Pat Bagley, in the Salt Lake Tribune

Death panels???





Swiftboating as a way of political life



The risk factor I paid less attention to was the steady wearing down of resistance to the habit of lying. In retrospect, the Swiftboating of John Kerry can be seen as a sort of trial run, whether that was the intention or not. The immediate objective was strategic: to neutralize any potential advantage that a war hero might have in a national election against a draft doger-turned-deserter. I wonder whether even Karl Rove imagined that you could befuddle the public to the extent of blackening the reputation of the war hero in the eyes of the people to whom that credential should have mattered most. If you're a political strategist, or at any rate a poliical strategist of a certain sort (Karl Rove, for example), you notice things like that, and you surely begin to wonder just how far you could push it.



Here we are in 2009, and we still don't know the answer to that. We still haven't found the limit. The process whereby a provision to make end-of-life counseling available to people who might otherwise never give any serious thought to preparing for the one stark reality we all face is twisted into "death panels" that decide who will live and who will die truly boggles my mind, which is highly boggle-resistant. (The fact that in the American health care system so beloved by people like Sen. Max Baucus, we have insurance-company bureaucrats making such decisions every day, and not just with regard to the elderly, really ought to be mentioned but isn't strictly speaking relevant to our discussion of political .)



What's intriguing is that the right to lie applies only to the Right. Remember when Bill Clinton got caught lying about the blowjobs he got from Monica Lewinsky? For months we had to listen to those sanctimonious GOP hypocrites on the House Judiciary Committee whine, "But he l-i-e-d." (They went into kind of chant mode for "lied," so that the word was stretched out to about 10 seconds.) That was all they needed to justify the president's impeachment -- and, they hoped, his conviction. Now every Republican lies every time he/she opens his/her mouth, and there is never any price to pay. They're heroes! Meanwhile your average "Christian values" conservative seems to be engaged in sexual escapades i doubt our Bill would have dared dream of.





Lying to them for their own damned good?



Obviously it's important here to tell the right kind of lies, and to tell them in the right kind of way. So what are "the right kind of lies"? They're the lies that many people not only don't mind but prefer to the truth, indeed may even insist on. That's right, brothers and sisters, the American people stand by their God-given right to be lied to!



Someimes these are lies that make them feel good, but more often they're lies that make people feel bad, but bad in a special kind of way. People like to be outraged, especially if they get to play the victim of malevolent forces whose villainy relieves them of responsibility for all that sucks in their lives. Back in the good old days, when "Tiny George" Bush and "Big Dick" Cheney were doing their best to scare the bejezus out of their fellow Americans, those fellow Americans gobbled up every lie they were fed, and the more it made their juices flow, the more alive they felt. God, that War on Terror was great! We didn't actually know who we were fighting, or how we were fighting them, but we spent money on it like it was going out of style, and nobody we knew was getting hurt, and it just felt great to be afraid -- it gave us a reason to live! By gosh, it was more exhilarating than this week's episode of Dancing With Big Brother. And best of all, it was all the libruls' fault, and the towelheads', and the homos' -- let's vote them all off of the island.



In a sane society, the first time somebody mentioned the nonexistent "death panels," the response of any normal person with an undamaged brain would have been, "Huh? That really doesn't sound likely." But the Right has worked hard for decades now to minimize the presence in the population of undamaged brains, and so the utterly insane response was, "The libruls wanna kill Gramma!"



In reality, I suspect there are few families that don't have at least one story of a relative or friend who went through the agony -- for all concerned -- of a grueling final leg of life's journey made worse by failure to anticipate its grim realities. I can thank my mother, now enduring a lengthy version of that final leg, for having the foresight to make her wishes known clearly in a living will: She wanted no extraordinary measures taken. She made this clear in conversation as well as the living will, and while I would never decline any medical procedure that offered her some genuine hope, I know -- and all the health care professionals involved in her treatment know -- that that's all she wants.



Lacking a shred of human decency



Counseling of this sort is precisely what that obscure provision buried in the health leigslative drafts seeks to make sure is available to everyone. You would think, who could possibly object? Counseling of this sort is precisely what that obscure provision buried in the health leigslative drafts seeks to make sure is available to everyone. You would think, who could possibly object?





Unfortunately, in our present political situation we have an entire political movement -- not at this point a large movement, but one that by virtue of its very shrunken state has nothing to lose -- dedicated to telling Americans lies they will like, and pressuring its band of (almost literally) confederates to keep the faith. Was there a sorrier spectacle than Georgia Sen. Johnny Isakson , caught by the archdemon of the Shithead Right, President Obama, as having sponsored legislation to do just this, having to back off the only evidence I've encountered that he actually has a shred of decency?





I don't know how a creature like Sarah Palin is able to look in the mirror without feeling an urge to blow her diseased brain out. Even she isn't stupid enough not to know she's lying her putrid guts out. But she is part of a political movement that thrives on, almost exists only for, boiling hatred, and I guess she figures somebody's gotta keep that blood boiling. The people demand their lies.



The final crushing irony is how much of this is done in the name of Jesus. Jesus, of course, would forgive them all, because that's what he did. But I've got to think that even Jesus would have a moment there when he felt despair at the evil being wrought in his name.



Hmm, I've been going on awhile now (I do get worked up, as you may have noticed), and still haven't gotten to the specific lies that set this particular round of philosophizing in motion. In our 6pm PT post I promise to try to shut up so you can hear some answers to some of the health care lies.

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Okay, I admit it. Even I was taken aback by the scale of the lying the opponents of health care reform, or the warriors of the I Hate Obama movement generally, have engaged in.In retrospect, though, I shouldn't have been surprised. After all, I'm the one who spent the entire presidential campaign jumping up and down screaming, "But every word out of the Republicans' mouths is a lie!"I even articulated on several occasions the worry that all those lies being dumped into the innocent minds of impressionable Americans couldn't be good for the future health of the republic. What I had in mind, though, was mostly the increase in the quantity of sludge lodging in those minds, which seemed inevitable given the breathtaking amount of what was being heaved out. Say only a certain percentage of it stuck, you've still got that much more gunk mucking up people's brains, and in my darker moments I wondered whether we weren't being naive about just how high that certain "sticking" percentage might be. How many Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11, or that there were links between Saddam and Al Qaeda?