GOP Dismiss Own Responsibility for Anti-Abortion Extremism; Cruz: Shooter Was a "Transgender Leftist Activist"

Carly Fiorina - who has made the worse false statements against Planned Parenthood

Overheated rhetoric and fabricated and false "facts" - outright lies might be an more apt description - often set the stage for violent acts.   And no one disseminates more deliberate lies and falsehoods than the "godly Christian" crowd be it about Planned Parenthood or LGBT citizens.  Yet when violence results from such efforts these same hate merchants feign shock, surprise and denial over their own the consequences of their handiwork.  The same holds true to political whores within the Republican Party, who parrot the same lies and dangerous rhetoric as they prostitute themselves to the ugliest elements of the party base.  An example of this phenomenon was on display as a number of the GOP presidential candidates condemned the murders at the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood facility out of one side of their mouths even as they dismissed any responsibility for repeating false and inflammatory religious extremist propaganda.  The Washington Post looks at this disgusting behavior as does Think Progress.  Here are highlights from the Post:

Several Republican presidential candidates on Sunday condemned the attack on a Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado Springs but stopped short of agreeing with liberal critics who say that fiery antiabortion rhetoric contributed to the shooting.

“It’s obviously a tragedy. Nothing justifies this,” former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina said on “Fox News Sunday.” “Any protesters should always be peaceful. Whether it’s Black Lives Matter or pro-life protesters.”

Calls to defund Planned Parenthood through congressional action have escalated in recent months amid a protracted national debate about the ethics of collecting fetal tissue for research.

That dialogue was cast in a grim light after reports that the suspected Colorado gunman is said to have used the phrase “no more baby parts’’ while discussing his motives for the attack, as reported by The Washington Post on Saturday. Liberal critics of antiabortion activism have linked escalating rhetoric on the right with Friday’s attack, including Vicki Cowart, president of Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains.

“We’ve seen an alarming increase in hateful rhetoric and smear campaigns against abortion providers and patients over the last few months,” Cowart said in a statement. “That environment breeds acts of violence.”

Fiorina took a particularly hard line against Planned Parenthood during the second Republican presidential debate, held in September. In one instance, she described “a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.”

That characterization struck an emotional chord with voters but was ultimately proven to be an inaccurate representation. Though no video showing what she described was found to exist, Fiorina has held that her depiction was accurate.

Carson did not directly address antiabortion rhetoric but did warn of increasing political divisions in the country.    “If we can get rid of the rhetoric from either side and actually talk about the facts, I think that's when we begin to make progress,” he said. “And, you know, a lot of people, when they don't have facts, when they don't have a good backup, that's when the rhetoric starts.

Ben Carson's remark about facts is ridiculous since he is the one with no facts to back up his batshitery.  The most dis gusting of all, however is Ted Cruz who described Planned Parenthood shooter as  a "transgendered leftist activist."   Here are excerpts from Think Progress:

Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz is the latest presidential candidate trying to downplay the role anti-abortion rhetoric may have played in motivating the Planned Parenthood shooting in Colorado Springs Friday afternoon. When a reporter asked him at an Iowa campaign stop Sunday evening about suspect Robert Lewis Dear saying he was motivated by “no more baby parts,” Cruz countered that he’s also been reported to be a “transgendered [sic] leftist activist.”

Cruz explained, “We know that he was a man registered to vote as a woman.” This discrepancy on Dear’s voter registration was first reported by The Gateway Pundit, a self-described “right-of-center news website,” under the claim that he “identifies as [a] woman.” Conservatives have since run with the claim that Dear is transgender.

There is actually no evidence to suggest that he is transgender, nor a “leftist,” nor any kind of activist. In fact, all of the available information suggests he was none of those things.

But since before the shooting was even resolved on Friday, conservatives have been clinging to such discrepancies in an attempt to suggest that it had little to do with the issue of abortion. When a witness called MSNBC Friday afternoon and indicated that the shooting had come from the direction of the Chase bank, a building that was between her location and the Planned Parenthood, conservatives invented an entirely new narrative claiming that the incident was a bank robbery gone wrong and that the shooter had simply hidden in the Planned Parenthood when he was unable to get away. Colorado Springs police debunked this story before the situation was over, clarifying that he had not entered any other buildings at any point.

Dear’s reference to “baby parts” clearly refers to deceptively edited videos suggesting that Planned Parenthood was selling parts of aborted fetuses for a profit. The claims were quickly debunked; in fact, the cut footage from one of the surreptitiously recorded videos even shows the targeted doctor saying, “Nobody should be ‘selling’ tissue. That’s just not the goal here.” The myth, nevertheless, has persisted.