What Have We Become?

Women working at his Houston abortion clinic saw Doctor Douglas Karpen kill babies by “twisting their heads off their necks with his own bare hands.” Sometimes he stabbed a surgical instrument into their heads or snipped their spinal cords just as Dr. Kermit Gosnell of Philadelphia did, and this happened every morning according to one of the witnesses. “Sometimes he couldn't get the fetus out... he would yank pieces – piece by piece – when they were oversize,” [Karpen’s ex-assistant Deborah] Edge explained. “And I'm talking about the whole floor dirty. I'm talking about me drenched in blood.” The women took pictures surreptitiously with their cell phones.

These are Doctor Karpen's assistants quoted above

Philadelphia’s Dr. Kermit Gosnell is serving three life terms in Pennsylvania for his crimes, but what happened to Houston’s Dr. Karpen? Nothing. A grand jury shepherded by Harris County District Attorney Devon Anderson refused to indict him. What about the testimony of four eyewitnesses? What about the photos they took with their cell phones? We don’t know if any of that was shown to the grand jury by Ms. Anderson because according to a statement from Anderson's office: “Texas law forbids this office from disclosing the proceedings of the grand jury, including the names of the witnesses who testified, the documents they subpoenaed, and any speculation into why the grand jury chose [not to indict Dr.] Karpen.”

So, we don’t know what Ms. Anderson showed the grand jury or didn’t show them. We don’t know what she said or didn’t say to the people on that jury either. Thirty years ago New York Judge Sol Wachtler observed that district attorneys have so much control over grand juries that they could convince them to indict a ham sandwich. Evidently, they can also persuade grand juries there’s no such thing as a ham sandwich. Did Dr. Karpen get away with murder? It sure looks like it. As Dr. Kermit Gosnell sits in his Pennsylvania prison cell, does he wish he had moved his clinic to Houston?

Doctor Kermit Gosnell enters prison in Pennsylvania

All that occurred in 2013. Fast forward to January, 2016 and District Attorney Devon Anderson was investigating Planned Parenthood for selling baby parts from its abortion clinics. You’ve all seen or heard about the infamous videos that came out last year, right? Well, “Surprise-surprise!” as Gomer Pyle would say. Ms. Anderson’s grand jury not only absolved Planned Parenthood of any wrongdoing, it actually indicted the two people who exposed their horrors! They were charged with misdemeanors for “buying” baby parts and a felony for making a fake ID!

Not tough with abortionists though

This is truly a bizarre story. DA Anderson claims to be a pro-life Republican who just applies the law regardless of her personal beliefs. Well, she is a Republican, but is she pro-life? One of the fellow prosecutors she hired is a board member of Planned Parenthood. She got at least $25,000 from Attorney Chip Lewis for her re-election campaign in late 2014 and guess who Chip Lewis represents? None other than butcher abortionist Dr. Karpen! And who are Chip Lewis’s other clients? They include the wealthy accused serial killer Robert Durst, who appears to keep him on retainer to handle his Houston legal troubles while he faces murder charges across the country. Lewis also donated at least $12,000 to Anderson’s late husband, which went to her after his death.

Chip Lewis, Robert Durst, Devon Anderson

What are some of the Houston legal troubles transgender millionaire and accused serial killer Robert Durst has? Well, according to Houston oil and gas executive Don Hooper, Durst was arrested for urinating on some candy a his local CVS store. Chip Lewis handled it and “Devon Anderson’s office reduced the charge to a fine-only class C charge.” Why didn't Anderson hold him and notify officials in two other states who wanted to prosecute him for murder? God knows.

Drag queen gave makeup tips to Durst

The more I looked into this story, the worse it got. I felt soiled and stunned by what I was learning. When Robert Durst was on trial for the murder of Morris Black in 2003, he admitted to dismembering Black’s body and dumping it in Galveston Bay. He claimed Black pulled a gun on him and while he and Black struggled, it went off into Black’s face, but authorities never found Black’s head, so “Prosecutors were unable to present sufficient forensic evidence to dispute Durst's account of the struggle.” Durst was acquitted!

