Well, cry me a river at flood stage. It seems we haven’t heard the last of former Great Pink Satan executive Karen Handel. In an interview with The Daily Beast, Ms. Handel calls Planned Parenthood “a Gigantic Bully”, and alleges that there was a secret deal between Planned Parenthood and the Great Pink Satan that the former was to keep their mouths shut about losing their Komen funding. This supposed “ladies’ agreement” would have been just fine had as long as everyone maintained their silence.
Silence works so well in matters of deadly disease, don’t you think? It’s clearly a winning political solution. Back-room deals under the cover of darkness… what could possibly go wrong? We’ll leave that for the future business school students to unravel as they wade into the wreckage of the Great Pink Satan’s self-initiated implosion.
Meanwhile, back to Ms. Handel, who seems to be angling for the Anita Perry Award for Unmitigated Whining.
“The idea that anyone would suggest Komen had a political agenda is absurd,” Handel told The Daily Beast. “Komen is a breast-cancer organization—that’s what it does.” Instead, she accused Planned Parenthood of making the matter political, saying the group had “unleashed Armageddon” by launching a social-media firestorm. “Planned Parenthood is a gigantic bully, using Komen as its own personal punching bag,” she said.
So everything was cool until the Planned Parenthood “gigantic bully” spoke out and used the Great Pink Satan as their “personal punching bag?” Setting aside the over-the-top rhetoric and Armageddon reference, it’s sure curious that Komen would have made their
mealy-mouthed “reversal” once again opening the [extremely remote] possibility of once again funding Planned Parenthood breast exams it they’d been used as a “personal punching bag”.
Karen Handel is either blaming the Great Pink Satan’s fall from grace on the bigger, stronger, tougher thugs over at Planned Parenthood, or – in her snarky backhanded way – suggesting that the Great Pink Satan is pretty damn weak. Given the language in her resignation letter as explored in my recent diary, I'd say Ms. Handel is doing her best to lay the blame squarely at the pink-shod feet of her former employer.
In explaining the decision-making process at Komen, Handel said, “It’s no secret that for some years—long before my time—Komen was dealing with a controversy regarding Planned Parenthood grants. The issue would flare up, then die down, then flare up again. It was fairly cyclical. But over the summer, it intensified. More donors said they were pulling out. The issue was ratcheting up. It wasn’t dying down.
“Two dozen Catholic bishops were saying not to support Komen,” she continued. “We needed to find some options for moving to neutral ground. I was tasked with doing that.” She added, “An inordinate amount of staff time was spent trying to manage the controversy. We should be able to focus on our own mission and not be distracted by the controversy of another organization.”
First of all, yes, we get it Karen. All this started before your time. It's got nothing to do with you. You were just following orders. You're the real victim here.
You do raise a valid point, though. We certainly can’t be wasting “an inordinate amount of staff time” managing the controversy. Those people need to be focused on the task at hand: shaking down corporate donors and selling pink crap. It’s amazing they’d have a moment to spare on research for a cure for breast cancer.
This past December, the president of Komen, Liz Thompson, met with the president of Planned Parenthood, Cecile Richards, to discuss the decision, according to Handel. “There was an open and candid conversation about the controversy and the effect on Komen. There was a gentle ladies’ agreement, if you will, that no one was going to go to the press about this,” Handel said. In the agreement, she said, Komen offered to continue funding current grants, but not future ones.
“We wanted a smooth transition,” she continued. “What happened is nothing short of a disgrace. Cecile Richards put this issue in the press. There was a coordinated effort to get sites like moveon.org and change.org involved. There was an orchestrated, premeditated attempt to put this issue in the press. Talk about betrayal by Planned Parenthood—against an organization that took up for it for years.”
Oh, what a tangled web we weave. It starts with “an open and candid conversation”, morphs into a “gentle ladies’ agreement”, and next thing you know, we’re in full scale betrayal.
I will agree with Ms. Handel on one thing: “what happened was nothing short of a disgrace”. As thousands of women were thrown under the bus in the Great Pink Satan’s no-doubt-political attempts to placate their right-wing donors, the resulting destruction of their brand sent their leaders into a frenzy of finger-pointing and blame-mongering reminiscent of an episode of “Dynasty”.
The Planned Parenthood spokeswoman said the news was first reported by “anti-choice outlets.” After that, she said, Komen announced the decision to hundreds of Planned Parenthood and Komen leaders, sparking media interest.
Handel sees it differently. “Planned Parenthood launched a vicious attack on a nonprofit organization that fights breast cancer,” she said. “Komen gave out $93 million in community grants last year. Planned Parenthood got $680,000—less than 1 percent of the total granting portfolio. They unleashed Armageddon on an organization for $680,000.”
Hey, Karen: sometimes it’s not about the dollar amount; it’s a matter of principal. Maybe YOU are accustomed to
selling out only at a certain price point, but don’t be projecting that philosophy on the rest of us. Some of us don't sell out at any price.
Handel, who ran for governor of Georgia in 2010 on an anti-abortion platform, denied that her political views played a role at Komen. She laughed when she heard that a blog had called her a “martyr for the pro-life cause.” She said, “There’s a great deal of irony in that when I ran for governor, I was not pro-life enough.” Her plan now, she said, “is going for some runs.”
Such a tease! You can’t leave without telling us: what kind of runs? The kind where you have to pay big bucks for a pink t-shirt? Something political? Or just running from the
flaming ruins of the Great Pink Satan?