Mona Charen
Paul Krugman and Mona Charen, two syndicated columnists. A recent column by each reminds me of a song: “What a difference a day makes.” Substitute “a day” with “the truth” and we see the good and the bad of newspaper journalism.
Paul Krugman
Krugman wrote about the last Republican presidential debate, in which “some of the candidates went beyond expounding bad analysis and peddling bad history to making outright false assertions, and probably doing so knowingly, which turns those false assertions into lies.” Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who writes for the New York Times, went on to mention Chris Christie’s false assertion in both debates that he was named U.S. attorney the day before 9/11, and noted that it wasn’t even announced until that December. But, he said, “Christie’s mendacity pales … in comparison with that of Carly Fiorina,” who made claims about her achievements as CEO of Hewlett-Packard that don’t jibe with the record of huge job cuts and financial losses before she was fired.
Chris Christie
Fiorina outdoes herself.
“But the truly awesome moment came when she asserted that the videos being used to attack Planned Parenthood show ‘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.’ No, they don’t.” In other words, there was no corroboration that Planned Parenthood had anything to do with the event in the video. PolitiFact investigated and determined that the video’s origin was unknown.
So Fiorina latched onto the video presented by the anti-abortion organization Center for Medical Progress, which linked it to Planned Parenthood. She lied to curry political favor.
Lying leader
Carly Fiorina
What did Mona Charen, the conservative columnist for Creators Syndicate, say of the presidential candidate? “Carly Fiorina demonstrates what a true leader looks like.”
So a true leader looks like a liar?
Charen asked, “How long have Republicans yearned to see a candidate frame the abortion question as Fiorina did at the CNN debate – daring Barack Obama and (Hillary) Clinton to watch the video in which a former clinic worker described how a fully formed fetus, his heart beating, was killed by a technician who cut open his face to harvest his brain?” The Center for Medical Progress attached that video, the source of which was unknown, to the interview of the clinic worker, implying that Planned Parenthood was involved in the procedure.
Flim-flam Fiorina
Krugman is not the only pundit who slammed Fiorina for her dishonesty. Ruth Marcus, an even-handed
columnist for the Washington Post, quoted Factcheck.org, which said that one clip in the video, where the fetus appears to move, “is credited to a different anti-abortion group, and it’s unclear where it was shot. Another shows a stillborn baby, it turns out, not an aborted fetus.” Marcus was willing to forgive her for “hyperbole, easily remedied.” But Fiorina refused to budge an inch to media persons who repeatedly challenged her account of the video. Even Fox News’ Chris Wallace confronted her, asking, “Do you acknowledge what every fact-checker has found … there is no actual footage of the incident that you just mentioned?” Her answer? “No, I don’t accept that at all.”
Said Marcus, “That dishonesty is part of a pattern.” She cited as an example Fiorina’s story of rising to the top from humble roots, which belies her privileged background.
No harm done
Has this hurt Fiora in the polls? Hardly. The numbers are getting better, just as Donald Trump’s did despite his many false assertions. It seems that Republicans love liars.
Politicians seem to have lying in their DNA to various degrees. Many people have come to expect it of them. In journalists, however, it’s especially reprehensible. Mona Charen is as guilty of fabrication as Fiorina. Peas of a pod, birds of a feather.
