To the editor:
While I agree with the Sept. 7 letter to the editor "urging voters to become informed before the election," I disagree with the assertion that PolitiFact presents only facts and not opinions. How naive to think that PolitiFact.com, like some other media, could not also write half-truths, misleading or incomplete information.
James Taranto of the "Wall Street Journal" says PolitiFact was "less seeker of truth than servant of power," after it ranked as "Lie of the Year" for 2009, Sarah Palin's claim that health care legislation we now know as Obamacare would set up "death panels." A "WSJ" editorial said PolitiFact is "part of a larger journalistic trend that seeks to recast all political debates as matters of lies (or myths), misinformation and 'facts,' rather than differences of world views and principles."
One of the major, differing world views in our country today involves those favoring Judeo-Christian values and those who are becoming increasingly more secular. Probably most media sources, including PolitiFact did not cover God being booed by a definite majority of the delegates to the Democrat convention while the chairman of the platform committee tried to have God put into the platform as in previous years. In three verbal votes, there was clearly not a two-thirds majority in favor of putting God back into the platform. Nevertheless, the chairman said that two-thirds majority was in favor of the motion. The episode demonstrates how radical the Democrat Party has become as well as how undemocratic and dictatorial the leadership can be.
Mr. Taranto's article can be found online and provides supporting evidence for his rebuttal to PolitiFact's assertion that "death panels" in Obamacare are a lie. Economist Thomas Sowell points out that government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. Ask any health-care provider who gets cents on the dollar for their services from current government health care programs. Who will suffer the most when care is rationed? The sick, the elderly and disabled, of course. In August, 2009, Sarah Palin wrote, "Health care by definition involves life and death decisions." Obamacare necessarily expands the power of federal bureaucrats to make such decisions and it creates enormous fiscal pressure to err on the side of death.
Today, those who have read the health care law, confirm that bureaucrats, not patients and doctors, will decide the who, what, when and if, of individual health care. Whether the government establishes literal panels for life and death decisions is a hair-splitting quibble. By naming "death panels" the "lie of the year," PolitiFact showed itself to be less seeker of truth than servant of power.
Nancy Wert
Belleville
