Religion And Politics Don’t Mix: Death Panels, Death Book The Right Has Become A Hysterically Insane Racist Religious Cult.
That These Two Matters Can Be Considered A Serious Part Of Our National Dialog Is A Clear Indicator Of The National Psychosis Infecting This Nation.
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Why Religion and Politics Don't Mix
“When politicians and governments are vested with religious authority, they will in almost every case abuse that authority to the detriment of the faith. Politics is necessarily a dirty game, religion is not. But when the two interact, religion does not clean up politics, it usually gets infected by it.”
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Sarah Palin Really Has Claimed ? With A Straight Face ? That Barack Obama Wants To Kill Her Baby
Something strange has happened in America in the nine months since Barack Obama was elected. It has best been summarized by the comedian Bill Maher:
"The Democrats Have Moved To The Right, And The Republicans Have Moved To A Mental Hospital."
The election of Obama – a black man with an anti-conservative message – as a successor to George W. Bush has scrambled the core American right's view of their country.
In their gut, they saw the US as a white-skinned, right-wing nation forever shaped like Sarah Palin.
When this image was repudiated by a majority of Americans in a massive landslide, it simply didn't compute. How could this have happened? How could the cry of "Drill, baby, drill" have been beaten by a supposedly big government black guy? So a streak that has always been there in the American right's world-view – to deny reality, and argue against a demonic phantasm of their own creation – has swollen. Now it is all they can see.
Since Obama's rise, the US right has been skipping frantically from one fantasy to another, like a person in the throes of a mental breakdown.
It started when they claimed he was a secret Muslim, and – at the same time – that he was a member of a Black Nationalist church that hated white people.
Then, once these arguments were rejected and Obama won, they began to argue that he was born in Kenya and secretly smuggled into the United States as a baby, and the Hawaiian authorities conspired to fake his US birth certificate. So he is ineligible to rule and the office of President should pass to... the Republican runner-up, John McCain.
These aren't fringe phenomena: a Research 200 poll found that a majority of Republicans and Southerners say Obama wasn't born in the US, or aren't sure. A steady stream of Republican congressman have been jabbering that Obama has "questions to answer". No amount of hard evidence – here's his birth certificate, here's a picture of his mother heavily pregnant in Hawaii, here's the announcement of his birth in the local Hawaiian paper – can pierce this conviction.
This trend has reached its apotheosis this summer with the Republican Party now claiming en masse that Obama wants to set up "death panels" to euthanize the old and disabled. Yes: Sarah Palin really has claimed – with a straight face – that Barack Obama wants to kill her baby.
You have to admire the audacity of the right. Here's what's actually happening.
The US is the only major industrialized country that does not provide regular healthcare to all its citizens. Instead, they are required to provide for themselves – and 50 million people can't afford the insurance.
As a result, 18,000 US citizens die every year needlessly, because they can't access the care they require. That's equivalent to six 9/11s, every year, year on year.
Yet the Republicans have accused the Democrats who are trying to stop all this death by extending healthcare of being "killers" – and they have successfully managed to put them on the defensive.
The Republicans want to defend the existing system, not least because they are given massive sums of money by the private medical firms who benefit from the deadly status quo.
But they can't do so honestly: some 70 per cent of Americans say it is "immoral" to retain a medical system that doesn't cover all citizens. So they have to invent lies to make any life-saving extension of healthcare sound depraved.
A few months ago, a recent board member for several private health corporations called Betsy McCaughey reportedly noticed a clause in the proposed healthcare legislation that would pay for old people to see a doctor and write a living will. They could stipulate when (if at all) they would like care to be withdrawn. It's totally voluntary.
Many people want it: I know I wouldn't want to be kept alive for a few extra months if I was only going to be in agony and unable to speak. But McCaughey started the rumor that this was a form of euthanasia, where old people would be forced to agree to death.
This was then stretched to include the disabled, like Palin's youngest child, who she claimed would have to "justify" his existence. It was flatly untrue – but the right had their talking-point, Palin declared the non-existent proposals "downright evil", and they were off.
It's been amazingly successful. Now, every conversation about healthcare has to begin with a Democrat explaining at great length that, no, they are not in favor of killing the elderly – while Republicans get away with defending a status quo that kills 18,000 people a year.
The hypocrisy was startling: when Sarah Palin was Governor of Alaska, she encouraged citizens there to take out living wills. Almost all the Republicans leading the charge against "death panels" have voted for living wills in the past. But the lie has done its work: confetti of distractions has been thrown up, and support is leaking away from the plan that would save lives.
These increasingly frenzied claims have become so detached from reality that they often seem like black comedy. The right-wing magazine US Investors' Daily claimed that if Stephen Hawking had been British, he would have been allowed to die at birth by its "socialist" healthcare system. Hawking responded with a polite cough that he is British, and "I wouldn't be here without the NHS".
This tendency to simply deny inconvenient facts and invent a fantasy world isn't new; it's only becoming more heightened.
It ran through the Bush years like a dash of bourbon in water.
When it became clear that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, the US right simply claimed they had been shipped to Syria. When the scientific evidence for man-made global warming became unanswerable, they claimed – as one Republican congressman put it – that it was "the greatest hoax in human history", and that all the world's climatologists were "liars". The American media then presents itself as an umpire between "the rival sides", as if they both had evidence behind them.
It's a shame, because there are some areas in which a conservative philosophy – reminding us of the limits of grand human schemes, and advising caution – could be a useful corrective.
But that's not what these so-called "conservatives" are providing: instead, they are pumping up a hysterical fantasy that serves as a thin skin covering some raw economic interests and base prejudices.
For many of the people at the top of the party, this is merely cynical manipulation.
One of Bush's former advisers, David Kuo, has said the President and Karl Rove would mock evangelicals as "nuts" as soon as they left the Oval Office.
But the ordinary Republican base believes this stuff. They are being tricked into opposing their own interests through false fears and invented demons.
Last week, one of the Republicans sent to disrupt a healthcare town hall started a fight and was injured – and then complained he had no health insurance. I didn't laugh; I wanted to weep.
How do they train themselves to be so impervious to reality? It begins, I suspect, with religion.
They are taught from a young age that it is good to have "faith" – which is, by definition, a belief without any evidence to back it up. You don't have "faith" that Australia exists, or that fire burns: you have evidence.
You only need "faith" to believe the untrue or unprovable. Indeed, they are taught that faith is the highest aspiration and most noble cause. Is it any surprise this then percolates into their political views? Faith-based thinking spreads and contaminates the rational.
Up to now, Obama has not responded well to this onslaught of unreason. He has had a two-pronged strategy: conciliate the elite economic interests, and joke about the fanatical fringe they are stirring up. He has (shamefully) assured the pharmaceutical companies that an expanded healthcare system will not use the power of government as a purchaser to bargain down drug prices, while wryly saying in public that he "doesn't want to kill Grandma". Rather than challenging these hard interests and bizarre fantasies aggressively, he has tried to flatter and soothe them.
This kind of mania can't be co-opted: it can only be overruled. Sometimes in politics you will have enemies, and they must be democratically defeated.
The political system cannot be gummed up by a need to reach out to the maddest people or the greediest constituencies.
There is no way to expand healthcare without angering Big Pharma and the Republicaloons.
So be it.
As Arianna Huffington put it, "It is as though, at the height of the civil rights movement, you thought you had to bring together Martin Luther King and George Wallace and make them agree. It's not how change happens."
However strange it seems, the Republican Party really is spinning off into a bizarre cult who believe Barack Obama is a baby-killer plotting to build death panels for the grannies of America. Their new slogan could be – shrill, baby, shrill.
Three Excerpts From Christopher Hitchens' New Book, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.
Mormonism: A Racket Becomes a Religion
Fox News Uses "Death Book" Lie To Revive "Death Panels" Lie
August 24, 2009 9:57 pm ET — 2 Comments
Following several days in which Fox News promoted the smear that an educational booklet on end-of-life decisions used by the Veterans Health Administration is a "death book," Fox News host Megyn Kelly and Fox News contributor Jonah Goldberg used a discussion about the booklet to revive the falsehood that Democratic health care reform legislation would institute "death panels." Kelly also falsely claimed that the booklet encourages veterans to "hurry up and die" and that VHA officials are "required" to refer patients to it.
