Republicans just love to tell lies about Planned Parenthood, and on Thursday House Speaker Paul Ryan announced the GOP would defund the women’s heath care organization, which has long been a dream of far right members of Congress who want to expand the Republican War on Women.
But yesterday on CNN, when former GOP Congressman Jack Kingston tried to fill the air with talking points and propaganda, he was slapped down by Democratic strategist Paul Begala.
Kingston began by saying that his home state of Georgia has:
“274 women’s health clinics that don’t do abortions [that] are Medicaid eligible. Women who want to get birth control advice and gynecological advice and anything that they need to get from Planned Parenthood, they can get from one of these 274 clinics.”
Then he muddied the waters further by declaring:
“And there’s no abortion debate. If we give [Planned Parenthood] money for a building and they build a building which eventually does house abortion operations and procedures, how is that money [non-]fungible?”
Begala dropped some major wisdom on Kingston by correcting him for the lie he had just told:
“We don’t give them money for buildings.There is no line item in the federal budget, Jack, that says, ‘Here’s money for Planned Parenthood.’ What we do is—through Medicaid—reimburse poor women.
“And it’s a little bit of a red herring to say they can go to 200 other clinics in your state of Georgia. Twenty-one percent of the counties in which Planned Parenthood operates, they’re the only women’s health center there. And so what happens is— just so you know— 97 percent of what they do is non-abortion; it is STD’s, it is cancer screening, it’s birth control.”
Kingston then declared that Planned Parenthood should get out of offering abortions altogether, and that led Begala to again drop a truth bomb on him:
“What you’re doing is condemning millions of poor women to having unwanted pregnancies, or cancer, or STDs. I mean this is a public health crisis.”
Wanna know why the GOP is so eager to cut funding for Planned Parenthood? It’s really quite simple: Because it serves communities and populations they know will never ever vote for them. It’s political calculus of the most craven and cynical kind. And it will backfire on them.
Featured Image Via CNN Screengrab
