Message #185

[GordMay]

Half-truths and outright lies, told with a straight face, and the preoccupation with a debate between those who believe medical care is a human right to be equitably shared and those who consider it just another commodity, to be profitably sold, should sound a warning about what goes wrong when demagogues take the debate hostage.

Sarah Palin, a once and future aspirant to executive power, is setting the excessive tone for the medicare shouting match. Inflaming fear with fiction, last year's Republican vice-presidential candidate is blogging that Barack Obama's reforms would leave the fates of Trig, her Down syndrome son, and her aging parents, to "death panels."

Bizarre and unhitched from reality, Palin's wild hyperbole is fodder for a lunatic minority now mixing the old and new technologies of mob rule and web connectivity to escape the fringes. Across the U.S. they are silencing serious consideration of fixes to a broken system that maroons 46 million people without insurance and is a leading cause of personal bankruptcy.

Those politically convenient fantasies are data points on a trend line that predates today’s partisan “conservatives”. More important is early recognition that viral nastiness now infects this debate. Facts have fled, leaving the vacuum to be filled by public histrionics that sway public opinion with name-calling, finger pointing and character assassination.

That's corrosive, even in  countries as moderate as the USA & Canada. There’s an urgent need to infuse policy deliberation with logic, and politics with civility.

Elbows will always be high, in a rolling power struggle that rewards the winner with so much, and leaves the losers so little. But desperate politicians, and partisan interest groups who reinforce weak positions with gross distortions poorly serve the greater national good.