Earlier this week, former Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina endorsed ex-competitor Ted Cruz for the GOP nomination, deeming him “a fearless fighter for our constitutional rights” who “has spent his life protecting Americans’ God-given liberties, and he has always stood by his word.”
This alliance hasn’t gone unnoticed by the abortion lobby.
At ThinkProgress, Emily Atkin’s report on the event proclaims Fiorina “Planned Parenthood’s worst enemy,” repeats the smear that her attacks on Planned Parenthood were “untrue,” and quotes a PP official painting her and Cruz as two propagandizing peas in a pod:
“Like a moth to the flame, Carly Fiorina continues to gravitate toward the biggest liar in the room,” Dawn Laguens, Planned Parenthood Action Fund’s executive vice president, said in a statement. “Fiorina spent her whole campaign lying about Planned Parenthood, embarrassingly ignoring fact checker after fact checker, and leading to a candidacy-killing drop in the polls. It’s no surprise she endorsed Ted Cruz. Together, they have created an echo chamber of lies that very seriously threatens the health and well-being of women in this country.”
First, you’ve gotta love how pro-aborts can’t help but tie political fortunes to their political preferences, no matter how nonsensical. Even if taking a tough line against Planned Parenthood was a general election liability (it isn’t), we’re not even in the general. The entire point of the primary is to appeal to the largest number of people who disagree with the other party on issues like abortion. And by Laguens’s logic, if she and Cruz are so similar that they form a hated “echo chamber,” he should be out of the race by now, too.
Second, the only lying here comes from Laguens and Atkin. As we’ve detailed before, this whole meme is based on Fiorina daring Hillary Clinton to watch the Center for Medical Progress undercover videos showing 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 in question contains testimony from ex-StemExpress technician and whistleblower Holly O’Donnell. In the video, O’Donnell recounts how she witnessed precisely what Fiorina described. The video also shows footage of another fetus, taken from a different intact-delivery abortion, used for illustrative purposes.
From that conflation of those two elements of the clip – a mild instance of misremembering that doesn’t even change the relevant event (which Planned Parenthood’s defenders have not even tried to debunk) – has grown the fiction that Fiorina was a liar, based on nothing more than the fact that other people said so. Never mind multiple reports and analyses (including those done by abortion-friendly outlets) which have failed to substantiate the sister claim of “deceptive editing.”
Nor has Cruz lied about Planned Parenthood. He has repeatedly pledged to not only defund, but also to prosecute the organization as president, calling it a “national criminal enterprise.” And despite the apologists’ caterwauling, there is every reason to believe PP is precisely that.
As my colleague Kristi Burton Brown has covered in great detail, the CMP footage shows Planned Parenthood officials in their own words alluding to multiple crimes they are either already committing or open to committing. These potential crimes include profiting from baby body parts, altering abortion procedures to obtain parts in ideal condition, performing partial-birth abortions, and informing abortionists when the particular baby they’re killing is being scavenged for parts (not to mention their litany of health violations and history of Medicaid fraud unrelated to the CMP bombshells).
Sure, pro-aborts love to repeat to themselves endlessly that Planned Parenthood has been exonerated, but make-believe only gets you so far. The truth is that our current Justice Department isn’t interested in figuring out what really happened. The state where most of the damning footage was taken, California, never even investigated. And the latest “proof” that PP’s in the clear – the Harris County, TX grand jury declining to prosecute them and going after CMP instead – stinks to high heaven:
Did the prosecutor even present the Planned Parenthood case to the grand jury? The AP has reported that the jury never took a vote on Planned Parenthood. Did the prosecutor even give the grand jury a chance to vote to indict Planned Parenthood officials or, maybe, the prosecutor redirected the grand jury to focus on Daleiden and Merritt instead? It seems as if Anderson is using the grand jury as a scapegoat for what, in actuality, falls within her prosecutorial discretion.
Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry are pushing this narrative because Cruz and Fiorina refuse to be impressed by PP’s lies, denials, and self-righteousness. Make no mistake: it’s not indignation that causes Team Abortion to lash out like this, but fear.