Kelly, Goldberg connect VHA booklet to "death panels" smear
From the August 24 edition of Fox News' America's Newsroom:
KELLY: Well, just as the White House says that people's fear about so-called "death panels" is baseless, critics now claim the administration is actually pressuring certain disabled veterans to, quote, "hurry up and die" -- that's the accusation. Asking physicians at the nation's VA hospitals to refer to our nation's veterans to a pamphlet called "Your Life, Your Choices."
Title sounds innocuous enough. However, inside, this booklet asks veterans to decide whether their lives are worth living if they are, for example, in a wheelchair, in a nursing home, or if they have become, quote, "a financial burden to their families."
[...]
GOLDBERG: And I think, you know, the problem here is the defense that [Assistant Veterans Affairs Secretary Tammy] Duckworth offers, saying, "Oh, well, this wasn't put forward by the Obama administration." She's sort of saying this sort of burbled up from the bureaucracy, which no one really disputes. That is not all that helpful. Because one of the points that critics of Obama's plan make is that this -- once you get the structure for it, it'll be on autopilot, and the bureaucracies will naturally tend towards exactly this kind of thing and death panels may, in fact, be not too far off on the horizon because of the very nature of how socialized medicine and rationing works.[America's Newsroom, 8/24/09]
"Death panels" smear has been widely debunked
Media debunk "death panels" lie dozens of times. Numerous media outlets have now debunked right-wing claims that the House health care reform bill would encourage euthanasia of the elderly, including Sarah Palin's Facebook claim -- forwarded by the conservative media -- that the bill would create a "death panel" and the related claim -- initiated by Betsy McCaughey -- that the bill would "absolutely require" that seniors on Medicare undergo end-of-life counseling "that will tell them how to end their life sooner." Indeed, Media Matters for America has identified more than 40 instances in which media outlets have reported that these claims are false.
Kelly forwards claims from "critics" that booklet tells veterans to "hurry up and die"
From the August 24 edition of America's Newsroom:
KELLY: Well, and it becomes a little bit more scary, doesn't it, Jonah, when you've got the government, in case of the VA -- or, perhaps, in the case of our new health care system, if it goes through -- the government is in charge of paying the bills for the person who's in the wheelchair or in the nursing home or so on. And so when the government is coming to that person and saying, "You really need to take stock about whether life is worth living under your current conditions. Ask yourself if you're a financial burden." It puts a layer of pressure, is the argument, on those people to basically, as I said in the intro -- this is from the critics -- quote, "hurry up and die," you know, for these veterans who've come back from war.
"Your Life, Your Choices" does not tell veterans to "hurry up and die." The booklet emphasizesthat "your wishes will direct future health care decisions" and presents preserving one's life "using any means possible" as an option to consider. An August 23 post by VoteVets.org blogger Richard Smith criticized former Bush administration official Jim Towey's assertion in The Wall Street Journal that "Your Life, Your Choices" presents "end-of-life choices in a way aimed at steering users toward predetermined conclusions," writing: "Really, if the document was really trying to get veterans to pull the plug on themselves, then first suggesting to them that their life should be prolonged at all costs is a pretty stupid way to do it" [emphasis in original].
Kelly falsely claims VHA doctors are "required" to show patients the booklet
From the August 24 edition of Fox News' America's Newsroom:
KELLY: Let me ask you about that, because Tammy Duckworth said, "Look, it hasn't" -- she maintains it hasn't been in effect. Now, the facts appear to belie that, because this has been up --
GOLDBERG: Right.
KELLY: -- on their website since July 2, and it requires physicians at VAs to at least refer their patients to this booklet. So, put aside that fact. Shouldn't the Obama administration just take this down? Maybe they inherited it from the Bush administra-- shouldn't it just come down off the website -- end of controversy?
VHA does not "require" physicians to refer patients to the booklet. A July 2 VHA documentactually directs patients to " 'Your Life, Your Choices' ... or other published resources."
Fox previously cropped doc to falsely claim VHA doctors "told to refer all veterans" to booklet.On Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace repeatedly cropped quotes from the document to support his false claim that under the document, "VA health practitioners were told to refer all veterans -- not just end-of-life veterans, but all 24 million veterans -- to this document, 'Your Life, Your Choices.' "
Fox News Freak-Out: Guests Make Extreme Claims And Accusations About Health Care
August 24, 2009 6:51 Pm ET — 4 Comments
In recent weeks, Fox News has hosted numerous individuals who advanced extreme, outrageous claims about health care reform at prior congressional town hall meetings, during their interviews, or both. For example, on Fox, one guest claimed that under health reform, he might have to "let" his wife "suffer until she passes on," while another claimed of Democratic leaders, "[Y]our thugs already know where we live. We've had a visit from them in the middle of the night."
Fox has provided individuals with a forum for extreme claims
Fox guest says that under health reform, he might have to "let" his wife "suffer until she passes on." On Fox & Friends, co-host Gretchen Carlson interviewed AARP members Patrick Liste and his wife, Mary Liste. During the interview, Patrick Liste stated that "if this national health care plan goes through," he would "have to give up my wife, because she costs insurance a lot of money." Patrick Liste later added: "[I]f they determine that because she's 70 years old, she no longer is eligible because there's younger people that want to use this money, what am I going to do? I'll just say goodbye. Let her suffer until she passes on." [Fox & Friends, 8/17/09]
Fox guest claims of Dem leadership: "[Y]our thugs already know where we live. We've had a visit from them." On America's Newsroom, anchor Megyn Kelly interviewed Mike Sola, whom police reportedly escorted from a town hall meeting held by Rep. John Dingell (D-MI) following a confrontationwith Dingell in which Sola claimed under the bill, his son "would be given no care whatsoever because he is a cerebral palsy handicapped person." On Fox News, Sola claimed that "thugs" had subsequently harassed his family in the middle of the night, saying, "I'd like to address something to Miss [Nancy] Pelosi and Mr. ... [Steny] Hoyer and Mr. [Harry] Reid. If you call my son un-American -- your thugs already know where we live. We've had a visit from them in the middle of the night." Sola later added, "I will use every means available to me, lethal force if necessary, to protect Scott [his son] and my wife."
From the August 10 edition of Fox News' America's Newsroom:
SOLA: But I'd like to address something to Miss Pelosi and Mr. Stoy -- Mr. -- whatever his name is --
KELLY: Hoyer.
SOLA: -- Hoyer and Mr. Reid. If you call my son un-American -- your thugs already know where we live. We've had a visit from them in the middle of the night. They can't come to us in the middle of the day, but they come to us in the middle of the night. You know where we live. I suggest you take that plane that you have and fly to Milan, Michigan, and say that directly to my son's face, if you've got the guts. This is a free country.
[...]
KELLY: Before we go on, I want to ask you, what do you mean they came to your house in the middle of the night?
SOLA: We -- after the incident was aired on television, we had a visit that night. A message was sent to my family. It has been reported to the Washtenaw County sheriff, and their deputy has reported it to the Michigan State Police.
KELLY: People are harassing you now, Mike?
SOLA: Yes, they are. And all I'm going to say to the person who doesn't have the courage to do it in the daytime, I will use every means available to me, lethal force if necessary, to protect Scott and my wife. Your message has been received. My wife is terrified. We have not told Scott about it. But if you -- I ever catch you on my property, I will take the risk of going to prison. But you will never again threaten my family.
Fox guest: "I don't want my children coming to me and ask me, 'Mom, why didn't you do anything? Why do we have to wait in line for, I don't know, toilet paper or anything?' "Happening Now anchor Jane Skinner interviewed town hall attendee Katy Abram, who during a town hall meeting with Sen. Arlen Specter (D-PA) stated that health care reform was "about the systematic dismantling of this country," adding, "I don't want this country turning into Russia." On Happening Now, Abram said, "I know that years down the road, I don't want my children coming to me and ask me, "Mom, why didn't you do anything? Why do we have to wait in line for, I don't know, toilet paper or anything?" I don't want to have to tell them I didn't do anything. And I know it's just a normal citizen. The most I feel I could do was come to this town hall meeting." [Happening Now, 8/11/09]
Fox's Carlson offers no criticism of guest's suggestion Pelosi is a Nazi
Fox guest at town hall: "If Nancy Pelosi wants to find a swastika, maybe the first place she should look is the sleeve of her own arm." Fox & Friends hosted David Hedrick, who at a town hall for Rep. Brian Baird (D-WA), stated:
HEDRICK: I also heard you say that you're going to let us keep our health insurance. Well, thank you. It's not your right to decide whether or not I keep my current plan or not. That's my decision. Now, I've heard recently in the media you and some other people on the political stage call us brownshirts because we opposed --
BAIRD: No, I did not. No, I did not. What I said was -- and I've apologized for it, sir.
