Who’s to blame for conservatives gaining traction with ridiculous arguments like Betsy McCaughey’s that Democratic healthcare proposals will make it easier for government bureaucrats to kill old people? Brendan Nyhan says it’s not Obama:
Who’s to blame for this problem? I largely fault the media. While the Obama administration’s message strategy has hardly been perfect, it’s absurd to say, as Cynthia Tucker did on This Week, that Obama “allowed the opposition [to health care reform] to scare people” (my emphasis). In a polarized political system, the McCaughey/Taitz approach to concocting and promoting misinformation probably would have worked no matter
what the White House did. As Kevin Drum and Matthew Yglesias recently argued, it’s extremely difficult to myth-proof a bill or to effectively counter these claims once they are made. Until the media stops giving airtime and column inches to proponents of misinformation, the playbook is going to keep working.
In recent weeks, variations of this argument have been sprouting up all over the conservative ecosystem. Rush Limbaugh has been laying it on particularly thick for his 22 million listeners. “People at a certain age with certain diseases will be deemed not worth the investment, and they will, just as Obama said, they’d give them some pain pills, and let them loop out till they die and they don’t even know what’s happened…They’re preparing you to die,” he said on one show. (A caller who said she was 66 responded, “You know, Rush…they want to get rid of the old people so they can insure the illegal aliens for their voting base.”) And it gets even more sinister: Rahm Emanuel’s brother Ezekiel, a physician and White House health care policy adviser is, Limbaugh says, a “central figure” who believes it’s a “waste of money to invest in health care in the elderly. ” Plus, he plans to expand hospice care. And we all know what that means!
Fox News host Sean Hannity has also taken up the cause, as has [Randall] Terry, the former head of anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, who has been railing against the President’s “death care.” Donny Ferguson at the libertarian Small Government Times writes that Obama’s plan “sends government employees to your home to monitor your parenting…and forces the sick and elderly to submit to ‘end of life counseling.'” According to the Washington Post, Betsy McCaughey, the former New York politician who played a major role in derailing the Clinton health care initiative, told former GOP senator and failed presidential contender Fred Thompson on his radio show that the health care reform bill contained mandatory counseling sessions for seniors “to end their life sooner” by showing them how to “decline nutrition…and cut your life short.”
Hmmm. So this is getting lots of play in the conservative media — places like talk radio and the Wall Street Journal editorial page — but how much play has it been getting in the mainstream media? I’m not saying it hasn’t, but I’m curious abut this since I don’t watch much of it. Outside of Fox, has the “Democrats want to kill granny” meme gotten much play? Help me out here in comments.
