Ventura County, California Sheriff’s Department photo of the beginning of the confrontation between Obamacare opponent William Rice, in the khaki shirt and olive shorts, and an unidentified Obamacare supporter wearing black, who authorities say bit off Rice’s little finger.

Here’s an account from the influential left Blogosphere Talking Points Memo quoting Karoli Kuns, a self-described eyewitness to the Thousand Oaks, California biting incident, who testifies that the leftwinger who bit off a 65-year-old’s finger had been immediately previously been assaulted by him.

So the biting incident becomes a somewhat bizarre, regrettable incident of justified retaliation for unprovoked violence.

The man in the orange shirt hit the pro-reform guy (I’m going to call him PR Guy just to keep the players straight). Hard. ( tweeted in real time) He punched him in the face, knocked him to the ground and into that thruway. As you can see from the photo, cars drive straight through that without stopping. The pro-reform guy could have been run over. He got up, tried to get back up on the curb, but Orange Shirt guy was in his face. Finger in his face, PR Guy standing, steps up to the curb, and there’s a scuffle. Orange shirt seemed to have PR Guy in a hold, but again, I was across the street, so won’t state that as absolute fact. Next thing I see is PR Guy’s hat being tossed into the street, both yelling at one another, then Orange shirt walks away, PR Guy picks up hat and crosses to our side.

When he gets to our side, he tells a story in one sentence: “He punched me hard, straight in the face, so I bit his finger off.”

Kuns obviously misidentified the biting victim. This Fox News 7:31 video demonstrates that the Ventura Counry Sheriff’s Department photo identification was correct and Kuns wrong.

Mary Katherine Hamm quotes an Obamacare opponent witness, who depicts the biter as the aggressor.

Scott Bush, an Obama critic who was standing next to Rice when the incident happened, said critics and supporters of Obama had had face-to-face, calm debates throughout the night without incident until the suspect in the biting crossed the street to confront critics. Of Rice’s behavior, he said:

“He didn’t even have a sign. He was just there to be a part of things. He’s a nice man.”

The suspect yelled at the group, “Are you for the public option?” When the crowd answered, “no,” Bush said he singled out Rice, one of the smaller men in the group, coming at him and yelling, “You’re an idiot, you’re an idiot!”

“I don’t think he had any intentions whatsoever of talking,” said Rice, who “popped him in the nose” when he got close to his face.

Bush called Rice’s move “defensive.” Bush said the incident became a scuffle, the public-option supporter pulled Rice into the street, and it was over very quickly after that. During the struggle, Rice said his finger ended up in the suspect’s mouth, and it was bitten off.

“William grabbed his hand and said, ‘Oh, he bit my finger off,” Bush said. “It was clear that the end of his finger was bitten off. It was a stump.”

Rice left for the hospital and the assailant ran away before police arrived. Bush looked for Rice’s fingertip and found it about 20 feet away from the scuffle, in the street.

“I got in my car and I took his finger to Los Robles and I found him, and I gave him back his finger,” Bush said, who carried the digit wrapped in a napkin.

Unfortunately, “it was of no use,” Rice said.

Mr. Rice, by his own account, evidently did strike the first blow, but “PR guy” clearly did advance upon Rice and confront him with close range verbal abuse. Traditional standards of self defense recognize the existence of fighting words, verbal insults seriously provocative enough to justify a physical response. If PR Guy really did grossly insult Mr. Rice, a punch in the nose could very well be a legitimate response. I’d consider a poke in the snout justification, too, for PR guy poking back, but the amputation of a finger is obviously a significantly greater escalation of violence, and there can be little doubt that PR guy is going to be prosecuted when the Ventura County authorities catch him.

Leftwing baby boomers will really have have something to look forward to under Obamacare, look at what Britain’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice –You have to love the acronym!) is doing for patients there.

Telegraph:

In a letter to The Daily Telegraph, a group of experts who care for the terminally ill claim that some patients are being wrongly judged as close to death.

