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There were lots of distortions emanating from the Republican debate stage last night, but Carly Fiorina’s outright lies about Planned Parenthood had to have been the most appalling.

Fiorina called on Hillary Clinton and President Obama to watch the videos produced by religious right group Center for Medical Progress, and said they showed:

“…a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking, while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.”

Well, I’ve watched these videos (much to my regret), including the supposedly “unedited” versions (which are actually edited) and I assure you that the scenario Fiorina described simply does not exist. She made it up out of thin air.

All of the candidates on that stage repeated the lies about Planned Parenthood being circulated by CMP — that they “sell baby parts” for profit, etc. — but Fiorina went a step beyond and invented a horrific gory scene that exists only in her mind.

It’s just one more example showing that the Republican Party has become completely unmoored from reality and lost in a kind of negative magical thinking; circulating outright falsehoods and blood libels to attack their enemies with absolutely no concern at all for the truth.

Note that in state after state where investigations of Planned Parenthood’s tissue donation practices have been conducted, the women’s health organization has been totally cleared of wrongdoing.