Teach The Controversy

Ceci Connolly, well-known around these parts, has a "teach the controversy" article out today about the utter B.S. flung about on talk radio and promoted by serial liar Betsy McCaughey that the Democratic health care plan surreptitiously seeks to send roving verbal hit squads out to the sticks to talk the elderly into suicide. Connolly, in her role as a stenographer, dutifully transcribes the claims from all sides of the "debate". In the second paragraph she gets close to actually explaining the language in the bill:

The controversy stems from a proposal to pay physicians who counsel elderly or terminally ill patients about what medical interventions they would prefer near the end of life and how to prepare instructions such as living wills. Under the plan, Medicare would reimburse doctors for one session every five years to confer with a patient about his or her wishes and how to ensure those preferences are followed. The counseling sessions would be voluntary.

That's not even totally correct, I wouldn't call Medicare covering end of life counseling a proposal to "pay physicians." Unless you want to call Medicare covering hip surgery as a proposal to pay physicians to take out people's hips.

You can read the provision right here. And the story could have ended there. But Connolly and her editors find it more exciting to give lots of space to those distorting the bill, without really coming down on one side or the other. The heading over Connolly's articles on this subject say "Tracking the Health Care Debate." I guess it's someone else's job to track the truth.

You know what would have been an interesting wrinkle in the article? Besides actually saying who's right and who's wrong, I mean. The tidbit that Sen. Susan Collins actually introduced this language back in the spring.

On May 22nd, Senators Collins and Jay Rockefeller introduced the “Advance Planning and Compassionate Care Act,” according to a press release sent over by a source. The measure provides Medicare funding “for advance care planning so that patients can routinely talk to their physicians about their wishes for end-of-life care,” the release says.

Collins praised the measure, which may be included in the Senate health care bill, in the release. “Our legislation will improve the way our health care system care for patients at the end of their lives,” she said, “and it will also facilitate appropriate discussions and individual autonomy in making decisions about end-of-life care.”

Maybe someone should ask Senator Collins whether she’s concerned that Federal funding for end of life consultations could result in “government-encouraged euthanasia,” as we keep hearing. Come to think of it, maybe I’ll ask her.

What a reporter like this would say is that they have a fact-check department, and they write articles about their fact-checking, and the point of this article is to highlight the "debate". I don't really understand how that illuminates much of anything. An article with the opening line "A campaign on late-night radio promoting theories that the Earth is flat and sailors fall off the side of the world just past the horizon have sparked fear among seafaring families" wouldn't be particularly helpful to anyone. I do think Democrats have shown a basic unwillingness to decide whether to ignore B.S. like this and let it fester or attack it and give it more attention, but a journalist writing about it should probably make pretty clear that only one side is telling the truth. There is actually no convention of balance in journalism, that's a recently invented altar upon which the modern press corps bends and prays.

Dog Whistle

President Bush called his decision to commute the sentence of Scooter Libby "fair and balanced" today for a very specific reason. He wanted to let the base know that their best interests were at heart, and that he'll be extremely likely to pardon Libby on his way out the door. This language of "fair and balanced" is extremely evocative and everyone knew what he was talking about. He was saying it was a fair decision in the way that Fox News is a fair network. He's admitting that the fix was in and giving a wink to his pals by letting them know that they would be protected too. It was the verbal equivalent of his smirk, and as far as I'm concerned it's a direct admission of obstruction of justice, or at least as direct as you're going to get with him.

One way to counteract this is to say to the President that, as long as he's being fair and balanced, he must immediately sequester himself in a room and take a look at all of these other federal sentences of similiar value, and decide if they need to be commuted as well. It's the only fair and balanced thing to do. And this should be said with a mocking tone, along the order of OJ looking for the real killers. "The President is holed up right now with the list of all federal perjury felons, scrupulously weighing the evidence like Solon and determining who must stay in jail and who must leave. Such wisdom and such essential fairness! We may need another President to step in while Bush undergoes this Herculean undertaking... oh wait, we've got someone handling that.

I would hand-deliver petitions for redress from hundreds of perjury felons to the White House in the interest of fairness and balance. I would convene "mock grand juries" on the Capitol steps and lie to them with impunity, since the President is honor-bound to study and commute my sentence. I would put up a graphic of the two sides of the balance sheet with respect to Libby: "On the one hand, he lied to a federal grand jury and FBI investigators and obstructed an investigation into outing a CIA covert operative which reached up to the OVP and possibly the President himself. On the other hand, he's a friend."

Let's tie this "fair and balanced" theme right around the President's neck. It's already seen in liberal and even independent circles as not so much a phrase but a punchline. Time to roll it out. We can play dog-whistle politics too.

UPDATE: The usage of "fair and balanced" to give this dog whistle was so clumsy and obvious that many liberals may shrug it off, much like Catherine Tremell in Basic Instinct writes a book about a murderer who uses ice picks, so how could she possibly be doing the same kind of murdering. Only an idiot would be so blatantly obvious!

As I was saying....