No wonder Republicans are in wholesale rebellion. The failure of “leadership” in Congress to defund Planned Parenthood was the final straw for millions of conservatives. We have a president who vows to shut down the entire federal government if Congress doesn’t give them $550 million. We have a Congress too timid to confront him, and we have a “pro-life” Republican in Houston who not only protects notorious baby killer Doctor Douglas Karpen, she prosecutes those who expose the butchers at Planned Parenthood.

What evidence did Anderson's grand jury see?

We refuse even to look at the evil in our midst and we prosecute those who would force us to look. What have we become? 

Discussion of this begins at 22:00

My local TV show "Left and Right"

Evil in Camouflage

“It’s a lump of cells,” insisted my left-wing opponent, referring to what is removed from a mother in an abortion. I started off the show with the appalling news that Planned Parenthood was selling parts of aborted babies as documented by a series of videos released by the Center for Medical Progress last week. He pooh-poohed it. That’s what the left must do — deny that it’s a human baby being killed in every abortion procedure. He stuck to the protocol. Every two weeks, my Democrat friend, Gino, and I meet in the local Time Warner studio to debate social and political issues of the day on our show called “Left and Right.” The sale of baby parts was big news last week.

Left wing Democrats (is there any other kind now?) never say “baby” or “human” or “kill” when discussing abortion. They don’t even like to say “abortion,” preferring to substitute “choice” or “women’s health” as if pregnancy were a disease and abortion the cure. They cannot talk plainly about what really happens during an abortion or people would be horrified. Hence, discussion is antiseptic and language censorious. The undercover videos cut through all that. Abortion doctors working for Planned Parenthood described how they modified abortion technique so as not to “crush” some baby parts and preserve them for sale, all this while chewing on a salad and sipping wine. “We’ve been very good about getting heart, lung, liver, because we know that, so I’m not gonna crush that part,” said Dr. Nucatola, medical director for Planned Parenthood nationally, “I’m going to basically crush below, I’m gonna crush above, and I’m gonna see if I can get it all intact.”

Clearly it’s not just a “lump of cells.” It’s got a heart, a lung, and a liver because it’s a baby.

White House press secretary Josh Earnest insisted last week that the videos were “entirely inaccurate,” then admitted he hadn’t seen them and he was repeating Planned Parenthood’s own talking points. Earnest said they were “selectively edited.” If you’re inclined to believe that, watch one yourself. 

The first three videos released were bad enough, showing doctors talking about how they do abortions, but the fourth showed images of Planned Parenthood staff poking at the baby parts in a dish, identifying a brain, a kidney, a leg, and a penis, declaring, “It’s another boy!” This, of course, is kryptonite for Democrats.

On my show I said abortion is the single most important issue for the Democrat Party, and my Democrat opponent agreed. To allow images of aborted human babies would be death for Democrats so, while claiming the videos were “extremist, right wing” attacks on Planned Parenthood, they went into defensive mode. Obama’s new Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced an investigation — not of Planned Parenthood which was violating federal laws against sale of human baby parts — but of the Center for Medical Progress which was exposing it all!

Leftist mainstream media outlets like ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, and the big broadsheet newspapers can be relied on to ignore stories depicting abortion in a bad light. That’s why they refused to cover the Dr. Kermit Gosnell murder trial, which I covered extensively in this column. They’re doing their best to play down the Planned Parenthood videos as well, giving the poached lion in Africa far more coverage than Planned Parenthood selling baby parts in the United States.

Boston College philosophy professor Peter Kreeft said: “When I talk about abortion, I often surprise most of my audience, even some prolifers, by saying that not only is abortion always evil but that it is not a ‘complex issue,’ that deep down we all know that it is evil; that Mother Teresa is very clearly right when she says ‘If abortion isn’t wrong, nothing is wrong.’”

Kreeft is right. Deep down, we all know it. That’s why most Democrats qualify their support for abortion by saying: “Personally, I’m against abortion, but I believe a woman has a right to choose.” That’s why Planned Parenthood is always blowing smoke about what they actually do, insisting it isn’t really a baby. It’s just a lump of tissue like an appendix or a tonsil. That’s why our left wing media couldn’t cover the murder trial of abortionist Dr. Kermit Gosnell. That’s why even most pro-life people can’t bring themselves to look at pictures of aborted babies. Because we know evil when we see it — all of us. Loretta Lynch is investigating the Center for Medical Progress instead of Planned Parenthood because she wants to shoot the messenger, not the evil perpetrator — which has become an object of worship for Democrats. That’s why Democrats fight state laws requiring women to have ultrasound images of what is in their uterus before having an abortion. Ninety percent of them change their minds when they see it’s not just a “lump of cells.”

