Hard core abortion supporter Amanda Marcotte has a new Salon propaganda piece that really raises the bar for dishonest reporting. In it, she marks the first anniversary of the Center for Medical Progress’s Planned Parenthood investigation by packing every single lie she and others have ever told about it in one spot—giving us the opportunity for a definitive, one-stop debunking.
First, Marcotte dismisses the idea that Planned Parenthood was illicitly selling baby parts—with “baby parts” in scare quotes, even though it’s 100% accurate (livers, lungs, etc., are “parts,” and fetuses are babies)—as a “lurid urban legend” and a “self-evidently idiotic conspiracy theory.” There she links to a profanity-laden rant by blogger Rebecca Watson titled, “Planned Parenthood is Not Selling Baby Parts, You F***ing Idiots.”
The profanity is apparently meant to compensate for nonexistent substance, inasmuch as Planned Parenthood openly admitted selling them; they just maintain the price at which they sold only covered expenses and therefore didn’t constitute profit.
Which was a lie. Marcotte tries to deny it by claiming the full video shows Dr. Deborah Nucatola “repeatedly mak[ing] it clear that Planned Parenthood does not sell fetal tissue. Instead, they donate fetal tissue.”
As I’ve covered in detail before, those comments are simply cover referencing Planned Parenthood’s interest in not being perceived as profiting. They don’t erase Nucatola saying some Planned Parenthood affiliates would like to “do a little better than break even,” Dr. Mary Gatter negotiating prices because “it has to be big enough that it is worthwhile,” or StemExpress flyers advertising the “financially profitable” nature of partnering with them on fetal organ procurement.
By the way, organ profiting isn’t the only possible crime the videos reveal. Marcotte has nothing to say about the talk of “try[ing] to change the presentation so that it’s not vertex” in order to “evacuate an intact calvarium at the end,” “training” abortionists “to make sure that they don’t crush” organs, or “get[ting] creative about when and where and under what conditions can we interject something that is specific to the tissue needs”—all of which signify illegally altering abortion procedures to obtain intact organs at greater risk to the woman (among other federal laws possibly broken).
CMP’s strategy was sleazy but effective, taking advantage of the internet era’s rush to get the story out while it’s still hot — and before there’s a chance for thorough fact-checking, or even basic research.
Ah, but thorough fact-checking and basic research did come months later, and do you know what it found? Two forensic analyses—one, yes, commissioned by pro-lifers, but the other by Planned Parenthood and done by left-wing, Democrat-affiliated Fusion GPS—confirmed that CMP was showing America what really happened.
Sure, Fusion GPS tried to satisfy their client with (per Politico) insinuations of “intentionally deceptive edits, missing footage and inaccurately transcribed conversations,” but ultimately had to admit “there is no evidence that the anti-abortion group behind the attack made up dialogue” or “widespread evidence of substantive video manipulation.”
After that, CNN’s Anderson Cooper and Drew Griffin—hardly anti-abortion propagandists—came up empty looking for the “heavy deceptive edits” Planned Parenthood keeps insisting are there. The “the only thing we found,” Griffin said, was one instance where footage of a baby was used as illustration, yet pro-aborts falsely inferred it was meant to be interpreted as another starving baby referenced by a whistleblower… who obviously wouldn’t have worn a hidden camera to work before witnessing the shocking incident that caused her to be a whistleblower in the first place.
Marcotte turns that molehill from a mountain from which to demonize Carly Fiorina as an “obnoxious liar.” If you’re gonna lie, Amanda, can you at least give us something original?
The attack failed,” Erica Sackin, the director of political communications for Planned Parenthood, argued in an email sent out on Wednesday. “And public support for Planned Parenthood continues to rise.” To back up this argument, Sackin cites polling that shows that support for Planned Parenthood has risen in the past year and notes that “voters in key swing states saying that opposing care at Planned Parenthood actually makes voters less likely to support a candidate.”
