The extraordinary prevalence and durability of the "death panel" lie in the current health care debate requires an explanation that goes a little deeper than attention to the usual suspects. Palin, Gingrich, and Grassley certainly deserve their share of credit for the lie, as does that segment of the public hungry for false and inflammatory rhetoric.
But a demonstrably false and empty-headed lie of the "death panel" calibre cannot continue to live without a wider network of enablers and deeper roots of support. A lie of this magnitude is only sustainable by virtue of an interlocking system of parts all working together to give it life.
There is nothing mysterious about the components of the system. There are the entrenched corporate interests with their army of lobbyists. There are the elected officials whose campaign coffers are filled by the corporations. There are the media outlets that are dependent upon ratings and advertisers. There are the radio and TV personalities whose stock-in-trade is politics as entertainment and marketable angry rhetoric. And so on.
But none of these separate and distinct components is capable of promulgating and sustaining a national lie by itself. The success of the lie is wholly dependent upon the several components working together in concert. Without this mutual, interlocking, self-reinforcing network of support -- without this systemic process -- any lie of this magnitude would collapse and die of its own ugly weight.
Unless the proponents of health care reform come fully into contact with the systemic nature of this deceit, they will not be able to eradicate it. Exposing the hypocrisy of the Grassley's of the world is not going to cut it. It is a step in the right direction to shine a bright light, as Olbermann has done, on the quantity of contributions flowing from the health-care corporations to selected Senators and Congressmen, because that illuminates one vital link in the system. But that is still not enough.
The entire system, the interlocking mutually-reinforcing network has to be exposed for what it is. And that is a tough mission for any individual to pull off. A single Senator, for example, just does not have the gravitas necessary to call out the whole system that sustains such a lie.
Only a President is equal to this task. It is a Herculean task, because the opponents are multiple and so formidable. Only the President has the moral weight, the platform, and the pulpit to expose deceit so deeply embedded in the system as a whole.
The success of health care reform hangs in the balance. The success of the Obama administration hangs in the balance. If Obama really wants to seize the day, to act upon "the fierce urgency of now," this is the task before him: to call out and expose the whole rotten interlocking structure -- the system of deceit -- that is the mortal enemy of all he is trying to accomplish.