By DEXTER DUGGAN
What more must the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) reveal in its Planned Parenthood sting videos before the Republican Party grows a spine? Having chosen the fetal position itself, the GOP should have gestated some backbone by now.
Since the videos began to be released on a general weekly schedule in mid-July, viewers have seen a march of horrors of aborted babies having their organs cruelly harvested reminiscent of National Socialist Germany, except it’s not Adolf Hitler’s treasury that makes the money off this.
Having destroyed the babies’ lives as worthless, abortionists turn right around and sell the valuable organs they needed to survive for profit. But grown-up Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) seemed as helpless as the babies themselves to stop the assaults. What more is needed to bestir McConnell?
The hapless Senate leader’s reputation, and his party’s, are going up in smoke, but he whimpers that he can’t get a fire extinguisher until at least 60 senators agree to let him ask for one. And even then, Barack Obama will say no, so what’s the use?
To spur McConnell into action, do CMP videos need to show Obama personally performing partial-birth abortions to obtain ingredients for hors d’oeuvres at a White House dinner honoring PP President Cecile Richards?
The ninth video, released September 1, continued the line of heartless chatter by baby-parts procurement specialists about their dreadful world of infants with their abdomens ripped open because that’s the first thing the abortionists can grab, of intact babies simply dropping out of the birth canal, and of giving preference to abortion instead of childbirth because that’s how to obtain the baby organs.
“Now they’re trying to make abortion illegal and that’s where we get our tissue,” said one procurer. “The whole point is not to have a live birth.”
The video goes into further detail on payment arrangements for organ harvesting, including comments that abortuary officials would receive a fee in order to ensure access to their clinic for a certain procurer.
A September 1 CMP news release cited the CEO of the StemExpress procurement company, Cate Dyer, saying that another procurer, Advanced Bioscience Resources (ABR), “would pay an ‘advisor fee’ to a clinic manager or director in order to preserve their exclusive right to harvest fetal tissue at that location.”
The conservative Washington Free Beacon website tried to follow up on the statement that one of ABR’s big customers is the U.S. National Institutes of Health, making purchases with taxpayer money.
The Free Beacon reported on September 1: “An NIH spokeswoman declined to comment on the use of taxpayer money for buying baby parts, saying she was ‘not an expert.’ The NIH did not return email inquiries into what the body parts were used for or if the government intended to maintain its relationship with companies that traffic baby organs.”
No sooner did the ninth CMP video appear than word spread on news sites that Senate leader McConnell had just told a Kentucky television station, WYMT, that because Obama favors abortion, the nation must wait until a new president enters the White House in 2017 before a half-billion dollars in annual tax funding can be cut off to PP.
But what if the new president is another pro-abortion radical, like Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders, because voters gave up on hoping for results from Republicans? Do we cut the funds in 2021, Mitch? 2025? The fourth millennium?
It seemed to be the classic GOP tactic guaranteed to fail: No tough legislative bargaining, no publicity pressure to make Democrat politicians ashamed to fund the torture of babies, no confronting a lying, lawless president who shouldn’t even show his face in public, no round of rallies, news conferences, and other events to build anti-funding momentum. Just sagging Republican shoulders shrugging in depression and defeat.
Is it any wonder a brash surprise like Donald Trump quickly started to win many Republicans’ support when he sprang on the presidential scene in June, proclaiming can-do, not surrender and collapse?
In the 2014 campaign, McConnell was among GOP leaders who said that once Republicans held the majority, a new day would arrive. So voters gave them the majority, and, month after month in 2015, GOP congressional leaders proceeded to do what radical left-wing Democrat Obama wanted them to do instead.
There’s disaffection because Republicans have held both the U.S. Senate and House for eight months but people don’t see conservative results, Washington Post reporter James Hohmann told the September 1 Hugh Hewitt national radio program.
“The Right Scoop” conservative blog said on September 1: “McConnell says the votes just aren’t there to defund Planned Parenthood, and he apparently isn’t willing to fight for it at all. . . . This is the problem with the Republican Party. They control both the House and the Senate, yet they concede to the demands of Obama without even a fight, all because he has a veto pen? What a joke.”
However, McClatchy news service reported from Washington on September 1: “Lawmakers such as Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) a Republican presidential candidate, and Cong. Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) have indicated a willingness to use the upcoming budget debates to press for defunding Planned Parenthood.”
The story continued: “‘If the president and the Democrats think it’s more important for Planned Parenthood to get your tax dollars than to fund the rest of the government, then they will be to blame for any (government) shutdown that occurs,’ Ken Cuccinelli, president of the Senate Conservatives Fund, told McClatchy. . . .”
After the third CMP video had been released, longtime Washington conservative observer Wesley Pruden suggested that Capitol Hill politicians didn’t really give a darn, but they had to go through the motions to make constituents think they were concerned.
