Dick Cheney may have won Human Events‘ “Conservative of the Year” award, but the Right’s more contemporary megastar, Sarah Palin, got her own big end of the year award. She’s the author of PolitiFact’s “Lie of the Year,” via her infamous Facebook post on health reform and “death panels.”
This was indeed an instant classic: completely fabricated, aimed at a particularly important constituency, and applying one of the favorite hallucinations of Palin’s buddies in the Right to Life movement (liberals want to extend their “holocaust” from the unborn to old folks) to the domestic policy issue of the day. And best of all, the lie was distributed not through some clunky and news-cycle-sensitive speech, but through Facebook!
TPM has a nice slide show illustrating how the “death panel” meme pre-developed before Palin invented the term and launched it into the national consciousness.
