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Palin-brained Bride of Frankenstein Reappears to Destroy Health Care for All

Wednesday, October 07 2009 @ 08:42 AM CDT

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Betsy 'Death Panels' McCaughey Made to Look Ridiculous by Progressive Stalwart in Key Health Care Debate

By Linda Hirshman

Debate with Rep. Anthony Weiner lays bare why nobody is buying Betsy McCaughey's whoppers and fearmongering over health care reform.

I know I'm not supposed to say this, but I actually feel sort of sorry for Betsy McCaughey. When McCaughey burst on the scene in the 1990s to take her shot at unraveling Hillary Clinton's health-care plan, she was heralded as the conservative's answer to the brainy first lady.

McCaughey was awarded instant intellectual credibility. Like Clinton, she has an Ivy League background: college at Vassar, Ph.D. from Columbia, and they may have shared the same hair colorist. But McCaughey undoubtedly got points for being something that Hillary Rodham Clinton was not: McCaughey was a babe. Now, 16 years later, as she once again does her bit to derail universal health care for the American people, the babe act is wearing thin.

McCaughey says she's 60, fachrissake -- almost as old as me. Yet there she was on Monday night, talking part in a health-care debate sponsored by the Democratic Leadership for the 21st Century, parading around on the stage of New York University's Zankel Auditorium on black stiletto heels so high, it hurt just to look at her. Doesn't being 60 mean never having to say Manolo? Click, click, click, click went the stilettos as the improbably blonde sexagenarian health-care commentator crossed the stage to thrust her ... invective in the face of poor Representative Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y., a genuine liberal.

The stage was pretty dark, so I didn't realize McCaughey was pushing sixty-one (October 20) until the media scrum after the debate was over. But it explains a lot. Trying to make it in those very early days of feminism, a few girls figured out that they could get some traction on their way out of the working class, as McCaughey did, or just into the larger world if they knew more than anyone else in the whole class about something. If they did all the extra-credit reading. If they could cite their authorities right down to the page number by heart. Didn't really matter what it was -- all 14 of Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, or the exact number of all the executive orders addressing sex discrimination in employment by the federal government, or that it was the commerce clause of the Constitution that supported the Civil Rights Act. There was a certain solidity in the real citations, proof against all the guys' preening and guessing and getting away with it. If you knew the 14th point, attention would be paid. If only for a moment.

It was the lesson that McCaughey took to heart. To her debate with Weiner, she brought her prop, a four-inch-thick notebook containing the supposed draft of the "health-care bill" -- whatever that means at this point in the legislative process. This was apparently the same notebook she trotted out for her quizzing by Jon Stewart of The Daily Show. McCaughey was never more than a foot away from her big book, tapping it and caressing it and shaking its pages at Weiner, as if the fumes from its deadly provisions would fell her adversaries by sheer proximity.

Trouble is, who knows what's really in her magic binder? At one point she referred to a provision supposedly at "page 120 and 121" while pointing at a paper at least midway through the massive tome. If that paper was page 121 of anything, then I'm the Queen of Romania. And, although there are doubtless words on page 121 of some health bill making its way through Congress, I'm skeptical that they say anything resembling what Betsy McCaughey says they say. Sadly, the actual proposal probably reads a lot more like the wonkish Weiner's version, who spoke of "avoiding disincentivizing doctors" from saving money and the like. (You can tell authentic wonk talk from the sudden conversion of nouns into verbs.)

McCaughey's most significant contribution to today's wrangling over health-care reform is the "death-panels" trope: the notion that a provision that allows coverage for counseling on end-of-life options amounts to a secret plan to off seniors. (Yes, it was McCaughey who served as Sarah Palin's Facebook source.) At one point McCaughey contended that a provision that would penalize doctors who prescribed treatment that contradicted their patients' end-of-life arrangements actually meant that doctors would pull the plug even while the patients, having second thoughts, begged them not to. No changing your mind in McCaughey's Brave New World, no sirree. McCaughey illustrated her loony misinterpretation of the consultation provisions with a "story" of a patient who, when the moment came to abide by her own prior arrangements, instead "chose life."

"Choose life," the anti-abortion movement's favorite slogan -- get it, get it? That's where the sisterly solidarity got a little thin for me. All that blonde hair started looking less like Gwyneth's and more like the coif of Medusa: One good look at Betsy McCaughey and health care dies for another generation.

The gender subtext of this so-called debate was so thick it was hard to hear the important arguments: Was there any way at all to cut health-care costs without reducing care? Was a bill other than Weiner's preferred single-payer bill worth supporting anyway? Why were cost rising faster in the United States than any other country? For, through it all, there was McCaughey, flicking her blonde locks (I counted 10 such motions, if you include both flicking and stroking, in the hour of formal debate), clicking on her heels and clucking over the danger to the republic, fairly heaving in indignation at the evils the president and his acolytes in Congress had in mind.

