Healthcare "Debate:" the VA's "Death Book"

Civitas has been slumbering for sometime, but was roused from its inactivity by this FoxNews video, as shared on Facebook (as part of some vague call to action to oppose Obama's health care project). The video is a "report" on the Veterans Affairs (VA) living will/end-of-life counseling workbook that is intended to provide vets with some tools and points of consideration when putting together an advanced directive or "living will." (Some have actually been able to muster the intellectual hutzpah to refer to it as the "VA Death Book.")

Now, you might think after watching the video that the VA is advising the mildly impaired or wheel-chair-bound vets to kill themselves. Or, you might conclude that the VA says somewhere in the booklet that disabled veterans should kill themselves because they are a financial burden. You might also conclude that Jonah Goldberg and Megyn Kelly are on the front lines of a war against life and moral rectitude being waged by liberals.

However, I can only conclude, to my own deep amazement and disgust, that these two people have done one of the following:

1) Given opinions about the VA's document without even reading it.

2) Read the VA's booklet and deliberately misrepresented it.

Either scenario is truly astonishing. The video report is Orwellian in its ability to take the VA's document and twist it into a recommendation for suicide. I honestly do not know how these people go to sleep at night.

If greater astonishment were possible, it is reserved for those people who watch the video, read the VA's pamphlet, and still conclude there is any correlation between what is being described and what was actually written.

Shame on Fox News, and shame on Megyn Kelly and Jonah Goldberg.