More Right Wing Pseudo Intellectualism

W. Jacobson at Legal Insurrection has decided to go all-in behind Sarah Palin's crazy talk. If you follow his posts regularly, you are already familiar with his knee-jerk pseudo-intellectualism. Suffice it to say, anyone with enough patience can get a PhD, LLD or MD (just look at Orly Taitz). Typically, he tries to provide cover for the wingnut faction of the right by pointing out possible generous interpretations of their crazy talk. In this case, he tries to make the case that Quitter Palin was actually talking about something real (even if inarticulately), when she pointed to "death panels".

To avoid questions of fairness, I'll print his caveat first:

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.

So far so good. But he also says:

These critics, however, didn't take the time to find out to what Palin was referring when she used the term "level of productivity in society" as being the basis for determining access to medical care. If the critics, who hold themselves in the highest of intellectual esteem, had bothered to do something other than react, they would have realized that the approach to health care to which Palin was referring was none other than that espoused by key Obama health care adviser Dr. Ezekial Emanuel (brother of Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel).

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."

I'm not qualified for the requisite discursive ass-kicking, so take it away Dr. Pollack:

Palin and Bachmann take pot shots at Ezekiel Emanuel, one of President Obama’s health policy advisors. Dr. Emanuel, a prominent medical ethicist and oncologist, makes a juicy target because he is Rahm’s brother, and because his paper trail provides incautiously blunt commentary regarding the pathologies of American health policy. It’s easy to lift one or two sentences from him, throw them onto the internet, and set the right-wing blogosphere aflame.

In fairness, Jacobson does post an entire document. That said, the bluntness of the Emanuels is well known--and this is substance of Jacobson's claim, not anything related to a health care policy actually being considered. Rationing already exists. It's just that right now it's the insurance industry that does it. What Dr Emanuel argues is that we apply some (gasp) ethics to the process.

I leave it to everyone's favorite math whiz, Nate Silver, to explain some of the problems with profit driven insurance to which I would only add: how much would you pay to save your own life, or the life of a loved-one?

But also, too (extra adverbs for you, Lady Sociopath, we know how you like that) Jacobson argues:

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."

No. Typically when double quotes are used to make reference to documents or speeches, they imply that those are the actual words lifted from the text. That is what most reasonable readers will infer--and only a bad writer would be unaware of this convention.