Betsy McCaughey Ross Has Always Been Nuts

http://gawker.com/5337724/betsy-mccaughey-liar

Betsy McCaughey is a professional liar. She lies. The things she writes are untrue. They are not even "distortions." They are made-up. Everyone has known this for years and yet she was still allowed to derail the nation this month.

McCaughey's schtick, as described by James Fallows, is to pose as a disinterested, objective researcher who is just shocked and dismayed to find something insane and evil in a piece of legislation supported by a Democratic president.

***

In a radio interview with Fred Thompson, McCaughey got more explicit, wholly inventing mandatory death panel sessions American seniors would have to face every five years.

And, thus, "death panels." From Betsy to Rush to Sarah Palin to Chuck Grassley to your own old relatives forwarding you crazy shit, probably.

Of course, she's been at this forever. In 1994, McCaughey worked for the Manhattan Institute, a right-wing think tank. And then she wrote a piece for The New Republic about how the Clinton health care plan would not allow people to buy health care coverage outside the government-run plan. This, obviously, was false. George Will picked up on it, adding nonsense about jail terms.

(Andrew Sullivan edited The New Republic from 1991 through 1996. In 1994, Sullivan was on a roll, publishing both the objectively racist pseudoscience of The Bell Curve and Betsy McCaughey's No Exit. This was all before Ruth Shalit and Stephen Glass. Current editor Franklin Foer apologized for the McCaughey piece shortly after assuming his position. Sullivan never really has. McCaughey's story was really more the fault of owner/"editor-in-chief" Marty Peretz, of course, because he had a psychotic hatred of Bill Clinton.)

So. After that one lying story full of lies made her famous, Al D'Amato told George Pataki to make her Lietenant Governor of New York. She did not get along with Pataki, and she famously, weirdly, stood up for the entirety of Pataki's 1996 State of the State address. In 1997, Pataki dropped her from the ticket with a nasty public letter and she decided to become a Democrat in order to run against him. She ended up on the Liberal Party ticket, and lost, obviously, and then she moved to DC to work for the Hudson Institute, another right-wing think tank.

So she is a known liar and an elected Republican politician (her brief and bizarre stint as a vengeful Liberal party candidate aside), and here she is still forcing people to argue with chimerical fantasies instead of legitimate criticisms of progressive legislation.

We are hard pressed to come up any equivalent figure on "the left," who openly and intentionally lies in the service of her partisan arguments, and who continues to do so with relative impunity, in major publications, long after the lies are exposed.

http://www.nytimes.com/1998/07/12/magazine/betsy-mccaughey-ross-is-not-kidding.html?pagewanted=1

There has, in the peculiar history of New York State politics, never been anyone quite like her. A consensus has emerged about this woman, at least in New York's political community, which is that McCaughey Ross is -- to put it directly -- a little loopy. It is a perception that has been explicitly promoted by Pataki's office, which has needed to account for the fact that, were it not for the efforts of Pataki and Senator Alfonse M. D'Amato, McCaughey Ross would almost certainly be unknown to most New Yorkers today. (In her more chivalrous moments, Zenia Mucha, Pataki's communications director, describes the Lieutenant Governor as ''an irrational person.'') And it is a perception that McCaughey Ross has encouraged with her bouts of unorthodoxy: the staff bloodlettings; the fact that she remained standing, rather conspicuously, throughout Pataki's 1996 State of the State speech; her frequent defiance of her sponsors, D'Amato and Pataki; her awkward public bearing.

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She now finds herself the only woman in the race, closely identified with the potent issues of health care and auto insurance, her campaign largely financed by her wealthy husband, Wilbur L. Ross Jr., an investment banker. (As of her last financial disclosure, she had raised $2.4 million, $2.25 million of which came from Ross.)

