Palin’s Death Panels: Crazy, True Belief, or Watching Torchwood?

So.  I really meant to come back and comment further on the meaningful news of the day, but, well, death panel.

Death panel?  DEATH PANEL!  Really, Sarah Palin?  Here’s what she posted today on noted news site Facebook (emphasis added):

The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

^{“The Death Panel is coming!  Save me, Sarah Palin!”}

I have three theories about this.  The first is that Sarah Palin, with all of her copius free time of late, sat down and watched “Torchwood: Children of Earth” this week, as I did, but somehow missed the part where that’s all fiction.  I won’t post spoilers, but — if you’ve never seen any of Torchwood (and I hadn’t, prior to this five-hour mini-series), check it out from Netflix, then come back and let’s discuss.  (Seriously.  Message me.  I need to talk this one out.)

The second is that Sarah Palin truly believes this.  If that’s true, well, I’m glad she’s taking to the series of tubes, as they call the Internet in Alaska, to tell the world.  What troubles me is that she and thousands of her followers seem able only to forward messages like these to their closest associates, but are not able to direct these same energies toward searching out the veracity of the rumor itself.  For all of these people, and for those who love them despite getting their my-head-is-going-to-explode e-mails, I would like to introduce/remind you of two of the best inventions on the Internet: Let Me Google That For You and Snopes.  If you have crazy and/or conservative relatives, I cannot recommend bookmarking these two sites enough.  They provide quick, easy solutions to the problem of lack of thinking for oneself that seems to completely encapsulate the strategy of the GOP and their e-mail chains.

The last I’m stealing from someone else: “Maybe she’s just bat-shit crazy.”  Occum’s Razor does point me in this direction, because how far divorced from the reality of our current society must you be to believe that the current president is about to institute DEATH PANELS via a system designed to improve health care availability nationally.  Please, Mrs. Palin, point to a place on Earth with a government-managed health system where something like this has happened.  And if you’ve been using the BBC as your source, well, make sure it’s BBC News, not Drama, that you’re watching (and message me if you want to know the difference).

^{Run, kiddies!  Socialism is coming!}