HEDRICK: OK, well, thanks for apologizing. But let -- I won't speak to you, then. I'll speak to others. But I'll remind you -- a little history lesson. The Nazis did not -- the Nazis were the National Socialist Party. They were leftists. They were -- they took over the finance. They took over the car industry. They took over health care in that country. If Nancy Pelosi wants to find a swastika, maybe the first place she should look is the sleeve of her own arm.
Now, what I want to know is, you've done a lot of things that violate your constitutional oath, as you know. What I want to know is, as a Marine, as a disabled veteran that served this country, I have kept my oath. Do you ever intend to keep yours?
Fox & Friends co-host Gretchen Carlson aired a clip of Hedrick comparing Pelosi a Nazi, but did not condemn his remarks or criticize Hedrick for them. Indeed, at no point in the interview did Carlson address Hedrick's comment. Instead, Carlson introduced Hedrick as "the Marine vet who took the congressman to task" and said only that his remarks got "quite the response." [Fox & Friends, 8/24/09]
Fox hosts have promoted disruptions of town hall events
As Media Matters for America has noted, many Fox hosts have praised town hall protests and encouraged viewers to participate in these events. Fox & Friends guest co-host Peter Johnson Jr. said to protesters, "[W]e thank you for representing Americans, and we hope that other Americans get out there" [Fox & Friends, 8/4/09]. Introducing a segment on a Philadelphia town hall, Carlson said, "Are you gonna call" your member of Congress "or are you gonna go to one of these receptions where they're actually there?" During the same segment on the Philadelphia town hall, Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy said, "If you want to contact your congress members and sound off, go to FoxNation.com" [Fox & Friends, 8/3/09]. Similarly, after airing clips from the Philadelphia town hall, Fox News host Sean Hannity said, "That's a pretty good way to fight back," and Fox News contributor Dick Morris stated, "We gotta sign that [protester] up" [Hannity, 8/3/09].
Transcripts
From the August 17 edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends:
CARLSON: Well, that was President Barack Obama at a recent town hall in Grand Junction, Colorado, affirming the AARP support for health care reform. But that's sparking some controversy among the group's members. Joining me right now from Cleveland, Ohio, are two of those members, Patrick and Mary Liste. Good morning to you.
PATRICK LISTE: Good morning, Gretchen.
MARY LISTE: Good morning, Gretchen.
CARLSON: Now, I understand that both of you have decided that you no longer want to be members of the AARP. Why?
PATRICK LISTE: That -- well, the AARP is backing something that is not going to be in the range of our ages. The AARP is backing a national health care plan. To me, if this national health care plan goes through, me and my age of over 70 -- going to be 73, my wife is going to be 70 -- we may be rationed out of the care. And if we are, we're both going to have to give up. I'm going to have to give up my wife, because she costs insurance a lot of money, and it's taking care of the things she's had as far as cancer for 17 years.
CARLSON: You know, I just have to say, Patrick, when you said that my heart sunk. You said you'd have to give up your wife? Mary --
PATRICK LISTE: I'd have to give her up -- yeah, if she couldn't get the medication. They're starting her on a new regimen this coming Wednesday that's going to be more horrific to her body, but it is also going to be more expensive. And if they determine that because she's 70 years old, she no longer is eligible because there's younger people that want to use this money, what am I going to do? I'll just say goodbye. Let her suffer until she passes on.
CARLSON: Oh, my goodness. Well, Mary, I know that you've been battling cancer for some time.
MARY LISTE: Yes.
CARLSON: This will be -- will this be your fourth or fifth regiment of treatment?
MARY LISTE: This is my fourth treatment.
CARLSON: And your fears -- this is a disease that you've been trying to overcome -- your fears with the AARP supporting health care reform are what?
MARY LISTE: Well, like I said and my husband said, I'm very worried that because of my age, and I'd have to go and have more cancer treatments, what will happen to me? I'm very worried about me and the future of my children and children's. I'm very concerned about this, because what will happen to us people that are elderly?
CARLSON: Well, and we all have parents -- at least I do -- in your age bracket as well, so many of us are asking some of the same questions. Patrick and Mary Liste, thank you so much for sharing your story with me today.
From the August 10 edition of Fox News' America's Newsroom:
KELLY: You know, so, Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the House, and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer come out with an editorial today, and they say, in part, quote, "These disruptions are occurring" -- at these town halls -- "because opponents are afraid, not just of differing views, but of the facts themselves. Drowning out opposing views is simply un-American." Is that what you were trying to do, sir?
SOLA: No, sir -- no, ma'am. I was trying to speak as an American in a free country with a right of freedom of speech. But I'd like to address something to Miss Pelosi and Mr. Stoy -- Mr. -- whatever his name is --
KELLY: Hoyer.
SOLA: -- Hoyer and Mr. Reid. If you call my son un-American -- your thugs already know where we live. We've had a visit from them in the middle of the night. They can't come to us in the middle of the day, but they come to us in the middle of the night. You know where we live. I suggest you take that plane that you have and fly to Milan, Michigan, and say that directly to my son's face, if you've got the guts. This is a free country.
I am a parent of a handicapped American citizen. And the reason that I am so concerned is this -- every American should pull this up on his computer. It's the New York Post, July 24 edition, "Dangerous Doctors." Every American needs to read this, and you'll understand why this groundswell of America's people has occurred.
KELLY: It's --
SOLA: The American people --
KELLY: And just to jump in, it's "Deadly Doctors," I think. It's by Betsy McCaughey --
SOLA: "Deadly Doctors." I'm sorry. I'm nervous.
KELLY: -- who is a former lieutenant --
SOLA: I've never done this before.
KELLY: No, no, don't worry. Don't be nervous. Who is a former governor of New York and who has been very outspoken in criticizing this health care plan from the start, and many of her predictions, some believe, have already come true.
In any event, she outlines how Rahm Emanuel's brother Ezekiel Emanuel has got some rather -- some might call them radical proposals for revision to our health care system. So that's the article to which you refer.
Before we go on, I want to ask you, what do you mean they came to your house in the middle of the night?
SOLA: We -- after the incident was aired on television, we had a visit that night. A message was sent to my family. It has been reported to the Washtenaw County sheriff, and their deputy has reported it to the Michigan State Police.
KELLY: People are harassing you now, Mike?
SOLA: Yes, they are. And all I'm going to say to the person who doesn't have the courage to do it in the daytime, I will use every means available to me, lethal force if necessary, to protect Scott and my wife. Your message has been received. My wife is terrified. We have not told Scott about it. But if you -- I ever catch you on my property, I will take the risk of going to prison. But you will never again threaten my family.
From the August 24 edition of Fox & Friends:
CARLSON: Well, that got quite the response. And that was from a scene from a town hall hosted by Congressman Brian Baird last week. And the Marine vet who took the congressman to task is with me now live. David Hedrick joins me now live from Seattle. Good morning to you, David.
HEDRICK: Good morning.
CARLSON: I know you decided to attend this town hall meeting -- 3,000 people there. You never thought you were going to ask a question, right?
HEDRICK: I didn't expect to get called at all. When I saw the number of people there, I was -- I really didn't prepare -- even prepare to be asked a question, but luckily they called number 191, and that was me.
CARLSON: So that was you, and what did you do at that point, then? You had been listening to what had been going on there. You didn't like what you were hearing --
HEDRICK: Right.
CARLSON: -- so you were inspired to ask a question. What did you ask?
HEDRICK: Well, what I asked him is, was he going to -- did he ever intend to honor his sworn oath to uphold the Constitution?
CARLSON: And what did he say?
HEDRICK: He said yes.
CARLSON: And then you said the comment about your children. You said, "Stay away from my kids." What did you mean by that?
HEDRICK: Right. Right. Well, that was actually earlier, when -- I asked the question near the end, but earlier in the evening, Brian Baird had been speaking about something that was in the Pelosi bill, and it specifically refers to our children and how they want to tell parents how to raise their kids. And he specifically even said it includes things such as when to potty-train children --
CARLSON: Uh-huh.
HEDRICK: -- and other aspects, which he considers minor. But is it -- but I have to ask, is it really government's role to tell us how to raise our children? Is that the proper role of government?
CARLSON: And was this your main concern about health care reform as well? Or what was your main problem with how you have seen this whole program playing out in our country right now?
