Saturday, February 05, 2011

Hard questions for PP supporter


Laura Ingraham shows a clip of one of the Live Action sting tapes, and notes that Planned Parenthood has, again, declined to appear. With good reason -- there is no way they could stand up to the grilling they'd get.

She instead has a political strategist, Jane Flemming Kleeb, who is a PP supporter.

Ingraham says that if it was her daughter who was abducted, she'd want the staffer to end the conversation and call the authorities NOW, not after the fact. But I'd want the staffer to -- as Ingraham indicates later -- play along to keep him on-site, and come up with some excuse to leave the room -- to get forms, perhaps -- and cue somebody else to call the cops, then return and continue to string him along until the cops arrived.

PP's claim that the staff told their supervisors, who notified authorities in a timely manner, might be true, but Ingraham seems to have information on the timeline to indicate that the notification was not timely, and was more of a "We think they're scamming us" than "This guy seems to be running a sex ring."

Kleeb said that as a mom she agreed. She pointed out that the Virginia PP worker didn't break any laws -- and that this was disturbing to her, and that she saw opposition to parent-free birth control for 12-year-old girls as a common ground area. In fact, I got the feeling that she doesn't realize how far out of step her outrage over this is with PP's political agenda and the prochoice movement in general.

Ingraham was disturbed by how unshaken the PP workers were, how cavalier, that all of them seemed to have routinely answered similar questions. She also notes that when PP did contact the FBI, their focus seemed to be far more on the sting than on possible sex trafficking.

Kleeb said that all the PP's reported the situation and were working with authorities. Ingraham held her feet to the fire on the timing of things, that it was dealt with as an internal weirdness first, and only as possible criminal activity later. Ingraham notes that only the Roanoke PP promptly notified law enforcement.

Kleeb agreed that this was disturbing. But she also said the workers at PP would agree. But if they didn't act on it, then they clearly did NOT agree.

Kleeb then tried to paint Live Action as a project of the Republican party -- as if we could possibly get the Republican party to give a rat's ass. They have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the abortion fray every time. Kleeb points out that the PR firm that designed the Live Action web site did work for the Republicans. And Ingraham leaped on the lack of connection: "If only the Republicans were this smart!"

This led to a lot of cross talk which cleared into Kleeb saying that the prolifers and prochoicers needed to come together on "common sense laws" to protect girls. Has she been living in a cave for her entire life, and not noticed that the prochoice movement uniformly opposes every common sense law proposed -- laws that prochoice citizens are fine with?

I think Ms. Kleeb will be sorely disappointed if she tries to get anybody actually affiliated with PP to support even the simplest common sense law. In fact, I challenge her to try it.

No comments: