Last updated on February 8th, 2013 at 02:03 pm
As we await the Supreme Court’s decision on the Affordable Care Act, conservatives are doing all in their power to smear it in hopes of further contaminating reform based on individual mandates that was theirs before it was Obama’s.
Who better than the PR arm of the Republican Party — aka, Fox News — to double down on a tired cliché of a lie, one that won Lie of the Year for 2009? Yes, Death Panels are back in vogue for the armchair patriots at Fox.
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Death Panels weren’t only the Lie of the Year in 2009, but they were also a still unreported confession on Sarah Palin’s part.
Watch here as Kilmeade dips his 2012 toes in the humiliating, stale Palin, from the June 25 edition of Fox News’ Fox & Friends via Media Matters:
There are no Death Panels and pretty much everyone knows it now, save for the depressed puppets at Fox, who are so desperate for a smear that they’ve rustled up this dusty Palin relic.
The irony of Death Panels being pushed by former Governor Sarah Palin is so tea party, because Palin was in charge of the real Alaska death panels where 250 people died waiting for care due to the utter incompetence of the Palin administration. The evil feds had to step in and shut her down. Naturally, this failure fueled Palin’s willingness to project her own bitter failings onto her “rival” of 2008.
On Friday, August 7th, 2009, just weeks after Palin had been notified of the federally mandated shut-down in her own state, along with the lawsuits filed against her administration, Sarah Palin wrote from her Facebook bunker:
“And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.”
Yes, the sick, the elderly and the disabled did suffer under Palin. Sadly, 250 of them died waiting to be processed as “worthy” of care.
We reported:
On June 26 , 2009, – just weeks before the breathy quitty speech along side the squawking fowl, federal auditors notified Alaska officials that they were suspending new enrollment into the Alaskan Medicaid health program for the poor and the disabled due to gross mismanagement by the state.
Leading up to this unprecedented shut down of a state managed program (which was funded 61% by the “feds”) over 250 people died waiting for assessment. Hundreds more did not receive treatment. Over eight lawsuits were filed against the state division before the shut-down. The Supreme court ruled that the state had improperly cut off or reduced services to more than 1,000 needy people. An additional 2,000 people were still waiting to be assessed at the time of the shut-down.
There are no death panels in ObamaCare. And as for Medicare, the insidious lies about ObamaCares bankrupting Medicare and causing huge price increases have made themselves at home in KoolAid land, but are as untrue as Sarah Palin’s death panels.
FactCheck reported:
Q: Will the new health care law raise Medicare’s basic monthly premium to $247 in 2014, as a viral message claims?
A: No, Medicare officials project the basic premium will be less than half that. But the law will eventually cause 14 percent of seniors with incomes over $85,000 a year ($170,000 for couples) to pay higher “income-related” premiums, up from 5 percent currently.
It should surprise no one that Fox News and their Siberia-relegated political “analyst” Sarah Palin are stuck in the days of rage brought on by their epic failure in 2008. Way back then, the nation was unprepared for the onslaught of violence and lies. But now, it’s expected.
When a conservative spews the tea lies, it would save us a lot of time if it were acknowledged that their accusations are confessions. Instead, we spend years refudiating the lies, while the awful truth gets buried, as was intended by the original smear.
The Death Panels always were a confession. We’ve spent three years debunking Sarah Palin’s projection, and still the media hasn’t caught on. And they say Tea Partiers are stupid.
Poor Fox News. Their debunked propaganda has lost a bit if its bite in the last three years, but they seem stuck perpetually in the tea glory of 2010.
Listen to Sarah on the PoliticusUSA Pod on The Daily newsletter podcast here.
Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.
Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.
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