HEDRICK: Well, I mean, we know that this -- health care is a huge part of this, and I think it's kind of the straw that broke the camel's back. And that's why you're seeing so much fury right now and you're seeing so much passion coming out against this. And it's -- we've seen government-run systems. I mean, anyone who's gone to the DMV before knows what it's like to take a ticket and sit there for four hours. Do you really want to do this at your doctor's office?
CARLSON: Well, it's a very good question, and one that the politicians continue to debate at this moment in time.
HEDRICK: Mm-hmm.
CARLSON: David Hedrick, a former Marine corporal, a veteran now. Thanks for your service, number one, and thanks for sharing your time with me this morning.
From the August 11 edition of Fox News' Happening Now:
SKINNER: Are you a part of any organized group? Why did you come today to this meeting?
OFF-CAMERA VOICE: Introduce yourself.
ABRAM: Intro-- yeah, my name is Katy. I live here in Lebanon. I'm about five -- I live about five minutes from where the town hall meeting was held. I am a stay-at-home mom. I have two young children. I've never been politically active. I used to, you know, not really care too much. But over the past couple years, I've opened my eyes a little bit more. I've started to read about the Constitution, about the founders of this country, because I -- like I said to, you know, Arlen Specter, the country is being slowly ripped apart, and it's so obvious to me. And I don't understand -- with some of the people that I talk to, they don't see it. But I do, and it scares the life out of me --
SKINNER: Tell me what --
ABRAM: -- to be honest with you.
SKINNER: You were inside that room, Katy. We got a glimpse from our television cameras, but describe the atmosphere with the senator. What was it like?
OFF-CAMERA VOICE: Describe the atmosphere.
ABRAM: The atmosphere of the town hall meeting -- I think there was a lot of excitement. I know I was extremely nervous. I've been waiting for this ever since I got the invitation in the mail from Arlen Specter's office. There was frustration, obvious frustration. There was thankfulness that he even had the town hall meeting. I appreciate that he had the town hall meeting because our local congressman, Tim Holden, is not holding any town hall meetings. I think there were a lot of different levels of frustration.
SKINNER: You know, the chief of staff of the White House, Rahm Emanuel, said at this point, there's just too much heat out there and not enough light, that things are getting so hot, we're not really achieving anything. Do you feel like anything was achieved?
OFF-CAMERA VOICE: Was anything achieved?
ABRAM: Was anything achieved from the meeting today? I don't know. I hope so. I know that years down the road, I don't want my children coming to me and ask me, "Mom, why didn't you do anything? Why do we have to wait in line for, I don't know, toilet paper or anything?" I don't want to have to tell them I didn't do anything. And I know it's just a normal citizen. The most I feel I could do was come to this town hall meeting. We're -- my husband and I are on vacation, the kids are at the grandparents' house, and we're -- came to a town hall meeting for vacation and our 10th anniversary.
SKINNER: Katy Abram. Quite a way to spend her anniversary. Sorry about the audio problems, Katy. We appreciate your time. Thanks.
Fox News, NRO, Limbaugh Run With "Death Book" Smears
August 24, 2009 5:15 pm ET — 3 Comments
Following false accusations that Democrats' health care reform legislation would institute "death panels" for the elderly, H. James Towey claimed in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that the Obama administration revived a Veterans Health Administration (VHA) booklet on advanced planning directives that would "steer vulnerable individuals to conclude for themselves that life is not worth living," calling the booklet a "death book." As with the death panel smear, conservative media -- particularly Fox News -- have promoted Towey's false "death book" claim, ignoring facts that undermine Towey's rhetoric.
Towey claims Veterans Administration has a "Death Book"
Towey: VHA manual tells veterans to "hurry-up-and-die." In an August 18 Wall Street Journalcolumn headlined, "The Death Book for Veterans," Towey, director of faith-based initiatives under President Bush, asserted that "government bureaucrats are greasing the slippery slope that can start with cost containment but quickly become a systematic denial of care." Towey continued:
Last year, bureaucrats at the VA's National Center for Ethics in Health Care advocated a 52-page end-of-life planning document, "Your Life, Your Choices." It was first published in 1997 and later promoted as the VA's preferred living will throughout its vast network of hospitals and nursing homes. After the Bush White House took a look at how this document was treating complex health and moral issues, the VA suspended its use. Unfortunately, under President Obama, the VA has now resuscitated "Your Life, Your Choices."
[...]
When the government can steer vulnerable individuals to conclude for themselves that life is not worth living, who needs a death panel? [The Wall Street Journal, 8/18/09]
"Your Life, Your Choices" is not a "death book." The booklet emphasizes that "your wishes will direct future health care decisions" and presents preserving one's life "using any means possible" as an option to consider. An August 23 post by VoteVets.org blogger Richard Smith criticized Towey's assertion that "Your Life, Your Choices" presents "end-of-life choices in a way aimed at steering users toward predetermined conclusions," writing: "Really, if the document was really trying to get veterans to pull the plug on themselves, then first suggesting to them that their life should be prolonged at all costs is a pretty stupid way to do it."
Towey's organization is selling "Five Wishes" booklet on end-of-life issues. As Media Matters for America noted, the organization Towey founded, Aging with Dignity, sells "Five Wishes," a booklet that, like "Your Life, Your Choices," is designed to guide people in the creation of a living will. Huffington Post news editor Marcus Baram reported on August 22 that "Towey seems to have his own axe to grind" in criticizing "Your Life, Your Choices" in that Towey "has repeatedly tried to get the government to spend millions to purchase his 'Five Wishes' book," citing "VA sources."
"Death book" claim begins to spread
NRO: Towey op-ed a "must-read." An August 19 post on National Review Online's blog The Corner, titled, "Would You Like Some Hemlock with Your Jello? -- Government-run 'End-of-Life' Counseling at the VA," called the op-ed a "must-read."
Hannity: Is document "equivalent of a death panel?" On his August 20 Fox News show, Sean Hannity said during an interview with Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele: "[A]pparently, they've got this document that they show veterans at all our VA hospitals, and they asked -- there's a section in which it says, have you ever heard anyone say, I'm a vegetable, pull the plug; I'm a severe burden financially on my family; I'm causing severe emotional damage to my family?" Hannity asked Steele if the manual is "the equivalent of a death panel," and Steele replied that "in my view, it very well could be."
Palin: VHA "encourages veterans to forego care as they make end-of-life decisions." In an August 20 post on her Facebook page, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin linked to Towey's op-ed, adding that "Jim Towey writes in The Wall Street Journal that the Veterans Administration encourages veterans to forego care as they make end-of-life decisions."
Limbaugh: Obama asking veterans to volunteer to die. On the August 21 edition of his nationally syndicated radio show, Rush Limbaugh used the term "death book" to describe the booklet and asserted that Obama is "asking veterans to basically say, 'You know what? I want to check out. The hell with this. I live in a nursing home. Screw it. Pull the plug. Where's Doctor Kevorkian?' This thing is obsessed with death. It's obsessed with you deciding -- or with some -- maybe some influence -- that your life isn't worth living. It's -- there's nothing positive in this."
Fox News Sunday interviews Towey, promotes "death book" rhetoric
Wallace: "[W]e're going to talk exclusively to the man who uncovered this book, and you'll find out why he calls this the death book." On the August 21 edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends, Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace promoted his August 23 interview with Towey:
WALLACE: I want to tell you about Sunday, because we actually have something that isn't a joke, that I think is a very serious story. There has been a lot of talk, of course, about the death panels, and some people have said that is overstated. We're going to tell you on Sunday about this book. This is a book that is being currently used by the Veterans Administration for end-of-life counseling on -- to veterans, either those returning -- oftentimes with terrible injuries -- or veterans up to the end of their life.
It is a book that is being used on end-of-life counseling, and I think you're going to be shocked when you find what it is that health care providers and the Veterans Administration right now are telling, advising, asking veterans. And which certainly seems to lead in the direction of pulling the plug, if you ever get to that situation at the end of life. And we're going to talk exclusively to the man who uncovered this book, and you'll find out why he calls this the death book. This is current Veterans Administration policy -- the kind of end-of-life counseling that is going on VA hospitals across the country right now.
Wallace, Towey advance "death book," "death panel" smears. From Towey's August 23 Fox News Sunday interview:
WALLACE: We're going to do something different here today. Usually we discuss the news, but today we're going to tell you about something you may never have heard about -- what critics are calling the "death book."
