By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
I have never been involved in strategy sessions with a political party, so I have no inside knowledge about how talking points are put together and disseminated. But everyone understands that the primary objective is to provide representatives of the party with the positions they are to take when interviewed by the media.
It has struck me for some time now that another goal is to give the party’s rank and file a quick retort to use when an issue of concern to the party comes up around the water cooler and over the backyard fence.
I am sure that the Republicans engage in the effort as well, but the Democrats have been especially effective with this second objective over the past few decades. Permit me to offer some examples. When the story about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky was still in the rumor stages, I can remember liberal Democrats I worked with at the time reacting at first with disdain and unqualified denials.
They would say things like, “Come on: This is ridiculous, a smear. There is no way anything like that could have happened! The president with an intern in the White House? Give me a break!”
When Monica’s blue dress entered the picture, denial was no longer possible. So my colleagues changed their story in an instant. They began to repeat verbatim the things that James Carville and Lanny Davis had said on the talk shows. Their stock response became “Everybody lies about sex.” “Lewinsky was over 21.” “Sex is a private matter, unrelated to a public official’s performance in office.” And then they would refuse to discuss the matter further. The case was closed for them. They insisted that Clinton’s critics were “obsessed with sex” and “haters.” When any new evidence came up, they said it was “old news.”
I can remember the same phenomenon when it became clear that Susan Rice had been sent out to the Sunday morning talk shows to repeat a contrived story about the attack on our embassy in Libya being caused by an “anti-Islamic video.” When it became obvious that this explanation was implausible, I heard people in diners repeating with a straight face that there was no reason to assume any intent to deceive the public, because such confusion happens often in the “fog of war.”
I would have bet my bottom dollar that the people repeating this line had never used the term “fog of war” before in their lives. Now it was part of their vernacular. They heard Hillary Clinton’s apologists use the term, so they used it, too. And dismissed with a shrug anything anyone said after that.
In both instances, the discussion in the public square was successfully shaped by the talking points. Loyal Democrats were given a method with which to defend the party’s position and its leaders and defuse the issue.
The point is not that the use of talking points is unethical; not in and of itself. It depends upon whether the goal is to serve the truth or to deceive the public. I contend the manner in which supporters of Planned Parenthood are seeking to shape public opinion about the videos of their doctors talking about dismembering unborn babies and selling the body parts is in the latter category.
The talking points are deceptions, obfuscations, lies. The people who put together the talking points know that; they know that they are being devious, dishonest, Machiavellian, trying every trick in the book to save Planned Parenthood’s and the Democratic Party’s bacon.
By now, I am sure you have heard the line until it is coming out of your ears: They tell us that the tapes can’t be trusted because “they have been heavily edited.” Whenever a Democrat is asked about the gruesome admission by Planned Parenthood’s representatives that they perform abortions in such a manner as to “protect” the body parts of the aborted baby — for the purpose of selling them — they repeat the line over and over: “You can’t trust those tapes. They have been edited.” And then they move on, as if there is nothing more to discuss.
Just to refresh your memory about what was on the tapes, recorded by the pro-life group Center for Medical Progress:
Senior Director of Medical Services Dr. Deborah Nucatola, while talking to actors posing as buyers from a human biologics company, can be heard describing how Planned Parenthood handles the body parts of aborted fetuses. The buyers asked Nucatola, “How much of a difference can that actually make, if you know kind of what’s expected, or what we need?” Nucatola answered, “It makes a huge difference. I’d say a lot of people want liver. And for that reason, most providers will do this case under ultrasound guidance, so they’ll know where they’re putting their forceps.”
Nucatola continues, “We’ve been very good at getting heart, lung, liver, because we know that, so I’m not gonna crush that part, I’m gonna basically crush below, I’m gonna crush above, and I’m gonna see if I can get it all intact. And with the calvarium [the skull], in general, some people will actually try to change the presentation so that it’s not vertex. So if you do it starting from the breech presentation, there’s dilation that happens as the case goes on, and often, the last step, you can evacuate an intact calvarium at the end.”
Were the tapes edited? Of course. The pro-life group that taped Nucatola came up with hours of tape. They had to remove extraneous material — chitchat about the weather, the restaurant, the normal pleasantries when people meet for a business lunch. But, come on: How can editing have done anything to misrepresent what Nucatola thinks about what she does for Planned Parenthood? She said what she meant and meant what she said.
Perhaps if the group taping Nucatola had cut out her saying something like, “I am going to give you now a grotesque, totally false caricature of what people who oppose Planned Parenthood think we would say when asked about abortions” — that would make a difference. Or if they removed sections where she said, “You know, crazy right-wingers hate Planned Parenthood so much that if they made a movie about us, they would hire some actress who looked like a concentration camp guard to say something like the following. . . .” — that would have been unfair to Nucatola.
But that did not happen. Seriously, what else could they have edited out that resulted in Nucatola being misrepresented?
I searched the Internet to find an example of editing that supporters of Planned Parenthood found objectionable. All I came up with is the contention that statements were removed that indicated Planned Parenthood’s efforts to stay within the legal guidelines in regard to selling the body parts of aborted fetuses. Also, statements that illustrate the sale of the body parts was only a small portion of Planned Parenthood’s overall revenues.
But how are those qualifications relevant? The point is not that Planned Parenthood did not seek a way to escape prosecution when they sold the body parts of aborted children; we know they are devious. Or that Planned Parenthood did not make more money from killing the unborn children than from selling the body parts; that’s a given. What takes place in Planned Parenthood’s clinics is the issue, not the nature of their ancillary revenue stream.
The sad thing is that the talking points about the editing of the tapes appears to be working. Polls indicate that a majority of Americans favor continued taxpayer support for Planned Parenthood. The good guys don’t always win; at least in the short run.
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