Failed Former Susan G. Komen VP Talks About Planned Parenthood ‘Bullying’

Karen Handel, the anti-gay, anti-choice failed and former vice president of the Susan G. Komen/Komen for the Cure Foundation, talked to (really, at) MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell yesterday. Handel, who sources say was hire by Komen founder Nancy Brinker to execute the plan to delete Planned Parenthood from the organization’s list of beneficiaries, actually told Mitchell that “the left and Planned Parenthood bullied up on Komen over $700,000, when Komen was about breast health, not about politics. Planned Parenthood made it about politics.”

Shocking. And shockingly twisted.

If the deletion, if the kicking out of Planned Parenthood hadn’t been about politics, why was it done at all? Why hire Ari Fleischer, former President George W. Bush’s press secretary, to devise a plan over a period of months to execute Planned Parenthood? And why hire Handel, whose filed Georgi gubernatorial campaign based based on a sheer hatred of abortion, Planned Parenthood, and gay people?

“The bottom line for Komen is, they were focused on what is in the best interest of women and breast health,” Handel told Mitchell, again, shockingly. How can anyone with any sense claim that Planned Parenthood’s medical services — often the only avenue for some women due to financial or geographic limitations — are not “n the best interest of women and breast health”?

Mitchell also confronts Handel with a statement from Karl Rove and Debbie Wasserman Schultz, denying accusations she writes in her book, Planned Bullyhood: The Truth Behind the Headlines about the Planned Parenthood Funding Battle with Susan G. Komen for the Cure.

Handel adds:

It is without question that Komen was on the receiving end of a bullying beat-up by Planned Parenthood and the left.

Well, again, not exactly. It is without question that women of all political stripes, and their allies, of all political stripes, drew a line in the sand against Komen’s conservative war on the very women they were created to protect and help, and stood up to Komen, stood up to Brinker, stood up to Handel,  and said, “Hell no!”

“By ending the funding to Planned Parenthood, you were in effect denying screenings to millions of women who rely on Planned Parenthood because they cannot afford medical care on their own —  private physicians,” Mitchell said to Handel, who flatly refused the idea.

Perhaps the best moment was Andrea Mitchell’s question toward the end of the interview:

Why, then, is there a widespread perception that you were pushing Komen into politics where it had never been before in decades and decades of laudatory work, when you and others who are very strongly opposed to any kind of abortion rights, that your entry into the fray is what facilitated this move against Planned Parenthood?

Watch:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32545640

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Related:

Breaking: Susan G. Komen Founder Nancy Brinker, Other Leaders Step Down

Komen Founder Begs Congress For Cash As Race For The Cure Fundraising Plummets

Komen: The Extreme Anti-Gay Views Of Their VP Who Dumped Planned Parenthood