Behold, the beast with multitude of heads shall ascend out of the bottomless pit and go into perdition: and those that dwell in the righteous Congress shall wonder, when they behold the beast that brandishes pitchforks, torches, swastikas, gathering its multitude of heads into mobs, hell and terror it will reign upon Town Hall meetings, smiting the innocent that dwell in Congress and scattering asunder, while cloaked in bourgeois raiments. --Revelation 17, Democratic Party Revised Bible

The last time town folk ran a miscreant out of town with pitchforks and torches was within the pages of Mary Shelly's Frankenstein. Now, in their town hall meetings, the miscreants of Congress are being afforded the same hospitality as Frankenstein's monster, the difference being Frankenstein's Monster was fiction, while Congress, unfortunately, is much too real.

Barack Obama and this Democratic House of Representatives have fervidly denied the existence of a clause in the behemothic and labyrinthical health care bill that would force the elderly to face "death panels" comprised of bureaucrats parading around as physicians, poised to determine the fate and quality of the elderlys' twilight years. This clause in the health care bill, which has yet to be read in its entirety by the House or Obama, and the denial of its existence, is most assuredly not a product of Congress and Obama's ingenious conceit, but rather the product of casuistic and postulative politics. Since the provision for the creation of "death panels" apparently does not exist in the bill, the House and the Senate Finance Committee, after experiencing the wrath of their constituents, have decided to eliminate the "death panel" provision in the bill that does not exist...in the bill...the provision...where it exits not, or something along those lines.

The "Death Panel" rhetoric has become so acrimonious, the New York Times felt compelled to refute its existence and arrest the proposition that Obama and the Congress are going to unleash syringe wielding apothecaric ninjas upon the elderly and infirmed in the cover of darkness to save a dollar. The apologetic exposé ensues:

New York Times, August 14, 2009

WASHINGTON - The stubborn yet false rumor that President Obama's health care proposals would create government-sponsored "death panels" to decide which patients were worthy of living seemed to arise from nowhere in recent weeks.

But the rumor - which has come up at Congressional town-hall style meetings this week in spite of an avalanche of reports laying out why it was false - was not born of anonymous e-mailers, partisan bloggers or stealthy cyberconspiracy theorists.

Rather, it has a far more mainstream provenance, openly emanating months ago from many of the same pundits and conservative media outlets that were central in defeating President Bill Clinton's health care proposals....

It is compelling that the New York Times is, in adolescent fashion, checking under beds and dark closets and finding that the "vast right-wing conspiracy" is still crucifying the progressive agenda after all these years. And this last assault "arose from nowhere," just out of the blue without provocation. But, as Mark Twain expressed,"if you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything."And, expectantly so, the New York Times is not too fond of telling the truth, nor do they care much for remembrance; New York Times columnist David Leonhardt, this past April 14th, conducted the following interview with Barack Obama:

The President: Now, I actually think that the tougher issue around medical care- it's a related one- is what you do around things like end-of-life care.

Mr. Leonhardt: Yes, where it's $20,000 for an extra week of life.

The President: Exactly. And I just recently went through this. I mean, I've told this story, maybe not publicly, but when my grandmother got very ill during the campaign, she got cancer; it was determined to be terminal. And about two or three weeks after her diagnosis she fell, broke her hip.... I don't know how much that hip replacement cost. I would have paid out of pocket for that hip replacement just because she's my grandmother. Whether, sort of in the aggregate, society making those decisions to give my grandmother, or everybody else's aging grandparents or parents, a hip replacement when they're terminally ill is a sustainable model, is a very difficult question.

Mr. Leonhardt: And it's going to be hard for people who don't have the option of paying for it.

The President: So that's where I think you just get into some very difficult moral issues. But that's also a huge driver of cost, right? I mean, the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out here.

Mr. Leonhardt: So how do you-how do we deal with it?

The President: Well, I think that there is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place. It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. And that's part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance. It's not determinative, but I think has to be able to give you some guidance. And that's part of what I suspect you'll see emerging out of the various health care conversations that are taking place on the Hill right now.

Note that the entirety of Obama's last answer could be abridged into one sentence for brevity's sake and still maintain its integrity: death panels will decide if it is too expensive to keep grandma alive or bless her with the quality of life that only American health care could dispense.

Barack Obama, during a tightly orchestrated and artificial town hall meeting in Portsmouth, N.H., while clearly infirmed with the affliction of prevarication (a disease, indecently, that has ascended to pandemic proportions in the Congress), and suffering greatly in its throes, stated the following: "The rumor that's been circulating a lot lately is this idea that somehow the House of Representatives voted for 'death panels' that will basically pull the plug on grandma because we've decided it's too expensive to let her live anymore." This statement has left Obama no choice but to be characterized as one of two things regarding the health care reform bill: [1] a liar, [2] a liar. Choose one, please.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, who in all likelihood has not read a single page of the health care bill, has jumped into the fray by trying to label the "death panels" as just a big misconception, and probably some type of misspeak.

The health care bill has been eradicated and cleansed of the "death panel" provision that did not exist. That this provision did not exist in the first place, but was removed anyway, is indicative of Barack Obama and his administration's circumlocutory anomaly with factualism during the first six months at this nation's helm. As recently as this past April, Obama described the hard choices the "death panels" would have to make by weighing costs and providing Grandma quality of life. But this was a documented statement that was never stated, just as he has broken, to date, almost every single campaign promise he made, but has not.

An abbreviated and incomplete list of promises that were broken, but were not:

• "The entire earmark process needs to be re-examined and reformed" = signs a bill with 9000 earmarks.
• "I will not sign any non-emergency bill without giving the American public an opportunity to review and comment on the White House website for five days" = has signed all bills immediately.
• "The most open and transparent administration in history" = one of the most secretive in history.
• "Lobbyists won't work in my White House" = cabinet primarily consisting of lobbyists.
• "I will not use signing statements to nullify or undermine congressional instructions as enacted into law" = executive signing statements abound.
• "Now, what I've done throughout this campaignis topropose a net spending cut"' = highest deficiency in U.S. history.

You get the gist that is there, but then again, maybe it's not there just because it is.