Republican House Whip John Kyl famously said this a few days ago:

Everybody goes to clinics, to doctors, to hospitals, so on,“ Kyl said. ”Some people go to Planned Parenthood. But you don’t have to go to Planned Parenthood to get your cholesterol or your blood pressure checked. If you want an abortion, you go to Planned Parenthood, and that’s well over 90% of what Planned Parenthood does.

As you probably know, this was not just wrong, but spectacularly wrong. Only 3% of what Planned Parenthood does is abortion services, and not one penny of federal money–by law–is spent on that.

When this was pointed out, one would expect Kyl to retract in some way, such as that he “misspoke” or “temporarily mixed up the numbers” or something of that sort. Naturally, one would expect some form of retraction followed immediately by a restatement of the general idea. However, the way his office explained it was rather stunning:

His remark was not intended to be a factual statement, but rather to illustrate that Planned Parenthood, a organization that receives millions of dollars in taxpayer funding, does subsidize abortions.

“His remark was not intended to be a factual statement”? I’m not a professional semanticist, but if you intentionally say something which is not factual, isn’t that a lie?

Meaning that the official statement was, essentially, “Yeah, he lied, but his point was that they’re abortionists.”

Wow.

By the way, only one non-political news outlet, ABC News (which I won’t link to because every news story on their site autoplays video beginning with ads that cannot be turned off) carried this story.

On the issue, Republicans are fully embracing this new tack: that federal money should be completely shut off for an organization that does stuff they don’t like even if no federal funds go to the activities they don’t like. (Of course, part of the strategy is to act like federal funding is used for the activity in question.) This was their big push against Planned Parenthood this time around, and you can expect to hear it again. Of course, they will not apply this evenly–a lot of federal money goes to organizations promoting religion, for example, and yet Republicans don’t want cut off their funds–exactly the opposite. But, of course, by now it is fully obvious that this is about ideology, not consistency.

Planned Parenthood is simply one more organization seen as a liberal bastion, and so is marked for elimination, just like ACORN, unions, AARP, NPR, PBS, and any number other organizations that can in any way be deemed left-leaning. Demonize, defund, destroy.