At California Debate… Fiorina Proves Timorous Consultants Wrong About Facing Abortion Issue

By DEXTER DUGGAN

If Carly Fiorina ends up as the Republican Party’s presidential nominee in 2016, being the first woman to shatter that particular glass ceiling, it’d be a major achievement for the California business executive, but perhaps not her biggest one.
That achievement might have occurred on September 16, at the second GOP presidential hopefuls’ debate, at the Air Force One Pavilion at California’s Reagan Presidential Library, when Fiorina defied many political consultants’ caution. She made a full-throated attack against Planned Parenthood’s viciousness and in defense of innocent preborn babies.
Various GOP contenders have made firm pro-life declarations through the years, but this was at a crucial moment in a vital forum, when aspiring presidential neophyte Fiorina had everything to win. Or lose.
Ronald Reagan himself had played a notable role as president three decades ago when calling for the protection of unborn babies from permissive abortion.
But, when hundreds of thousands of pro-lifers gathered annually at the January March for Life in Washington, D.C., Reagan repeatedly spoke to them only through a sound system from the nearby White House — as if actually showing his face among pro-life posters and banners would be an image too politically perilous.
However, Fiorina faced a potentially hostile audience seated right in front of her at the Reagan Library in mid-September — in addition to putting herself boldly on record before 23 million viewers, an unprecedented figure for debate sponsor CNN.
Before the debate began, CNN commentator Michael Smerconish said, “This is not an evangelical crowd” at the library.
National radio talk host Laura Ingraham, who was in that crowd, commented two days later on her program that much of the debate audience was big donors, not ordinary people.
This was a gathering that would hate hearing about “conservative social issues,” according to decades of timorous GOP consultants. However, strong applause for Fiorina began rolling through that audience even before she finished denouncing Planned Parenthood’s cruelty as demonstrated in the series of sting videotapes from the California-based Center for Medical Progress.
According to tons of conventional cant, Fiorina should have been chased from the stage that night amid groans and sighs that would end her candidacy. Instead, she improved her standing.
“As regards Planned Parenthood,” Fiorina said, “anyone who has watched this videotape, I dare Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama to watch these tapes. 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 is about the character of our nation, and if we will not stand up and force President Obama to veto this bill, shame on us.”
Fiorina didn’t mean she actually hoped Obama would veto a bill that excludes abortion giant PP from tax funding, but that Obama’s pro-abortion extremism should be highlighted by offering him a budget bill to sign that didn’t provide such funding, which Obama warned Congress not to send him.
For decades, national GOP leaders mostly have cowered rather than challenge the abortion industry, allowing and encouraging its brutality to expand. Protecting babies from being poisoned, sliced, and ripped apart supposedly was such a controversial stand that the GOP dare not speak up, and certainly not before the donor class.
Yet, when big donors were confronted with facts about the barbarity, they loudly supported the woman who made them face this. Later that evening, the plain-spoken Fiorina was judged to be the clear winner of the debate.
Washington Examiner commentator Byron York reported on September 17 that neither Fiorina nor her surrogates went to the “spin room” after the debate to brag of her performance, although the other candidates all were represented there.
York said that when he asked if her absence was intentional, a top aide to Fiorina replied, “Yep. Mic drop.”
For those unfamiliar with the term “mic drop,” York explained it meant a performance so awesome that there’s nothing more to say, so the performer in essence just drops the microphone onto the floor. “So Team Fiorina’s post-debate silence was a sure sign the candidate was happy,” York wrote.
On September 21, The Washington Post reported that a new poll showed Fiorina jumping into second spot in the GOP presidential contest, “after her strong performance in last week’s debate.” A few weeks earlier, Fiorina barely registered with many voters.
Fiorina wasn’t the only Republican criticizing PP at the debate — Ted Cruz said the videos show “an ongoing criminal enterprise,” although GOP leaders “preemptively surrender” to Obama — but she made the strongest statement.
Candidates Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, and Chris Christie also favored defunding. Most of the time at the debate, not every candidate was asked the same questions.