[...]
WALLACE: Let's start with an overview. What's wrong with this material, "Your Life, Your Choices," that the VA is using for end-of-life counseling right now?
In the article that you wrote in The Wall Street Journal, in which you disclosed this, you say that the message is clear: hurry up and die.
TOWEY: Well, the message that they want to communicate, I think, is that if you have a stroke or if you have a coma situation, that somehow your life has lost a little value and it may not be worth living anymore.
My problem with the document, Chris, is that the author of it is a proponent of assisted suicide; he's way out there on that issue. And the VA has been using this -- a new directive just came out in July urging providers to refer patients to it. So, in my view, there should be a balanced treatment. And this is a slippery slope that kind of makes people -- when you look at the document, it makes people feel like they're a burden and that they should do the decent thing and die.
WALLACE: All right. We're going to get to the specifics in this book in a second, but I want to ask you another general question.
President Obama calls talk of a government-run death panel a, quote, "extraordinary lie." But I want to put up what you said in your Wall Street Journal article this week. You said the following: "When the government can steer vulnerable individuals to conclude for themselves that life is not worth living, who needs a death panel?" [Fox Broadcasting Co.'s Fox News Sunday, 08/23/09]
Fox News Sunday interviews rife with distortions, falsehoods
Wallace, Towey misrepresented passage that says, "If I'm a vegetable, pull the plug." Prompted by Wallace, Towey cited a passage in "Your Life, Your Choices" that reads, "I'm a vegetable, pull the plug," as an example of why he thinks "the document is so fundamentally flawed that the VA ought to throw it out." In his op-ed, Towey suggested that language was "aimed at steering users toward predetermined conclusions, much like a political 'push poll.' " As Media Matters noted, however, the context of that passage was an explanation of the importance of being very specific regarding your end-of-life preferences. "Your Life, Your Choices" says that statements like, "If I'm a vegetable, pull the plug," can mean different things to different people.
Wallace, Towey falsely claimed Bush suspended purported "death book" use. During the interview, Towey claimed that the Bush administration "pulled" the document in 2007, and Wallace claimed that "President Bush suspended the use of this document" and that the Obama administration "reinstate[d] it." In reality, Bush's VA promoted the document throughout his presidency, asdocumented by Daily Kos blogger Jed Lewison. Indeed, an online document on the VA's website labeled, "Reviewed/Updated Date: December 29, 2008," states, "To learn about a Living Will, read 'Your Life, Your Choices.' "
Wallace falsely claimed VHA document directs VA doctors "to refer all veterans" to "Your Life, Your Choices." During his interview with Assistant Secretary of Veterans Affairs Tammy Duckworth on the August 23 edition of Fox News Sunday, Wallace claimed that "more than a month ago -- VA health practitioners were told to refer all veterans -- not just end-of-life veterans, but all 24 million veterans -- to this document, 'Your Life, Your Choices.' " In fact, as Media Matters documented, the VHA document to which Wallace was referring actually directs patients to " 'Your Life, Your Choices' ... or other published resources." [Fox News Sunday, 8/23/09]
Fox, NRO continue to promote "death book" smear after Towey interview
Bream: "[C]ontroversy" over "death book." On the August 23 edition of Fox News' America's News HQ, Fox News legal analyst Shannon Bream hosted Wallace to talk about his interview with Towey and repeatedly promoted the idea of a "death book." Bream said that a "controversy that is brewing around what is being called the death book," prompting Wallace to respond that "it seems to at the very least raise and some would say even steer veterans at the end of their life to pulling the plug."
Goldberg: Duckworth "Defended This Irretrievably Gross Book On The Merits And Attacked The Messenger To Boot."
In an August 23 NRO post, editor-at-large Jonah Goldberg adopted "death book" and "death panels" while attacking Duckworth's "very lame" "talking points." From Goldberg's post:
I just watched Tammy Duckworth try her best to defend the V.A. "death book" on Fox News Sunday. The Iraq War veteran was severely wounded as an army aviator, losing both her legs, and is currently an assistant secretary at the V.A. The administration sent her out to defend the book and to push back against Jim Towey, who first raised the issue. While she admirably held her own, her talking points were often very, very lame (she kept insinuating that Towey's bitter his $5 book isn't free of charge to vets). The upshot was she defended this irretrievably gross book on the merits and attacked the messenger to boot. And here's the thing: The death book is doomed, doomed. It's obvious Obama will pull the thing, because it's the right thing to do and because it's a political no-brainer while he's trying to shake off the "death panel" albatross. So they sent out Duckworth to stake a position that will be reversed, making her look like a fool. Just give it time.
Goldberg: "Metaphysically Grotesque Document" Is "Telling Veterans That Maybe They Should Be Euthanized."
On the August 24 edition of Fox News' America's Newsroom, Goldberg claimed that "[t]here's no way Obama can be trying to sell a massive new health care plan that has this sort of specter of death panels hovering around it, and at the same time support this really sort of metaphysically grotesque document, which is telling veterans that maybe they should be euthanized." Host Megyn Kelly also falsely claimed that the administration "requires physicians at VAs to at least refer their patients to this." From the segment:
KELLY: Let me ask you about that, because Tammy Duckworth said, look, it hasn't -- she maintains it hasn't been in effect. Now, the facts appear to belie that, because this has been up on their website since July 2, and requires physicians at VAs to at least refer their patients to this booklet. So, put aside that fact. Shouldn't the Obama administration just take this down? Maybe they inherited it from the Bush administration -- shouldn't it just come down off the website? End of controversy?
GOLDBERG: Of course they should. I mean, I think the politics are obvious, the morality is obvious. And that's one of the reasons why it's so outrageous to send poor Tammy Duckworth out there, not armed with the facts, who's going to get thrown under the bus in two weeks time anyway, because there's no way Obama can be trying to sell a massive new health care plan that has this sort of specter of death panels hovering around it, and at the same time support this really sort of metaphysically grotesque document, which is telling veterans that maybe they should be euthanized. [America's Newsroom, 08/24/09]
"Death panel" redux
Conservative media also promoted false "death panel" term. After serial misinformer Betsy McCaughey falsely claimed that the House health care reform bill instituted "mandatory" end-of-life counseling sessions for seniors, Palin wrote in a post on her Facebook page: "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." Numerous media outlets -- including Fox News -- promoted Palin's "death panel" smear and the related claim -- initiated by McCaughey -- that the bill would "absolutely require" that seniors on Medicare undergo end-of-life counseling "that will tell them how to end their life sooner," even though those claims had been debunked in the media 40 times over.
Transcripts
From the August 20 edition of Fox News' Hannity:
HANNITY: Well, I want to ask you this. There was an article in The Wall Street Journal, and it talks about, quote, "the death books" for veterans. Have you -- I don't know if you had an opportunity to read this, because we've talked a lot about these death panels. Governor Palin -- Democrats, denied it existed then they pulled it out.
But among the many things, apparently they've got this document that they show veterans at all our VA hospitals, and they asked -- there's a section in which it says, have you ever heard anyone say, I'm a vegetable, pull the plug; I'm a severe burden financially on my family; I'm causing severe emotional damage to my family?
Now that exists and was eliminated in the Bush years and brought back under President Obama.
STEELE: Yeah.
HANNITY: Is that the equivalent of a death panel?
STEELE: I -- in my view, it very well could be. And that's the problem here. No one is laying out with any clarity exactly what these panels -- what this composition of medical professionals are going to do.
From the August 21 edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends:
WALLACE: I want to tell you about Sunday, because we actually have something that isn't a joke, that I think is a very serious story. There has been a lot of talk, of course, about the death panels, and some people have said that is overstated. We're going to tell you on Sunday about this book. This is a book that is being currently used by the Veterans Administration for end-of-life counseling on -- to veterans, either those returning -- oftentimes with terrible injuries -- or veterans up to the end of their life.
It is a book that is being used on end-of-life counseling, and I think you're going to be shocked when you find what it is that health care providers and the Veterans Administration right now are telling, advising, asking veterans. And which certainly seems to lead in the direction of pulling the plug, if you ever get to that situation at the end of life. And we're going to talk exclusively to the man who uncovered this book, and you'll find out why he calls this the death book. This is current Veterans Administration policy -- the kind of end-of-life counseling that is going on VA hospitals across the country right now.
