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There is dithering over Planned Parenthood.
There always is, of course. But it’s never quite been driven to this level of weird batshit.
Much of the current dithering is partly the result of a purported sting video released by a conservative activist group in June, but mainly from the fact that Carly Fiorina, a serious POTUS candidate, stated during a nationally televised debate that the video contains “a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says, 'We have to keep it alive to harvest its brain’.”
The video has been so debunked that even the unedited raw footage doesn’t include any such scene, which is why Fiorina has amended her statement to say: “Planned Parenthood is aborting fetuses alive to harvest their brains and other body parts. That is a fact.” Then a Fiorina Super PAC made their own video proving Fiorina is right. Which it doesn’t.
I suppose we can thank Donald Trump for this. When you lie and you get called on it, you double down and go large. Fiorina seems to be following that template to the point of creating an alternate reality for PP that only other Republicans can see.
This in itself isn’t all that new. I’ve written before about the Batshit Reality Schism that American politics has undergone over the last decade or so, where the Interwub and cable TV news have enabled people on both sides of the aisle to filter all news and information to conform to their specific sociopolitical beliefs to the point that it becomes a self-perpetuating, personalized reality.
The PP “debate” is becoming a textbook example of how far you can take alternate reality bubbles. Most of not all of the criticisms being leveled at PP are even remotely factual, and this is not hard to prove. But it doesn’t matter. We now have the spectacle of House reps hysterically grilling Cecile Richards in large part because of a debunked partisan video containing a scene that demonstrably does not exist. They spent much of the time yelling and interrupting and displaying charts that were about as accurate and objective as the video (which is to say, not at all). And they were either oblivious to or completely disinterested in the fact that no tax dollars fund PP’s abortion work, which only accounts for 3% of its business, and that most of the money they do get from the feds is for Medicaid reimbursement.
None of that matters. All that matters is the GOP bullet point that no organization that receives tax money in any form should be doing abortions (a legal service), and thus should be entirely defunded, even though the vast majority of PP’s operations are not only unrelated to abortion services, but also include birth control services that could help prevent the unwanted pregnancies that lead to abortion in the first place.
If yr really anti-abortion, this is a very stupid tactic. But then conservatives have never really liked any birth control method beyond telling young couples “NO FUCKING!” (which works perfectly in the alternate reality in which they live – much less so in this reality), so it’s no surprise they haven’t thought that one through.
Anyway, the whole thing is just weird. You’ve basically got one of two scenarios (or possibly both at once) happening here:
1. House Repubs are trying to shut down an alternate-reality version of PP that exists only in their minds, only it’s the real-world PP that will get shut down.
2. House Repubs aren’t really interested in investigating PP – they just want to use the PP video meme as an excuse to grandstand and make speeches about how much they hate abortion and govt spending.
I really don’t know how else to describe this. All I can add is: you know House Repubs have gone off the rails with this when even pro-lifers are on Twitter going, “WTF was that all about?”
It’s all in yr head,
This is dF
There always is, of course. But it’s never quite been driven to this level of weird batshit.
Much of the current dithering is partly the result of a purported sting video released by a conservative activist group in June, but mainly from the fact that Carly Fiorina, a serious POTUS candidate, stated during a nationally televised debate that the video contains “a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says, 'We have to keep it alive to harvest its brain’.”
The video has been so debunked that even the unedited raw footage doesn’t include any such scene, which is why Fiorina has amended her statement to say: “Planned Parenthood is aborting fetuses alive to harvest their brains and other body parts. That is a fact.” Then a Fiorina Super PAC made their own video proving Fiorina is right. Which it doesn’t.
I suppose we can thank Donald Trump for this. When you lie and you get called on it, you double down and go large. Fiorina seems to be following that template to the point of creating an alternate reality for PP that only other Republicans can see.
This in itself isn’t all that new. I’ve written before about the Batshit Reality Schism that American politics has undergone over the last decade or so, where the Interwub and cable TV news have enabled people on both sides of the aisle to filter all news and information to conform to their specific sociopolitical beliefs to the point that it becomes a self-perpetuating, personalized reality.
The PP “debate” is becoming a textbook example of how far you can take alternate reality bubbles. Most of not all of the criticisms being leveled at PP are even remotely factual, and this is not hard to prove. But it doesn’t matter. We now have the spectacle of House reps hysterically grilling Cecile Richards in large part because of a debunked partisan video containing a scene that demonstrably does not exist. They spent much of the time yelling and interrupting and displaying charts that were about as accurate and objective as the video (which is to say, not at all). And they were either oblivious to or completely disinterested in the fact that no tax dollars fund PP’s abortion work, which only accounts for 3% of its business, and that most of the money they do get from the feds is for Medicaid reimbursement.
None of that matters. All that matters is the GOP bullet point that no organization that receives tax money in any form should be doing abortions (a legal service), and thus should be entirely defunded, even though the vast majority of PP’s operations are not only unrelated to abortion services, but also include birth control services that could help prevent the unwanted pregnancies that lead to abortion in the first place.
If yr really anti-abortion, this is a very stupid tactic. But then conservatives have never really liked any birth control method beyond telling young couples “NO FUCKING!” (which works perfectly in the alternate reality in which they live – much less so in this reality), so it’s no surprise they haven’t thought that one through.
Anyway, the whole thing is just weird. You’ve basically got one of two scenarios (or possibly both at once) happening here:
1. House Repubs are trying to shut down an alternate-reality version of PP that exists only in their minds, only it’s the real-world PP that will get shut down.
2. House Repubs aren’t really interested in investigating PP – they just want to use the PP video meme as an excuse to grandstand and make speeches about how much they hate abortion and govt spending.
I really don’t know how else to describe this. All I can add is: you know House Repubs have gone off the rails with this when even pro-lifers are on Twitter going, “WTF was that all about?”
It’s all in yr head,
This is dF
