Excerpt: For the record and for the umpteenth time: No version of healthcare reform being contemplated by Congress mandates death for the old, the disabled or the infirm. That's a canard. It is mendacity, prevarication, a bald-faced lie.
In other words, politics.
The art of the untruth is, after all, the life's blood of governance. As a brief spin through PolitiFact.com, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact checking website will attest, no party, ideology or politician has a monopoly on lying. Lying is as bipartisan as it gets.
And yet, the lies that have characterized the debate over healthcare are in a class all their own -- not simply because they are outrageous, but because they are designed specifically to inflame and terrorize. As such, those lies are deserving of special rebuke. Last week, they got it.
Sojourners, which calls itself the nation's largest network of progressive Christians, says its members sent out thousands of e-mails to five of the biggest offenders: Beck, his fellow Fox personalities Sean Hannity, Steve Doocy and Bill O'Reilly, and radio host Rush Limbaugh. Each e-mail said the same thing in essence: stop lying.
Wallis, a celebrated theologian and author of The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith & Politics in a Post-Religious Right America, says Sojourners is trying to redeem things people ``really should've learned in Sunday school.
http://www.miamiherald.com/living/columnists/leonard-pitts/story/1246797.html