Under NHS guidance introduced across England to help doctors and medical staff deal with dying patients, they can then have fluid and drugs withdrawn and many are put on continuous sedation until they pass away. …

The warning comes just a week after a report by the Patients Association estimated that up to one million patients had received poor or cruel care on the NHS. …

The scheme, called the Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP), was designed to reduce patient suffering in their final hours.

Developed by Marie Curie, the cancer charity, in a Liverpool hospice it was initially developed for cancer patients but now includes other life threatening conditions.

It was recommended as a model by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice), the Government’s health scrutiny body, in 2004.

It has been gradually adopted nationwide and more than 300 hospitals, 130 hospices and 560 care homes in England currently use the system.

Under the guidelines the decision to diagnose that a patient is close to death is made by the entire medical team treating them, including a senior doctor.

They look for signs that a patient is approaching their final hours, which can include if patients have lost consciousness or whether they are having difficulty swallowing medication.

However, doctors warn that these signs can point to other medical problems.

Patients can become semi-conscious and confused as a side effect of pain-killing drugs such as morphine if they are also dehydrated, for instance.

When a decision has been made to place a patient on the pathway doctors are then recommended to consider removing medication or invasive procedures, such as intravenous drips, which are no longer of benefit.

If a patient is judged to still be able to eat or drink food and water will still be offered to them, as this is considered nursing care rather than medical intervention.

Dr Hargreaves said that this depended, however, on constant assessment of a patient’s condition.

He added that some patients were being “wrongly” put on the pathway, which created a “self-fulfilling prophecy” that they would die.

In Newsweek, George Will compares the Chosen One both to Muzak and to Depression-era populist demagogue Huey Long.

In August our ubiquitous president became the nation’s elevator music, always out and about, heard but not really listened to, like audible wallpaper. And now, as Congress returns to resume wrestling with health care reform, we shall see if he continues his August project of proving that the idea of an Ivy LeagueHuey Long is not oxymoronic.

Barack Obama in August became a Huey for today, a rabble rouser with a better tailor, an unrumpled and modulated tribune of downtrodden Americans, telling them that opponents of his reform plan—which actually does not yet exist—are fearmongers employing scare tactics. He also told Americans to be afraid, very afraid of health-insurance providers because they are dishonest (and will remain so until there is a “public option” to make them “honest”). And to be afraid, very afraid of pediatricians who unnecessarily extract children’s tonsils for monetary rather than medical reasons. And to be afraid, very afraid of doctors generally because so many of them are so rapacious that they prefer lopping off limbs of diabetes patients rather than engaging in lifestyle counseling that for “a pittance” could prevent diabetes.

Read the whole thing. George Will is in good form.

Charles Murray wonders what the Obama Administration thinks it’s doing.

The late New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael famously said after Nixon’s landslide reelection, “How can he have won? Nobody I know voted for him.” My proposition for today is that the entire White House suffers from the Kael syndrome.

It was the only explanation I could think of as I watched the news last night about the coming prosecution of CIA interrogators. When it comes to political analysis, I’m no Barone or Bowman or Ornstein, but this is not a really tough call. Attempts to put men on trial who obtained information that most Americans will believe (probably rightly) saved the nation from more terrorist attacks will be a political catastrophe, all the more so because I bet that the defendants will come across as straight-arrow good guys (and probably are), while the prosecutors come across as self-righteous wimps (and…). How could the White House not have thought this through? …

(E)very white socioeconomic class in America has become more conservative in the last four decades, with the Traditional Middles moving the most decisively rightward. But the Intellectual Uppers have not just moved slightly in the other direction, they have careened in the other direction.

They won the election with a candidate who sounded centrist running against an exceptionally weak Republican opponent. But they’ve been in the bubble too long. They really think that the rest of America thinks as they do. Nothing but the Pauline Kael syndrome can explain the political idiocy of letting Attorney General Eric Holder go after the interrogators.

Read the whole thing.

