Healthcare Hustle: Palin Brags Her Family Crossed Border for CanadaCare When She Was a Child

Last week, Facebook Celebrity and former Half-Governor of Alaska Sarah Palin regaled a crowd of supporters in Calgary, Alberta with a typical shitload of aw-shucks one-liners and winky applause cues, plus this peculiarly off-key, Freeper-freaking confession:

The vocal opponent of health care reform in the U.S. steered largely clear of the topic except to reveal a tidbit about her life growing up not far from Whitehorse.

“We used to hustle over the border for health care we received in Canada,” she said. “And I think now, isn’t that ironic.”

Palin was apparently using “ironic” in it’s rarely-employed alternative sense of “cynical, double-dealing hypocrisy.”

Dave Weigel had it first, and links to a fuller account at the Calgary Herald.

If there’s such a thing as “political acoustics,” that line should reverberate all the way to 2012, at least.

Posted by StrangeAppar8us on 03/08/10 at 01:48 PM • Permalink

Categories: Politics • Nutters • Sarah Palin • Teabaggery •

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I’m gonna go ahead and assume she means that because of the evil commie health care in Canada millions of Canadians are now pouring over our borders in hopes of getting the best health care ever. Though I’ve also seen various alternatives to this story, such as they had to escape Canada on a ferry to Juneau in order to avoid death panels… or something like that.

Comment by Zam on 03/08/10 at 02:01 PM

What a gigantic fucking hypocrite. I eagerly await the in-depth investigation at Fox News.

Comment by Betty Cracker on 03/08/10 at 02:04 PM

FR link is fixed. Looks like the Medicine Hat News server is getting crushed, though.

Comment by StrangeAppar8us on 03/08/10 at 02:08 PM

Give her credit; she knows how to pander to a crowd.

Comment by Morbo on 03/08/10 at 02:09 PM

I really resent their swamping our drugstores looking for cheap blood-pressure medication, so at least to know that half-Governor Sharpie once received attentions those flannel-wearin’, poutine-snarfin’ freeloaders is some small compensation.

Comment by Mrs. Polly on 03/08/10 at 02:10 PM

as it is, it’s a jaw-droppingly idiotic thing to say

The Freeper Freakout page is a classic, and should be bronzed.

Comment by Mrs. Polly on 03/08/10 at 02:14 PM

Indeed, Polly. Despite two separate, reinforcing local newspaper accounts, a desperate Patriot types this in 24-pt letters:

This is a BOGUS and totally UNSUBSTANTIATED story that only far-leftist extremists will believe.

Comment by StrangeAppar8us on 03/08/10 at 02:20 PM

The Palin quote surprised me. It’s like she doesn’t get that could be used against her for the rest of her career.

Unless she meant it in a now I understand the error of my ways sense. Just like I might say that in High School I thought Dennis Miller was funny, but now I think isn’t that ironic. Doncha know.

Come to think of it I can see most of Dennis Miller’s punchlines coming from my house.

Comment by AltHippo on 03/08/10 at 02:25 PM

Poor Patriot! He should follow his brother Freeper and go with defense #2: IT WAS TINA FEY!

The Real Sarah was at the Oscars last night, looking hot; sorta Visigothgirl. That marauding-the-swag-suite thing definitely produced results.

Comment by Mrs. Polly on 03/08/10 at 02:28 PM

http://www.skagwaynews.com/051107GovPalinvisit.html
Palin drew from her Skagway past to illustrate her point. Her brother burned his foot badly jumping through a fire, and her mother had to take him down to Juneau on the ferry to the hospital. “All these years later, that’s still what people have to rely on here in some instances,” she said.

Actually, it is bogus. Comment from watertiger’s post on this.

Comment by Twinky P on 03/08/10 at 02:33 PM

Twinky P, her brother seems to have been some kind of fire-walker, because he seems to have had his feet treated just miles from wherever she happens to be speaking.

Comment by Mrs. Polly on 03/08/10 at 02:53 PM

And I have poor reading comprehension, since the first comment by Zam talks about the Juneau version! Didn’t Palin trash Biden at one point for doing the same thing?

Comment by Twinky P on 03/08/10 at 03:21 PM

This is the first I’ve heard that she has a brother at all. The sister who used to be married to the trooper I knew about, but not the fire-walking brother. How many more siblings will crawl out of the woodwork before all is said and done?

Comment by Betty Cracker on 03/08/10 at 03:28 PM

Found this hilarious tidbit in the comment thread of the linked article:

Final point to Jason Markusoff and the Calgary Herald, how about doing some research on the under aged wife of a British colonial subject, who was in Washington state shortly after the birth of her British Nationality Act baby, and probably delivered the child due to free Canadian health care in August of 1961.

As airlines did not allow pregnant women to fly, and no birth records were recorded in Washington, this British wife of a British colonial appears to have delivered a boy named Barack Hussein Obama in a Canadian hospital due to her husband’s Colonial status.

Why don’t Canadian liberals try researching that as the Obama child was a later registration in Hawaii like all babies of that era born out of state.

I sure hope someone lets Orly know ASAP so she can subpoena Canada’s birth records.

Comment by karen marie on 03/08/10 at 03:42 PM

It’s like she doesn’t get that could be used against her for the rest of her career.

Everything Palin does these days could be used against her for the rest of her career. None of it seems to stop her though.

Comment by marindenver on 03/08/10 at 04:38 PM

My gawd, the Freepers have started posting maps of the Skagway-to-Whitehorse highway.

And all those plaintive cries of “When did socialised medicine start in Canada”? It would be worth it to register there just to tell them that Canada has had universal health coverage since 1957—years before their heroine was born. Suckers.

Comment by MaryRC on 03/08/10 at 05:48 PM

The Freeptards’ comments remind me of Who Framed Roger Rabbit: “I don’t believe it! I won’t believe it! I can’t believe it! I shan’t believe it!”

Verily, it is a thing of beauty.

Comment by Hunger Tallest Palin on 03/08/10 at 06:28 PM

When I saw this developing on twitter today I could not believe that someone could be so blatently hypocritical, then I realized that we were talking about Bible Spice and just waited for it to go viral. Sure enuf it did.

Comment by Litlebritdifrnt on 03/08/10 at 06:41 PM

Canadian who can’t stand Palin here. If she went to Whitehorse, which is in the Yukon, they may not have have fully implemented their single-payer provincial coverage in the 60s. This federal site lists a couple of key dates:

1960: Yukon creates hospital insurance plan with federal cost sharing, July 1. ... 1972: Yukon creates medical insurance plans with federal cost sharing, April 1.

So it’s not entirely clear to me just how much Yukon residents paid into a provincial system in the 1960s and how much it covered. Several blogs, including Ben Smith’s, have interpreted the latter date as the start of true single-payer in Yukon, but I haven’t seen an authoritative Canadian source interpreting these dates yet.

Side note: Colby Cosh, a conservative Canadian blogger, was generally unimpressed with her speech. Oddly enough, he never mentions the health claims in his detailed account of her speech. I think she plumb wore him out.

Comment by Comrade Mary on 03/09/10 at 01:14 AM