Destroyer of American jobs and GOP presidential candidate Carly Fiorina insists, with the kind of fervent madness that you get in someone who believes Jesus appears in tree bark and water stains on concrete, that she has viewed a scene in one of the anti-Planned Parenthood videos where one can "Watch 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.'" This supposedly happens, according to people who have seen all the videos, in the seventh one.
So the Rude Pundit watched it. It is disturbing as fucking hell. Of course it is. It's talking about medical procedures. Of course the doctors and lab technicians are inured to how gross it is and speak in blase', clinical tones about it. They have to or they couldn't do their jobs. And, technically, you do witness what Fiorina says. Except, as so many have pointed out, the fetus shown is a stillborn having some nerve reactions, and "fully-formed" is really a bit of a stretch.
The rest of the video relies on an interview with Holly O'Donnell, someone who didn't work at Planned Parenthood, who didn't witness any abortions, who heard a couple of things and said she saw an email. When the fetus is shown, we hear O'Donnell quoting a colleague at the lab where she worked, saying, "This is a really good fetus and it looks like we can procure a lot from it. We're going to procure brain." So they have to cut open the head, O'Donnell says. Again, it's disgusting, it's unpleasant, but it's not illegal and it's not the scene that Fiorina said she saw. Fiorina could have reasonably said that the Planned Parenthood videos had an emotional impact on her, but that, being a thinking, rational adult, she'd like more information.
Except she didn't do that. Confronted time and again with the fact, the indisputable, actual fact, that the scene she described doesn't exist, Fiorina has insisted that everyone else is a liar but her. On Facebook yesterday, she said, "[I]t's clear the video is of an aborted baby left to die in a metal tray kicking for life." Her source for this is a conservative website that is quoting a radical anti-choice group on what the footage is, although the group refuses to say where it got the images. Not only is it most definitely not "clear," even Fiorina admits that the words and the video are not of the same thing. We don't know what happened to the fetus that's shown.
If the footage was real, if Planned Parenthood was doing anything wrong, then perhaps, just maybe, one of the investigations of PPFA would have turned something up. Maybe there would be a document or two. Maybe there would be more witnesses willing to step forward. Because to believe Fiorina means that there would have to be a major conspiracy of silence going on among people who would have every financial and moral motive in the world not to stay silent. If a Planned Parenthood employee came forward with a stack of files and personally-witnessed testimony, that person would be treated like a Roman emperor by the anti-choice movement. The riches of the world and all the pussy and/or dick they wanted would be laid at their feet.
Instead, we get the pathetic sight of Fiorina's campaign scraping through the internet's sphincter to find something to justify the boss's lies. And that must be a shitty job for her staff. They already have to pretend that Fiorina did anything other than nearly destroy Hewlett-Packard. Besides her lies, she's just another odious conservative, crapping into the eager ears of the bullshit seekers. Today, she declared that waterboarding was just great and that NSA warrantless spying is dandy.
The New York Times has an article about the supposed "conflicted feelings" that feminist women are having about Fiorina, as if just her lack of a penis was enough to make her electable and that women are so stupid that they would think for a second about voting for her. On that count, let's give the final word here to Gloria Steinem, also on Facebook, who wrote after the GOP debate, "If you thought Republicans could find no woman more damaging to the diversity and needs of the female half of this country than Sarah Palin, take a good look at Carly Fiorina and what she stands for."
