By: Leonard Pitts Jr.
“If you want an abortion, you go to Planned Parenthood. And that’s well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does.” — Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., April 8, 2011.
“(The statistic Kyl used) was not intended to be a factual statement …” — Statement from Kyl’s office to CNN, later that day.
Actually, about 3 percent of Planned Parenthood’s services are abortion-related. The overwhelming majority of the organization’s work involves cancer screenings, contraception and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases.
Granted, the 3 percent figure is self-reported and Politifact, the nonpartisan, Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking website, suggests it could nudge higher depending on how you crunch the numbers.
But it also rules that Kyl “vastly overstated” the organization’s involvement in abortions. In other words, he lied.
Conservatives seem to do that an awful lot.
No, the capacity for mendacity is not exclusive to any party or ideology. Yes, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Harry Reid have all, at one point or another, been at variance with the truth.
But when it comes to serial lying, to the biggest, most brazen, most audacious lies, the lies repeated ad nauseam until people mistake them for truth, when it comes to the most absolute contempt for the facts and for the necessity of honest debate, it’s not even close.
Conservatives have no equal.
Consider: Politifact has six categories for judging veracity.
A statement is either true, mostly true, half true, barely true, false, or “Pants On Fire,” after the old schoolyard taunt that begins “Liar! Liar!”
Politifact uses this designation for statements that are not only untrue but also make some “ridiculous claim.”
I reviewed 100 such statements on Politifact’s website. By my count, of the 70 that originated with an identifiable individual or group (as opposed to a chain e-mail or miscellaneous source), 61 were from the political right.
That includes Rush Limbaugh saying President Obama is going to take away your right to fish, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer saying beheaded bodies are being found in the desert, Sarah Palin claiming death panels will stalk the elderly — 90 percent of the most audacious lies coming from conservatives.
And that word is used advisedly here. There is little that is truly conservative about what we are seeing.
No, this is extremism, true believers so rigidly committed to their ideological crusades that they feel justified in vandalizing reason and sacrificing integrity in furtherance of their cause. The end justifies any means.
So, as was the case with Jon Kyl, if you can’t prove your point with the facts at hand, make up some facts and prove it with those.
It says much about the intellectual state of what passes for conservatism and the intellectual state of the union itself that this sort of behavior has become business as usual, just another day in the Zeitgeist.
This cannot end well. To continue down this path is to carve out a future of intellectual incoherence and international irrelevance, to doom ourselves to yet more of a fractured political discourse that is loud, ignorant and incapable of reason, much less resolution.
And maybe Sen. Kyl’s claim was “not intended to be a factual statement,” but just so you know? Mine is.
Playlist: Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) — Liar, Arizona Bigot
| About The Author: Leonard Pitts, Jr. is a nationally-syndicated columnist and winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary.
He was originally hired by the Miami Herald to critique music, but within a few years he received his own column in which he dealt extensively with race, politics, and culture. He lives in Bowie, Maryland. He has won awards for his writing from the Society of Professional Journalists and the American Society of Newspaper Editors, and was first nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1993, eventually claiming the honor in 2004. He is also the author of the bestselling book Becoming Dad: Black Men and the Journey to Fatherhood. Pitts gained national recognition for his widely-circulated column of September 12, 2001, “We’ll Go Forward From This Moment,” in which he described the toughness of the American spirit even in the face of such a horrible attack. In June 2007, Pitts was the subject of a campaign of death threats and harassment by neo-Nazis angry at a column he wrote about two whites raped and murdered in Knoxville, Tennessee. In his column addressing the murders, Pitts stated “for the crackpots, incendiaries and flat-out racists who have chosen this tragedy upon which to take an obscene and ludicrous stand. I have four words for them and any other white Americans who feel themselves similarly victimized. Cry me a river.” More death threats were made in April 2008 before his appearance at the University of Puget Sound. ——————————————————————- | Read More About Leonard Pitts Jr. | Visit his website at www.leonardpittsjr.com.
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