There is no “pro-life” case for any candidate of the Republican Party going at least back to Reagan.

There is the “anti-abortion” case for those candidates, including Trump, who think killing the children of rapists is a good idea (Trump, GWB, Romney, McCain, Dole, GHWBush all support(ed) such exceptions.

Maybe a meaningless distinction but I think it real.

If you had peeked in on the Boar’s Head Tavern and seen jovial Sir John Falstaff deep in the cups and in the company of younger drunkard, you might conclude that the carousing, womanizing young imp could not rise to the occasions that would cross his path, but then you might have dismissed Henry V.

Do I think carousing and womanizing and drunkenness is a great training ground for a future king, a future president, a future mayor. No. But I also think that one of the side lessons in the Henry V story is how a focus on the ground clutter might have deprived England of its King Henry V.

Henry IV part 2, last remarks of the new king, Henry V, to his former companion, and mentor in mendacity and drunkennes::

“ I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers;
How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!
I have long dream’d of such a kind of man,
So surfeit-swell’d, so old and so profane;
But, being awaked, I do despise my dream.
Make less thy body hence, and more thy grace;
Leave gormandizing; know the grave doth gape
For thee thrice wider than for other men.
Reply not to me with a fool-born jest:
Presume not that I am the thing I was;
For God doth know, so shall the world perceive,
That I have turn’d away my former self;
So will I those that kept me company.
When thou dost hear I am as I have been,
Approach me, and thou shalt be as thou wast,
The tutor and the feeder of my riots:
Till then, I banish thee, on pain of death,
As I have done the rest of my misleaders,
Not to come near our person by ten mile.
For competence of life I will allow you,
That lack of means enforce you not to evil:
And, as we hear you do reform yourselves,
We will, according to your strengths and qualities,
Give you advancement. Be it your charge, my lord,
To see perform’d the tenor of our word. Set on.”