Yes… polling resulting from a corrupt media that won’t cover videos that have been confirmed to turn people against PP and spreads the lie that PP is primarily about non-abortion services (something the majority opposes), and an opposition party that’s failed to aggressively pursue the issue in the court of public opinion. So the poll says nothing about CMP’s credibility or Planned Parenthood’s innocence.
CMP also had to tangle with the criminal authorities. A grand jury convened by Republicans to dig up dirt on Planned Parenthood instead, after looking at the evidence, chose to indict Daleiden and his co-conspirator instead.
You mean the grand jury that didn’t actually vote on Planned Parenthood’s indictment?
California officials have also raided Daleiden’s home, confiscating a laptop and multiple hard drives, though no charges have yet been filed.
“No charges have yet been filed” is a funny way to misspell “one was dismissed entirely and the other is bogus”…
In the same month, House Republicans decided to drag Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards into a kangaroo hearing clearly designed to embarrass her. Instead, Richards turned the tables on them, drawing attention to their various falsehoods, which swiftly became fodder for late night comedians.
Marcotte sure has a strange definition of “turning the tables” if it includes standing by Nucatola without substantively refuting the allegations against her, being forced to admit Planned Parenthood doesn’t do mammograms (while falsely claiming never to have claimed otherwise), falsely denying the numbers about Planned Parenthood’s abortion increases, admitting real low-income women’s health providers outnumber Planned Parenthood locations, and lying about botched abortions.
But that’s reasonable compared to Marcotte’s “case” against Congress’s Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives. In the interest of clean screens, be sure you’re not drinking anything when you read this next part:
Earlier this week, a diverse coalition of 20 organizations co-signed a letter from the ACLU demanding that Speaker Paul Ryan put an end to this charade.
The signatories include groups like the SEIU, the Sierra Club, the National Immigration Law Center, the NAACP, and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) — groups that have no relationship to the debate over reproductive rights, but who felt they had to say something.
“No relationship to the debate over reproductive rights”…other than, y’know, being hard-left advocacy groups and/or major donors to the Democrat Party. (In fact, up until last year, Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards’ husband, Kirk Adams, held a high-ranking position with the SEIU.) For Marcotte to hype their shilling for a cousin coalition as profound is proof positive that she thinks—and desperately hopes—that her readers are stupid.
In April, NAF released a report showing that the release of the hoax videos precipitated a rise in anti-clinic violence generally, with the most shocking example being a mass shooting in a Colorado Planned Parenthood, where a man named Robert Dear killed three people, which he justified by spewing incoherent nonsense about “baby parts”.
Sure, Amanda, accurately reporting Planned Parenthood’s activities makes one culpable for people reacting badly to true information (never mind how peaceful 99.99999999% of pro-lifers are or how rare actual anti-abortion violence is); by that logic nobody should ever raise awareness of any scandal or crime with any potential to stir intense emotions (for instance, no matter what anyone thinks of Donald Trump, let’s not pretend Marcotte calling him and his supporters fascists isn’t similarly inflammatory).
Let’s also ignore any possible ulterior motives NAF might have… like, say, drawing attention away from their own role in the CMP videos, in which panelists at a NAF conference show a callousness toward dead children that would cast their business in a far less humanitarian light than the “women’s health” narrative.
Blackburn’s panel made this worse, by “accidentally” revealing the names of medical researchers in a memo that was easily accessed by the terrorist-minded elements of the anti-choice movement.
The conspiracy mongering is strong with this one. For those (somehow) stumped as to why the names of fetal tissue researchers would be kind of important to investigating fetal tissue research, read this from the Daily Signal’s Kelsey Harkness.
In honorable debates, when one party says things that turn out to be untrue, they incorporate updated information into their understanding of the issue and move on to different arguments. They don’t spend the next year knowingly repeating untrue things. But considering that demonstrable lies are the abortion lobby’s chief currency, Marcotte’s dishonesty should surprise no one.