A Common Journalistic
Technique

For years media leftists have smilingly tolerated brazen lie after brazen lie from Obama, but the GOP debate was hardly over when tendentious media pro-abortionists declared there was no such video that Fiorina had described.
In fact, video interviewee Holly O’Donnell, a former California baby-parts procurement worker, explicitly described how she cut open the face of a well-developed baby boy at a Planned Parenthood clinic to obtain his brain, while footage of a different surviving aborted baby boy was shown in a metal pan as he died.
Wall Street Journal “Best of the Web” columnist James Taranto posted on September 21 that “Fiorina was accurately describing what she saw in the video. The worst one can say is that she appears to have mistaken the baby in the footage for the one the technician describes having cut up. And perhaps one can fault the video makers for creating that impression, but it seems to us the Federalist (website) is correct when it observes that ‘illustrating stories with appropriate images is a common journalistic technique, one used by all media outlets’.”
In a typically inaccurate criticism, The New York Times’ Alan Rappeport posted on September 17: “The video that Mrs. Fiorina seems to be referring to does show a still image of a fetus being held outside of the womb. But it is not seen squirming as Mrs. Fiorina describes. . . . There is no indication that the fetus pictured is about to have its brain removed, as the video implies.”
Rappeport ignored the image of the dying aborted baby moving an arm and a leg in the metal pan, and he ignored the fact O’Donnell described in detail that she harvested a baby boy’s brain at a Planned Parenthood clinic.
In a September 20 telephone interview, former southern California conservative GOP Cong. Robert Dornan told The Wanderer that if Fiorina had quoted O’Donnell about taking the scissors and cutting through the baby’s face, “that would have been just as effective.”
Dornan added later that “people have been progressively watching” the various PP videos as they’re released, are familiar with them, and know that Fiorina was almost entirely accurate in her description. “So her narration in substance is true.”
He said he believes Fiorina is sincere in her strong opposition to abortion, and has a “wonderful focus that the enemy is Hillary (Clinton)” on the abortion issue. “This is Hillary’s Achilles heel, or it should be, her full-throated defense of Planned Parenthood.”
The early death of Fiorina’s stepdaughter made her more sensitive to the value of life, Dornan said. “I think the death of her stepdaughter was a heartbreaking situation” that helps explain her sincerity in opposing abortion.
Clinton “is a one-issue candidate, and the Democrat Party is a one-issue party,” considering their emphasis on defending and promoting abortion, Dornan told The Wanderer.
Media pro-abortionists didn’t seem a bit concerned about Hillary Clinton’s inaccuracy when she lied about reasons for late abortions as she defended abortion throughout pregnancy shortly after the GOP debate. The Orlando Sentinel posted on September 20:
“Asked about a Senate vote to ban late-term abortions, Clinton said those abortions take place because of medical necessity. ‘Therefore, I would hate to see the government interfering with that decision,’ she added. ‘This gets back to whether you respect a woman’s right to choose or not. And I think that’s what this whole argument, once again, is about’.”
At the Reagan Library debate, candidate Mike Huckabee stood up for traditional moral values and said he’d like to see a time when “abortion would be no more. It would be as much a scourge of the past as slavery.”
Wall Street Journal columnist Taranto pointed out that shortly after the debate, pro-abortion New York Times columnist Paul Krugman denied that brains are harvested. “Anti-abortion activists have claimed that such things happen, but have produced no evidence, just assertions mingled with stock footage of fetuses,” Krugman spouted.
That’s what happens to the Times’ writers’ own minds when they believe the fantasies their paper regularly devises to protect massive permissive abortion.
If Krugman had any idea of what’s in the videos, he’d know baby-parts procurers openly speak of shipping babies’ intact heads and obtaining their brains.
On September 15, the conservative Washington Free Beacon website cited some remarks directly from PP officials about organ harvesting in the newly released tenth video:
“ ‘They want cardiac or they want eyes or they want neural,’ said Dr. Carolyn Westhoff, a Planned Parenthood medical adviser, as she held a plastic cup of wine. ‘People want spinal cords. So I mean, that sort of thing. Certainly everything we provide — oh, gonads. Oh my God, gonads. Everything we provide is fresh’.”
As for the supposed innocence of PP activities, the Free Beacon quoted Vanessa Cullins, vice president for external medical affairs at Planned Parenthood Federation of America, saying in the video, “This could destroy your company and us if we don’t time those conversations correctly.”
Staff at the Federalist website posted on September 18: “The media have consistently failed to cover the Planned Parenthood footage, and now they are covering up the truth. The reality is that babies of the same gestational age are having their organs harvested every day.
“These videos feature graphic footage of abortionists mangling babies to harvest organs to sell. They feature abortionists admitting that babies often survive those abortions. They show high-level Planned Parenthood officials encouraging this organ-harvesting scheme, acknowledged that it is happening, and attempting to skirt scrutiny from it,” the Federalist wrote.