Blumenauer to Olbermann: I should have called them "life panels"

Kari Chisholm

On Monday night's Countdown show on MSNBC, host Keith Olbermann followed up on his personal revelation last week. (See Olbermann: "Friday night, my father asked me to kill him.")

He briefly updated his viewers on the medical situation facing his father (still alive, but no longer awake.) And then, expanded on his comments regarding end-of-life planning.

In particular, Olbermann connected the dots from Congressman Earl Blumenauer's original policy proposal to Sarah Palin's "death panels" fantasy to the overheated rhetoric we're hearing now from Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.

He also noted that he received a personal note from Congressman Blumenauer last week, in which Blumenauer says he wished he'd had the foresight to give his end-of-life planning Medicare reimbursement proposal the name "life panels", as Olbermann now has.

Here's the full video. The discussion of Beck, Palin, and Blumenauer starts at 3:45 and runs until about 5:30.

Sidenote: Sarah Palin's absurd "death panels" notion was named the "Biggest Lie of the Year" for 2009 by the Pulitizer Prize-winning PolitiFact fact-checking operation run by St. Petersburg Times.

By Kari Chisholm March 01, 2010