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-03-18/my-plan-to-fix-healthcare/full/

(Betsy McCaughey) almost single-handedly killed Hillary Clinton's health care reform a quarter-century ago by writing an influential article in the New Republic in which she charged that Hillary's plan would force people into health-maintenance and preferred-provider insurance programs where they wouldn't be able to choose their own doctors. This wasn't even true. What was true, though McCaughey seemed blissfully unaware of it, was that when her article was published, private employers—including the New Republic itself—were pushing their employees into HMOs and PPOs as fast as they could. Almost nobody anymore—except for the elderly on Medicare (and not even all of them) can choose his or her own doctor, at least not without paying extra if that doctor is not part of your employer's chosen-provider network.

The New Republic later renounced McCaughey's article and apologized for running it. McCaughey herself became lieutenant governor of New York. Wikipedia deadpans, "McCaughey was a political novice at the time of her election as lieutenant governor. She and George Pataki did not know each other when he asked her to be his running-mate. She was selected on the recommendation of former US Senator Alfonse D'Amato, who was impressed by her writings on health-care reform."

http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/gossip/1998/11/05/1998-11-05_term_limit_up_for_mrs_wilbur.html

TERM LIMIT UP FOR MRS.WILBUR ROSS
BY GEORGE RUSH AND JOANNA MOLLOY WITH MARCUS BARAM AND K.C. BAKER
Thursday, November 5th 1998, 2:05AM

On Election Day, her political career went kaput. Yesterday, it was Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey Ross' marriage. One day after voters made short shrift of her bid to become governor, her investment banker husband, Wilbur Ross - who plowed a reported $2 million into her campaign - filed for divorce.

"It's always a shame when things don't work out in a marriage and people grow apart, as Betsy and I have," Ross said in a statement.

"I continue to hold Betsy in high regard and am committed to working things out with her in a constructive, amicable fashion. I hope that our friends and people who know us will allow us to deal with this issue privately and avoid the type of personal comments that characterize other divorces and only serve to hurt both parties."

The couple married in December 1995 after a bumpy engagement in which McCaughey called off their September wedding because she said Ross failed to finalize his divorce from first wife Judith. Ross had left Judith for McCaughey.

In August, he pulled the rug out from under her campaign by withdrawing $2.25 million from her war chest.

https://www.nydailynews.com/archives/news/1998/07/12/1998-07-12_hey__it_s_her_party_the_rags.html

==snip==

Former staffers say her rocky relationship with Pataki helped drive the chaos in her office. More than two dozen aides have left since her 1994 election. Five have departed the current campaign.

==snip==

GOP consultant Thomas Slater, who lasted three months, elaborated slightly: "I hope she never needs brain surgery because she'll tell the doctor he was doing it wrong and will believe she knows more about the operation than the doctor does."

Sam Thernstrom, 31, who quit after six months as a speechwriter, joined because McCaughey Ross was a friend of his mother, the writer Abigail Thernstrom.

He soon became frustrated by what he described as her inability to focus for a prolonged period on a set of issues. He quit after she phoned him five times on New Year's Eve demanding that he help her publish an Op-Ed article.

"I was sipping champagne with friends and we listened to her scream into my answering machine," he said. "It went on all night. I started looking for a new job."

Thernstrom said McCaughey Ross urged his mother to convince him to stay.

"She said if my mother didn't make me stay, she'd make certain I never worked again," said Thernstrom, now a spokesman for the state Department of Environmental Conservation.

http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/news/1996/06/05/1996-06-05_betsy_never_cut_it_as_one_of.html

McCaughey Ross also has given a convoluted explanation as to why she remained standing during Pataki's State of the State speech in January. The boys have called this incident bizarre and point to it as proof of her true ambitions.

McCaughey begins by blaming the state trooper who she mistakenly says failed to pick her up on time. She says that she was rattled by having to catch a ride and was further unnerved when the governor was late. She says that when Pataki finally did show, she was so relieved that she simply lost her postural bearings.

"I was so glad to see him come up there and start to talk, that I just kept standing," she has been quoted saying. "I forgot to sit down."