Sarah Palin proves lying can be very effective

By Greg Sargent

Some folks on the right are excited about an article in The New York Times today reporting that the Obama administration, in a sudden shift, has decided to nix those fabled "death panels":

The Obama administration, reversing course, will revise a Medicare regulation to delete references to end-of-life planning as part of the annual physical examinations covered under the new health care law, administration officials said Tuesday.

The Times bluntly notes that politics helped drive the Obama administration's decision, because the "renewed debate over advance care planning threatened to become a distraction" to the administration's campaign pushing back on the House GOP's push to repeal health reform.

And so conservatives are approvingly pointing to the Times pice as evidence that Sarah Palin, the primary author of the "death panel" formulation, "won" this debate. The New York Sun went so far as to suggest that the nixed provision be renamed "the Palin patch."

Amusingly, however, the very same Times article that's being widely cited by conservatives today also contains a delicate reminder that Palin's "death panel" formulation, which was echoed by conservatives and Republicans for months, is a flat out lie:

During debate on the legislation, Democrats dropped a somewhat similar proposal to encourage end-of-life planning after it touched off a political storm. Republicans said inaccurately that the House version of the bill allowed a government panel to make decisions about end-of-life care for people on Medicare.

It's an interesting and rather revealing definition of "victory."

