Crossing An Unthinkable Line

Via TPMDC's Eric Kleefield, Sarah Palin wades into the Obama Derangement Syndrome swamp with this horrible accusation:

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 system she describes is indeed downright diabolical.

It of course has nothing to do with actual reality or any proposed legislation by the Democrats, Republicans, or anyone in the current health care debate. But Sarah Palin apparently believes that such a plan will result in people deciding who lives and who dies based on their contribution to society.

My response to this is a personal message for Sarah Palin. She will probably never read it. I will say it anyway because it needs to be said.

My father spent more than twenty-five years as a developmental psychologist working for a state facility that provides direct services to families with children who have developmental disabilities, children like Trig Palin. For almost three decades, my father dedicated his professional career to helping those children make great contributions to society, to be respected, to be loved, and to be treated fairly and with dignity, to get the services and help they needed and to help create and anchor a support network for families across the area. He was on the front lines of "government health care" making sure that no one "subjectively judged" these wonderful children and their families. He still helps people today as a county mental health counselor.

I myself spent several summer volunteering at that facility. I learned there what people with severe developmental disabilities could contribute to society if given an environment in which they could do so, from the arts and sports to being an example to others of what basic human dignity means. I learned to be grateful for what I had and grateful to other for what they could show me about the world.

But to see you denigrate those so less fortunate by using your own child as a political talking point to suggest such a brutally barbaric and horrific lie is about the most repugnant, sickening, infuriating thing I have ever seen, madam.

Know then, that there are people out there who have proven government-provided health care services work. They provide such care every day. You demean them and their service to the people through such a hideous act. You demean they people they work hard to help, some of who have Down's Syndrome, like your son. You demean yourself as well.

You owe my father and everyone he has helped in his over 35 years as a developmental psychologist a heartfelt and sincere apology, madam. And you should look inside your own heart and ask yourself what kind of world you would like Trig Palin to grow up in...hopefully one without such rancorous falsehoods.

He deserves more, and so does this country.

-Fin-