BEING A senator apparently means you can lie all you want in public. At least according to Arizona Republican Sen. John Kyl, that is.
During a recent debate on the Senate floor over the move by Republicans to strip Planned Parenthood of all federal funding, Kyl got caught telling a whopper of a lie.
During remarks, Kyl claimed that abortion is "well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does." In fact, only 3 percent of Planned Parenthood's patient care is abortion. The rest is things like screening for sexually transmitted infections and providing birth control and routine gynecological care to low-income women.
After being called out for his blatant lie, Kyl's office told CNN that the senator's "remark was not intended to be a factual statement."
In a brilliant segment, The Colbert Report's Stephen Colbert mercilessly mocked Kyl. Saying that Kyl had "just rounded up to the nearest 90," Colbert declared that Kyl's "not factual" defense was "amazingly liberating." He went on to make up a series of absurd "not factual" facts about Kyl, including, "John Kyl has a vestigial tail...And it's not where you think it would be."
As the Online Journal noted:
Later, Colbert said that Kyl had had sexual relations with his own first cousins, and then went on to say that this was a factual statement. (Colbert then said that the previous statement, about the statement before that being a factual statement, was not a factual statement.)
Colbert then took the "non factual" joke online, writing on his Twitter page that "Jon Kyl calls the underside of his Senate seat: 'The Booger Graveyard'" and "Jon Kyl once ate a badger he hit with his car."