From the August 23 edition of Fox News' America's News HQ:
BREAM: Hurricane Bill sweeps past New England, hampering the first family's vacation plans. But as President Obama plans for some downtime in Martha's Vineyard, the health care debate rages. Word today from leading -- excuse me. A controversy that is brewing around what is being called the death book. Earlier today I sat down with Chris Wallace, host of Fox News Sunday, to talk all about it.
[begin video clip]
BREAM: A fascinating show today on Fox News Sunday -- they're always great -- but today some brand new information I had never heard before about these so-called death books that involve veterans. What is that all about?
WALLACE: Well, here it is -- 51 pages. Let me -- there you go -- and it's called "Your Life, Your Choices." And this is an end-of-life counseling book that is given to all 24 million veterans in the U.S. It has been in existence since 1997, but it was killed by the Bush administration and just last month reinstated by the Obama administration, and doctors are told to refer veterans to it.
What is troubling about it, and why a fellow named Jim Towey, who was an official -- an adviser in the Bush administration, broke the story in an article inThe Wall Street Journal late this week -- is it seems to at the very least raise and some would say even steer veterans at the end of their life to pulling the plug.
WSJ to Fox to CNN: Malveaux legitimizes "death book" distortions
18 minutes ago — 0 Comments
Echoing distortions advanced by former Bush administration aide Jim Towey and Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace, CNN White House correspondent Suzanne Malveaux introduced a report by correspondent Brian Todd by stating, "Are [military veterans] forced to face a variation of the so-called 'death panels,' as administration critics have called them?" In fact, as Todd's report indicated, the end-of-life educational booklet used by the Veterans Health Administration (VHA), which Towey has called a "Death Book," does not encourage veterans to end their lives.
Contradicting CNN reporting, Malveaux asked if vets are "forced to face a variation of the so-called 'death panels' "
From the August 24 edition of CNN's The Situation Room:
MALVEAUX: Military veterans are at the center of a new controversy in the debate over health care reform. Are they forced to face a variation of the so-called "death panels," as administration critics have called them?
Our Brian Todd is here with the Situation Room investigation. And, Brian, what have you learned?
TODD: Well, Suzanne, this particular controversy focuses on a guide that's posted on the Department of Veterans Affairs website. The VA says this manual simply encourages vets to go over every possible scenario with their families, including what to do if they get too sick to make decisions themselves.
Todd's report did not mention "the debate over health care reform." Despite Malveaux's assertion that the VHA manual is "a new controversy in the debate over health care reform," in his report, Todd did not mention any of the health care reform plans or provide information suggesting that the VHA booklet has any bearing on the health care reform debate.
Malveaux falsely suggested "death panels" attack refers to something real, but CNN has repeatedly debunked the charge. CNN figures have repeatedly debunked right-wing claims that the House health care reform bill would encourage euthanasia of the elderly, including former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's (R) claim -- forwarded by the conservative media -- that the bill would create a "death panel" and the related claim -- initiated by former New York Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey (R) -- that the bill would "absolutely require" that seniors on Medicare undergo end-of-life counseling "that will tell them how to end their life sooner."
Booklet does not "force" veterans to do anything. Todd reported that the "VA says this manual simply encourages vets to go over every possible scenario with their families, including what to do if they get too sick to make decisions themselves." Nothing in Todd's report supported claims that veterans are forced to make certain decisions about end-of-life care.
CNN on-screen text refuted by report
CNN on-screen text: "Veterans' Guide to Dying: Are some being urged to end their lives?"Throughout the report, on-screen text asserted that the booklet is a "Veterans' guide to Dying":
VA spokesperson: Booklet is "educational resource" to help individuals deal with health care questions. In his report, Todd stated that "a department official strongly denied that this guide suggests veterans end their lives when they're very sick," and reported the official's statement that the guide is "simply an educational resource designed to help veterans deal with excruciating questions about what kind of health care they would like to receive." Todd also reported: "The VA says this manual simply encourages vets to go over every possible scenario with their families, including what to do if they get too sick to make decisions themselves," and aired a quote from bioethicist Paul Wolpe, the director of Emory University's Center for Ethics, who said the booklet "says, you might think you're being a burden when you're not a burden at all. Your family may want to reward your lifetime of love of them and relationship to them by taking care of you in your old age."
"Your Life, Your Choices" emphasizes "your wishes will direct future health care decisions."From the booklet, "Your Life, Your Choices: Planning for Future Medical Decisions: How to Prepare a Personalized Living Will":
There's only one person who is truly qualified to tell health care providers how you feel about different kinds of health care issues -- and that's you. But, what if you get sick, or injured so severely that you can't communicate with your doctors or family members? Have you thought about what kinds of medical care you would want? Do your loved ones and health care providers know your wishes?
Many people assume that close family members automatically know what they want. But studies have shown that spouses guess wrong over half the time about what kinds of treatment their husbands or wives would want.
You can help assure that your wishes will direct future health care decisions through the process of advance care planning. ["Your Life, Your Choices," Page 1]
"Your Life, Your Choices" asks individuals to consider the statement: "I believe that it is always wrong to withhold (not start) treatments that could keep me alive." In a section that addresses "Personal and spiritual beliefs," the booklet asks individuals to consider whether they agree with the following statements and to explain and clarify their beliefs regarding these statements:
I believe that it is always wrong to withhold (not start) treatments that could keep me alive.
I believe that it is always wrong to withdraw (stop) treatments that could keep me alive after they've been started.
I believe it is wrong to withhold (not provide) nutrition and fluids given through tubes, even if I am terminally ill or in a permanent coma. ["Your Life, Your Choices," Page 22]
CNN on-screen text echoed Towey WSJ op-ed titled, "The Death Book for Veterans." On August 18, The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by Towey titled, "The Death Book for Veterans," in which Towey criticized "Your Life, Your Choices," asserting that "government bureaucrats are greasing the slippery slope that can start with cost containment but quickly become a systematic denial of care."
Echoing Wallace and Towey, CNN report distorted passage that says: "If I'm a vegetable, pull the plug"
From the August 24 edition of The Situation Room:
TODD: Jim Towey, former head of the Bush administration's Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, is a harsh critic of a guide on the Department of Veterans Affairs website. It's called, "Your Life, Your Choices," and counsels vets on how to plan their future medical decisions.
On one page, a fictitious character is quoted as saying, "I'd never want to live like a vegetable."
Later, a questionnaire, "What makes your life worth living?" Its scenarios: being in a wheelchair, living in a nursing home, being a severe financial burden on my family. Vets filling it out are offered options to describe those situations from "difficult but acceptable" to "not worth living."
"Your Life, Your Choices" passage addresses importance of being more specific regarding end-of-life care. In a passage explaining the importance of being very specific regarding end-of-life preferences, "Your Life, Your Choices" said that statements such as, "If I'm a vegetable, pull the plug," can mean different things to different people. From the booklet:
Have you ever heard anyone say, "If I'm a vegetable, pull the plug"? What does this mean to you? What's a vegetable? What's a plug? Even people who live together can have very different ideas about what the same words mean without knowing it. The story of May and John Williams shows how important it is to be specific about what you mean.
"I'd never want to live like a vegetable." Both May & John Williams have always shared this belief during their fifty years of marriage. But when they were talking about their advance care plans, they learned that they had very different views about what that meant. For May, it's when she can't take care of herself. John was surprised. For him, being a "vegetable" is much worse. "It's when my brain's not working but my body is being kept alive by machines." ["Your Life, Your Choices," Pages 6-7]
Towey misrepresented the passage in his WSJ op-ed. In his Wall Street Journal op-ed, Towey wrote of "Your Life, Your Choices": "There is a section which provocatively asks, 'Have you ever heard anyone say, 'If I'm a vegetable, pull the plug'?' " Towey never explained the context of the quote and suggested that the statement was "aimed at steering users toward predetermined conclusions, much like a political 'push poll.' "
Wallace, Towey misrepresented the passage on Fox News Sunday. On August 23 on Fox News Sunday, Wallace similarly presented the "If I'm a vegetable, pull the plug" statement without context:
WALLACE: You're also upset about another question in the booklet, and I want to put that up: "Have you ever heard anyone say, 'If I'm a vegetable, pull the plug'?"
TOWEY: Yeah. I think the word vegetable's demeaning. It's used three times in the document, and it kind of communicates somebody that's not human. This is why I think the document is so fundamentally flawed that the VA ought to throw it out. [Fox Broadcasting Co.'s Fox News Sunday, 8/23/09]
Transcript
From the August 24 edition of CNN's The Situation Room:
MALVEAUX: Military veterans are at the center of a new controversy in the debate over health care reform. Are they forced to face a variation of the so-called "death panels," as administration critics have called them?
