"No More Baby Parts."

If the "mainstream media" is to be believed, Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood shooter, Robert Dear, said "No more baby parts," when he was finally taken into custody after his violent rampage.  But, why, whatever could he have meant by that, do you suppose? Maybe he was just down to the clinic to borrow a cup of baby parts and found they were all out?  Maybe he was building a Frankenstein-esque creature and got peeved at the glut of juvenile bits on the market? Maybe he was misheard and was unhappy with "A. B. parts."

As Sherlock Holmes might have said, if he were prone to using my vernacular, if every other possibility is so fucking stupid and fanciful that you'd have to be a lying bastard to propose them, you should consider the evidence staring you in the face.

And it might just sound a little self-serving if one admits that Dear was a domestic terrorist, as Gov. Mike Huckabee has, but then plays victim by saying it especially harms the pro-life folks. Does this make the anti-abortion people really look bad? Do they need much help, there? And the knee-slapper is, this is the guy who was going to use the US military to forcibly close health clinics. It's "domestic terrorism" if you are a DIY-type. If you're president, you do what you want!

Failed tech-CEO Carly Fiorina takes a slightly different tack--it's just "typical left-wing tactics" to blame anti-abortion rhetoric for violent actions.  How dare we connect those dots in chronological order! This was the candidate, mind you, who imagined a scenario that wasn't even in the highly-edited videos who had to go on to produce one yet more lurid. Which we are not supposed to find incendiary or deceitful in the least, mind you.

Now, a handful of people are just looking at this guy's criminal records and immediately dismissing him as a lunatic. Mental illness is a spectrum, charges against this miscreant were regularly dismissed, and the things he was accused of weren't necessarily out of bounds for people who are considered perfectly sane. Being antisocial or even sociopathic doesn't exclude this person from having political views. People have made note of the fact that Colorado Springs is the headquarters for Focus on the Family. The founding member, Dr. James Dobson, justified both wife-beating and animal abuse.  (Not that I'm saying Dear was influenced by Focus on the Family, at all, at all--after all, he wasn't originally from Colorado Springs. He was from North Carolina. Where Eric Rudolph was found holed up. And there's some folks to this day who consider Rudolph a folk hero. )


I'm not even going to touch the statements of Senator Ted Cruz or his Operation Rescue endorser, Troy Newman. 

The "baby parts" videos, from the beginning, are about a very specific and legal donation of fetal tissue for research purposes. These donations have been occurring for years, and are not about "baby parts". Fetuses are not "babies" and their "parts" are not being sold in some kind of ghoulish money-making endeavor. Up until recently, Planned Parenthood was only reimbursed handling fees, and I've always maintained it was idiotic, all things considered, to suppose otherwise. And yet several GOP candidates, even those supposed to be moderates, deliberately misunderstood what the issue was about for political purposes.

Yes, if you spread propaganda that wee little babies are being hacked-up and sold off to the highest bidder so that limousine Liberals in the genocide for hire business can roll in the dough, maybe there will be consequences. Maybe the upcoming House Select Committee on Planned Parenthood might want to reconsider their particularly useless charges. But let's not dismiss the possibility that words mean things, and people act on those things, whether they are true or not.