Salon's Joe Conason: Will Bill and Betsy Kill Again?

Will Bill and Betsy kill again?

Kristol and McCaughey helped derail Clinton's healthcare reforms with misinformation -- and now they're at it again
By Joe Conason

Jul. 31, 2009

If the current effort to reform American healthcare ends in frustration, much of the blame rests on our political culture's empowerment of deception and ignorance. Fake erudition is revered, every hoax is deemed brilliant, and prejudice is presented as knowledge -- while actual expertise is disregarded or devalued.

The glaring evidence may be found in media and online everywhere today – but most blatantly, perhaps, in the nation's rapt attention to the fraudulent pronouncements of William Kristol and Betsy McCaughey, the right-wing celebrities who worked so hard to kill the Clinton reform plan. Knowing what we have since learned about him and her, it is hard to believe that anyone believes anything they say. But once again it is their words -- brimming with falsehood, stupidity and possibly both -- that inspire the opposition and confuse the public.

It appears that McCaughey is the source of the "elderly euthanasia" hoax now circulating on the Internet, talk radio and in right-wing media, which claims that Democratic health bills will force old, ill Medicare recipients into making plans for their own deaths. Two weeks ago, on former Sen. Fred Thompson's radio program, she warned that "the healthcare reform bill would make it mandatory — absolutely require -- that every five years people in Medicare have a required counseling session that will tell them how to end their life sooner." The nonpartisan Politifact.com Web site described this claim as a "ridiculous falsehood."

Over the past several years, McCaughey had lapsed into a hard-earned obscurity, following her embarrassing stint as New York's lieutenant governor and spectacularly unsuccessful gubernatorial candidate, and then an even more embarrassing, somewhat bizarre divorce from Wilbur Ross, one of America's wealthiest investors. Her dizzying career had begun with "No Exit," the New Republic cover story that was responsible for blowing the first big political hole in the Clinton health plan.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2009/07/31/bill_betsy/print.html