The Great 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.

– 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.

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.

– 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.

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.

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.