Our Brian Todd is here with the Situation Room investigation. And, Brian, what have you learned?
TODD: Well, Suzanne, this particular controversy focuses on a guide that's posted on the Department of Veterans Affairs website. The VA says this manual simply encourages vets to go over every possible scenario with their families, including what to do if they get too sick to make decisions themselves.
Critics say it steers vets to question whether their lives are worth living.
[begin video clip]
TODD: They make up one of the most valued and vulnerable segments of America's population: millions of military veterans, some with debilitating injuries from recent wars, others facing health challenges associated with aging. Now, the agency charged with caring for them is accused of steering veterans toward ending their lives if they become too sick.
TOWEY: It guilt-trips veterans. It makes them feel like their life is a burden, not a gift.
TODD: Jim Towey, former head of the Bush administration's Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, is a harsh critic of a guide on the Department of Veterans Affairs website. It's called, "Your Life, Your Choices," and counsels vets on how to plan their future medical decisions.
On one page, a fictitious character is quoted as saying, "I'd never want to live like a vegetable."
Later, a questionnaire, "What makes your life worth living?" Its scenarios: being in a wheelchair, living in a nursing home, being a severe financial burden on my family. Vets filling it out are offered options to describe those situations from "difficult but acceptable" to "not worth living."
TOWEY: Where is the column that says, "Yes, I have suffering in my life, but my life's beautiful. I find meaning and purpose, even though I have a disability"? ... When government only asks it in a build-up to life isn't worth living, I think it's wrong.
TODD: Contacted by CNN, the VA couldn't provide someone to speak on camera, but a department official strongly denied that this guide suggests veterans end their lives when they're very sick.
The official points out the guide is being revised, but issued a statement saying, "It's simply an educational resource designed to help veterans deal with excruciating questions about what kind of health care they would like to receive if they're unable to make decisions for themselves."
And as one medical ethicist points out, the VA guide offers opposite scenarios as well.
WOLPE: It says, you might think you're being a burden when you're not a burden at all. Your family may want to reward your lifetime of love of them and relationship to them by taking care of you in your old age.
TODD: Paul Wolpe and the VA official we spoke with point out that the critic of the VA guide, Jim Towey, has his own manual on how to plan for future medical decisions if you're debilitated. And Towey charges for that.
[end video clip]
TODD: Now, when we asked Towey about that, he said his guide is not for profit and he's not pushing his manual over anyone else's. He says the difference here is that the VA guide is a taxpayer-funded document whose principal author is an advocate of assisted suicide.
Now, we checked on that. The lead author of the VA guide, Dr. Robert Perlman, did sign a brief supporting assisted suicide in a Supreme Court case many years ago. When we contacted Perlman, he said the VA had to speak for him on this issue. The VA official said Perlman's part in that Supreme Court case was not necessarily his personal view and that he was simply presenting some clinical findings in that case -- Suzanne.
MALVEAUX: So, is there a political angle to this controversy?
TODD: Well, Towey claims that this document was kind of suspended during the Bush administration for some of the problems that he said it presented. The VA said, no, that's not the case; this was actually -- this existed during the later years of the Bush administration and it crossed over into the Obama administration. So, they're denying a political bent to this.
MALVEAUX: OK, thank you very much, Brian.
Religion and Politics Don't Mix?
Reinhold Niebuhr: “The Worst Corruption Is A Corrupt Religion.”
[I, too, as did Chris Hedges, studied theology before turning to another career. One of my teachers at Union Theological Seminary, Reinhold Niebuhr (no pacifist — he had urged U.S. resistance to fascism and Nazism) had also warned of the hazards of the degenerate, simplistic religion being promoted by the fundamentalists of that day, particularly the apparently benign Billy Graham. See Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. on this subject:
It does not take too much of a stretch of imagination to see the rampaging of ‘born again’ Bush with his notion of his divine mission to bring American nationalized religion to the Middle East in this light. Bush, as so many religionists of the past, has confused a Gospel call to help those in need as an excuse for making war big time. No, untrammeled capitalism is not what the globe needs at this juncture. The unleashing of the greedies is bringing extreme suffering to so many — if not by genocide then by starvation and disease as the developed nations cruelly exploit the resources of the under developed.
Let us not forget the earlier depredations that are well remembered by those who suffered them — the destruction of the Arbenz government (1953-4) in Guatemala, for instance, in 1953 at the behest of Chiquita Banana (United Fruit) which punished the Arbenz threat to its monopolies on fruit-growing throughout Latin America or more immediately the CIA subversion of the Mossadegh government in Iran in 1952-3 on behalf of British and U.S. oil interests there:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobo_Arbenz_Guzm%C3%A1n
Why is it that our news reports on Iran always begin Iranian history with the hostage taking of the U.S. diplomats in Iran in 1979 rather than with the brutal reign of the Shaw whom we had installed from 1954 until his regime was overthrown by a Muslim cleric?
http://www.iranonline.com/NewsRoom/Archive/Mossadeq/
I assume that Chris Hedges, too, became aware of the dirty side of Christianity during his theological studies — its attacks not only on other religions (the Crusades), but its brutal cruelties to people (the Inquisition) in the name of Jesus, its internecine wars between Christian states, and most destructive of all, the imperialistic drive to dominate the world and to destroy all peoples and cultures that stood in its way this past half millennium? It really is amazing that some of these (India and China) actually survived. Africa is largely a basket case trying to recover from the European colonization — and is still largely dominated the ‘global’ economy which favors the developed nations.
Frankly I, too, would characterize the Middle East excursions of the neocons supported by the right wing fundamentalists as fascism lite. Hopefully some evangelicals — Jim Wallis’ Sojourners and individuals on their own — are beginning to awaken from this mad religious nightmare — a dream of world domination in the name of a Jesus — who bears absolutely no resemblance to the original man of peace!
To quote scriptures here:
15 Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. 16 Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? 17 Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. 18 A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. 19 Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire. 20 Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them. (Matthew 7:15-20 KJV)
Yes, I agree with Christ Hedges. This current American aberration is not authentic religion. It is fascism. Ed Kent]
…………………………………….
The Rise of Christian Fascism and Its Threat to American Democracy
By Chris Hedges
Truthdig
February 8, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/47679/
Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, told his students that when we were his age — he was then close to 80 — we would all be fighting the “Christian fascists.”
The warning, given 25 years ago, came at the moment Pat Robertson and other radio and television evangelists began speaking about a new political religion that would direct its efforts toward taking control of all institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government. Its stated goal was to use the United States to create a global Christian empire.
This call for fundamentalists and evangelicals to take political power was a radical and ominous mutation of traditional Christianity. It was hard, at the time, to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously, especially given the buffoonish quality of those who expounded it. But Adams warned us against the blindness caused by intellectual snobbery. The Nazis, he said, were not going to return with swastikas and brown shirts. Their ideological inheritors had found a mask for fascism in the pages of the Bible.
He was not a man to use the word fascist lightly. He had been in Germany in 1935 and 1936 and worked with the underground anti-Nazi church, known as the Confessing Church, led by Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Adams was eventually detained and interrogated by the Gestapo, who suggested he might want to consider returning to the United States. It was a suggestion he followed. He left on a night train with framed portraits of Adolf Hitler placed over the contents of his suitcases to hide the rolls of home-movie film he had taken of the so-called German
Christian Church, which was pro-Nazi, and the few individuals who defied the Nazis, including the theologians Karl Barth and Albert Schweitzer. The ruse worked when the border police lifted the tops of the suitcases, saw the portraits of the Führer and closed them up again. I watched hours of the grainy black-and-white films as he narrated in his apartment in Cambridge.
Adams understood that totalitarian movements are built out of deep personal and economic despair. He warned that the flight of manufacturing jobs, the impoverishment of the American working class, the physical obliteration of communities in the vast, soulless exurbs and decaying Rust Belt, were swiftly deforming our society. The current assault on the middle class, which now lives in a world in which anything that can be put on software can be outsourced, would have terrified him. The stories that many in this movement told me over the past two years as I worked on “American Fascists: The
Christian Right and the War on America” were stories of this failure – personal, communal and often economic. This despair, Adams said, would empower dangerous dreamers — those who today bombard the airwaves with an idealistic and religious utopianism that promises, through violent apocalyptic purification, to eradicate the old, sinful
world that has failed many Americans.