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Meanwhile in the Wall Street Journal, Fouad Ajami concludes that Barack Obama’s moment has passed. Health Care Reform finished it. Barack Obama is definitely not Ronald Reagan, and the American people who gambled on his governing as a centrist are gradually coming to recognize his real agenda and are growing increasingly frightened and appalled.

In one of the revealing moments of the presidential campaign, Mr. Obama rightly observed that the Reagan presidency was a transformational presidency in a way Clinton’s wasn’t. And by that Reagan precedent, that Reagan standard, the faults of the Obama presidency are laid bare. Ronald Reagan, it should be recalled, had been swept into office by a wave of dissatisfaction with Jimmy Carter and his failures. At the core of the Reagan mission was the recovery of the nation’s esteem and self-regard. Reagan was an optimist. He was Hollywood glamour to be sure, but he was also Peoria, Ill. His faith in the country was boundless, and when he said it was “morning in America” he meant it; he believed in America’s miracle and had seen it in his own life, in his rise from a child of the Depression to the summit of political power.

The failure of the Carter years was, in Reagan’s view, the failure of the man at the helm and the policies he had pursued at home and abroad. At no time had Ronald Reagan believed that the American covenant had failed, that America should apologize for itself in the world beyond its shores. There was no narcissism in Reagan. It was stirring that the man who headed into the sunset of his life would bid his country farewell by reminding it that its best days were yet to come.

In contrast, there is joylessness in Mr. Obama. He is a scold, the “Yes we can!” mantra is shallow, and at any rate, it is about the coming to power of a man, and a political class, invested in its own sense of smarts and wisdom, and its right to alter the social contract of the land. In this view, the country had lost its way and the new leader and the political class arrayed around him will bring it back to the right path.

Thus the moment of crisis would become an opportunity to push through a political economy of redistribution and a foreign policy of American penance. The independent voters were the first to break ranks. They hadn’t underwritten this fundamental change in the American polity when they cast their votes for Mr. Obama.

American democracy has never been democracy by plebiscite, a process by which a leader is anointed, then the populace steps out of the way, and the anointed one puts his political program in place. In the American tradition, the “mandate of heaven” is gained and lost every day and people talk back to their leaders. They are not held in thrall by them. The leaders are not infallible or a breed apart. That way is the Third World way, the way it plays out in Arab and Latin American politics.

Those protesters in those town-hall meetings have served notice that Mr. Obama’s charismatic moment has passed. Once again, the belief in that American exception that set this nation apart from other lands is re-emerging. Health care is the tip of the iceberg. Beneath it is an unease with the way the verdict of the 2008 election was read by those who prevailed. It shall be seen whether the man swept into office in the moment of national panic will adjust to the nation’s recovery of its self-confidence.

Read the whole thing.

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Barack Obama’s determination to govern de haute en bas, to impose on the rest of the country the ideological preferences of what Charles Murray calls the “Intellectual Upper,” really the community of fashion, places him in serious conflict with the uncommitted political center which gave him his margin of victory. Rather than giving Obama and the democrat party a mandate for Socialism and a blank check for revenge, the centrists mistakenly accepted Obama’s soft talk and tone of moderation. They voted for a calm and emollient presidency, desiring an end to the ideological furor of George W. Bush’s presidency. Barack Obama is fatally misinterpreting the voters’ message.

Ronald Dworkin, an anesthesiologist editorializing on Health Care Reform in the Wall Street Journal last Thursday, identified one very key impact of Obamacare which would guarantee the degradation of quality of American health care.

(US Health Care today) unites rich and poor in a common private insurance system.

Here’s how it works. When a rich person rolls into the operating room, the nurse asks him: “Would you like a warm blanket? How about a pillow?” The anesthesiologist numbs his skin before putting in the I.V. Every effort is made to make him happy.

People in the operating room pay attention to a rich patient’s wishes because they know a rich person can make their lives miserable. He can complain to the hospital president, or call the mayor. But the side effect is that their high quality care becomes habitual, and all patients receive it. When a poor person complains in most environments, no one listens. But in health care, through a common private insurance system, poor people go to the same hospitals and doctors as rich people and thus enjoy the benefit of rich people’s power.

