This morning, when Karen Handel, senior vice president of public policy at Susan G. Komen for the Cure,
resigned—a resignation that founder and CEO Nancy Brinker has
officially accepted—Handel included, in her letter, a rather curious admission:
I openly acknowledge my role in the matter ...
Why, it seems like only last week, founder and CEO Karen Brinker was insisting that Handel did not have anything to do with this decision.
Oh, right. That's because it was last week:
Well, let me just for the record tell you, Karen did not have anything to do with this decision.
Of course, we already knew that wasn't true. As Laura Bassett at Huffington Post
reported:
Karen Handel was the prime instigator of this effort, and she herself personally came up with investigation criteria," the source, who requested anonymity for professional reasons, told HuffPost. "She said, 'If we just say it's about investigations, we can defund Planned Parenthood and no one can blame us for being political.'"
In her resignation letter, Handel insists that "the controversy related to Planned Parenthood has long been a concern to the organization." But as Bassett also reported, according to a source at Komen:
Komen's been dealing with the Planned Parenthood issue for years, and you know, some right-wing groups would organize a protest or send out a mailing every now and then, but it was on a low simmer [...[ What Karen's been doing for the past six months is ratcheting up the issue with leadership. Every time someone would even mention a protest, she would magnify it, pump it up, exaggerate it. She's the one that kept driving this issue.
There really is no question that Karen Handel joined Komen last year with an agenda to defund Planned Parenthood. That was part of her platform during her failed, Sarah Palin-endorsed run for governor in Georgia; it was clearly part of her mission at Komen too.
For the past week, Brinker has insisted that Handel had nothing to do with the decision, and that the decision had nothing to do with politics. But it has become increasingly clear that Nancy Brinker is lying. And now Handel has confirmed it.
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