Sanjay Gupta vs. Michael Moore on the national health care system on Larry King Live, July 2007

WSJ Health Blog:

The Washington Post is reporting that Barack Obama has offered the job of surgeon general to Sanjay Gupta. He’s expected to accept the job, the Post says, citing two unnamed sources. Gupta declined the Post’s request for comment.

Besides his CNN gig, Gupta also appears on CBS and writes for Time Magazine. He was a White House Fellow and a special adviser to Hillary Clinton when she was First Lady. Oh, and he’s a neurosurgeon at Emory and associate chief of the neurosurgery service at Atlanta’s Grady Memorial Hospital.

There’s a certain logic to picking a TV talking head to be surgeon general, because the surgeon general is largely a talking head. The top doc does oversee the 6,000-member Commissioned Corps of the U.S. Public Health Service, but the real work of the job is traveling around the country, using the title as a bully pulpit to advance a public health agenda.

Of course, it would be nice if he used that bully pulpit to advocate for Universal Health Care, which would be the single best news for public health in this country, but it doesn't appear that Dr. Gupta thinks there's a problem. Paul Krugman agrees:

I don’t have a problem with Gupta’s qualifications. But I do remember his mugging of Michael Moore over Sicko. You don’t have to like Moore or his film; but Gupta specifically claimed that Moore “fudged his facts”, when the truth was that on every one of the allegedly fudged facts, Moore was actually right and CNN was wrong.

What bothered me about the incident was that it was what Digby would call Village behavior: Moore is an outsider, he’s uncouth, so he gets smeared as unreliable even though he actually got it right. It’s sort of a minor-league version of the way people who pointed out in real time that Bush was misleading us into war are to this day considered less “serious” than people who waited until it was fashionable to reach that conclusion.

In addition to the Gupta hit piece they aired at every opportunity, it looks like CNN wanted to make Moore look as bad physically as they could. Look at that image. Hoffmania! noticed that Michael Moore looked much different--and not for the better--on CNN's site than he did on air. Hmmmm....

UPDATE: CNN's page describing the exchange between Moore and Sanjay Gupta on Larry King also depicts a decidedly splotchy Moore. Our video of the exchange doesn't look nearly that bad. Coincidence?

UPDATE #2: MBH looks at what may be behind Gupta's spat with Moore.

On 4/3, our favorite Michelle posted : AN HONEST SCHIAVO POLL

In my March 23 column, I wrote: " Imagine how the poll results might have turned out if ABC News had made clear to participants that Terri is not terminally ill." Well, no need to imagine any longer. A new Zogby poll suggests that if Americans knew the details of the Schiavo case they would not have supported removing her feeding tube.

Here’s the part that they get wrong.

"If a disabled person is not terminally ill, not in a coma, and not being kept alive on life support, and they have no written directive, should or should they not be denied food and water," the poll asked. A whopping 79 percent said the patient should not have food and water taken away while just 9 percent said yes.

That sounds like what most Americans would say to a question like that. The only problem with it is that it does not describe Terri Schiavo. Terri Schiavo was suffering from PVT, an injury that not one person has ever recovered from according to Dr. Sanjay Gupta of CNN. (you know where to find all the facts)

A group of right wingers jumped on this like: David Limbaugh's : Now they Tell us

If a person can't swallow or eat and needs a device implanted in them to keep them alive. Then isn't that life support? Steven Taylor of Poliblogger and James Joyner of Outside the Beltway agree. They say:

"Further, to ignore that the feeding tube was medical intervention, of a type similar to, although not as dramatic as, a ventilator is to put ideological blinders on. At a fundamental level it ignores the fact that for the vast predonerance of human history, Terri would have died 15 years ago."

The problem really isn’t with the poll, but how it was applied.

Now of course the obvious truth has reared up and shown its truthful head.

on 4/10 Malkin posts: A SECOND LOOK AT THAT ZOGBY SCHIAVO POLL : But now some skeptical bloggers--conservative bloggers--are revisiting the poll and asking questions about the sponsors, poll wording, and reporting on the poll.

So she starts apologizing not because the poll doesn't accurately describe Terri, but because some of the information about the questions was not released by Zogby, and the poll was a joint effort with The Christian Defense Coalition.

Smells fishy to me. Of course Malkin tried to say how thoroughly the conservatives were investigating and fact checking this story now, so there's no problem here. Don’t criticize us you nasty liberal bloggers. Then she’s gives us the stupid example from her "MICHELLE MALKIN IS A C**T" post.

I know apologizing is getting quite common for the right wing blogosphere lately. Can you please just apologize not only for getting the story wrong, because we all will at some point, but for the fact that you were blinded by your ideology to honestly look at the facts of an issue.

(Update): The same is happening with the Drudge driven UNHINGED LIBERAL PRODUCTS FOR SALE. The bottom line is that Cafe Express is getting a lot of action because of these dimwitted efforts to try and help Tom Delay. Is that all Drudge and Malkin can find to defend Delay and smear liberals with? More on this later...