The second season of House of Cards, the documentary Netflix drama about D.C. politicians, lobbyists, press agents, businessmen and journalists, was released on Friday. Much of Washington buzzed with excitement and some of us may have engaged in some binge watching. I think I’m up to episode eight. As Slate’s Dave Weigel put it, “House of Cards and official Washington have achieved symbiosis since before the first episodes started streaming last year.”
Anywho, Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards joined in the fun, tweeting a picture of herself with one of the stars of the show:
Welcome back, Claire Underwood. #HouseOfCards pic.twitter.com/gIYmV4A3cE
— Cecile Richards (@CecileRichards) February 14, 2014
Uncanny, no? They look like twins! One of them regularly appears on television as the Machiavellian head of a political non-profit and the other used to be married to Sean Penn!
For those of you who don’t watch House of Cards, the Claire Underwood character, played perfectly by Robin Wright, is the wife of an extremely powerful member of Congress. She runs an environmental non-profit. She and her husband will do anything at all to bolster their power. Lying, manipulation, murder, you name it.
Cecile Richards is part of a love triangle between the media, ruling Democrats and the abortion business. She runs Planned Parenthood, the country’s largest abortion provider with more than 300,000 abortions each year. It’s a big-time operation and the cooperation between the media, one political party and this particular organization is straight out of, well, House of Cards. (Last week, for example, Nancy Pelosi and the House Democrats, Planned Parenthood‘s Cecile Richards, bureaucracies within the federal government and most of Hollywood colluded in an abortion-friendly progressive political campaign for Valentine’s Day under the hashtag #WhatWomenWant. I don’t believe anyone in the media so much as batted an eye except to positively note it. One suspects a media made up of Andrea Mitchells might not be able to even, uh, conceive of the problems of such cooperation.)
Or as I put it:
YIKES. Makes creepily perfect sense you would love her character. MT @CecileRichards: Welcome back, Claire Underwood. pic.twitter.com/hvRblBs7zK
— Mollie (@MZHemingway) February 14, 2014
So imagine my surprise when the first episode of season two includes Claire Underwood discussing her views on unborn children:
That’s right. She just said to her pregnant former employee, “I’m willing to let your child wither and die inside you if that’s what’s required.”
Let’s move on from the first episode into subsequent episodes.
SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER ALERT!
Even though I joke that House of Cards is a documentary, this season includes some journalism that would never exist in the real world. For instance, Ashley Banfield, of all people, plays a journalist who does a tough interview about abortion. Ha! As if any so-called mainstream journalist in America is capable of asking pro-choice politicians tough questions about abortion. In this alternative House of Cards universe, she asks Claire Underwood if she had an abortion during one of her husband’s previous campaigns. I’m trying to imagine a scenario in America where a mainstream journalist would ask this question.
Now, it turns out that Underwood’s had not one abortion, not two abortions but three abortions. And she’s adamant that ending these unborn lives is something she in no way regrets. She doesn’t reveal all this publicly, of course, since in so doing she would appear to be a monster and that would hurt her politically. So instead she tells Banfield that she had an abortion and that her pregnancy resulted from a rape she endured. Her character was, in fact, raped. However, she didn’t get pregnant as a result of that rape. Every part of her deception and manipulation of the media is done with the express aim of furthering her husband’s political career.
Or furthering her own career. Before the clip seen above, Underwood forged her former employee’s signature on documents that enabled her to find out sensitive medical information. The former employee was covered under a severance package after a rather dramatic falling out. The employee followed up with a lawsuit that could do serious damage to Underwood. Underwood then pretended she wanted to get pregnant so she could talk to a doctor about medication used by the former employee. Then she cut off the former employee’s insurance — and medicine — to gain leverage, even though she knew that it could kill the baby. Keeping babies out of wombs or getting them out of there by force seems to be the major theme.
It’s sort of like House of Cards is running the Democratic playbook’s “War on Women” as a major storyline. Except, with no thanks to the Washington media that ruthlessly helps advance this campaign, we get to see how calculated and manipulative it really is.
