On Friday's PBS NewsHour, anchor William Brangham twisted around the horrible child rape in Ohio as something the Republicans tried to "make hay" of, somehow not a story that Democrats and the liberal media were the first to exploit.
This began as a single-source story in the Indianapolis Star, and CNN's Dana Bash threw it in the face of Gov. Kristi Noem and tried to intimidate her about allowing the murder of a baby after rape. When Washington Post "Fact Checker" Glenn Kessler found the Star reporter and her abortionist source didn't want to talk, Republicans "made hay" of how the story might not be true. Then this controversy forced it to come out.
BRANGHAM: I want to switch, Jonathan, to this issue of the continued fallout of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade.
And Democrats seem to believe that this could be one of the things that might give them at least some trace of a fighting chance in the midterms. And we saw we this week this sort of horrendous case of a young 10-year-old girl who had been raped. She got pregnant. She was — then had to leave her state and go to another state where abortion would still be allowed.
And GOP officials tried to make hay of it. They doubted that that story really existed. The local A.G. said, we're going to go after the doctor that performed this. Do you think that — that issue and the extremity of the way that this is being handled will actually benefit Democrats?
Brangham really wanted to drive home that this should help Democrats, because he repeated the question to David Brooks: "I mean, David, this was an incredibly extreme case, in some ways crystallized the sharpness and the horribleness of this division in this country. Do you think it will redound to the Democrats' benefit?" Brooks said "not much," because the economy is so bad.
Jonathan Capehart on the other hand, claimed the child was being "persecuted and prosecuted" for getting an abortion, and slinked back to the rerun that America looked like The Handmaid's Tale under Trump, and we're still there:
CAPEHART: We are in Handmaid's Tale territory here. We are turning into Gilead. And if there are people out there who are upset by the Supreme Court decision, by what Republican legislators around the country in states and localities are doing to further restrictions and bans on abortion, I don't know what else could push people to the polls more than not just being stripped of a constitutional right, but having your right to — right to freedom, right to privacy, right to liberty not just taken away, but local officials doing everything they can to ensure that you don't have autonomy over your own body.
If that doesn't get people out to the polls, I don't know what will.
The NewsHour also used this story to host a liberal hay-making interview on Thursday night with Dr. Katie McHugh of "Physicians for Reproductive Health." In neither segment did PBS report that the confessed child rapist is an illegal immigrant. No one gets to "make hay" with that.
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