Jacob Weisberg Is A Retard

I usually say "moron" for members of the media who show less than average intelligence in their writing, but somehow it wasn't strong enough for this.

Republicans charge that Democratic health care reform would, in Sen. Charles Grassley's words, "pull the plug on Grandma." According to Sen. Jon Kyl, the bills before Congress would ration medical treatment by age. Rep. John Boehner says they promote euthanasia. Alaskan abdicate Sarah Palin has raised the specter of "death panels." Such fears are understandable. It's not preposterous to imagine laws that would try to save money by encouraging the inconvenient elderly to make a timely exit. After all, that's been Republican policy for years.

It was Sen. Grassley himself who rammed the GOP's most astonishing pro-death policy through the Senate in 2001. The estate-tax revision he championed reduces the estate tax to zero next year. But when the law expires at year's end, the tax will jump back up to its previous level of 55 percent. Grassley's exploding offer has an entirely foreseen if unintended consequence: It's going to encourage those whose parents and grandparents are worth anything more than a million bucks to get them dead by midnight on Dec. 31, 2010. This would be a great plot for a P.D. James novel if it weren't an actual piece of legislation.

Uh, yeah, if you say so. (Actually, I wonder how many people have committed suicide after they realized the death of a patriarch/matriarch meant a crushing tax burden that could only be met by selling off a family business that could have been generations in the making. But, hey, scumbags like Weisberg want the money because they know better what to do with it than people who have been employing people for decades. After all, they don't have journalism degrees.)

But wait! There is more:

Other GOP policies promote death for senior citizens with more modest incomes. Take the conservative push to privatize Social Security, which George W. Bush proposed and failed to get Congress to pass in 2005. Social Security has driven life expectancy up and death rates down since it was instituted. It has an especially pronounced impact on suicide rates for the elderly, which have declined 56 percent since 1930. Had Bush prevailed, we would now be undoing income security for the elderly. Those who gambled on the stock market and lost would be less able to afford medicine, food, and heating for their homes. In aggregate, they'd presumably die younger and commit suicide more often.

I'd bring up a discussion of correlation versus causation, if I thought there was a snowball's chance in hell that Weisberg had the mental ability to understand the distinction. Maybe he also believe the phases of the moon cause menstrual cycles?