White Coat Underground

The Right likes to hold up Sarah Palin as a beacon of morality and virtue in an irredeemably corrupt world. But with her latest words, she has shown herself to be either an immoral, lying sack of crap, or severely cognitively impaired.

And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

Such as system, were it to to exist, or even to be proposed, would be evil. Since no one has proposed any such thing, Palin has Godwined herself even closer to irrelevancy.

Comments

#1 k
August 10, 2009

IMO, she is both an immoral, lying sack of crap, and severely cognitively impaired. You could probably throw the book (DSM-IV) at her and score a few more points.
#2 Nelson Muntz
August 10, 2009

“Death panel”? Oh, she means “insurance company”.

@1: Would you consider hitting her with the DSM-IV? Repeat as needed.
#3 Frank
August 10, 2009

From driftglass.blogspot.com

The world is full of bad people. Dumb people.

I don’t mind bad people; them I can handle.
But dumb people are tough.
And arrogant dumb people are impossible.

Dumb people you can outsmart.
Arrogant people you can outwit.

But dumb, arrogant people, Jack?
Forget it.
You cannot go over them, under them,
around them or through them.

They are there.

– Harlan Ellison
#4 Donna B.
August 10, 2009

I don’t really think anybody reading this blog cares, but this post on another blog has some background as to why she might say such an “immoral” thing:
http://legalinsurrection.blogspot.com/2009/08/inconvenient-truth-about-death-panel.html
#5 mxh
August 10, 2009

Too bad a large percentage of the country actually believes what she says. This month I’m assigned to a rural hospital and FoxNews is on every TV (including in the physician’s lounge) and I keep on hearing an ad repeating the “government bureaucrats will decide whether your grandmother lives or dies” crap. The problem is that when people are getting their information exclusively from these sources, and it’s repeated over and over again, they start believing it. The sad thing is that the poor people here without insurance have also been tricked into thinking healthcare reform is a bad thing. There are a lot more people that just Sarah Palin that are immoral.
#6 daedalus2u
August 10, 2009

Call it what it is, a blood libel. No different than the anti-Semitic blood libel claiming that Jews use the blood of Christians and need to be slaughtered, or that witches kill children and need to be burned at the stake, or that blacks in the south raped white women and needed to be lynched.

Palin is using lies to whip up a hysterical mob and use that rage to intimidate members of Congress with lynching in effigy and death threats. Gingrich agrees with her.

I hope these film clips are saved for the next election so the people understand what the GOP really stands for. They criticize Obama because in an off the cuff comment he says “the cops acted stupidly”, but Palin gets a free pass to make a blood libel and Gingrich agrees with her?
#7 R E G
August 10, 2009

Please America – Stop letting these clowns manipulate you through fear.

Do you think all those Canadian seniors are in Florida every winter to avoid “death panels”?

Ironically, when citing wait list times for elective surgery in Canada, hip replacements are nearly always in the lead. Could it be because there is no age limit?

My friend’s father is doing well, now that he has completed his cancer treatment. He is 87.

I think the insurance companies have created an atmosphere of learned helplessness in the American public. Americans just don’t seem to believe they can ever design an option that doesn’t formally deny care to someone. Guess what – Yes You Can. You have the money, the creativity, the ability and the ambition to accomplish great things.

A Canadian – concerned for her American friends and relatives.
#8 Pascale
August 10, 2009

Why won’t she just go away????
I was hoping her “failure to finish” would start her marginalization, but no. She keeps moving her mouth and people keep printing its output, no matter how wrong or ridiculous it is.
With all of the intelligent, thoughtful women in the world (even within the Republican party there are some), why do we have to suffer Sarah Palin?
#9 charles schmitz
August 10, 2009

i have never seen so much hatred like this directed towards another humanbeing and there family!! male or female.alot of people love sarah.she has a nice family.if you disagree with her policies thats one thing.but the insults are starting to get old.give her a break.i bet the country ends up sideing with sarah.because when people get treated that unfairly by MOST major news outlets.it usally means there doing something right. get it right [hehehe]
#10 mxh
August 11, 2009

Charles, if she stops saying stupid things, then maybe people will stop criticizing her. What she said is there for anyone to analyze… if you want to defend her, defend her statements, don’t cry about the media not being nice to her.
#11 Matthew
August 11, 2009

Maybe it’s the BMI postings, but at first I read “bacon of morality”
#12 daedalus2u
August 11, 2009

Charles, she is not saying “stupid” things, she is telling inflammatory lies. She is bearing false witness. She is saying that Obama wants to kill her son.

