But the tensest moments came in an exchange with the NBC reporter Peter Alexander, who repeatedly tried to read Mr. Trump’s quotations from an old interview with Tim Russert in which he described himself as “pro-choice.” That footage is being used in ads by a “super PAC” supporting Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, with whom Mr. Trump is closely competing, and by the Cruz campaign. Mr. Cruz, he said, is a “wreck.”
Mr. Trump repeatedly cut off Mr. Alexander as he tried to read the quotation from the 1999 interview. “Excuse me, excuse me,” Mr. Trump said, talking over Mr. Alexander.
Later, when Mr. Alexander tried to ask again, Mr. Trump demanded to know if the reporter would apologize. Mr. Alexander said that he was sorry the candidate felt he didn’t represent the statement correctly, but that he was trying to read it.
“Forget you,” Mr. Trump said, cutting him off.
It was reminiscent of the news conferences that another pugnacious New Yorker, Rudolph W. Giuliani, held when he was the city’s mayor.
.. Later, when another reporter asked why it was a cheap shot for Mr. Sasse to ask about his infidelity when Mr. Trump had raised Bill Clinton’s transgressions as fair game, the candidate replied that in fact it wasn’t a cheap shot.
“I’m a religious person,” Mr. Trump then said.
We Do Abortions Here
There is a numbing sameness lurking in this job: the same questions, the same answers, even the same trembling tone in the voices. The worst is the sameness of human failure, of inadequacy in the face of each day’s dull demands.
.. I look at abortion as if I am standing on a cliff with a telescope, gazing at some great vista. I can sweep the horizon with both eyes, survey the scene in all its distance and size. Or I can put my eye to the lens and focus on the small details, suddenly so close. In abortion the absolute must always be tempered by the contextual, because both are real, both valid; both hard. How can we do this? How can we refuse? Each abortion is a measure of our failure to protect, to nourish our own. Each basin I empty is a promise—but a promise broken a long time ago.
Planned Parenthood Videos Were Altered, Analysis Finds
That comparison, the analysis said, showed “substantive omissions” in the group’s version. Mr. Simpson was assisted in the analysis by several others, including a video forensics expert, Grant Fredericks, and a television producer, Scott Goldie.
According to the investigation, the reviewers could not determine “the extent to which C.M.P.’s undisclosed edits and cuts distort the meaning of the encounters the videos purport to document.”
But, it said, “the manipulation of the videos does mean they have no evidentiary value in a legal context and cannot be relied upon for any official inquiries” unless C.M.P. provides investigators with its original material, and that material is independently authenticated as unaltered.
For example, Mr. Fredericks said recordings in Houston and Denver were each missing about 30 minutes of video, judging from time stamps and frame counters on the recordings.
.. He added, “The absence of bathroom breaks and waiting periods between meetings does not change the hours of dialogue with top-level Planned Parenthood executives eager to manipulate abortion procedures to get high-quality baby parts for financially profitable sale.”
Looking Away From Abortion
And the problem these videos create for Planned Parenthood isn’t just a generalized queasiness at surgery and blood.
It’s a very specific disgust, informed by reason and experience — the reasoning that notes that it’s precisely a fetus’s humanity that makes its organs valuable, and the experience of recognizing one’s own children, on the ultrasound monitor and after, as something more than just “products of conception” or tissue for the knife.
.. But the reluctance to look closely doesn’t change the truth of what there is to see. Those were dead human beings on Richard Selzer’s street 40 years ago, and these are dead human beings being discussed on video today: Human beings that the nice, idealistic medical personnel at Planned Parenthood have spent their careers crushing, evacuating, and carving up for parts.