I have been so busy trying to get things ready lately that I almost forgot to congratulate Caribou Barbie on FINALLY winning a national contest.

I have a feeling that this is only the beginning for the White Trash Welfare Queen of Wasilla. She’s almost certain to win this contest over and over again.

But the first win is always the most special one, and that’s why I wanted to give Caribou Barbie a proper shout-out on this most auspicious of occasions. Way to go, Barbie!

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s claim about so-called “death panels” has landed her on the political equivalent of Santa’s naughty list: PolitiFact’s “Lie of the Year.”

Palin earned the dubious honor last week for her Aug. 7 assertion on Facebook that people would face “death panels” under the health care overhaul bill as proposed by the House of Representatives this summer.

It was such a falsehood that the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking Web site gave it a “Pants on Fire” rating on its Truth-O-Meter in August. And this week, Palin’s truth stretching was seconded as “Lie of the Year” by an overwhelming 61 percent of PolitiFact readers who cast votes on the editors’ pick.

At the time, Palin wrote: “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.

“We agree with Palin that such a system would be evil,” PolitiFact’s editors wrote at the time. “But it’s definitely not what President Barack Obama or any other Democrat has proposed.”

Palin’s claim about death panels — although disproven and widely derided — came to define the health care debate in the pivotal month of August. That’s when lawmakers were home for their summer recess, facing constituents who showed up at raucous town hall meetings with questions about what’s in the health care legislation being debated by Congress.

The provisions Palin referred to in the legislation gave Medicare patients the ability to seek paid-for counseling for end-of-life issues, such as living wills. Nothing was mandatory about the counseling provision, which Medicare previously had not covered.

Although she has been rebuked repeatedly as a liar for her remarks, Palin this week continued to repeat the assertion that health care legislation might include “death panels.” On the Twitter account she’s using to promote her new memoir, “Going Rogue,” Palin wrote on Tuesday that it was important people pay attention to the legislation.

She used the social networking Web site’s vernacular to bring up the topic again: “merged bill may be unrecognizable from what assumed was a done deal: R death panels back in?” Palin wrote from her Blackberry.

As you can see, the Queen isn’t resting on her laurels. She’s getting right back in the thick of things and getting a jump start on 2010!

In other news, Levi Johnston’s mom has been sprung from the joint. As you may remember, her case was in limbo right up till the day Caribou Barbie took a powder from the Governor’s Office. The scuttlebutt at the time said that Caribou Barbie was doing what she always does, using her offices to try to push for the maximum amount of punishment Sherry Johnston could receive. The fact that the case got settled right after the Queen went away kinda lends a lot of weight to the scuttlebutt, doesn’t it?

I do wish Ms. Johnston all the best, and I suggest that she move out of Wasilla, where every third house or so is a meth lab. If you keep bad company, you can get into bad things.

Tags: lie of the year, lies, palin, sherry johnston

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 24th, 2009 at 4:24 pm and is filed under Jolly Roger, Stupidity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.