Townhalls and Inventing tales of a union "beating"
The conservative blogosphere is absolutely atwitter with news that an activist was attacked by union thugs at a town hall meeting this week in St. Louis. It's the best the right-wing can do to deflect blame for unleashing mini-mobs on town hall forums: They did it!
The tale was first told in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
Kenneth Gladney, 38, a conservative activist from St. Louis, said he was attacked by some of those arrested as he handed out yellow flags with "Don't tread on me" printed on them. He spoke to the Post-Dispatch from the emergency room at St. John's Mercy Medical Center, where he said he was awaiting treatment for injuries to his knee, back, elbow, shoulder and face. Gladney, who is black, said one of his attackers, also a black man, used a racial slur against him before the attack.
The newspaper had no witnesses, just Gladney's account. Then Gladney's attorney got involved and from conservatives' perspective, the tale got better and better:
He went to the ground. Subsequently, two other SEIU representatives or members, however you want to say it, jumped on top of him, yelled racial epithets at him...kicked him, punched him...He sustained some injuries to his back, some bruising.
And even better:
The SEIU member used a racial slur against Kenneth, then punched him in the face. Kenneth fell to the ground. Another SEIU member yelled racial epithets at Kenneth as he kicked him in the head and back. Kenneth was also brutally attacked by one other male SEIU member and an unidentified woman. The three men were clearly SEIU members, as they were wearing T-shirts with the SEIU logo.
Gladney was clearly beaten at length (it was "brutal"), and at least from this description, was lucky to survive with his life, right?
Mary Katharine Ham wrote up an especially excited write-up at The Weekly Standard about the vicious union thugs and how Gladney was severely beaten. The only mistake Ham made was including a YouTube clip of the incident; a clip that pretty much undercuts the entire tale of run-away union violence.
Go watch the YouTube video. (Or, the "shocking video," as Power Line hypes it.) The first thing you notice when the camera starts rolling is a union member already sprawled out on the ground with somebody standing over him. No explanation of how he got there (pushed, shoved, punched?) and Ham couldn't care less. Then yes, Gladney is pulled to the ground by somebody wearing a union shirt. (At the :06 mark.) But instead of Gladney being beaten and punched, as his attorney describes, and instead of union "thugs" standing over him and threatening him, Gladney bounces right back on his feet in approximately two seconds and the scuffle ends.
That was the savage "beating" the conservative blogosphere can't stop talking about?
The only real mystery from the incident is why Tea Party member Gladney, who's seen up-close after the brief encounter walking around and talking to people and who appears to be injury-free, then decided to go to the hospital to treat injuries to his "knee, back, elbow, shoulder and face." All that from a two-second fall to the pavement?
Also unclear is why he contacted a newspaper reporter, or why his attorney wrote up lavish accounts and sent them to conservative bloggers, or why Gladney and his attorney appeared on Fox News.
FYI, according to his attorney, Gladney plans on filing a civil lawsuit against the union.
UPDATED: The Hill erroneously reported that Gladney had been "hospitalized" after being "attacked." As you can see from the video, Gladney was not "hospitalized." (i.e. Rushed away by ambulance.) Instead, as the Post-Dispatch correctly reported, Gladney "said he sought hospital treatment."
Have You No Decency? Sarah Palin and her "death panels"
To be clear, it is downright evil to establish a “death panel” that decides who is allowed to live based on their “level of productivity in society.” Less clear is what the heck Palin or Bachmann are talking about. I can’t find the words “death panel” in any administration position paper, the stimulus package, or the House and Senate draft health reform bills. Don’t take my word for it. Read the bills.
Palin and Bachmann take pot shots at Ezekiel Emanuel, one of President Obama’s health policy advisors. Dr. Emanuel, a prominent medical ethicist and oncologist, makes a juicy target because he is Rahm’s brother, and because his paper trail provides incautiously blunt commentary regarding the pathologies of American health policy. It’s easy to lift one or two sentences from him, throw them onto the internet, and set the right-wing blogosphere aflame.
Palin and Bachmann remind no one of Hillary Clinton in their success in grasping complex policy issues, or in their desire to do so. It may be too much to expect them to trace the origin and veracity of these talking points. These originate in a New York Post op-ed by Betsy McCaughey, which Bachmann essentially recites on the House floor. In the original op-ed, McCaughey mushes together and distorts three articles Emanuel wrote between 1996 and 2008. I wish the Post would exercise greater quality control over what appears in its pages.
Human rights and human dignity indeed belong at the center of medical care. Americans hold vastly different ideas about how to best honor these values when human life nears its end or when basic physical and cognitive functioning can no longer be preserved.
I do know four things.
First, these issues are quite separate from the main issues being debated in health reform. Under a single-payer system, a strong public plan, or under a libertarian’s privatized dream-system, we will still face fundamental dilemmas in caring for our loved ones, and ourselves. This is not merely or primarily a money issue. Like other forms of care, end-of-life care is sometimes wasteful or ineffective, but nobody is looking to skimp on or ration such care to finance health reform. Nor should they.
Second, health reform would address an equally fundamental dilemma of human dignity and human rights: millions of people’s lack of access to basic care. Many of these people are disabled or live with chronic illnesses. Over at Obsidian Wings, Publius yesterday noted the predicament of children with Down Syndrome denied health insurance because they have a preexisting condition.
Governor Palin writes: “And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled.” It’s telling that she omitted one category: Poor people, whose care is now cruelly rationed in ways the Obama administration and congressional Democrats are trying to address in health care reform. Palin brings genuine moral passion to the issue of cognitive disability. I wish she would bring that same passion to the plight of uninsured patients forced to seek substandard, delayed care, or the millions of Americans facing the dual challenge of serious illness and large medical bills. If you live in any big city, go down to your local public hospital emergency room. You will probably find people in visible discomfort or illness languishing for hours. A society that cares about human rights and dignity would not tolerate this.
Third, people genuinely worry that comparative effectiveness research (CER) is a stalking horse for rationing or for curtailing care for the sick, elderly, or disabled. This is a misplaced concern. I recently noted an Institute of Medicine CER report. None of the identified high-priority items involved anything approximating the rationing of life-saving or life-extending care. End of life care ranked 28th in their chart of priority areas for CER research. This may be a mistake. Better approaches to palliative care often look very good when evaluated against the standard benchmarks of medical cost-effectiveness.
Fourth and finally, publicity-seeking politicians subtract a lot from these conversations. Palin, Bachmann, and others score cheap points by scaring people and by spreading falsehoods. Their disrespect goes beyond their own political base to those whose views they so recklessly misconstrue.
Dr. Emanuel’s oncology career provides more than passing familiarity with the consequences of devastating, sometimes life-ending illness. He has written widely about the dilemmas of relying on medical care proxies in caring for desperately ill patients, chemotherapy at the end of life, and other intimate clinical concerns. There is nothing Orwellian about him. He has prominently opposed legalization of euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, for example.
Emanuel’s work offers a model of sustained achievement that both Governor Palin and Representative Bachmann would be wise to emulate. He deserves better than to be trashed in this way. So do the rest of us
--Harold Pollack
