FOX News' Chris Wallace Joins Right-Wing Fringe

Posted by Adele Stan, AlterNet at 10:00 AM on August 25, 2009.

Chris Wallace used to be a serious journalist. In fact, when FOX News hired him in 2003 to host FOX News Sunday, it was a bid for legitimacy amid the lions of Sunday morning political talk shows: NBC's Meet the Press, CBS' Face the Nation and ABC's This Week.

But Wallace knows who's buttering his bread, so this week he joined the ranks of right-wing paranoids who advance the lie that your government is out to kill you.

In a segment on the August 23 edition of FOX News Sunday, Wallace selectively quoted from a booklet that is among several recommended by the Department of Veterans Affairs for vets who are grappling with filling out living wills and advanced directives.

The book, Your Life, Your Choices, offers worksheets whereby readers look at statements offered in the kind of language people often use when talking about end-of-life issues, such as, "I'd never want to live like a vegetable." It then asks people to consider what a statement like that means to them personally:

 "I'd never want to live like a vegetable." Both May & John Williams have always shared this belief during their fifty years of marriage. But when they were talking about their advance care plans, they learned that they had very different views about what that meant. For May, it’s when she can’t take care of herself. John was surprised. For him, being a "vegetable" is much worse. "It’s when my brain’s not working but my body is being kept alive by machines."

Pages 21-26 have exercises to help you specify your beliefs and values in more detail.

With right-wing propaganda now debunked concerning end-of-life counseling included in the health-care reform legislation now under consideration by Congress, right-wing wizards how now  manufactured this controversy over a booklet designed to help veterans and their families make informed decisions about critical issues. "Breaking the story," according to Wallace, in the Wall Street Journal -- which, like F News, is owned by Rupert Murdoch -- was Pat Towey, the former director of the Bush Administration's Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, who appeared as Wallace's guest.

Actually, Towey wrote an opinion piece in which he touted the virtues of his own end-of-life guide, 5 Wishes, which, according to VA Assistant Secretary Tammy Duckworth, who was also interviewed by Wallace, the Department of Veterans Affairs declined to purchase for its patients.

Towey claimed to object to Your Life, Your Choices on the merits, saying the use of the word "vegetable" is demeaning, and claiming that a values-clarification worksheet that asks respondents questions to help them determine what "makes life worth living" is actually a "hurry-up-and-die" quiz for vets.

Later in the show, Wallace exacted a promise from Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Penn., to convene hearings on the VA's booklet.

Between Wallace's right-wing pandering and Specter's craven caving, it's hard to say what's worse. Most despicable of all, however, is the way in which these men are using America's war veterans as pawns in a game of fear.

Media Matters has more on this issue.

FOX News Sunday transcript of the Towey-Duckworth segment is available here.

FOX News Sunday transcript of the Specter segment is available here.

Tagged as: va, health care reform, chris wallace, veterans affairs, fox news sunday, death book, tammy duckworth, pat towey, end-of-life issues

Adele M. Stan is AlterNet's Washington bureau chief.