The public option severs this link. Dissatisfied with government-run health care, the rich will exit the system. The poor and middle-class will be left to flounder alone inside the public system. Government-run health care will become like the public schools.

The best doctors will be opening luxury clinics in Carribean resort locations, and the wealthy will simply jet off for their health care, leaving everyone else experiencing the equivalent of inner city hospital emergency room service, endless queues, drastic rationing and triage.

In a perfect vignette from those Town Hall Meetings on Health Care Reform that have been making news, David Hedrick, a Marine Corps veteran, makes mincemeat out of Rep.Brian Baird (D- Wash) at a meeting somewhere in Washington State.

Hedrick’s point, that Congress has absolutely no right to interfere with our right to chose our own health insurance, is dead on.

2:19 video

Mr. Hedrick was clearly far from alone in his sentiments. The crowd cheered his remarks.

From Simon at Classical Values via Bird Dog at Maggie’s Farm.

Marc Ambinder identifies Health Care Reform as a classic example of the kind of policy fight a president can’t win.

I think he’s right. Socialized health care is a goal that the left can neither relinquish nor hope to win.

As the prospects for bipartisan agreement in the Senate fade, the need for Obama to unify Democrats will increase. Right now, though, he is losing Democrats from both wings of the party, even as independents soften and conservatives mobilize. Obama’s ratings in the Pew survey declined slightly from July to August among moderate Democrats (down two percentage points) and sharply among liberal Democrats (down nine percentage points).

These poll numbers suggest that health care is becoming the classic issue that wounds a president: one that unites his opponents and divides his own side. Obama probably has little hope of changing the first half of that equation; when Congress returns he’ll probably need to focus more on improving the second.

Scott Wong, at PhxBeat, explains that the black guy with the gun outside the Obama Health Care Town Hall meeting in Phoenix was just affirming his Second Amendment rights.

Neatly dressed in a white shirt, black tie and gray slacks, the man, who only gave his first name as Chris, also had a pistol holstered at his side as he engaged in heated debates with those rallying in support of Obama’s heath-care reform plan.

A Phoenix police spokesman said plainclothes detectives were monitoring about a dozen protesters carrying guns, though no one broke any laws or was arrested.

Arizona is an “open-carry” state, which means anyone legally allowed to have a firearm can carry it in public as long as it’s visible. A permit is required if the weapon is carried concealed.

“Because I can do it,” Chris said when asked why he brought guns to the rally at 3rd and Washington streets. “In Arizona, I still have some freedoms left.”

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Newsbusters Kyle Drennen caught MSNBC red-handed engaged in some racially-charged and highly misleading reporting.

On Tuesday, MSNBC’s Contessa Brewer fretted over health care reform protesters legally carrying guns: “A man at a pro-health care reform rally…wore a semiautomatic assault rifle on his shoulder and a pistol on his hip….there are questions about whether this has racial overtones….white people showing up with guns.” Brewer failed to mention the man she described was black.

Following Brewer’s report, which occurred on the Morning Meeting program, host Dylan Ratigan and MSNBC pop culture analyst Toure discussed the supposed racism involved in the protests. Toure argued: “…there is tremendous anger in this country about government, the way government seems to be taking over the country, anger about a black person being president….we see these hate groups rising up and this is definitely part of that.” Ratigan agreed: “…then they get the variable of a black president on top of all these other things and that’s the move – the cherry on top, if you will, to the accumulated frustration for folks.”

Not only did Brewer, Ratigan, and Toure fail to point out the fact that the gun-toting protester that sparked the discussion was black, but the video footage shown of that protester was so edited, that it was impossible to see that he was black.

1:34 video

With negative polls numbers on Obamacare in the 60’s and rising, and moderate democrat support on Congress increasingly in doubt, the Obama Administration scurried to save face, trying to find something, anything it could hope to pass later his Fall, and call Health Care Reform.

