Sarah Palin, big political lies and the U.S. immigration debate
The prize for the biggest political lie of 2009 went to Sarah Palin, the darling of the American right, for injecting fictitious “death panels” into the health reform debate. This year, fact-benders are hard at work to control the debate on another controversial topic, immigration. Competition is intense.
It comes from opponents of immigration reforms that would simultaneously offer better control of the 2,000-mile U.S-Mexico border, a new visa system, and a path to legal status for the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants, the majority Mexicans, who are already in the country. The official term for this is “comprehensive immigration reform.”
But influential politicians insist there must be no reform before the border is entry-proof to illegals, and they portray the frontier as a virtual war zone, on both sides of the line.
There is Arizona’s governor, Jan Brewer, who is talking about the discovery of decapitated bodies on the American side of the border. There is Senator John McCain, who has said violence along the border is the worst he has ever seen. There is a letter 12 members of congress (10 Republicans, two Democrats) wrote to President Barack Obama saying border violence is increasing “at an alarming pace.”
None of this stands up to factual scrutiny though perhaps none of it is quite at the toxic level of the claim Palin put on her Facebook page last year — that the government’s proposed health care reforms included setting up panels that would decide whether elderly or disabled Americans were worthy of continued health care or should be let to die.
This was entirely fictitious but it “set political debate on fire,” said the Pulitzer prize-winning fact-check site Politifact.com, which rated the death panels the biggest political lie of 2009, based on a poll of 5,000 readers. The death panel canard contributed to the rapid growth of the anti-government tea party movement and threw doubt over the passage of the health reform bill. It finally passed in March, against unanimous Republican opposition.
On the emotional issue of immigration, perception trumps reality and the widely-held perception is of an “unsecured border” (McCain’s phrase) and a cross-border invasion by criminals rather than people in search of work and a better life. There has been no corroboration of Governor Brewer’s claim that 87 percent of illegal border crossers have prior criminal records.
Refuting healthcare myths
– David Magnus, Phd, is the director of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics. The views expressed are his own. –
The public discussion of healthcare reform has been full of so many lies and myths that it is less a policy debate than bad theater.
Critics of reform (conservatives hoping to score political points and oppose Obama on anything; free market ideologues; those with threatened financial interests) have stooped to absurdity in their public pronouncements. One publication declared that severely disabled physicist Stephen Hawking would never get life saving medicine in a national health system, ignoring that Hawking is British—virtually all of his life saving treatments were done through their National Health Service.
As debate over reforming health care continues, these are some of the key myths that get in the way of truly meaningful discussion.
Myth #1—We have the best health care in the world
This is probably true for some Americans. But on the whole our system is among the poorest of all developed nations. We spend far more per capita than any of our peers on healthcare, yet health outcomes measures are no better in aggregate. The World Health Organization ranking of health systems rated 36 other countries as having better health systems despite spending far less. The U.S. was right behind Costa Rica (and only two spots ahead of Cuba).
But the reality of the failure of our health system is best seen by the thousands of people being turned away in Los Angeles last week at the massive free clinic set up by the Remote Area Medical Foundation (see Reuters story). When the country spending the most money can not meet the basic medical needs of so many of its citizens, it does not have a good (or just) health system, much less the best system.
This country can no longer keep what passes for a health care system. I believe the survival of the republic is at stake here. A healthy nation is a happy one, and we have a right to pursue happiness.
For Palin, rules have never applied
Matthew E. Berger covered Palin’s vice presidential campaign as an embedded reporter for NBC News and National Journal. He is the author of a book on Palin’s campaign and political future, scheduled for release in the fall by Wiley. The article originally appeared on Politico.com. The views expressed are his own.
Standard Washington political rules state that any presidential aspirants must finish out their term, write a book, travel to Iowa and New Hampshire, and start talking policy. Any deviation from the norm suggests political suicide, and many analysts have spent the past few days writing Sarah Palin’s political obituary.
But Palin never learned the rules, and she certainly doesn’t play by them. Palin has her own set of rules, which minimizes the expertise of political veterans and relies almost entirely on her gut. As times got tough during her vice presidential campaign, Palin began to ignore the advice of those around her and started doing the things she relied on to win in Alaska, specifically directly attacking her critics and speaking more to local media. Whether her small-town politics translated well to the national stage didn’t seem to register with her.
And under her personal guidelines, Friday’s announcement makes sense. The timing and her unscripted words — full of metaphors of basketball and fishing — made clear the decision had been reached without full consultation or preparation with political advisers. Palin had decided on a path, consulted few outside her family and moved forward.
