Dan Patrick, the right-wing extremist who holds the most powerful office in Texas, seems to be too extremist even for Fox News.
Patrick visited Fox News yesterday to talk up his state’s probably illegal decision to cut off Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood. But one sign that Fox is not exactly embracing him is that Patrick was booked on the afternoon show, Your World, not on prime time. The less-than-supportive questions from Host Neil Cavuto were more indications.
Cavuto began by saying, “A lot of people are saying you’re wasting your time, that the legal football goes back and forth.”
Patrick tried to justify his state’s decision by pretending that he’s only looking out for good medical care for women: “We have learned now from inspecting Planned Parenthood clinics, that they have not trained their employees as required by the law to handle blood and tissue,” Patrick stated. Later, he claimed Planned Parenthood employed “in some cases, nothing more than high school kids performing sonograms on women coming in for abortion.” Cavuto did not press for more details of those ostensibly awful practices.
But clearly those doctored videos the right-wing is swooning over have a lot to do with it. “They allow people to come in who are posing as buyers of fetal tissue to handle material they should not have,” Patrick continued.
Probably not in Texas, though. As The Houston Chronicle pointed out, Planned Parenthood affiliates in Texas don’t currently collect fetal tissue for medical research.
Nevertheless, Patrick continued, “We’ve been on Planned Parenthood for a long time in Texas. We know that they’re only in the business to profit from killing babies at the end of the day. They have not had professional people working at their clinics with the exception of the doctors that come in to take the life of an innocent baby.”
Cavuto asked, “Do you think that Planned Parenthood does anything good?”
No, Patrick doesn’t. He said, “Look, they’re nothing more than a referral service. They pretend to care about women’s health. ...They don’t do anything except profit from killing babies and then selling body parts.”
Even Cavuto couldn’t buy that. “I understand your passion, sir, but they do a little bit more than that,” he said.
Patrick got testy. “Neil, very little,” he retorted.
Cavuto’s real objections to Patrick were political and logistical: He noted that “Hillary Clinton’s having a field day” accusing Republicans of launching a war on women. He also likened Republican tactics of trying to defund Planned Parenthood at the state level to the failed GOP efforts to stop ObamaCare by trying to defund the exchanges. “But is that really ever going to stop Planned Parenthood?” he asked.
“You’ll never stop them if you don’t keep trying,” Patrick replied. Then he laughably insisted that his only goal is “to protect women.”
But here’s what Cavuto didn’t reveal to the “we report, you decide” network’s viewers: Patrick, who now holds the most powerful office in Texas, has compared himself to Jesus and said this when he won the nomination to run for his current position:
We are a Christian nation. And the only way the world will survive is with a strong America. And a strong America will only be strong again if we stand on the word of God. Again, there’s a difference from believing in God and believing God. Even the Democrats believe in God. But when you believe God you must take him at his word and you can’t back up from that word. And that has to be the policy mindset of our elected officials. It should be biblically based, because every problem we have in America has a solution in the Bible. And that doesn’t mean we want a theocracy. But it does mean we can’t walk away from what we believe.
Watch it below, from the October 19 Your World.
Just say no. To your male partners. Until PP gets its funding.
Who would have thought that hiring kinfolk would lead to more harmful outcomes.
I guess that’s why more progressive businesses forbid the practice.