Megyn Kelly was so busy crying for the right-wingers who are now being criticized for their demonization of Planned Parenthood, she barely gave a thought to the people who were actually murdered in the Planned Parenthood massacre last week.
With her new Nancy Grace-style haircut, Kelly seemed to be emulating Grace’s nastiness in last night’s vision of scripted outrage on behalf of anti-choice hate mongering.
You may recall that just a few days before the Planned Parenthood shooting, Kelly complained about a #BlackLivesMatter protester staring into the face of a police officer. “It’s not a question of what his constitutional rights are. It’s a question of what’s appropriate,” Kelly snapped.
Apparently, while staring at a police officer during a protest is not appropriate, calling abortion providers “baby killers” is Kelly’s idea of real dialogue.
Kelly began by suggesting that the deceptively-edited videos about Planned Parenthood – which the alleged perpetrator seemed to have had in mind when he shot up the Colorado Springs clinic – were being unfairly demonized along with her right-wing BFFs.
KELLY: There are now some claims that these videos have been, quote debunked, an idea that has not been proven.
Well, not unless you consider FactCheck.org’s analysis nor PolitiFact’s nor the fact that the states of Indiana, Georgia, Massachusetts and South Dakota made subsequent investigations and found no wrongdoing. “Straight news anchor” Kelly somehow left those facts out of this six-minute discussion.
KELLY: Over the last 24 hours, a number of media outlets appeared to jump on the idea that the videos – the ones they barely covered – are to blame.
Actually, nobody blamed the videos but the inflammatory rhetoric that followed in their wake. Kelly’s own clips made that point.
Later, she hosted two of her favorite toadies, Fox’s Chris Stirewalt and Howard Kurtz.
Stirewalt whitewashed rhetoric such as this statement about Planned Parenthood by Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, which went largely unchallenged on Fox News: “They pretend to care about women’s health. ...They don’t do anything except profit from killing babies and then selling body parts.” Or Bill O’Reilly’s repeated demonization of abortion provider Dr. George Tiller as “Dr. Tiller, the baby killer” – who was later assassinated by an anti-abortion zealot.
According to Stirewalt, that was “talking about this issue that [they] care deeply about.” To further legitimize it, he added, “40 or 45% of the public agrees with you that abortion is wrong and that the federal government shouldn’t be giving taxpayer dollars to Planned Parenthood.”
Fact check: Most Americans support federal funding of Planned Parenthood. But “independent” Kelly did not correct the falsehood.
“Do you think you – Mike Huckabee or whomever or any Republican candidate - shouldn’t be talking about this subject in case a guy who lives in a camper in the middle of nowhere, and is evidently very unwell, takes it the wrong way and does something?” Stirewalt asked, making an either dishonest or extremely uninformed view of what people are complaining about.
With her thoughtful expression plastered on her face, Kelly mimicked this “they were just saying” faux innocence to her other toadie guest, Howard Kurtz: “Is this not evidence of the bias in some of these reporters, who are on the pro-choice side, and think any expression of the anti-abortion, the pro-life stance is angry rhetoric - if you use the term ‘baby killers,’ which the pro life people believe abortion is, that’s the hateful rhetoric they want to shut down. That’s the hateful rhetoric they want to pin this crime on."
“Yeah, it’s also called free speech,” Kurtz agreed. “Look, I think the media need to be awfully careful about giving an uncritical megaphone to those who want to make this bogus link. Some of the rhetoric from the left has been very disturbing in this case.”
Funny, how he didn't mentioned any bogus link that Fox repeatedly made between #BlackLivesMatter or African American criticisms of the police and later shootings of police. “For every mass shooting," Kurtz said, "I say this to the guilt-by-association types on the right as well as the left, depending on the situation. In this case, the people who are opposed to abortion and want to defund Planned Parenthood cannot be held responsible for the actions of a madman with a gun.”
Yeah, we’ll see how much he chides the right but we won’t hold our breath.
But “straight news anchor” Kelly wasn’t done attacking those who are pro-choice.
KELLY: To try to just dismiss what half of the country genuinely believes and what science is providing a lot of evidence for, if you’ve ever had a baby and gone through a bunch of ultrasounds, which is that a fetus, when it is 17 weeks old and can still be aborted, looks an awful lot like a human being – is arguably detrimental to the dialogue, to getting anywhere with the other side.
Right. Because “dialogue” is so much what Fox News is all about.
Watch the BS below, from the November 30 The Kelly File.
But they are protected by the first amendment even though they abuse it continuely. But if the shoe were on the other foot, these weasels would be howling from the rooftops without an ounce of empathy for anyone else.