Rick Santorum says 10% of Netherlands deaths are from euthanasia, the latest Republican fear-mongering about supposed European barbarity.

Reuters

The American right sure seems to like stories about foreign countries killing their citizens. Most recently, leading GOP candidate Rick Santorum claimed that 10 per cent of the Netherlands' deaths were from euthanasia, 5 percent forced, and that "elderly people in the Netherlands don't go to the hospital" or, if they do, wear bracelets saying "do not euthanize me," all of which is false.

The furor was only just beginning to die down when, Monday, a video of Santorum spokeswoman Alice Stewart began to circulate. Asked about Santorum's bizarre claims, Stewart, astonishingly, held her ground. "Rick is strong pro-life," she repeated.

Ignoring the shakiness of Santorum's statements seems like an odd strategy. Many Americans have already stepped forward to denounce the "bogus statistics," as the Washington Post calls them, and the Dutch seem to be somewhere between bewilderment and outrage. What's behind the Santorum campaign's bizarre insistence that the Dutch are icing their elderly at such an appalling rate? Well, it's part of a pattern.

This isn't the first time that Republican politicians have scared voters with stories of seemingly civilized Europe ushering its citizens off to their deaths. Back during the health care debate in 2009, Republican senator Chuck Grassley suggested the British National Health Service would have refused to treat Senator Ted Kennedy, instead letting his brain tumor run its course. British paper The Guardian noted, too, at the time, that the what it called the "right-leaning" Conservatives for Patients' Rights group claimed on its website that "anyone over 59 in Britain is ineligible for treatment for heart disease." The trend reached peak absurdity when Investor's Business Daily issued an editorial backing Republican opposition to Obamacare while including the sentence "People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless." The problem with this, of course, was that Stephen Hawking is himself British, and responded by telling The Guardian that he "wouldn't be here today if it were not for the NHS."