It's been a little more than a week since a newly minted anti-choice group, the Center For Medical Progress, released a video allegedly showing a Planned Parenthood official describing how the organization harvests and sells organs from aborted fetuses via some sort of grisly black market. Within several hours, numerous websites laid bare the video's obviously deceptive editing and established the reality of what the Planned Parenthood official was actually describing. No, Planned Parenthood isn't doing what the video claims it's doing.
Anti-choice zealots refuse to admit that they have naively accepted a fraudulent video at face value, and without questioning any of the misleading or downright erroneous claims therein. Despite what they believe and what the video claims to show, Planned Parenthood, along with numerous other organizations, routinely donates fetal tissue to various biomedical research facilities in order to help save lives. Full stop. Planned Parenthood is reimbursed for travel and shipping expenses, but it makes no profit from the transaction, otherwise they wouldn't be donations. Everything that occurs in the video is perfectly legal, and authorized by the women who undergo the also-legal procedure in the first place.
The Center for Medical Progress video is a provable, objectively determined fraud, and yet conservatives really, really believe it's everything it claims to be. They want it so badly to be real, they're burying what's left of their already minuscule credibility under an ocean of denial.
In the process, many characters on the far-right have completely steamrolled Godwin's Law, then backed over it again just to make sure it was dead. Indeed, they're saying Planned Parenthood -- which is responsible for actually preventing abortions by providing contraceptive care, not to mention affordable cancer screenings and the like -- is just like Nazis.
Take, for example, Erick Erickson on Planned Parenthood's president Cecile Richards:
[embedtweet id="623673325328314369"]
Rush Limbaugh also mentioned Mengele, then continued:
They're advocating pregnant women to go and have their babies' body parts harvested. [...]
We as a country went to war to stop another country that was in effect doing things like this. It was World War II and it was Adolf Hitler and the Germans. We have not become that. We may have pockets of our perverted, sick culture that have become that. But it's not who we are. It's not who the majority of the country is.
Fox News Channel's Sean Hannity said the process was similar to "the things you'd expect to hear from a high-ranking official in the Nazi regime." Glenn Beck's The Blaze published an article that compared Planned Parenthood to Auschwitz:
But I suppose our perpetual "shock" at Planned Parenthood is kind of like the viewer who watches a documentary about Auschwitz and comes away calling it "eye opening." In one sense it is, but in another, it ought not be. This was a place where Nazis murdered human beings in bulk.
And Red State's Steve Berman bluntly stated:
Abortion is as evil as genocide. Planned Parenthood is as evil as the Nazis in the way they defend it.
The real question for everyone condemning the video is quite simple: Would you rather Planned Parenthood dump the fetal remains into the medical waste-bin? If so, why? At least with medical research, the tissue has a chance to cure diseases and, you know, save lives. Why are Erick Erickson and Rush Limbaugh against finding a cure for Parkinson's or Alzheimer's? Obviously because they're so uncorked with volcanic rage that they'll never be able to see the tissue donation process as anything but just like Hitler. In order to do so, they'd have to acknowledge what's really happening in the first place, permanently checking their ludicrous Nazi-mongering and accepting that their awful little video is a fabrication. But they clearly have no intention of doing that any time soon.
Really, I don't know why I'm so shocked how thoroughly the far-right was sucked by the video. They're the world's biggest fiction fans.
- They believed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
- They believe the California drought is caused by abortion.
- Likewise, the believe the scientific consensus on the climate crisis is a hoax. (Science is fake, but God's wrath is legitimate.)
- They can't stop screeching about some sort of conspiracy and cover-up surrounding the attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.
- They refuse to acknowledge that the budget deficit has dropped from $1.4 trillion in 2009 to $468 billion by the end of this year.
- They believe Congress is exempt from Obamacare when, in fact, Congress is required by law to use Obamacare if members want employer-based health insurance.
- The libertarian wing of the party seriously believes that a completely unproven objectivist system would actually work in a complex society without entirely collapsing the system.
- And way too many Republicans, including Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump, believes President Obama's birth certificate was falsified.
Is it any wonder they've been fished in by this phony-baloney video, not to mention the spate of fake videos that preceded it? It's not easy to find a lengthier conga-line of true believers, short of the children lined up to meet a mall Santa. As for the Nazi crap, it's one step removed from invoking "neener-neener." When their childish devotion to fiction is combined with the usual argument-ending Nazi metaphors, is it any wonder why their current frontrunner is a transparently bewigged reality-show stooge who's successfully blowing up the party from within?
Shares