Big Lies from the Deathers
The most offensive and bald-faced lie being trotted out by the right is that the government will determine who lives and who dies under public health care.
This lie really became the focus of national discussion after Sarah Palin issued a statement about government “death panels.” Limbaugh had been using similar lanugage — Obama wants to kill your grandmother! — and Gingrich backed her up after she said it (and had been touring with his own deather road show before that). Cal Thomas, Glenn Beck, and Lubbock’s own Mr. Conservative are all parroting the deather lie. Indeed, right-wing windbags are tripping over each other to get a piece of this “deather” nonsense — it’s such a big, juicy, attention-grabbing lie that they can’t help themselves.
Of course, the real truth is that private insurance already has the closest thing we’ve ever seen to a “death panel,” and a public option would help to prevent that.
Steven Pearlstein at the Washington Times puts it all together:
The recent attacks by Republican leaders and their ideological fellow-travelers on the effort to reform the health-care system have been so misleading, so disingenuous, that they could only spring from a cynical effort to gain partisan political advantage. By poisoning the political well, they’ve given up any pretense of being the loyal opposition. They’ve become political terrorists, willing to say or do anything to prevent the country from reaching a consensus on one of its most serious domestic problems.
There are lots of valid criticisms that can be made against the health reform plans moving through Congress — I’ve made a few myself. But there is no credible way to look at what has been proposed by the president or any congressional committee and conclude that these will result in a government takeover of the health-care system. That is a flat-out lie whose only purpose is to scare the public and stop political conversation.
(my emphasis)
Teabaggers, birthers, and now deathers — oh my.
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