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Now welcome to the best of the left podcast with clips today from Rachel Maddo,

on the media, the Young Turks, Slate Magazine, the Colbert Report, NPR, and Countdown.

When politics gets crazy, when political debate discards the facts and favor of the freaky

and the far-fetched and the fearful, those of us who make a living talking about the news sometimes

have a little bit of a dilemma. In order to represent truthfully the character of a political

debate, you have to point it out if someone in that debate is making stuff up or if they don't

appear to understand what they're saying. In order to give an accurate portrayal of what's going on,

it's important to point out when people are lying. The dilemma is that even negative attention

is still attention. The time it takes on a TV show like this one to point out that someone is a liar

is national media attention being devoted to a liar. A liar who probably is loving the attention

and therefore is being rewarded for their lying. It's a dilemma. But is a dilemma that can be solved?

Did you see Betsy McCoy on the Daily Show last night? As we have reported at some

length on this show, Betsy McCoy is responsible for the whole conspiracy theory that the government

encouraging people to make living wills, which the government has done for 20 years, is somehow now

that it's included in the House Health Reform Bill, somehow now it's a secret plot to kill old people.

Betsy McCoy started this conspiracy theory. She is the typhoid Mary of the Deathers scourge.

She is the Angel of Deathers. And last night, John Stewart on the Daily Show braved the risk of

giving Betsy McCoy a bigger platform than she's ever had before. Bigger than Fred Thompson's

talk radio show, bigger than the op-ed page of Rupert Murdoch's New York Post, bigger even then

the New Republic in which she published a famously error-ridden hit piece on Bill Clinton's

...