NYT Editorial: Vindication for Planned Parenthood (and my comment posted to it)

[markpkessinger]

Here is a comment I posted to the editorial (a link to and excerpt of the editorial follows after my comment):

[font size=3]Mark P. Kessinger[/font] New York, NY

It is certainly past time for politicians to back off their attacks on Planned Parenthood. But isn't it time also to ask why we continue to allow these scams involving videos that purport to show wrongdoing by some agency or official, videos produced by activists with a known agenda, to be perpetrated on the American public? Isn't it time to call out media outlets who run with these stories, at face value, without undertaking their own independent investigation of their veracity? And is it not time to demand accountability from politicians who opportunistically seize upon any video that surfaces, irrespective of its source and before knowing whether or not what is presented is accurate, in furtherance of a political agenda, wasting millions of taxpayers' dollars on pointless investigations that serve no public purpose, but merely provide a vehicle for political posturing?

The Planned Parenthood "baby parts" scam followed, play for play, the game plan that was used to falsely discredit ACORN and to slander Shirley Sherrod: (1) a person with a known, right-wing agenda comes forward with a selectively and misleadingly edited video; (2) one media outlet runs with it with no attempt to ascertain the truth of the story; and (3) Republican politicians immediately demand expensive investigations aimed not so much at discerning the truth of the video, but at smearing the person or organization targeted by the video. How many times must we go through this?

And here is the excerpt of the editorial itself:

[font size=5]Vindication for Planned Parenthood[/font]
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD - JAN. 26, 2016

One after the other, investigations of Planned Parenthood prompted by hidden-camera videos released last summer have found no evidence of wrongdoing. On Monday, a grand jury in Harris County, Tex., went a step further. Though it was convened to investigate Planned Parenthood, it indicted two members of the group that made the videos instead.

The Harris County prosecutor, Devon Anderson, a Republican who was asked by the lieutenant governor, a strident opponent of Planned Parenthood, to open the criminal investigation, said on Monday that the grand jurors had cleared Planned Parenthood of any misconduct.

Yet despite all the evidence, Texas’ Republican governor, Greg Abbott, said on Monday that the state attorney general’s office and the State Health and Human Services Commission would continue investigating Planned Parenthood. This is a purely political campaign of intimidation and persecution meant to destroy an organization whose mission to serve women’s health care needs the governor abhors.

Fortunately, in the Harris County case, the jurors considered the facts. David Daleiden, the director of the Center for Medical Progress, which released the videos, and Sandra Merritt, an employee, were indicted on felony charges of tampering with governmental records, probably connected to their alleged use of fake driver’s licenses to get into a Planned Parenthood office.

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[BillZBubb]

1. Congrats, Mark. Good letter.

Reminding people of the other abuses was fantastic.

[spanone]

2. also, marsha blackburn chairs a congressional witch hunt in the house....

K&R..

[Scurrilous]

3. K & R

[Liberal_Dog]

4. K & R