Lie? Big Lie? Who is the liar?

PolitiFact awarded it the Lie of the Year for 2009.  Now, let's not over complicate things--PolitiFact is no more an enlightened arbiter of truth versus lie than is my dachshund, but rather a sole proprietary concoction of the St. Petersberg Times.

Of course, to give the Times a bit of a break, the term "Death Panel" was a colloquialism so in a literal sense it was abjectly false, sort of like saying "there are a trillion stars in the sky" is a lie because who can really count that high?  So the Times stepped to the plate, made its award, and forever stamped Sarah Palin with the tag of liar regardless of what the true intent of her words were.

Well, out of Great Britain we are getting a snifter of what Ms. Palin's lie and all the associated ado were really about as an expert in the NHS has estimated that about 130,000 people annually have their lives ended prematurely at the hands of their benevolent overlords.

While there may have been no single death panel overseeing the starving of Grandma or of Great Uncle Angus dying of thirst, they are currently both pushing up daisies.  Oh, they as well as 129,998 others in just the last year.

Obamacare might not refer to death panels.  Obama himself, the economic genius he has proven to be, might not even believe that the premature deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans per year is the only conceivable outcome of his signature supported legislation.  Yet, there is nothing in the law that reduces the costs of health care, it simply adds onerous regulations and myriad boards and committees and commissions.  In effect it caps total spending on health care while making per item procedures more expensive.  So, when the money runs out and the feeding tube gets disconnected, Aunt Edna can clutch her rosary and be thankful that a death panel doesn't exist. 

h/t Bruce at QandO