the authorities.

Aside from the fact that the polling question specifically mentions this requirement, so we know that Millennials aren’t bothered by the requirement, the real question is, why is it bad to require women to report being raped if they take more than five months to decide to kill their unborn daughters?  Remember: if the woman chooses to have an abortion before science is 100% sure that her unborn daughter feels pain, she doesn’t have to report being raped.

Rape is a horrible experience, but is it really too much to ask a woman who has been raped to either kill her unborn daughter before her daughter will suffer unimaginable pain or report the rapist?

Saying that it’s uncharitable or cruel to ask women to report being raped is even more bizarre when we note that every unreported rape empowers a rapist to rape more women.  It would seem that the modern liberated woman in solidarity with her sisters would condemn sheltering rapists.

Further, for those women who are embarrassed about being raped, the answer is for Republicans to take a strong stand that if a woman said no, or was afraid to say no because of a threat of violence, and the man didn’t stop, the woman has absolutely no culpability.  No doesn’t mean yes, and even if the women “led on” the guy, men are not animals in heat – they have the responsibility to stop.  We need to deal with some women’s fear of reporting rape by changing the old chauvinist position that the woman is responsible with the truth that in a rape, only the rapist is at fault.  No woman should ever feel embarrassed about being physically overpowered and assaulted.

Lena Dunham has been excoriated by the conservative press for not reporting her rape –  even though her rapist was supposedly a Republican – precisely because every unreported rape is a win for rapists.  Apparently the conservative press is more concerned about rape in America than modern “feminists” are.  But Republicans like Renee Ellmers are concerned that asking women to stand up for their sisters and not shelter rapists will cause Republicans to lose support among Millienials.

Rep. Ellmers兵s website says, “I have gained the wisdom of knowing that every life is a precious gift from God and it is not for us to judge its worth, deny its beginning or determine its end.”  Yet she’s stopped the House from approving a bill that would keep 12,000 unborn from being brutally, and in many cases literally, butchered each year.

Apparently, Rep. Ellmers is unfamiliar with the poll data, or else she’s lying about being pro-life, or she’s succumbed to the perennial Republican disease of confusing the Washington government bubble with America.In Washington, the nattering class constantly spews out the smog of liberal orthodoxy.  Immersed in a society where the main newspaper “missed” a march by hundreds of thousands of pro-lifers one year, some Republicans seem to confuse the Berkeley of the East with reality.  They then fear to take any stand that would cause them to be looked down on by the Washington establishment.  They rationalize limiting their actions by believing that any strong move on their part will result in total Democrat dominance, which would somehow be worse.  In their mind, only Democrats really win elections; when Republicans win, it is a fluke due to voter confusion.

Strangely, the problem disappears when those same politicians go home to run for re-election.  Momentarily free of the pernicious influence of the mind controlling Washington media, these “conservative” Republicans assure their constituents that they need to be re-elected in order to implement conservative values.

The growth of the Tea Party shows that the Republican base – as opposed to the fat-cat big donors – are losing patience with the “make no waves” approach of Republicans on the issues that matter most to average Americans.

So long as Republicans like Rep. Ellmers worry more about optics than about doing what they were elected to do, they can assume that more and more conservatives will desert the Republican Party and either simply give up hope, as so many did when they didn’t vote for Romney, or support the Tea Party.

Meanwhile, every day, 33 pain-feeling unborn human beings are legally tortured to death in a country where non-lethal cruelty to animals can result in jail time.

You can read more of Tom’s rants at his blog, Conversations about the obvious, and feel free to follow him on Twitter.