"You used to have a rabbit. Beautiful little thing. Do you remember?"
"Flossy."
"That's right. Flossy. Do you remember what happened to Flossy?"
"You shot him."
"That's right. It was the kindest thing to do after he'd been run over by that car."
"Your car, sir."
"Yes, by my car. But even that was an act of mercy when you remember that that dog had been set on him."
"Your dog, sir."
-    General Melchett and George (From Blackadder)


The death panel tidal wave has washed over the media and destroyed the whole structure of a slowly and painstakingly constructed national dialogue on the technical and moral underpinnings of health care reform. It's nauseating that one side of the aisle has demagogued an issue that is or should be deeply important to all families. I just don't understand how a whole major party can take end of life issues and treat them with such a lack of respect. And I don't understand how the whole national media could have jumped on this particularly despicable panic-party wagon with such apparent glee.

One of the toughest decisions anyone will have to make in their lives is literally or metaphorically pulling the plug on their parents. Anything that could make these end of life decisions less heart-wrenching just can't be treated in this way; warped out of recognition, caricatured as a monstrous genocidal scheme, and the perpetrators of this outrage treated with respectful kid-gloves in the media.

I spent the last weeks of my father's life at his bedside, keeping one hand on his shoulder all night because it was the only way to calm him enough so that he could sleep, watching him slowly lose his mind due to the meds and the pain, and then finding myself handed the responsibility of deciding to end the brutal treatment that had no chance of saving his life (or perhaps...  an ever so slight one...?), with my siblings overseas on the phone wondering whether we shouldn't perhaps let it continue....

Nothing will make such decisions easy, but any discussion of measures that could grant those involved some peace of mind just can't become the center of a national clown-show like what has just happened. I will never cease to be surprised by how low the moral lepers can set the limbo-bar of lunacy and how the media can again and again manage to stoop below it.

The media is not completely blind. They are now involved in their nth cycle of self-reflection as they look on the latest wreckage of their own making. And yet, surprise surprise, they see nothing in that mirror other than a thing of pristine innocence sullied by strange forces quite beyond their control.

After all, they did not push the lies and demagoguery. They merely
- reported what the liars were saying ,
- gave the demagogues a bigger soap-box,
- asked the hard questions, such as "is this tough GOP campaign a good strategy?",

- and then after a couple of weeks decided to check whether the rumors swirling around the village like a tornado were actually founded in fact.

After all, they never ever intended for it to end like this, hysterical gun slinging screamers at town halls, the Hill more and more polarized, two halves of the country convinced the other half are Nazis bent on subverting democracy, the President forced on the defensive...

but GAWD does it make for good TV and flashy headlines.

Anarchy sells, what-are-you-gonna-do...?

This would be less maddening if this moment of reflection actually led to thoughts about how to improve the political discourse. But no. The handwringing concerns primarily their fragile place as an elite that moves and shapes this discourse. The worry issues from a sense that they no longer control things. Oh dear. The poor little big-wigs.

We have Joe Klein whining about the difficulty for the Serious Press in maintaining that sacred convention of giving equal credence to both parties, at a time when one party has become so incredibly stupid. You can almost see him WISH the Democrats would turn into equally pathological liars so that the press could once again appear fair and balanced. "Why oh why do the Dems so want to hurt America with their reasonable fact-based arguments?" Of course, now Klein's piece from five days ago is tucked away in Time's historical archive, and on the front page it's replaced (if it ever was there?) by Joel Stein's half-hearted Millbanky tongue-flapping ruminations on how he'd go about setting up the death panel, entitled " Can I Kill You?". Sickening.

For a couple of weeks, the NYT stroked its collective beard 'questioning' whether these rumors were true, and finally decided, with half the country well-entrenched in a panic about the coming genocide, that they were 'false'. But such head-line illumination was reserved for the tech-savvy readers of the interwebs, leaving the unworthy print-readers still in the dark. Why? Maybe clarity on paper is just irresponsible - someone might whack a wingnut over the head with the solid truth. Pixels just don't have the same effect.

Howard Kurtz of WaPo wails about the MSM's impotence in debunking myths. He lists the various instances where CNN, NYT, WaPo, MSNBC and others had flat out called the various crazy rumors baseless. He of course elides the fact that CNN also loudly trumpets the various lies as the Gospel Truth on prime time with Lou Dobbs. WaPo publishes these rumors as fact every other day with the likes of Krauthammer and Kristol. And as for MSNBC, well they've been long been slapped with the discrediting partisan Liberal tag anyway.

These wheezy self-absorbed media 'critics' sound like Glenn Beck summing up his position in one long breath "Obama IS racist, though I'm not saying he's racist, so why do people say I'm saying that...?". What goes on in the brains of the editors at these outfits? Do they really not know what they're doing when they give people the finger with the right hand and pat them lovingly with the left?

The most heartbreaking read in this periodically refreshed media genre is Ezra Klein's sweeping absolution of the media. I used to love reading this guy. But I'm starting to feel that the WaPo virus is going to his brain. In a first shot at this topic of media complicity/impotence in the madness he attributes some responsibility for not doing a better job of knocking the crazy slander down. But then he comes back and offers the following exculpatory thoughts:

The problem isn't in the particulars. It's in the profession. Namely, it's in the competitive pressures to drift toward sensationalism and hot stories. A smear like "death panels" emerges and catches fire because it's fundamentally interesting. You could write a great thriller, or film a poignant drama, about death panels. Not so about health insurance exchanges. That said, the New York Times would probably never mention the lie if given the opportunity. But after it hits talk radio and explodes onto cable news and rips through the blogosphere, it stops being a lie and begins being a story. [...]

They just get caught following a manipulated conversation, and so being part of the manipulation, part of the machine that focuses on cynical lies like the death panels rather than policy specifics like the exchanges. That's not the fault of an individual reporter, though. It's structural, and it requires a structural response.)

WTF? A lie on cable, on the internet, does not stop being a lie.

The story is not that some people are saying this exciting/scary-if-true thing.

The story is that some very powerful people are lying their pants off on the TV.

THAT is an exciting AND scary story. The story is that the GOP are spreading insanely inflammatory lies about their political opposites. Report it. THAT's your job.

When a republican, famous for nothing but her track record of fear-mongering comes out with an Op-ed peddling death panels, a responsible reporter writes gripping pieces like this, laying out her long trail of toxic slime eroding the political fabric of a country.

When a leading respected politician like John McCain feeds the rumors by mumbling skepticism about whether or not half his long-time Senate friends and colleagues are actually genocidal maniacs, the story should not be

'Respected politician has doubts',

 the real story is

'Respected politician has lost his mind'.

The truth in such cases is actually a great story. The problem is that some true, and truly great, stories require a journalist and his editors to have backbone. And perhaps Ezra is right. That is a kind of 'structural problem'. Just not the kind he thinks.