Jonah Goldberg, editor-at-large of National Review Online, went on Fox News today to fan the flames of the latest fabricated “death panel” controversy.
Goldberg equated a Veterans Affairs pamphlet — one that’s reportedly no longer being used — with Nazi eugenics, saying “death panels may not be too far off the horizon.”
The pamphlet in question is one that, Fox reported this weekend, encourages disabled veterans to decide whether their lives are worth living. Tammy Duckworth, an assistant secretary of the VA, told Fox on Sunday that the department instructed VA doctors to stop using the pamphlet in 2007.
But Fox has ignored that insistence, saying soldiers returning from Iraq are given the pamphlet.
“This goes into the realm of valuing whether life is worthy of life, as the Germans used to say,” Goldberg said today.
“This goes into the idea that somehow if you’re in a wheelchair, if you’re handicapped, if you’re just too melancholy to contribute to society, well then maybe those are circumstances where you … need to be culled from the tribe. That is the sort of thing that emanates up from this document,” he said.