Dealing With Evil

When I was about seven, a smart-alecky girl from up the street asked me if I’d lived a million days. I said yes, and she said, “Oh no you haven’t.” With a stick, she wrote “365” in the dirt seven times and added it up to 2555. “If you lived to be a hundred, you would only live 36,500 days - not even close to a million.” Humbled, I walked home. Shortly after, I watched an episode of “World At War” with my father and learned that six million Jews were murdered in the death camps of Nazi-occupied Europe. I was struggling to grasp what a million was, yet here were gruesome images of more than six million mass murder victims.

That such an astonishingly evil thing could occur shocked me. Nothing I’ve learned since exceeded it except discovering there were six million other victims as well. I read all I could about the Holocaust until sometime in the 1980s. My curiosity had become morbid fascination, then profound depression. I had to stop my research.

Two enigmas remained, however. One was the systematic banality of Nazi bureaucrats who perpetrated the worst mass murder in history. The other was the submissiveness of the victims. Millions went into ghettoes, onto transports and into gas chambers with little resistance. It’s true that most didn’t know what would happen when the train stopped. They thought they were going to labor camps, communal farms or relocation centers. They thought gas chambers were showers. Even when told by escapees what awaited them at the camps, however, many wouldn’t believe it. There were only a few valiant acts of defiance like the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 in which Jews chose to die fighting rather than submit like sheep. That kind of courage led to the reincarnation of Israel as a country immediately after the war. This tiny nation knew what evil looked like.

What struck me about the mass murder at Virginia Tech last week was not so much the shooter, of whom much has been written. It was the reactions of victims. Most screamed, ran and hid, but a 76-year-old professor used his body to block the door of his classroom and told students to flee. They jumped out second-story windows while the old man impeded the shooter, who eventually pushed the door open and shot him to death. That this professor, Liviu Librescu, was a Holocaust survivor interests me.

Librescu would have been only fourteen in 1945, the last year of WWII and of the Holocaust. As an inmate at Thereseinstadt in Czechoslovakia, he would have had prolonged, intimate contact with evil. After, he spent thirty-three years in Romania under the control of the “Evil Empire” as President Reagan referred to the Soviet Union. Then, through the personal intervention of Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin in 1978, he was able to leave Soviet-dominated Romania and move to Israel. For eight years he lived among people who had fought off four full-scale invasions by much larger, Arab Muslim countries as well as their countless terrorist attacks. In 1986, he went on a sabbatical to the United States and stayed.

Last week, evil paid another visit to Liviu Librescu in the form of a hate-filled young man invading his classroom. I suspect the professor recognized his old nemesis right away. Such awareness would have made him different from the typical academics who run our universities today. Thinking themselves intelligent and sophisticated, they defined evil out of existence decades ago. They believed they could protect themselves by declaring their campus a gun-free zone and putting up a few signs. Jews who reestablished Israel after the Holocaust would not make such a mistake because they learned the hard way that the most effective method of deterring those bent on murdering you is being prepared to kill them before they kill you. “Gun-free zones” protect murderers, not the innocent.

My trip to Israel is still on for May 14th to the 24th. My wife and I were supposed to go last October, but rocket attacks by the evil, Iranian-financed, terrorist organization known as Hezbollah on northern Israeli cities we were scheduled to visit forced a postponement. Israeli Defense Forces attacked the terrorists in southern Lebanon but stopped short of destroying Hezbollah when Prime Minister Ehud Olmert wimped out and accepted a UN-negotiated cease fire. Emboldened, the terrorists are already gearing up for another strike. Hezbollah knows UN “Peacekeeping” Forces are about as effective as “Gun-free zone” signs.

A generation has passed since the last Arab Muslim invasion and it looks like some Israelis are getting soft. If they don’t get rid of Olmert and elect a warrior to deal with terrorist murderers, their tiny country will return to oblivion.