As usual, all that pulchritude does make for difficult forensics. When Weiner compared debating McCaughey to arguing with a pyromaniac in a straw man factory, a loud male voice from the back called out, "Argue like a man!" Every time Weiner, not unreasonably, referred to McCaughey's low veracity ranking with the nonpartisan Politifact fact-checker (she has a "Pants on Fire" rating for the death panels business), McCaughey's male supporters in the audience began chanting "rude MAN, rude MAN!"

Initially, this debate held some prospect of being edifying, especially since Weiner supports the most liberal version of health care, single payer, and has expressed a coherent, genuinely progressive position. (Regarding the current bill, he's an ardent proponent of the public option.) But the evening quickly degenerated into an all-too-common formula: hair-tossing, right-wing provocateur; disaffected, shouting-out audience member; verb-form-abusing liberal policy wonk. At least the memory of the old days at the girls' school kept me interested while they acted out their parts. I didn't learn much about health care, but I've got almost all of the 14 Points.

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The New Republic Attempts to Repent for Its 1994 Health Care Sins, Rips Into Betsy McCaughey

by dday

A new TNR article carefully documents the "never-ending lunacy" of McCaughey.



The staff of The New Republic has begun to flagellate themselves with birch twigs over the reappearance of professional liar Betsy McCaughey as a nemesis to health care reform. Michelle Cottle wrote a long vivisection of McCaughey under the familiar title "No Exit," the same as McCaughey's 1994 article in TNR that managed to set conventional wisdom in the Beltway against the Clinton health care plan. You cannot read the reams of charges without concluding that McCaughey is a horrible woman, which I'm sure was Cottle's directive (though in McCaughey's case, it's not hard). Franklin Foer, the current editor, also threw himself upon the mercy of the court of public opinion:

As Betsy McCaughey returns to the scene for another fight against health care reform, New Republic editor Frank Foer is still thinking about the piece she wrote for the magazine 15 years ago.

“To me, it’s an original sin that I hope we can expunge,” Foer told POLITICO [...]

Indeed, the McCaughey piece has been a sticking point for TNR staffers for some time. And when Foer took over as editor in March 2006, the magazine recanted McCaughey’s article and formally apologized for it. But still, Foer said he “wanted to make it our mission to be on the right side this time” and pointed out that he’s “made health care reform a pretty important issue for the magazine."
Of course, Marty Peretz still likes her:

“I do not think Betsy is an intellectual fraud. Not at all,” Peretz wrote in an email.

“I have not read the Cottle piece and I do look forward to doing that,” he continued. "But the issue that McCaughey went after was one of the most intricate and economically challenging ones that America has faced, as we can see from the present debate.”
Aside from Peretz acknowledging he doesn't read his own magazine, there's a bias he displays here toward giving wide latitude to anyone who offers the conservative counter in favor of the status quo against something new and different. Peretz has studiously ignored 15 years' worth of discrediting McCaughey, including the recent charge that she coordinated her piece in TNR with the tobacco industry, who wanted to stop the Clinton plan because cigarette taxes partially financed it. The problem is that other media outlets have done the same. They have not only failed to rebut McCaughey, they have bothered to amplify her claims in the first place, as Jamison Foser points out.

There are plenty of liars in the world who nobody gets worked up about -- because their lies don't drive major media coverage about an important issue. That's what's infuriating about Betsy McCaughey: major news organizations give her a platform. They run her op-eds, they host her on television, they quote her, they allow her falsehoods to shape the public debate about health care. They do this despite knowing that she's a liar.

That's what's infuriating: that someone whose defining quality for the past 15 years has been her dishonesty about health care reform should be granted a role shaping the debate over health care reform by major media outlets. And, unfortunately, Cottle doesn't address that issue at all. How did TNR come to publish McCaughey in the first place? Don't they employ fact-checkers? Shouldn't they? How do her false claims continue to make it into print? Why do television news shows book her? What does it say about the news media that they grant McCaughey a platform? That's the important part. If McCaughey was just another crackpot spouting off lies and conspiracy theories while nursing a cup of coffee at the local diner, nobody would care.



Cottle isn't responsible for McCaughey's 1994 TNR piece - people should direct those inquiries to Peretz and Andrew Sullivan, who as of a couple years ago was still mighty touchy about it. But there's enough in the public domain - Cottle has now pulled all the strands together into one package - for news producers to never put her on the air again, given the history of dishonesty.

I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for that to happen. Just yesterday, in fact, McCaughey printed an op-ed where she favorably quoted David McKalip, the neurosurgeon who earlier this year sent out a picture of Barack Obama dressed as a witch doctor with the word "Obamacare" below him. She must be building a new generation of liars.

http://www.alternet.org/

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