Following the growth of "a new right-wing scare tactic" that "has blossomed on conservative blogs and emails lists," Talking Points Memo Muckraker Zachary Roth (7/28/09) describes the healthcare meme as "the notion that the reform bill making its way through the House would lead to euthanasia by requiring senior citizens to submit to 'end-of-life consultations'"--and thinks that maybe

it won't surprise you to learn this is a lie. But President Obama just got a question on it at a public event. And the idea has now made it into Politico, where a straight news story asks in its headline, all even-handed: "Will Proposal Promote Euthanasia?" Since Politico thinks it'll be easier to "win the morning" by misleading readers into believing there's a legitimate debate over this issue, it's worth taking a minute to debunk it.

In fact, Politico's story contains pretty much all the information needed to do that. It's just that almost none of it makes it into the headline, or the first seven paragraphs of the piece, which focus on the fact that Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, John Boehner, Eric Cantor and other reforms opponents are raising the euthanasia alarm.

Explaining how the clause in question would really only require that regular consultations with seniors contain "an explanation by the practitioner of the continuum of end-of-life services and supports available, including palliative care and hospice," Roth notes that "seniors are in no way required to take advantage of this benefit."

Roth tells how "Politico renders this information as: 'It does not mandate individuals to take advantage of the benefit, proponents say'" [Roth's emphasis].

"Nor is there any reasonable basis for believing that these consultations, if chosen, would do anything to promote euthanasia," Roth writes, especially since it "is illegal in 48 states anyway."

Noting that, "for the last decade or so, Washington has indulged Pat Buchanan as a sort of crazy political uncle" by having "agreed to forget about his long track record of racially questionable commentary and writing," TPM Muckraker's Zachary Roth and Justin Elliott (4/24/09) have caught a column "for the far-right web magazine, Human Events," that doesn't quite jibe with the image portrayed on Buchanan's "frequent MSNBC appearances, where he plays a mostly well-mannered, if hardline, conservative."

The commentary in question asserts that "family-and-faith, God-and-country" America "does not comprehend how the president could sit in Trinidad and listen to the scrub stock of the hemisphere trash our country--and say nothing." Taking a closer look at the "scrub stock" descriptor in that sentence, Roth and Elliott find a definition no less offensive in its connotations for being so archaic:

There's no record of it appearing in the New York Times since 1943. (Hey, no one ever called Buchanan hip!) Until then, it was almost exclusively used to refer to an inferior breed of farm animal, usually cattle or horses, as when the paper reported in 1907: "Financial Disturbance Forces Cattlemen to Sell 'Scrub' Stock to Hold Prime Grades."...

In other words, "scrub stock" essentially means an inferior breed.

It's worse than that, though. There's evidence that theorists of racial and genetic superiority--an area of pseudo-scientific "scholarship" that was in vogue even among mainstream intellectuals in the late 19th and early 20th century--explicitly extended the use of the phrase beyond animals and into humans. In short, the phrase has been used by both eugenicists and racial segregationists to argue for the superiority of the white race.

See FAIR's regrettably still-relevant article: "In His Own Words: The History Book on Patrick Buchanan" (10/3/99) by Jeff Cohen