Republican congressman says Palin's death panel statement is "nuts"

Rep. John Isakson (R-GA) (Wiki Commons)

The title of the article from which I quote below is “Is the Government Going to Euthanize your Grandmother? An Interview With Sen. Johnny Isakson.” The article was written by Ezra Klein, and ran in the Washington Post, where I found it online this morning. The article, an interview transcript, by all rights should put paid to the notion that Sarah Palin’s natterings about the health-care reform bill are anything except the figments of a discombobulated imagination.

I rarely include long quotes by other writers; I view it as lazy on my part and possibly unfair to them. But in this case, just the beginning of the Klein article speaks so many volumes that I’ll make an exception, while also prominently including the url and asking that you visit WaPo and read the article in its entirety. Find the article here.

Sarah Palin's belief that the House health-care reform bill would create "death panels" might be particularly extreme, but she's hardly the only person to wildly misunderstand the section of the bill ordering Medicare to cover voluntary end-of-life counseling sessions between doctors and their patients.

One of the foremost advocates of expanding Medicare end-of-life planning coverage is Johnny Isakson, a Republican Senator from Georgia. He co-sponsored 2007's Medicare End-of-Life Planning Act and proposed an amendment similar to the House bill's Section 1233 during the Senate HELP Committee's mark-up of its health care bill. I reached Sen. Isakson at his office this afternoon. He was befuddled that this had become a question of euthanasia, termed Palin's interpretation ‘nuts,’ and emphasized that all 50 states currently have some legislation allowing end-of-life directives.” (Washington Post)

Isakson also told Klein that the provision in the bill would specifically disallow government from making end-of-life decisions.

Perhaps this should be explained in simple language, so that even the most willfully gullible cannot mistake the meaning of end-of-life decision:

• An end-of-life decision is not the same thing as an “ending life” decision. The former refers to a decision  made by an individual at the end of that individual’s life, and commonly includes such matters as which grandchild gets the gold-rimmed teacups and where one wants to be buried.
• An “ending life” decision (death panel), on the other hand, would be a decision made about the individual by another party…a relative, a government, a jury of one’s peers and so on.

It isn’t awfully surprising that Palin would mix up the meanings of these two terms. She joins a long list of other ignorant conservatives who willfully and purposely misuse language to pull the wool over the eyes of others, most notably their own followers since the rest of humanity seems able to see through it.

Here’s the really sad thing; most of those who have fallen into the trap are not particularly evil people. Gullible and ignorant, perhaps. But then, the people misusing language are doing so in order to fool people, and they’re good at it. It’s their job. So one can hardly blame the gullible and ignorant, except when they are so mired in that gullibility and ignorance that they as willfully refuse to see sense as their heroes willfully refuse to talk sense.

When Rush Limbaugh (proper term: blowhard*, not media personality) misuses a word, he knows his loyal following will become as a nation of parrots, uttering gibberish without thinking about its meaning. When Bill O’Reilly suggests some sort of cockamamie jihad against those he disagrees with, he ought to know that his loyal following will become as a nation of robots, and sooner or later, one of them will pull a trigger while aiming a gun at someone they’ve been taught to hate: abortion doctors, women, successful students…whoever is in the O’Reilly sights at the moment.

Those calls to action by people who know what effect their words will have on those with anger-management issues or damaged spirits or insufficient knowledge or weak powers of discernment is unethical in anybody’s book. Ms. Palin’s invention of the term “death panel” was nothing less.

But don’t take my word for it. Since it was clearly a Republican who referred to Ms. Palin’s “death panel” statements as “nuts,” I suggest Palin’s followers read the Washington Post story, and then come back at me to tell me how hateful I am for pointing out the obvious, if you like. But note: If I am hateful for exposing Ms. Palin’s manipulative and execrable mischaracterization as the hateful exercise in subterfuge that it was, what must Rep. Isakson be for calling her “nuts?”

Or is it OK because he’s a card-carrying Republican and only Democrats and Independents can be characterized as hateful and evil?

Think about the ethics of that.