On June 13, Alaska, ex-governor, Sarah Palin, tweeted:
"Sarah Murnaghan had a successful lung transplant; God bless her & docs & judge who said 'yes' after death panel/HHS Secy Sebelius said 'no'."
But if Palin had been getting her information from the medical professionals at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia rather than from the mother of a terminally ill child, willing to say whatever it took to gain sympathy, she would have learned that the first transplant had failed almost immediately. This was precisely the outcome doctors had anticipated in refusing to place the child on the adult lung transplant list. In fact, at the time Palin's tweet went out, 10 year old Sarah Murnaghan was clinging to life by a few rubber tubes hooked to a heart/lung machine, with an open cavity in her chest where a set of lungs should have been. Thrust to the top of the adult lung list a second time, the little girl, who also suffers from cystic fibrosis, was secretly given another pair of adult lungs three days later.
Because the Murnaghan family only disclosed the failure of the first double-lung transplant two weeks later, Republicans in Congress, Palin, and Rush Limbaugh continued to denounce so-called Obamacare bureaucrats and HHS Secretary Sebelius for refusing to override established medical protocols. In the end, however, a successful lawsuit on the parents' part and GOP hysteria over "Obamacare death panels" could not change the fact that donating adult-sized organs to a terminally ill child, against the advice of medical professionals, might shorten rather than prolong the little girl's life.
What troubles me most in this case and others is what I've begun to call the "GOP gullibility factor." Conservatives' unwillingness to accept medical or any other empirical evidence that counters wishful thinking appears to have grown exponentially since the last presidential election. Karl Rove had so convinced Republican voters that all of the professional pollsters were wrong in projecting Barack Obama's probable win, that he had been able to relieve them of 300 million dollars for Mitt Romney's failed campaign.
These days my ears are ringing from increasingly shrill, apocalyptic claims being made by Rush Limbaugh and other conservatives that the Obama presidency has destroyed the national economy. In truth, professional economists agree that his adept handling of the financial disaster inherited from his GOP predecessor, is finally bringing the nation out of the worse financial crisis since the Great Depression. Twenty-first century America needs a GOP willing to relinquish the kind of medieval gullibility that once led people to believe that praying over the bones of dead saints was the surest cure for syphilis.
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