Richard Cohen Accuses Palin

Of using overwrought and highly political language. He makes his point about the use of hysterical rhetoric by calling her the next Joe McCarthy. If people like Cohen didn't exist, you would have to make them up.

As with McCarthyism, Palinism is a product of its times. McCarthy exploited the public's fear of communism and communists. Not only were they abroad, but they were here in America -- spies, fellow travelers, pinkos, apologists, intellectuals and short, bespectacled minorities. It was their very ubiquity and invisibility that made them so dangerous. Health care reform provides Palin with the same opportunity.

Never Disliked Death Panel

Let me just state for the record that I never found anything offensive about the use of the phrase "death panel". The Left has embraced "framing" for years but has only recently given credence to the term through the work of a strident liberal professor from Berkeley by the name of George Lakoff. Lakoff has written for at least a decade about how Liberals must use language to win battles and that language can be used to manipulate public opinion. Well, what Sarah Palin did is no more than to use the same tactics against the Left and that's why they seethe.

Update: Steyn weighs in on a little controversy over at NRO with regard to the phrase and the concept:

And finally I don't think this is any time for NR to be joining the Frumsters and deploring the halfwit vulgarity of déclassé immoderates like Palin. This is a big-stakes battle: If we cross this bridge, there's no going back. Being "moderate" is not a good strategy. It risks delivering the nation to the usual reach-across-the-aisle compromise that will get Democrats far enough across the bridge that the Big Government ratchet effect will do the rest.

Palin on Panels

Sarah Palin vigorously defends herself against those who've gone nuts over her "death panel" reference:

President Obama can try to gloss over the effects of government authorized end-of-life consultations, but the views of one of his top health care advisors are clear enough. It’s all just more evidence that the Democratic legislative proposals will lead to health care rationing, and more evidence that the top-down plans of government bureaucrats will never result in real health care reform.

Love This from The Weekly Standard

A new series from TWS: If Sarah Palin Had Said It:

When a wise Latina accidentally says "vagrancies of ... the moment" instead of "vagaries of ... the moment" during the oral argument of the Ricci case, we're supposed to ignore the slip-up

Much more at the link