Most of the well informed, or moderately well informed among us know Betsy McCaughey as the lady that propagated the lie about there being death panels. Betsy McCaughey was recently on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Stewart, to his credit did an admirable job of countering her spin and nonsense because he actually does his homework and does not accept everything that comes out of his guest's mouths. I wish we had more like him in the MSM.
If you want to see the whole interview you can find it at the Washington Monthly Website, which I highly recommend for sane commentary. (I have no affiliation with the site).
But Betsy McCaughey (pronounced "McCoy")got away with her biggest and clearly most subtle doozie before the interview actually began. It was how she was introduced. She was introduced as a member of the "Hudson Institute" and as the founder of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths and patient rights advocate. That gives her the veneer of legitimacy when she deserves none.
Her title debunked below the fold: OOOH OOOH! New info, hot off the presses. See below.
McCaughey was the former lieutenant governor under Pataki (just one of his terms). There may be something to that but I did not look into it.
Searching the internets for just a little while I found a treasure trove about McCaughey. I love those tubes.
After leaving office, she joined the Hudson Institute, a conservative think thank. It is ranked by other conservative think tanks as a 7 out of 8 in terms of its conservativeness. The Hudson institute opposes climate change legislation, it opposes the adoption of organic farming methods. Besides being dutiful conservatives opposed to anything new that made sense, just look at their donors to see why they would take a position such as opposing organic farming. They are sponsored by:
* Ag Processing Inc (an large scale agricultural processor with no biz from small organic producers)
* American Crop Protection Association (Name changed to CropAmerica) Here is a position paper on the Endangered Species Act in which they argue that pesticides are good for saving endangered species. CropLifeAmerica Position Paper * American Cyanamid (A chemical Co.) * Archer Daniels Midland (A chemical and Agribiz Co.) * Cargill (Same as ADM) * Ciba-Geigy (?) * ConAgra Foods (Major Agribusiness) * Conrad Black (Is this the guy that was convicted of Fraud in the UK?) * CropLife International (An international alter ego of themselves) * DowElanco (Chemical Co.) * DuPont (Chemical Co.) * Eli Lilly and Company (Chemical Co.) * Exxon Mobil (Oil) * Fannie Mae (Banking) * General Electric Fund (Soup to nuts and Energy) * Heinz (Katchup?) * IBM (Computers) * Lilly Endowment (?) * McDonald's (Big Macs for everyone) * Merck (Drugs) * Microsoft (Computers for everyone through monopoly) * Monsanto (Major Agribusiness and Chemical Co.) * National Agricultural Chemical Association (No description necessary) * Nichols-Dezenhall Communications Management Group (?) * Novartis (Medical Components and Drugs) * PayPal (Money) * PhRMA (A pharmaceutical lobbying firm) * PriceWaterhouseCoopers (Money) * Procter & Gamble (Drugs, Chemicals) * Sunkist Growers (Major Agribusiness) * Syngenta Crop Protection (Chemical Co.) * United Agri Products (?) * Westfield Corporation (?)
So there you have the Hudson's institutes bona fides. They are, in my opinion, a wholly owned subsidiary of chemical, pharmaceutical, and agribusiness companies and one of their PR firms.
BC as I will call her collaborated on an opinion piece that Giuliani (Mr. Noun + Verb + 9-11) touted during his run for presidency about the US being a leader in cancer therapy. This paper purportedly examined the five year cancer survival rates of patients in the US and Europe. Cancer experts and statisticians found no merit in the calculations of "survival rates" and deemed them "complete nonsense" and "a very dangerous thing to do" for which "you would get an F in epidemiology." She quoted this same study to Stewart during their interview to which he did not know about and could not rebut.
Lastly, for now at least, BC is described as founding the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths. Sounds noble, right? Not so fast. She is on the board of directors (salary unknown) to a company called Cantel Medical Corp. They make medical equipment. Cantel press release announcing BC joining the board
Layers my friends, layers of insulation. Dig deeper. Cantel has four subsidiaries:
Minntech, which sells Dialysis, Endoscope Reprocessing and Therapeutic Filtration equipment, and Crosstex, which sells healthcare disposables, primarily dental supplies and disinfectants, and Mar Cor Purification, which manufactures and sells water purification and filtration products to the medical, pharmaceutical, biotechnology, research and other industrial markets, and Saf-T-Pak, which sells specialty packaging and thermal control products, for the transport of medical and biological contents.
All of these companies specialize in making money selling equipment that reduce infectious diseases. The more people are worked up about infectious diseases, the more equipment they sell.
So BC's founding this committee is not so noble. She founded the committee to reduce infectious diseases in either 2004 or 2005, coincidentally the same year she was elected to the board of Cantel Medical Corp. So I don't believe her motives are so noble. You can always feel good about reducing infectious diseases, but you can feel better when you can make a buck at it as well. So color me a skeptic.
Honorable mentions: Her various Op Eds includes attacking methods of redistricting to comply with the Voting Rights Act (quoting Scalia of course); opposing Cuomo's attempts to increase judicial diversity; hoping Clarence Thomas would not rule against a tobacco company; criticized the Supreme Court for not overturning Roe v. Wade in the Casey case; against integration of segregated schools; praising the SCOTUS for overturning a redistricting plan in NC that integrated schools (BC loves her some Clarence Thomas)
In sum, BC is a tool. Jon I love you, but you should have gone harder and put her on the defensive more.
******UPDATE!!! According to Rachel Maddow on the Teevee tonight, the Cantel Corp. has canned BC. Yes! Not so good to have your public shill who purportedly is a public advocate demolished on national television by a comedian using the very same prop she brought with her as proof of her argument(s). Talk about drinking her milkshake!