The Hill:

Obama and top administration officials this weekend dropped the president’s longtime insistence that the health legislation include a government-run public plan amid widespread flare-ups of outrage at town halls across the country.

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Needless to say, the Progressive Left is not looking kindly on the decision to retreat off of the Road to Socialism. Leftwing blogs are a lot of fun to read this week.

Matt Taibbi may have delivered the unkindest cut of all… a negative comparison to George W.

I’ll say this for George Bush: you’d never have caught him frantically negotiating against himself to take the meat out of a signature legislative initiative just because his approval ratings had a bad summer. Can you imagine Bush and Karl Rove allowing themselves to be paraded through Washington on a leash by some dimwit Republican Senator of a state with six people in it the way the Obama White House this summer is allowing Max Baucus (favorite son of the mighty state of Montana) to frog-march them to a one-term presidency?

Get out the shovels and start burying it, folks, before it starts to smell. It’s dead. The Obama Revolution is over. The high tide of American leftism has crested. The Retreat from Moscow is on.

In 2008, a glib and fortunate beneficiary of a massive legacy of liberal guilt was able to smooth talk his way into an electoral victory based on a sudden market crash created by the combination of long-standing democrat housing market interventions combined with well-founded fears of the possibility of his election.

Ironically, it was Mr. Market’s bipolar panic attack which actually assured that the nightmare of his own imaginings could and would become reality. The GOP turned chicken, too, and chose what the bosses thought must be the safest play, nominating the geriatric and politically incoherent John McCain, who ran an uninspired campaign, trying to oppose age to youth and promises of less to promises of everything paid for by somebody else. Everything fell apart at once. So the least qualified, most radical candidate ever, a community organizer and Alinskyite radical, whose best friends have been black Communist poets, Weathermen cop killers, and racist clergymen, waltzed into the White House, accompanied by a Star Wars bar’s assemblage of exotic representatives of the radical fringe, all bent of bringing Socialism to America.

He spent a few trillions in a matter of weeks, assuring a dimmer future to a generation of Americans, then gleefully nationalized General Motors delivering control of America’s largest auto maker to the UAW’s commissars. Barack Obama took to heart Rahm Emanuel’s dictum about using an economic crisis as an empowering opportunity. But that power was only on loan. The American people were frightened and willing to put their faith in the two party system, roll the dice, and give the party which had been out of power a chance. Their decision had only been based on the “we’re tired of A and unhappy, let’s try B for a while” approach. The assertion by democrats and by Barack Hussein Obama that the 2008 election gave them a mandate for Socialism has been proven wrong.

Obama in 2009 has wound up just like Napoleon in 1812. Flushed with a string of victories, armed with an unfilibusterable Congressional majority, backed by an enormous army of labor unions, interest groups, and activist organizations, funded by George Soros, allied to the mainstream media, and well-supported by the mass artillery of the leftwing blogosphere, the Obama Administration even succeeded in negotiating free passage for the invasion from large corporations like Walmart and the pharmaceuticals companies (no doughty Belgium in 1914, they). As always, capitalists will willingly sell the rope used to hang free enterprise to the bolsheviks for short term profit as long as the sellers get assurances that they themselves will be hanged last.

But the denoument is worthy of Tolstoy. The Grand Armee of Socialist Ideology, despite all its votes in Congress; its media support; its grand alliance of corrupt businesses, unions; the AMA and the AARP; ACORN and George Soros has been brought to a crashing halt. Its morale is crumbling. It is in complete disorder, and it will soon be in full retreat. Barack Obama has been dealt a devastating defeat, one which will permanently shatter his image of invincibility, and placing Barack Obama, the democrat party, and the American left on the defensive, struggling to avoid complete and total ruin.

The left is crying out that it was the weak and inferior forces of the Republican Party and the American Right that brought them low. I’m a Movement Conservative and a rock-ribbed Republican myself. I wish that it were so. But the truth is the Republican Party and the Conservative Movement have no such capabilities. What defeated Obamacare was the American People.

