Last updated on September 25th, 2023 at 01:47 pm
Speaker of the House John Boehner, in blind support to videos long proven to be pure fantasy, attacked President Obama yesterday in a tweet, claiming “President Obama’s blind support for this abortion business is indefensible.”
This “abortion business” has Republicans outraged to the extent that Carly Fiorina can invent incidents out of whole cloth that, bad as the videos are, are not even in the videos. And nobody challenges it. Not Republicans. Not the mainstream media. Democrats, to their credit, are standing with Planned Parenthood. Not only Obama, but Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.
Clinton, who has already shown herself ready to go toe to toe with Speaker John Boehner and his fellow House Republicans as they pursue their party’s War on Women, tweeted a message yesterday to Republicans to keep their hands off women’s healthcare – and the government as well:
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"Don’t attack women’s health care. And don’t shut down the government." Hillary's message to Republicans: pic.twitter.com/L7Uyb3vYmt
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) September 17, 2015
Appearing on The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer yesterday, Clinton condemned Boehner’s “emotionally, politically charged partisan attack” on Planned Parenthood:
Hillary to @SpeakerBoehner: Shutting down our government over a partisan attack on Planned Parenthood is just wrong.
https://t.co/m7ZEPnkjf6
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) September 17, 2015
Boehner meanwhile, released a statement yesterday that was blistering with false outrage, turning Planned Parenthood into another Benghazi, which, after all, is easy to do when both are fake scandals:
“Over the past three months, Americans have watched with shock as the grisly practices embraced by the abortion business have been exposed. When an organization dismembers and monetizes babies, we must all act. And so tomorrow the House will vote to defund this organization as our committees continue their work to get the whole truth, and make crystal clear that if you kill an infant born alive, you will be prosecuted.
“While the House prepares to take much-needed action, President Obama continues to hope this crisis will go away. He still has not watched these horrific videos, and his administration flatly dismisses any need for investigation. Such blind support for the abortion business is totally indefensible.
“Tomorrow I hope my colleagues in Congress will ignore the White House’s absurd veto threats, listen to the American people, and do the right thing. No organization that illegally harvests baby parts should receive taxpayer funds. And babies that survive abortions should get the same care provided to those born prematurely. This is about basic decency, and respect for all life.”
The House has already passed the Defund Planned Parenthood Act of 2015 (H.R. 3134), with President Obama has promised to veto, and the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act (H.R. 3504), which is another one of those Republican solutions to a problem that doesn’t exist.
Clinton, in contrast to Boehner’s hysteria, offered facts yesterday in response:
What this is about is the fact that some of the Planned Parenthood facilities perform abortions, which is legal under the laws of the United States.
I understand that the Republican Party, and particularly the candidates we heard from last night, wish that were not the case, wish that abortion were illegal and they could turn the clock back.
That’s it in a nutshell. They can’t change the law, but they can make abortion impossible by any underhanded means they can think of, including cutting women off from cancer screenings, contraceptives and other medical services just to get rid of abortion.
The Republican War on Women and on their health and reproductive rights has grown in intensity over this invented scandal to the extent that Republicans can simply invent horror stories about Planned Parenthood without inviting media scrutiny, and can even pass legislation to protect fetuses from threats that do not, in fact, exist.
And it is not like we do not have a plethora of problems the House could address – like what happens to those children Republicans demand be born:
Do you think it is moral that 20% of the children in this county are living in poverty? pic.twitter.com/Z1Cd6AUa0L
— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) September 15, 2015
Like Benghazi, these Republican responses to the fake Planned Parenthood scandal are not only, as Clinton has pointed out, hateful and dishonest, but a waste of time and taxpayer money, another means of diverting attention away from their failure over the past seven years to do a single damned thing, to create a single job, to provide healthcare, to provide anything at all Americans need and care about.
Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.
