I suppose it could be just sloppy wording, but Joe Scarborough — the MSNBC morning host who is making noises about running for office again — appears to suggest that Sarah Palin is a Birther in an interview with Howard Kurtz: “I’ve told them it’s counterproductive to call Obama a Marxist. I caught so much flak by calling out Republicans when a few of them, like Sarah Palin, made things up like death panels, or obsessing over his birth certificate.”

Er . . . no.

Voters have every right to ask candidates for information if they so choose. I’ve pointed out that it was seemingly fair game during the 2008 election for many on the left to badger my doctor and lawyer for proof that Trig is in fact my child. Conspiracy-minded reporters and voters had a right to ask . . . which they have repeatedly. But at no point — not during the campaign, and not during recent interviews — have I asked the president to produce his birth certificate or suggested that he was not born in the United States.

That was in a Facebook post entitled “Stupid Conspiracies,” lest anyone have any doubt about what Palin thinks of the Birther theory.

As for the notion that Palin “made things up like death panels,” he’s wrong there too. I’ll refer you to the Wall Street Journal:

We wrote at the time that Sarah Palin’s coinage was sensationalistic, but it was meant to illustrate a larger truth about a world of finite resources and infinite entitlement wants. Under highly centralized national health care, the government inevitably makes cost-minded judgments about what types of care are “best” for society at large, and the standardized treatments it prescribes inevitably steal life-saving options from individual patients. This is precisely why many liberals like former White House budget director Peter Orszag support government-run health care to control costs: Technocrats in government can then decide who gets Avastin for cancer, say, and who doesn’t.
Democrats and the press corps accused Mrs. Palin of misrepresentation to avoid reckoning with this inexorable rationing reality that President Obama has himself implicitly acknowledged. In a 2009 interview with ObamaCare advocate David Leonhardt of the New York Times, he called for “a very difficult democratic conversation” about the costs that are incurred in the last six months of life. The President even mused about whether his own grandmother’s hip replacement following a terminal cancer diagnosis represented “a sustainable model.”

But how is Scarborough to know this? I’m sure no one around his MSNBC table ever corrected him.

But I guess I shouldn’t call him “wrong,” after all . . . that’s a label.