Certainly, Palin’s decision to resign stems in large part from frustration over how her identity has changed in the past 11 months. Her allies in Alaska and Washington say she seemed unhappy in recent weeks, exasperated by the negative media attention and her inability to effect change in Juneau. Her combative tone with Levi Johnston and David Letterman suggested a woman thinking more about her family than her political future. Palin’s mother even told friends and neighbors she did not know how much more the governor could stand.
Support for Governor Palin scares me because, like George Bush, Governor Palin makes no sense when she talks, and yet, half of America doesn’t seem to notice. If she were coherent and radically conservative, she wouldn’t worry me. But she rambles incoherently and still people think they hear what they want to hear. Does half of America have some sort of audio-processing disability?
G20 should be pragmatic about protectionism
– Paul Blustein is a journalist-in-residence at the Brookings Institution. He is writing a book on the World Trade Organization, which will be published in September. The views expressed are his own. —
Telling young people to abstain from sex is “not realistic at all” — new mother Bristol Palin, 18.
The wisdom of Ms. Palin should be borne in mind by the leaders of the Group of 20 nations at their April 2 summit when they turn to trade.
The meeting comes at a time when worries about protectionism are mounting, because a number of countries have raised trade barriers and enacted other quasi-protectionist measures.
It is tempting to say, as many commentators have, that the G20 should vow to shun all new acts of protectionism, including any tariff-raising or more subtle actions such as “buy local” provisions in government stimulus programs. Unfortunately, such blanket pledges will be no more credible than teenage abstinence campaigns. The G20 must be ambitious on trade, but it must also be practical. Minimizing long-term damage to the trading system should be the overarching goal.
The G20’s effort on trade at its first summit last November was loaded with high-mindedness—and, as it turned out, hot air. The leaders said they would “strive to reach agreement” in 2008 in the World Trade Organization’s Doha Round of trade negotiations, which have dragged on for seven years. And they promised to “refrain from raising new barriers” for 12 months.
Alas, violations of both the spirit and letter of the declaration materialized within days of its promulgation.
I would suggest that anyone who advocates protectionism and tariffs would do well to Google “Smoot-Hawley Act”…
Real vs unreal Americans
By Bernd Debusmann
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – What is a real American? As opposed to an unreal American, a fake American, an un-American American or an anti-American American.
The answer is in the eye of the beholder and his or her political orientation. The question, and variations of it, has been asked in several periods of U.S. history and has bubbled up again, one of a number of odd sideshows, in the closing stages of the campaign for the presidential election on Nov. 4.
Robin Hayes, a Republican congressman from North Carolina, provided details on Americans who do not qualify as real. “Liberals hate real Americans that work, and accomplish, and achieve, and believe in God.” Both Palin and Hayes later “clarified” their remarks to say they had not actually meant to suggest the existence of pro- and anti-American parts of the country. Nevertheless, their words prompted a vivid debate in cyberspace and on talk radio.
What is a real American? I think that question was best answered back in 1835 by Alexis de Tocqueville in his “Democracy in America.” It’s still accurate. Try reading that instead of listening to self-serving politicians.
from Tales from the Trail:
Is internal strife rippling through McCain-Palin campaign?
WASHINGTON - As the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign enters its final week, reports are bubbling up about internal strife within the Republican ticket that suggest vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is trying to distance herself from the top of the ticket, John McCain.
Palin over the last few weeks has publicly expressed her differences with McCain on issues such as a constitutional ban on gay marriage, the campaign's decision to no longer contest Democrats in Michigan and her distaste for automated calls that have drawn scrutiny.
Politico.com reported this weekend that Palin has also cast aside advice from former George W. Bush aides assigned to help her on the campaign trail, citing their handling of her debut. She was roundly criticized for her poor performance in her initial national media interviews.
The report said:
Those Palin supporters, inside the campaign and out, said Palin blames her handlers for a botched rollout and a tarnished public image — even as others in McCain's camp blame the pick of the relatively inexperienced Alaska governor, and her public performance, for McCain's decline.
"She's lost confidence in most of the people on the plane," said a senior Republican who speaks to Palin, referring to her campaign jet. He said Palin had begun to "go rogue" in some of her public pronouncements and decisions.
After that story emerged, CNN reported that aides from the McCain side of the house were fighting back, including quoting one unnamed aide who described Palin as a "diva" and that she was looking out for her own political future in case they do not win the White House next week.
I think the McCain campaign chose Palin as a running mate for the wrong reasons; most notably, because they thought it would cleave a large segment of female and independent voters from Obama’s base.
It seems that her history and socio-political views have trumped her personality and gender in the minds of independents, and that wasn’t what McCain was hoping for.