Who is treating her unfairly by repeating what she says? Who is she treating fairly by lying and saying they intend to kill people?

Maybe she will be able to get a lynch mob mentality going. The people who follow her do have a lot of guns, and are willing to use them. A lot of then already don’t like Obama because he is black, liberal, intelligent, educated, articulate. Adding the false reason that he wants to kill her child may drive some to violence. That certainly is a foreseeable consequence; I presume that is her plan.

The moment that the violence of a minority with lies and guns outweighs the voice of the majority with truth and votes, is the moment that the US becomes a failed state like Somalia. We know the GOP wants Obama and the US to fail, their spokesman Limbaugh has said so.
#13 mxh
August 11, 2009

That’s a good point daedalus2u, whether it’s her or people who tell her what to say, someone actually has an ulterior motive behind what she says, so I shouldn’t call her comments as stupid, rather they are calculated to incite the anger of the public rather than to seriously debate an important national issue.
#14 BB
August 11, 2009

K with post #1 got it right at the first shot.
Good job.
#15 Calli Arcale
August 11, 2009

Agreed; she can’t be that stupid. She (and the other right-wing windbags) don’t believe the proposed bill to be this psychotic. What they are doing is playing politics, which should come as no surprise to anyone, and yet we all (myself included) find ourselves shocked and surprised when they do it. They are poisoning the well, a known tactic when fighting an idea, by trying to get horrible scary things linked to health care reform in the minds of the public. It’s not a new tactic, and it’s been used by both political parties many times. Neither of them originated it either; it probably predates recorded history.
#16 Whitecoat Tales
August 11, 2009

@Donna B

To be clear, that blog post is pretty deceptive in it’s writing.

It fails to discuss how these decisions are made NOW.

Right now, whether or not a particular service is paid for by medicare/medicaid is voted on by congress. Each individual service. Congresspeople who can’t pronounce lymphadenopathy and TIA, vote on whether or not treatment for those conditions will be paid for.

The proposal discussed on that blog says “well, experts should decide, and part of their evaluation for really expensive, scarce resource treatments should include an answer to the question ‘will this person have a chance to live a full life?’”

And thats not just about cost, it’s about suffering. Should your 90 year old man with pancreatic cancer, and other medical problems who currently has painless juandice, have extensive surgery that might add a few months onto his life, if that time will be spent in the hospital, in pain? It’s up to the 90 year old man, but he should be aware of the actual risks and benefits.

The blogger says that Down’s syndrome would conceivably NOT get treatment in this scenario. Speaking from a medical perspective, i sincerely doubt that.

I’m not a huge fan of most of the writing about healthcare reform from lawyers. They generally read things written by doctors and quote them out of context. They almost always leave out anything approaching the common base of knowledge and ethics that doctors would know, and have discussed earlier in the papers and writings quoted from.
#17 catgirl
August 11, 2009

Palin is right. Death panels are evil. That is exactly why we need an alternative to private insurance companies. She doesn’t even realize that she proved the opposite of her point.
#18 dedicated lurker
August 11, 2009

No, the most stupid was the IBD saying that Stephen Hawking would be killed in the UK.
#19 Denice Walter
August 11, 2009

“Counselling Sarah”: she needs to find “something to do with her time” (hopefully,where she’ll cause the *least* harm possible)- she likes the limelight and talking, so how about encouraging her to become a gossip columnist on Fox?( but she’d probably make *even that* political). Maybe a nice charity to help disadvantaged people?(Wait, she wouldn’t want to help *them*).What about going back to school? (Not likely).Scratch hobbies, she already has a lot of them.Perhaps she needs to find an all-consuming interest/*raison d’etre* that takes a great deal of money to indulge(therefore, she’d also need to work to support it)- answer: high-end fashion (she already has some experience with that)and/or boating (Alaska has a huge coastline that borders Russia).Now we need a self-sacrificing wealthy liberal to get her introduced and “hooked”…….Arianna, that’s you!
#20 The Blind Watchmaker
August 11, 2009

Skepticism 101

“Ok class, today we are going to learn about the “Straw Man Fallacy”.

For a classic example, we’re going to hear Sarah Palin’s argument against Health Care Reform.

As you can see, she creates a classic “Straw-man” by completely mischaracterizing the real…..Oh no, Angello threw up again! I’m sorry. I’ll try to get some more pleasant examples.
#21 DLC
August 12, 2009

Why does anyone with an IQ in excess of 60 read or believe anything this Palin woman has to say? Or care for that matter?

There’s only one donor liver, and two patients it’ll work with. All other things being equal, who gets the liver and who has to wait and likely die ?
The one who can pay the bigger bribe ?