Barack Obama believed the American People are so stupid, so selfish, and so greedy that they would fall for democrat promises of health care free lunch, all the health care everybody needs or wants, paid for by the upper tiny few percent of staggeringly rich taxpayers (who won’t even miss it anyway). Uncle Sam will just nudge the taxes on Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and the guys at Goldman getting those multi-million dollar bonuses up just a notch, essentially sneaking into their bedrooms and removing some extra spare change from the tops of their bureaus, and granny gets her hip replacement gratis, and Tiny Tim will walk again, even if Bob Crachit has no insurance.

None of these promises were true, of course. The democrat “health care reform” was never going to bring ordinary Americans the kind of care US Senators get, “just like me,” as Obama promised so persistently during the campaign. What it was going to do, obviously, was to create a new and enormous federal entitlement program necessitating a massive increase of government’s share of the US economy. Socialism would have made a scarce and desirable service, medical care, cost free, obviously dramatically increasing demand. Most Americans would inevitably pay more and get less, as the health care butter got spread by the federal knife onto ever more slices of bread.

America today is a rapidly aging nation. The time to offer the Woodstock Generation a nice socialist health care system was 40 years ago when we were young and perfectly healthy, and could not imagine ourselves ever really needing it. Today, there are lots of Boomer generation geezers out there who have a real personal interest in just how health care reform will affect them now and who are old enough to know better. A lot of people tried sharing the granola and peanut butter supply back on the commune in 1969. They know just how “sharing” works out.

It was not Dick Armey and Rush Limbaugh who showed up with greater strength and larger funding or who beat back the democrat advance with superior cunning. It was the American People, who are experiencing this country’s economy right now, who saw Obama’s stimulus package and his bailouts, who paid their income taxes, and who are beginning to become afraid, very afraid of where Barack Obama’s economic policies are leading us. It was the American People that said, No, we do not believe there is really such a thing as a free lunch. It is the American People who are turning out at those Town Halls, and whose negative opinions are showing up in all the polls. It is the American People, not the Republican Party, that has defeated Obamacare.

The people had forfeited the confidence of the government and could win it back only by redoubled efforts. Wouldn’t it be easier to dissolve the people and elect another in their place? — Berthold Brecht.

Nancy Morgan, at American Thinker, comments on the anger of the democrat elite at the common people daring to talk back.

The face-off between the ruling party and the people continues to unfold, as Democrat politicians hold town hall meetings across the country to build support for the Obama administration’s latest power grab, misleadingly labeled ‘health care reform.’

The faux outrage politicians manufacture on demand has been replaced by real outrage. Outrage at the American people for failing to understand the nuances, the broad outline of a 1,000 page plus bill that most politicians haven’t even read. Hey, that’s what staff is for, explained new Democrat, Arlen Spector.

Peons from fly-over country are daring to challenge the carefully scripted and (deliberately?) misleading talking points. Talking points which, by the way, have been endorsed by the media. Don’t these guys read the New York Times?

Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are using the standard liberal tactic of diverting attention from the issue by demonizing the dissenter, in this case, the American people. According to Pelosi and Reid, voicing objections to the federal government’s take over of 17% of the formerly free market economy is ‘un-American.’ Harry Reid has gone a step further, tarring dissenter’s as ‘evil mongers.’

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs has blithely dismissed the burgeoning dissent by informing one and all that these ‘townhalls are not representative of America.’ Obama, meanwhile, is trying to divert the issue by blaming the ‘headline hungry television networks’, accusing them of ‘enflaming an ugly backlash.’

Unused to any opposition that can’t be spun to their advantage or ignored, Democrats are desperately trying to convince Americans that the tidal wave of opposition is not genuine. Used to viewing every issue in political terms, our elected officials are actually convinced that the disruptive townhalls are merely the product of an evil conservative cabal. After all, every person these lawmakers know agree with them on this issue. Its called the ‘inside the beltway syndrome.’