These Christian utopians promise to replace this internal and external emptiness with a mythical world where time stops and all problems are solved. The mounting despair rippling across the United States, one I witnessed repeatedly as I traveled the country, remains unaddressed by the Democratic Party, which has abandoned the working class, like its Republican counterpart, for massive corporate funding.
The Christian right has lured tens of millions of Americans, who rightly feel abandoned and betrayed by the political system, from the reality-based world to one of magic — to fantastic visions of angels and miracles, to a childlike belief that God has a plan for them and Jesus will guide and protect them. This mythological worldview, one that has no use for science or dispassionate, honest intellectual inquiry, one that promises that the loss of jobs and health insurance does not matter, as long as you are right with Jesus, offers a lying world of consistency that addresses the emotional yearnings of desperate followers at the expense of reality. It creates a world where facts become interchangeable with opinions, where lies become true — the very essence of the totalitarian state. It includes a dark license to kill, to obliterate all those who do not conform to this vision, from Muslims in the Middle East to those at home who refuse to submit to the movement. And it conveniently empowers a rapacious oligarchy whose god is maximum profit at the expense of citizens.
We now live in a nation where the top 1 percent control more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined, where we have legalized torture and can lock up citizens without trial. Arthur Schlesinger, in “The Cycles of American History,” wrote that “the great religious ages were notable for their indifference to human rights in the contemporary
sense — not only for their acquiescence in poverty, inequality and oppression, but for their enthusiastic justification of slavery, persecution, torture and genocide.”
Adams saw in the Christian right, long before we did, disturbing similarities with the German Christian Church and the Nazi Party, similarities that he said would, in the event of prolonged social instability or a national crisis, see American fascists rise under the guise of religion to dismantle the open society. He despaired of U.S. liberals, who, he said, as in Nazi Germany, mouthed silly platitudes about dialogue and inclusiveness that made them ineffectual and impotent. Liberals, he said, did not understand the power and allure of evil or the cold reality of how the world worked. The current hand-wringing by Democrats, with many asking how they can reach out to a movement whose leaders brand them “demonic” and “satanic,” would not have surprised Adams. Like Bonhoeffer, he did not believe that those who would fight effectively in coming times of turmoil, a fight that for him was an integral part of the biblical message, would come from the church or the liberal, secular elite.
His critique of the prominent research universities, along with the media, was no less withering. These institutions, self-absorbed, compromised by their close relationship with government and corporations, given enough of the pie to be complacent, were unwilling to deal with the fundamental moral questions and inequities of the age. They had no stomach for a battle that might cost them their prestige and comfort. He told me, I suspect half in jest, that if the Nazis took over America “60 percent of the Harvard faculty would begin their lectures with the Nazi salute.” But this too was not an abstraction. He had watched academics at the University of Heidelberg, including the philosopher Martin Heidegger, raise their arms stiffly to students before class.
Two decades later, even in the face of the growing reach of the Christian right, his prediction seems apocalyptic. And yet the powerbrokers in the Christian right have moved from the fringes of society to the floor of the House of Representatives and the Senate.
Forty-five senators and 186 members of the House before the last elections earned approval ratings of 80 to100 percent from the three most influential Christian right advocacy groups — the Christian Coalition, Eagle Forum, and Family Resource Council. President Bush has handed hundreds of millions of dollars in federal aid to these groups and dismantled federal programs in science, reproductive rights and AIDS research to pay homage to the pseudo-science and quackery of the Christian right.
Bush will, I suspect, turn out to be no more than a weak transition figure, our version of Otto von Bismarck — who also used “values” to energize his base at the end of the 19th century and launched “Kulturkampf,” the word from which we get culture wars, against
Catholics and Jews. Bismarck’s attacks, which split Germany and made the discrediting of whole segments of the society an acceptable part of the civil discourse, paved the way for the Nazis’ more virulent racism and repression.
The radical Christian right, calling for a “Christian state” — where whole segments of American society, from gays and lesbians to liberals to immigrants to artists to intellectuals, will have no legitimacy and be reduced, at best, to second-class citizens — awaits a crisis, an economic meltdown, another catastrophic terrorist strike or a series of environmental disasters. A period of instability will permit them to push through their radical agenda, one that will be sold to a frightened American public as a return to security and law and order, as well as moral purity and prosperity. This movement — the most
dangerous mass movement in American history — will not be blunted until the growing social and economic inequities that blight this nation are addressed, until tens of millions of Americans, now locked in hermetic systems of indoctrination through Christian television and radio, as well as Christian schools, are reincorporated into American
society and given a future, one with hope, adequate wages, job security and generous federal and state assistance.
The unchecked rape of America, which continues with the blessing of both political parties, heralds not only the empowerment of this American oligarchy but the eventual death of the democratic state and birth of American fascism.
Chris Hedges is the former Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times and the author of “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.”
“A War Is Just If There Is No Alternative, And The Resort To Arms Is Legitimate If They Represent Your Last Hope.” (Livy Cited By Machiavelli)
Christopher Hitchens vs. Douglas Wilson Debate at Westminster Theological Seminary, Part 1 of 12
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TQc-t8v-U4
"Is Christianity Good for the World?"
Christopher Hitchens and Douglas Wilson debate.
posted 5/08/2007 09:17AM
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Theologian Douglas Wilson and atheist Christopher Hitchens, authors whose books are already part of a larger debate on whether religion is pernicious, agreed to discuss their views on whether Christianity itself has benefited the world. Below is their exchange, one in a series that will appear on our website over the course of this month.
Douglas Wilson is author of Letter from a Christian Citizen , senior fellow of theology at New Saint Andrews College, and minister at Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho. He is also the editor of Credenda/Agenda magazine and has written (among other things ) Reforming Marriage and A Serrated Edge: A Brief Defense of Biblical Satire and Trinitarian Skylarking. His Blog and Mablog site inevitably makes for provocative reading.
Christopher Hitchens wrote, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything(Twelve Books). Hitchens is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and a visiting professor of liberal studies at the New School. He is the author of numerous books, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America, Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man,"Letters To a Young Contrarian, and Why Orwell Matters. He was named, to his own amusement, number five on a list of the "Top 100 Public Intellectuals" by Foreign Policy and Britain's Prospect.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6
From: Christopher Hitchens
To: Douglas Wilson
Subject: Is Christianity Good for the World?
In considering the above question (for which my thanks are due to your generosity and hospitality in inviting my response), I have complete confidence in replying in the negative. This is for the following reasons.
1) Although Christianity is often credited (or credits itself) with spreading moral precepts such as "Love thy neighbor", I know of no evidence that such precepts derive from Christianity. To take one instance from each Testament, I cannot believe that the followers of Moses had been indifferent to murder and theft and perjury until they arrived at Sinai, and I notice that the parable of the good Samaritan is told of someone who by definition cannot have been a Christian.
To these obvious points, I add that the "Golden Rule" is much older than any monotheism, and that no human society would have been possible or even thinkable without elementary solidarity (which also allows for self-interest) between its members. Though it is not strictly relevant to the ethical dimension, I would further say that neither the fable of Moses nor the wildly discrepant Gospel accounts of Jesus of Nazareth may claim the virtue of being historically true. I am aware that many Christians also doubt the literal truth of the tales but this seems to me to be a problem for them rather than a difficulty for me. Even if I accepted that Jesus—like almost every other prophet on record—was born of a virgin, I cannot think that this proves the divinity of his father or the truth of his teachings. The same would be true if I accepted that he had been resurrected. There are too many resurrections in the New Testament for me to put my trust in any one of them, let alone to employ them as a basis for something as integral to me as my morality.
2) Many of the teachings of Christianity are, as well as being incredible and mythical, immoral. I would principally wish to cite the concept of vicarious redemption, whereby one's own responsibilities can be flung onto a scapegoat and thereby taken away. In my book, I argue that I can pay your debt or even take your place in prison but I cannot absolve you of what you actually did. This exorbitant fantasy of "forgiveness" is unfortunately matched by an equally extreme admonition—which is that the refusal to accept such a sublime offer may be punishable by eternal damnation. Not even the Old Testament, which speaks hotly in recommending genocide, slavery, genital mutilation, and other horrors, stoops to mention the torture of the dead. Those who tell this evil story to small children are not damned by me, but have been damned by history and should also be condemned by those who shrink from cruelty to children (a moral essential that underlies all cultures).
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