Crazy wins, Senate caves, on non-existent “Death Panels”
The crazy over-the-top rantings of tea-baggers and their cheerleaders, people such as Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, are winning the day as the health care bill languishes in the Senate Finance Committee. Yesterday they caved in and dropped voluntary end of life counseling from the bill.
Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, said in a statement, “We dropped end-of-life provisions from consideration entirely because of the way they could be misinterpreted and implemented incorrectly.”
Grassley said the end-of-life provision in the versions of the healthcare reform bill under consideration in the House would pay physicians to “advise patients about end-of-life care and rate physician quality of care based on the creation of and adherence to orders for end-of-life care.”
“Maybe others can defend a bill like the Pelosi bill that leaves major issues open to interpretation, but I can’t,” Grassley added.
Score one for Sarah Palin. Her frightening, and totally fallacious, description of “death panels” who would meet and decide to “pull the plug on grandma” helped excite people to the point of hysteria. For the sake of defeating the health care bill she hates, Palin now must accept responsibility for additional suffering for those who don’t receive this valuable advice when they are facing pain and confusion in their last days. Go pray on that, Sarah.
Moral of the story? Maybe progressives will never win, because we aren’t willing to be crazy and irrational enough to win by any possible method.
Related posts:
“Maybe progressives will never win, because we aren’t willing to be crazy and irrational enough to win by any possible method.”
You don’t give yourselves nearly enough credit. MoveOn.org, Cindy Sheehan, and Code Pink, just to name a few off the top of my head, seem to be doing whatever it takes to push their cause of the moment. Heck, Cynthia McKinney has tried running an Israeli Navel Blockade twice to show her support for Palestine. I’d say that rates pretty high on the crazy and irrational scale.
Dood! It’s been a while, how ya been? Regarding the above, let me set you straight. You are confusing “crazy & irrational” with “extreme and determined.” The efforts you describe are extreme and require a lot of pluck, but those extreme actions might be the result of a reasoned thought process. Sarah Palin and the others are not engaging in measured thinking and debate, they are just plain making stuff up, crazy scary stuff about “death panels” and comparing Obama to Hitler and so on. Their outward behavior is normal — no blockades, no camping out — but their talk is crazy, and sky’s the limit in order to get their way…. which they7 just did in the Senate.
Remember is is on the Senate side - to move the bill out of a Senate committee.
HR 3200 is a different animal
Nonsense. It’s semantics based on which side of an argument you’re on. Speaker Pelosi felt quite differently about protests in 2006 than she does today, merely because she’s now on the opposite side of those that are protesting. Then it was patriotic, now it’s un-American. Dissent is dissent.
Please explain to me exactly how the protesters in this link were simply “extreme and determined” and not “crazy and irrational”.
http://www.zombietime.com/zomblog/?p=612
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