Despite a new $12 million ad campaign designed to soothe Americans into relying on misplaced compassion instead of common sense, pesky Joe Six-Pack and Susy Homemaker still don’t get it. And adding insult to injury, American citizens are starting to question where all the money is coming from to run these ads. And by the way, who’s signing the paychecks for the new army of health care advocates who are being paid $12 to $13 an hour for their support? Inquiring minds want to know.

Answers to these questions are not forthcoming. Like the classic case of a wife catching her husband in bed with another woman, the question has become, “Who are you going to believe? Me, or your lying eyes?”

Big one, must be a full Harvard professor.

Leftists characteristically avoid openly advocating their goals. They don’t call themselves Marxists or socialists. These days they even avoid the label of liberal, and prefer to speak of themselves as “progressives.” Their reliance on deception, their preference for seeking power not via an open fight, but rather by a gradual process of subversion, have made traditionally the favored zoological metaphors for leftists, not major predators like wolves, but small and sneaky vermin like rats or roaches. Winston Churchill once even described Lenin (being transported to Russia from Switzerland in a sealed train by Germany) as resembling a plague bacillus.

This morning, however, Maureen Dowd is a bit more denunciatory than usual, accusing Sarah Palin of turning back country Alaska major predator control tactics on Rahm Emanuel’s brother, medical ethicist Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel.

At the moment, what she wants to do is tap into her visceral talent for aerial-shooting her favorite human prey: cerebral Ivy League Democrats.

Just as she was able to stir up the mob against Barack Obama on the trail, now she is fanning the flames against another Harvard smarty-pants — Dr. Zeke Emanuel, a White House health care adviser and the older brother of Rahmbo.

She took a forum, Facebook, more commonly used by kids hooking up and cyberstalking, and with one catchy phrase, several footnotes and a zesty disregard for facts, managed to hijack the health care debate from Mr. Obama.

Sarahcuda knows, from her brush with Barry on the campaign trail, that he is vulnerable on matters that demand a visceral and muscular response rather than a logical and book-learned one. Mr. Obama was charming and informed at his town hall in Montana on Friday, but he’s going to need some sustained passion, a clear plan and a narrative as gripping as Palin’s I-see-dead-people scenario.

She has successfully caricatured the White House health care effort, making it sound like the plot of the 1976 sci-fi movie “Logan’s Run,” about a post-apocalyptic society with limited resources where you can live only until age 30, when you must take part in an extermination ceremony called “Carousel” or flee the city.

Painting the Giacometti-esque Emanuel as a creepy Dr. Death, Palin attacked him on her Facebook page a week ago, complaining that his “Orwellian thinking” could lead to a “death panel” with bureaucrats deciding whether to pull the plug on less hardy Americans.

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When democrats go ballistic like this, and pull out all the stops on denial, you can tell that someone has struck a nerve. For several days now, democrats everywhere have been screaming in pain over this one. Even my liberal classmates have been faithfully repeating the Gospel According to Talking Points Memo and Daily Kos: “Palin is lying about ‘Death Panels.'”

Was Palin lying? Let’s see.

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Sarah Palin’s Facebook entry said:

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.

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Palin was repeating a point made in a House speech, Monday, July 27, 2009 (5:18 video), by Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-6th district Minn.)

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Much of Michelle Bachmann’s speech consisted of her reading a July 24th column from the New York Post by Betsey McCaughey. McCaughey quoted Dr. Emanuel repeatedly:

Emanuel bluntly admits that the cuts (produced by democrat so-called health care reform) will not be pain-free. “Vague promises of savings from cutting waste, enhancing prevention and wellness, installing electronic medical records and improving quality are merely ‘lipstick’ cost control, more for show and public relations than for true change,” he wrote last year (Health Affairs Feb. 27, 2008).