In his “Pruden on Politics” column in The Washington Times, he wrote: “The latest disclosures about Planned Parenthood’s body-parts sales have been only an annoyance in Congress, where senators put the back of a delicate and well-manicured hand to a brow and cry, ‘Heaven forfend!’ pretending to be shocked! Shocked!”
The Hill national political news site quoted McConnell telling the Kentucky TV station on August 31: “The president’s made it very clear that he’s not going to sign any bill that includes defunding of Planned Parenthood, so that’s another issue that awaits a new president, hopefully with a different point of view about Planned Parenthood.”
Although Obama has shown he’ll do whatever lawbreaking he wants to attain his agenda, McConnell seemed to think the political process works as it always has, as the Senate majority leader rather tediously explained that “I would remind all of your viewers the way you make a law in this country, the Congress has to pass it and the president has to sign it.”
If Obama lacks respect for congressional authority and McConnell himself, the reason may be that the majority leader’s defeatism and passivity serve to lead Obama to no other conclusion about his own supremacy.
After Planned Parenthood was thrown back on its heels that someone would actually challenge some of its lawbreaking, it hired Fusion GPS, an opposition-research group tied to liberal Democrats, to produce a report, released on August 27, attacking the CMP videos. How convenient.
Now, if some conservative group aired a video of, say, Obama announcing he had just surrendered U.S. military supremacy to Communist China, would the White House take a month and a half before issuing an “analysis” about the inaccuracy of such a video? Or would it rush Obama into a news conference to deny it immediately?
But PP hasn’t trotted out its executives babbling away in the CMP videos to proclaim their inaccuracy at news conferences.
And, as blogger Matt Walsh wrote at TheBlaze website on August 28, even if the videos turned out to be entirely false, no one, not even PP, denies that it aborts about one-third of a million infants every year. Walsh wrote:
“No matter what — even if the videos used computer animation and special effects and the Planned Parenthood officials were actually Tom Cruise wearing realistic masks like in Mission Impossible — we still know that Planned Parenthood kills over 300,000 human beings a year. That’s established. Nobody denies it.
“The defunding of Planned Parenthood should still proceed, even if this all turns out to be an elaborate and morbid Broadway production, because no civilized country should fund the murder of human beings. Period,” Walsh wrote.
On August 31, CMP issued its own report on the “analysis.” CMP began: “On August 27, Planned Parenthood released what they claimed was a ‘forensic analysis’ report on CMP’s published investigative footage. In reality, the report is a pseudoscientific production by Fusion GPS, a political opposition-research company that has no forensic certifications.
“While the report, which contains multiple errors, set out to delegitimize CMP’s video evidence, it only provides evidence of the opposite: the report admits that ‘This analysis did not reveal widespread evidence of substantive video manipulation’ and that it ‘shows no evidence of audio manipulation’,” CMP wrote.
Nonetheless, PP’s liberal media pals claimed that Fusion GPS had discredited the videos.
An Honest Story
In an August 31 interview, California conservative commentator Barbara Simpson told The Wanderer that these media “will report it the way they want to report it. . . . The media don’t want Planned Parenthood to be seen as ‘guilty’ of these horrendous acts.”
Simpson worked for decades in television and radio in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Regarding accusations that CMP edited its videos, she recalled learning as a new reporter that even extensive footage shot in the field has to be edited for airtime.
“I just let it roll. I used way too much film,” Simpson said of an early experience. But when she returned to the television station, she was told, “I had to cut it down to three minutes.”
No matter how much editing is needed, “you have to tell an honest story,” she added.
Although some media members may say details in the CMP videos are too disturbing to cover, Simpson said, media have shown great fascination with publicizing such serial killers as Chicago rapist John Wayne Gacy, convicted of 33 murders of young males. Gacy was executed by lethal injection in 1994.
Planned Parenthood uses “a lot of taxpayer dollars to do what they’re doing,” Simpson said. “And they’re still murdering human beings.”
In a separate case, an Obama-appointed federal judge in San Francisco, William Orrick, is considering whether to permanently enjoin the CMP from releasing footage it may have shot at gatherings of the National Abortion Federation (NAF).
Orrick is strongly pro-abortion and bundled campaign contributions for Obama.
Conducting Investigations
Katie Short, an attorney for CMP, told The Wanderer in an August 31 email: “The August 27 date for Judge Orrick to decide whether to turn the temporary restraining order into a permanent injunction was delayed. Actually, it has been delayed a couple of times and, right now, there is no date for that hearing at all.
“The parties are in a dispute about discovery, and this entailed moving back the date for the preliminary injunction hearing, because the judge and NAF believe it is necessary for NAF to get discovery from the defendants before ruling. . . .
“Meanwhile, the attorneys general from four states have weighed in and asked the court not to prevent the release of any enjoined materials to their agencies or any other law-enforcement agencies for purposes of conducting investigations,” Short said.
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