Dr. Death

Welcome to the intersection of Washington, Wingnuttia, and the bottom feeders who suck blood from both, Dr. Emanuel.

"I couldn't believe this was happening to me," says Emanuel, who in addition to spending his career opposing euthanasia and working to increase the quality of care for dying patients is the brother of White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. "It is incredible how much one's reputation can be besmirched and taken out of context." (See pictures of health care for the uninsured.)

It would only get worse. Within days, the Post article, with selective and misleading quotes from Emanuel's 200 or so published academic papers, went viral. Minnesota Representative Michelle Bachmann, a fierce opponent of Obama's reform plans, read large portions of it on the House floor. "Watch out if you are disabled!" she warned. Days later, in an online posting, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin attacked Emanuel's "Orwellian thinking," which she suggested would lead to a "downright evil" system that would employ a "death panel" to decide who gets lifesaving health care. By Aug. 10, hysteria had begun to take over in places. Mike Sola, whose son has cerebral palsy, turned up at a Michigan town-hall meeting to shout out concerns about what he regarded as Obama and Emanuel's plans to deny treatment to their family. Later, in an interview on Fox News, Sola held up the Post article. "Every American needs to read this," he declared. (Read "What Health-Care Reform Really Means.")

By this point, Emanuel, who has a sister who suffers from cerebral palsy, had arrived in northern Italy, where he planned to spend a week on vacation, hiking in the Dolomites. Instead, he found himself calling the White House, offering to book a plane home to defend his name. "As an academic, what do you have? You have the quality of your work and the integrity with which you do it," he said by phone from the Italian Alps. "If it requires canceling a week's long vacation, what's the big deal?"

It's funny he was in Italy. Because "quality" and "integrity" are foreign words to Betsey McCaughey.

But it is important to note that Time's Michael Scherer is calling bullshit on this.

In her Post article, McCaughey paints the worst possible image of Emanuel, quoting him, for instance, endorsing age discrimination for health-care distribution, without mentioning that he was only addressing extreme cases like organ donation, where there is an absolute scarcity of resources. She quotes him discussing the denial of care for people with dementia without revealing that Emanuel only mentioned dementia in a discussion of theoretical approaches, not an endorsement of a particular policy. She notes that he has criticized medical culture for trying to do everything for a patient, "regardless of the cost or effects on others," without making clear that he was not speaking of lifesaving care but of treatments with little demonstrated value. "No one who has read what I have done for 25 years would come to the conclusions that have been put out there," says Emanuel. "My quotes were just being taken out of context."