Savings, he writes, will require changing how doctors think about their patients: Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously, “as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of the cost or effects on others” (Journal of the American Medical Association, June 18, 2008). …

Emanuel wants doctors to look beyond the needs of their patients and consider social justice, such as whether the money could be better spent on somebody else.

Many doctors are horrified by this notion; they’ll tell you that a doctor’s job is to achieve social justice one patient at a time.

Emanuel, however, believes that “communitarianism” should guide decisions on who gets care. He says medical care should be reserved for the non-disabled, not given to those “who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens . . . An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia” (Hastings Center Report, Nov.-Dec. ’96).

Translation: Don’t give much care to a grandmother with Parkinson’s or a child with cerebral palsy.

He explicitly defends discrimination against older patients: “Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination; every person lives through different life stages rather than being a single age. Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years” (Lancet, Jan. 31).

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Cornell Law Professor William A. Jacobson observes that the argument Sarah Palin quoted from Rep. Bachman certainly is important and central to the debate of proposed health care reform.

The article in which Dr. Emanuel puts forth his approach is “Principles for Allocation of Scarce Medical Interventions,” published on January 31, 2009. A full copy is embedded below. Read it, particularly the section beginning at page 6 of the embed (page 428 in the original) at which Dr. Emanuel sets forth the principles of “The Complete Lives System.”

While Emanuel does not use the term “death panel,” Palin put that term in quotation marks to signify the concept of medical decisions based on the perceived societal worth of an individual, not literally a “death panel.” And in so doing, Palin was true to Dr. Emanuel’s concept of a system which

considers prognosis, since its aim is to achieve complete lives. A young person with a poor prognosis has had a few life-years but lacks the potential to live a complete life. Considering prognosis forestalls the concern the disproportionately large amounts of resources will be directed to young people with poor prognoses. When the worst-off can benefit only slightly while better-off people could benefit greatly, allocating to the better-off is often justifiable….

When implemented, the complete lives system produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated.

Put together the concepts of prognosis and age, and Dr. Emanuel’s proposal reasonably could be construed as advocating the withholding of some level of medical treatment (probably not basic care, but likely expensive advanced care) to a baby born with Down Syndrome. You may not like this implication, but it is Dr. Emanuel’s implication not Palin’s.

The next question is, whether Dr. Emanuel’s proposal bears any connection to current Democratic proposals. There is no single Democratic proposal at this point, only a series of proposals and concepts. To that extent, Palin’s comments properly are viewed as a warning shot not to move to Dr. Emanuel’s concept of health care rationing based on societal worth, rather than a critique of a specific bill ready for vote.

Certainly, no Democrat is proposing a “death panel,” or withholding care to the young or infirm. To say such a thing would be political suicide.

But one interesting concept which is central to the concepts being discussed is the creation of a panel of “experts” to make the politically unpopular decisions on allocating health care resources. In a letter to the Senate, Barack Obama expressed support for such a commission:

I am committed to working with the Congress to fully offset the cost of health care reform by reducing Medicare and Medicaid spending by another $200 to $300 billion over the next 10 years, and by enacting appropriate proposals to generate additional revenues. These savings will come not only by adopting new technologies and addressing the vastly different costs of care, but from going after the key drivers of skyrocketing health care costs, including unmanaged chronic diseases, duplicated tests, and unnecessary hospital readmissions.

To identify and achieve additional savings, I am also open to your ideas about giving special consideration to the recommendations of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC), a commission created by a Republican Congress. Under this approach, MedPAC’s recommendations on cost reductions would be adopted unless opposed by a joint resolution of the Congress. This is similar to a process that has been used effectively by a commission charged with closing military bases, and could be a valuable tool to help achieve health care reform in a fiscally responsible way.

Will such a commission decide to curtail allocation of resources to those who are not deemed capable of “complete lives” based on prognosis and age, as proposed by Dr. Emanuel? There is no way to tell at this point since we do not have a final Democratic proposal, or know who would be appointed to such a commission.

Ezekiel Emanuel’s paper: Principles for Allocation of Scarce Medical Interventions