The big question in GOP Presidential primary politics right now is whether conservatives will be able to overlook Rudy Giuliani's increasingly strident pro-choice comments. If the opinions of the editors of National Review are any indication, they emphatically won't be able to overlook them.

Check out this new and scathing National Review editorial blasting Rudy over his pronouncement that government should fund abortion — a position well to the left of even many high-ranking Democrats. The editorialists note that they had "held out hope that Giuliani would try to meet pro-life conservatives halfway," adding: "Instead, we are sorry to say, he has mostly gone into reverse." In its toughest passage, it continues:

Economist Michael New has studied the effect of various policies on abortion rates and concluded that nothing has reduced them more than cutoffs in public funding. We can therefore assume that an America with Giuliani’s favored policies would be a country with more abortion — probably reversing the 15-year trend of decline, including the decline in New York City for which he takes dubious credit.

The last Republican president to favor legal abortion was the late Gerald Ford, and even he did not support taxpayer funding. Every Republican president and presidential nominee since then has favored legal protection for unborn life. Neither morality nor opinion polls suggest any reason to do a 180-degree turn now. Support for taxpayer funding of abortion is a minority position. Seventeen states provide taxpayer funding for abortion, all but four of them under judicial compulsion....

His position makes neither logical, moral, nor political sense. Many conservatives are disappointed, and hope that their disappointment is not going to grow as the campaign wears on.

Ouch. The whole thing is here.