The GOP Gullibility Factor or Dying Child's Mom Punks GOP

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 doctors at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia rather than from the emotionally distressed mom of a terminally ill child suffering from cystic fibrosis, she would have learned that the opposite was the case. The adult lungs had failed almost immediately as medical experts feared they would.  In fact, at the time Palin's tweet went out, the child was hanging on 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, little Sarah Murnaghan 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 foreshorten rather than prolong the little girl's life.     

Medieval Court Jester

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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