"Sarahcuda"

"Sarahcuda." As in Sarah-barracuda (as in Palin). I like it.

Credit goes to Maureen Dowd. The gist of her column in the NYT today is that Sarahcuda is very skilled at "tap[ping] into her visceral talent for aerial-shooting her favorite human prey: cerebral Ivy League Democrats."

It may be sport to her, or just political infighting; but what she and others are doing is grabbing some minor point, turning it into fear or outrage to stir up the paranoid fringe, and driving the debate over the cliff. It's hard to have rational discussions when such things grab the headlines.

Sarahcuda has discovered Ezekial Emanuel -- health care adviser to Obama, oncologist, and thoughtful medical ethicist who, in calmer times, has written about the problems of how to decide on the use of scarce medical resources. Such as: suppose there is one liver available for transplant and three who need one. Who gets it? And how do you decide? Would it be the youngest? The one waiting the longest? The one whose overall condition gives him the best chance for surviving the surgery?

These are serious questions that need to be discussed in a serious way, but they are not part of the current proposals for health care reform. Such issues are, of course, live hot ammunition for those who are trying to paint Obama as proposing that the government is going to "pull the plug on grandma" and force people into euthanasia when they get too old to be useful. Sarahcuda's sensationalizing distortions create the noise that drowns out serious discussion. So, there'll be no provision in the final bill for living wills.

There's one thing the Republicans are good at: they sure know how to kill legislation they don't like, even when they're in a clear minority. Looks like the public health care plan is going down the tubes the same way. Just make it look like the "gummint" is gonna control your life or destroy your business -- and the paranoia comes out of the woodwork.

I'm trying to remember that we'll still get some improvements and be better off than we are now. But I'm not so sure. Without the public plan, it won't save enough money, and then the Sarahcudas will say: "see, we told you it wouldn't work. Now the Democrats have just put in another vast entitlement program that will bankrupt the nation." Just keep hammering back: it won't cost any more than george bush's war in Iraq. We couldn't afford that either.

Ralph