Ari Fleischer, official spokesman
for clusterfucks everywhere
Oh, for the love of:
Ari Fleischer, former press secretary for George W. Bush and prominent right-wing pundit, secretly helped guide Komen Foundation’s disastrous strategy regarding Planned Parenthood. Fleischer personally interviewed candidates for the position of “Senior Vice President for Communications and External Relations” at Komen last December. According to a source with first-hand knowledge, Fleischer drilled prospective candidates during their interviews on how they would handle the controversy about Komen’s relationship with Planned Parenthood.
Well, consider me properly chastened. I should have known right off the bat that, when some group manages to botch up a situation beyond all hope of credible recovery, there was going to be a connection to the George Bush crowd.
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Well, from this we know several new things. First, that the Planned Parenthood "issue" was in the fore of Nancy Brinker's mind during the search for a new VP of Communications (the article cites her as being "at her wits end about how to proceed"). And second, that the Planned Parenthood "issue" was a major selection criteria for the position. One can presume, from recent events and from the rigidly conservative stance of Fleischer himself, that they were looking for a particular ideological answer.
So the Komen Foundation was, in December, looking for someone to help them roll out a strategy for properly caving to the right. And the guy they put in charge of the search? Ari Fleischer. That Ari Fleischer, proud face of such great Bush initiatives as shut up, Iraq will be a cakewalk, nobody here mentioned Valerie Plame and these new tax cuts will be great for the economy.
Yeah, I can't imagine how putting a Bush guy in charge of that process could possibly have ended up as a gargantuan public clusterfuck.