Cynical, Moronic or just Bat-sh!t crazy?

I had lunch with A Fortunate One yesterday, and he described a debate he’s having with a family member about whether a single-payer healthcare bill is desirable practically and morally. (He’s covered this topic already.)

We talked about the ‘death panel’ idea, being spread mostly by American republicans that there will be some group of people convened by the healthcare reform that will decide whether certain treatments will be covered. Although I don’t think it was news to AF1, I pointed out that such things already exist, often in the form of insurance actuaries, and they’ve even been portrayed in pop culture (sorry, I just broke the first two rules). If this seems controversial to you, Slate gives a bit of an explanation.

Sarah Palin has used her facebook status to play up the death panel idea, and this raises a question in my mind. Is she cynical, stupid, or plain ol’ bat-sh!t crazy?

• The cynicism hypothesis is that Palin knows how insurance and legal compensation work, but she invokes terms like ‘death panel’ either to get herself in the headlines or because somebody has paid her. It would make sense because, though she isn’t necessarily the sharpest knife in the drawer, she has quite a bit of experience. I mean, I wouldn’t call her educated, but she has done stuff. She was mayor of Wasilla, governor of Alaska and VP candidate. I mean, she was even on the evening news for a while. How did she get through her (sadly) illustrious life without picking up a solid thought or two about risk and valuation?
• If she is genuinely stupid, there would probably have to be somebody egging her on. I mean, if she’s not smart enough to understand and accept that everybody’s life has, at least in practical terms, a monetary value, somebody must have explained some corollaries of single-payer healthcare to her and put her up to it. She’s had her moments in the past (see above), so it’s plausible that she was just a cog in some heinous individual’s machine.
• You think it’s impossible for her to have achieved such stature and be a few cans short of a Joe-Six-Pack, read her resignation speech again. She knows what she needs to deflect and what kinds of things she mustn’t say (e.g. “I’m in over my depth”, “Who are we kidding?”, “I shall rule all!”), but her means of misdirection are, well, unconventionally composed.

So what is it? Cynical, moronic, or bat-sh!t crazy?

Oh, and while we’re talking about the ‘intellectually disabled’, I posted recently about hand-wringing in Canada to refer respectfully to descendants-of-people-who-live-in-what-we-now-call-‘Canada’-before-Europeans-arrived and American neglect or ignorance of a problem. It seems that Americans are worried about other problems of nomenclature when it comes to ‘klatschies’, as my special-ed-teaching bro-in-law would call them.