Inaccurate? Jesus Fucking Christ. He lied. According to his office it was not intended to be factual. How can such a statement be evaluated on the basis of it’s accuracy? He wasn’t aiming for the truth, so his accuracy or lack thereof is moot. If I let loose an arrow, on what basis can you determine how accurate my shot was if you don’t know what the target was?
And even granting your unsubstantiated assertions of false statements, do you really see an equivalence between what is said here and what is stated on the Senate floor? Please.
I live in Arizona and here is how it is being spun by the local conservatives.
"Here are the real FACTS from Planned Parenhood’s own 2009 report, the most recent report available.
Of the 340,276 pregnant women who entered PP “clinics” in 2009, 7,021 were offered prenatal care and 977 were referred for adoptions, for a total of 2.4% of clients.
332,278 clients (97.6%) exercised their right to choose to pay someone to kill their preborn child for them. Kyl erred and should have used the 97.6% figure; his 90% figure was too conservative."
So in this way, according to the conservatives, Kyl was actually RIGHT!
Of course not. However, what he did does not qualify as hyperbole. Hyperbole is an obvious and intentional exaggeration. Here’s what I said in another thread:
Clear hyperbole involves the impossible: “Planned Parenthood does billions more abortions than everyone else combined” would be clear hyperbole. “Planned Parenthood has a million different ways to juggle their financing to fund abortions with federal dollars” would be hyperbole. But what he said wasn’t clear hyperbole: it took the form of a statistic that would be thoroughly plausible to people who are unfamiliar with Planned Parenthood’s operations. What’s more, if he’d used the factual statistic, his statement would be thoroughly underwhelming, almost an argument for his opposition. His rhetorical punch depended on the false claim.
I stand by that. If his claim had been accurate, it would have sounded like this:
Note the total lack of rhetorical punch.
Furthermore, note Palo Verde’s post: at least some conservatives believe he was being accurate. It fails on the “obvious” part of the exaggeration.
In general, if you use remotely plausible numbers in your statement (as in, it’s plausible for folks who don’t know PP that they might be almost exclusively an abortion provider), I won’t cut you slack as hyperbole. If your numbers are completely implausible, you’re a lot likelier to get characterized as hyperbole.
Not at all, but I know the difference between the two. If I say “shit this crap makes my head explode” that is hyperbole. If I make a false statement to deliberately misrepresent something and mislead people, complete with fake statistics then that is a lie. Do YOU know the fucking difference?
So quoting bogus statistics on the floor of the Senate is now excusable by calling it hyperbole? Are Republicans going to start telling us which statements are intended as fact and which are not, or are we supposed to just make our best guess? Even you must be embarassed by this, right?
I don’t think they want to eliminate abortion. They just want to eliminate abortion by the poor. The rich will go back to the practice of sending their daughters “to Europe for a few months” and will mysteriously not be plagued by unwanted babies messing up inheritances.
I’m serious – back when abortion was illegal, rich people mostly just sent their daughters away to where it was legal. Since they’ll still be able to do that after outlawing public support for abortions, and then all abortions, here in the US, they’re not worried about the consequences, which won’t fall on them.
If they were really serious about protecting unborn babies, they’d already have proposed a system of mandatory sonograms and hormone tests on rich girls. Ask them if they’d support that, and if the answer is anything but, “hey, let’s draft a bill,” then protecting the unborn babies isn’t really the thrust of their effort.
I posted the question to you because in the post I was responding to you seemed to grant that it was hyperbole. If I didn’t get that impression from your post I wouldn’t have asked you the question.
No-one who quotes an actual statistic is indulging in hyperbole. Saying “most PP clients end up having abortions” may be excused as hyperbole, despite being factually inaccurate. “A lot of …” even more so. "Many of … " certainly.
But in what world is saying “over 90%”, when the truth is single digits, excusable as exaggeration for rhetorical effect? It is either lying or wilful ignorance, there is simply no other way to honestly characterise it.
John Kyl has Fotheringay-Phipps mother’s face tattooed on 90% of the head of his penis.
(Not intended to be a factual statement.) That makes it ok, right?
I’ve reaad this six times and I still don’t get it. Are they spinning that PP provided 332,278 abortion referrals, or just trying to say that PP gave out over 300,000 condoms?
I had to read this a few times too. I think they are assuming that the women who were offered prenatal care (7021) were the only ones who ended up keeping their babies, and that every other women (340,276 - 7021) sought out an abortion, either from Planned Parenthood or from someone else.
There still seems to be a few things wrong with that outlook, however. I wonder if it is intended to be a factual statement.
