As the media mouthpiece for the anti-choice movement and the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, Fox News has been unwavering in its support for opposition to the HHS birth control mandate which has exempted churches and provided a mechanism by which religious non-profits and educational institutions can invoke their exemption to allow their insurance carriers to cover the cost of birth control. In promoting the bishop's position, Fox News has promoted their claim that the mandate covers abortion inducing drugs including emergency contraception which is only considered an "abortifacient" by the Catholic Church and not the medical community. (It prevents ovulation) On January 4th, Fox host and GOP hack Jeanine Pirro kept the lie going - by my count from only the programs that I reviewed - for the *11th time.
She and Michael Hiltzik (the LA Times) discussed the newest cause celebre for Fox News; i.e the Little Sisters of the Poor, a religious group who are refusing to sign the paperwork which authorizes their exemption from the birth control mandate. The issue is propaganda gold for Fox News. It allows them to validate the position of the Catholic Church about how the mandate violates their religious freedom and provides them with an opportunity to promote the right wing meme that the president is anti-Catholic and - true story - has put the nuns on his enemies list. Last week, during her discussion with an anti-choice Catholic priest, Pirro pushed the narrative. It also burnishes Fox's anti-choice creds.
During her interview with Hiltzik, Pirro disputed his claim that the nuns case has no basis. She went on a rant about how the president is being abusive to poor nuns who take care of the poor (not exactly a group high on the Fox priority list). She brayed about how this infringes on - wait for it - religious liberty. As she did in her interview with Fr. Murray, she accused the President of lying to the Catholic Church when he "promised" them that he wouldn't "force those with religious objections to provide contraception to employees, which of course is contrary to their fundamental beliefs and their exercise of their religion." (Pirro obviously ignoring the compromise made by the administration) And she deftly worked in the lie that the evil Catholic hating President is forcing the little nuns to pay for abortions:
"In spite of your promise, you are spending millions in legal fees to force the Little Sisters of the Poor, who spend their lives serving the sick and the elderly, to provide contraception, sterilization, and abortifacients to their employees."
One more time - Emergency contraception does not cause abortions and abortion inducing drugs are not covered under the ACA.
For Fox, as George Costanza once said, "it's not a lie if you believe it." Perhaps Fox News thinks that if they telling this lie, their audience will believe it, too.
*Here, Here, Here, Here, Here, Here, Here, Here, Here,Here,Here
To understand this bitter old broad we have to take you back to her past.
Straight from the streets of New York.
“What am I supposed to do, Bernie? Watch him f—- her every night?” according to a transcript obtained by WNBC-TV. “What am I supposed to do? I can go on the boat. I’ll put the f——-g thing on myself.”
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/splitsville-jeanine-al-pirro-article-1.258599
I’m more in mind of someone far more hateful.
Like Joseph Goebbels.
“To attract people, to win over people to that which I have realized as being true, that is called propaganda. In the beginning there is the understanding, this understanding uses propaganda as a tool to find those men, that shall turn understanding into politics. Success is the important thing. Propaganda is not a matter for average minds, but rather a matter for practitioners. It is not supposed to be lovely or theoretically correct. I do not care if I give wonderful, aesthetically elegant speeches, or speak so that women cry. The point of a political speech is to persuade people of what we think right. I speak differently in the provinces than I do in Berlin, and when I speak in Bayreuth, I say different things than I say in the Pharus Hall. That is a matter of practice, not of theory. We do not want to be a movement of a few straw brains, but rather a movement that can conquer the broad masses. Propaganda should be popular, not intellectually pleasing. It is not the task of propaganda to discover intellectual truths. Those are found in other circumstances, I find them when thinking at my desk, but not in the meeting hall.” (speech given in January 1928, to an audience of party members at the “Hochschule für Politik”, a series of training talks for Nazi party members in Berlin; from http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Joseph_Goebbels)