Easily Refutable Lies

One of the big lies the right has been telling about the sad excuse for health care legislation we are getting is that it will require death panels; panels that will counsel old people to abandon medical care and die so as to save the system money. John Stossel, conservative columnist, points out how stupid this argument is.

. . . no bill in Congress mandates end-of-life counseling, much less "death panels." And there's a deeper problem. When opponents of nationalization make such easily refuted charges, supporters of nationalization gain the upper hand. All criticism is undermined. Neutral observers can easily conclude, "If the death-panel claim is false, why believe anything else the critics say?"

That would be a disaster.

Of course this debunking doesn't seem to have persuaded his readers.

The fact is the Obamacare dream promotes the shifting of healthcare from the elderly to the ficticious 47 million have-nots--thus death panels...social justice not.

The rest of the Obamacare dream has nothing to do with healthcare but the total control of everyones freedom of individual determination. The Obamacare dream is evil and must be defeated now before a revolution takes the lives of millions of Americans.

But then again a guy like that might not be capable of persuasion. And, for a counter point, over at Salon they have a quote from Farhad Manjoo on whether or not the President should bother debunking these rumors; Manjoo thinks Obama shouldn't waste his time.

I've got some simple advice for Obama: Shut up about the death panels already. Don't keep fighting this rumor. You've lost—and the more time you spend trying to make things better, the worse off you'll be.

He argues that he's not going to convince the people who believe in the death panels and that continuing to refute them will, in effect, spread the rumors.