lies, damned lies

[intertribal]

I'm coming to this a week late or thereabouts, but my friend Halley just told me about this today - Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), Senate Minority Whip, stated on the Senate floor that "If you want an abortion, you go to Planned Parenthood, and that’s well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does."  Actually, abortions are 3 percent of what Planned Parenthood does. 

CNN asked him what's up with that, and his office responded, "his remark was not intended to be a factual statement, but rather to illustrate that Planned Parenthood, a organization that receives millions of dollars in taxpayer funding, does subsidize abortions."  In fact, Planned Parenthood is not allowed to use taxpayer money for abortions (also in fact, I wouldn't give a damn if 90% of what they did was abortions), but whatever.  Facts!

So Stephen Colbert has a new twitter hash tag, #NotIntendedToBeAFactualStatement:

• "Once a year, Jon Kyl retreats to the Arizona Desert and deposits 2 million egg sacs under the sand."
• "John Kyl is 90% prune juice."
• "Jon Kyl has the world's most extensive catalogue of snuff films."
• "Jon Kyl assassinated Archduke Ferdinand."

Aside from validating my mother's statement that Arizona is "the prime wacko state" because their legislature decided to allow concealed and openly carried guns in public spaces on college campuses (I can only assume high school is next - those students gotta defend themselves or getting shot's on them!), this reminds me of the “Did Glenn Beck Murder and Rape a Young Girl in 1990?" hoax mocking Beck's habit of making crazy accusations preemptively framed as innocent questions, and the Rick Santorum redefinition as revenge for likening homosexual sex to incest and polygamy.  It's the Anonymous age. 

The problem of this twitter hash tag is that I think it risks spreading a joke without the punchline - this senator mixed up 3% with 90% in Congress in order to "demonize" an organization, so what the hell else is said in Congress that's blatantly incorrect but has been more efficiently streamlined into our political discourse?  I assume a whole bunch of statistics about military spending and UN dues and health care and taxes - and that people won't remember, but they will remember that John Kyl is 90% prune juice.

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

That is jawdroppingly, flabbergastingly.... I don't even know. Big Lie theory at work.

I like the 2 million egg sacs even better than the prune juice, actually.

--But yeah, to your point: that's the problem with Big Lies. Even when they're proved to be lies, they linger and linger.

[barry-king.livejournal.com]

...what the hell else is said in Congress that's blatantly incorrect but has been more efficiently streamlined into our political discourse?

What bothers me about the twitter campaign is that the issue of abortion as a right is being backhandedly undermined for the sake of ad hominem attack. If the right to safe termination of pregnancy is asserted, then it shouldn't matter if it's 3% or 90% of the organization's mandate. It's still a right. But if 90% is too much, but 3% is OK, then where does the thin end of the wedge begin?

Perhaps the semantics of inclusion have made the left wing soft on its own standards. But to me, it looks like a classic ratchet-argument, where the extremist always wins the day because the moderate re-iteratively "meets them halfway", until the moderate is holding to arguments they would never stand for, i.e. very close to those of the extremist.

Or maybe it's time to teach basic logic and rhetoric in schools again.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I agree. To be honest I didn't know what Planned Parenthood's statistics are, and when my friend was relating this story to me my face didn't change when 90% came up. Like I said, I wouldn't care if it was 100% of what PP did. And the backlash does have this sort of "how dare you, we don't like abortion THAT much" ring to it. IDK.