Republican presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina spoke at an event yesterday hosted by the Oklahoma Independent Petroleum Association, where she reflected on the difference between the worlds of politics and business. “Politics is a fact-free zone,” she said. “People just say things.”
Even by 2015 standards, the irony was almost overwhelming. The principal criticism of Fiorina is that she has an unfortunate habit of saying things that aren’t true — and then embracing those falsehoods with unnerving vigor when confronted with reality.
Take Fiorina’s Planned Parenthood lie, for example. It started with a bogus claim during a recent debate, which was quickly discredited, but which the GOP candidate falsely claimed was true over and over and over again. When pressed for evidence, Fiorina’s campaign staff tried to bolster the falsehood, but the “proof” wasn’t true, either.
Yesterday, the story got just a little worse.
The video depicting a live fetus allegedly being kept alive to harvest its organs that Carly Fiorina described during the last Republican presidential debate has been published in full online, according to its creator.Gregg Cunningham, the founder of the group that collected the footage, called the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, told TIME magazine that the full video was released on Tuesday, as a YouTube clip titled “Carly was right.”
The problem, of course, is that the video doesn’t prove that at all. Vox’s Sarah Kliff unpacked the key details:
The graphic video does show a fetus that appears to fall spontaneously out of a woman’s vagina, still moving its limbs after being placed in a metal dish. But there is no evidence that the tape was shot in a Planned Parenthood clinic, nor is there any audio like what Fiorina described. […][Anti-abortion activist Gregg Cunningham told Time] that he is certain it is an abortion process, but at least one obstetrician, Jen Gunter, has argued that the video more likely shows a premature delivery…. The video is certainly graphic, and does show extensive footage of a fetus whose limbs move and whose heart appears to beat. But it is still not the scene Fiorina described in the debate, and definitely does not deliver on the title of the YouTube video: “Carly Fiorina Was Right.”
Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum added that, in light of the additional evidence, Fiorina now appears “even wronger.”
Perhaps, when Fiorina complained yesterday that “politics is a fact-free zone,” and that “people just say things,” she intended it as some kind of confession?
Disclosure: My wife works for Planned Parenthood, but she played no role in this report, and her work is unrelated to the videos Fiorina has tried to describe.
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Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."