My father's funeral was yesterday. There are a lot of ways that I could attempt to eulogize him, but for the sake of expediency I'm going to go with an incident, towards the tail end of the Obama administration, where I was sitting in the living room reading, and he charges in in a big huff, says, "Look at what he sent me! Can you believe this guy?" and hands me this:
I'm so so curious what death panels could possibly be. is this a council that decides who dies ? what does this mean ?
A major Republican talking point/smear during the early Obama years was the idea that the Affordable Care Act would inevitably result in a slippery-slope towards the existence of dystopian bureaucratic review panels who would assess whether it was cost effective to keep any given person alive using state resources (colloquially referred to as "death panels.")
The intended joke was that my father was LARPing as a hypothetical insane person who heard about the concept of death panels, misunderstood them as an actual plank of Obama's platform, thought they were a great idea, and then spent eight years badgering the surgeon general about how to sign up for them as if it were akin to jury duty, before Obama personally intervenes to try and get him to stop. The tone of the conversation right before he handed this to me had undertones of a guy feeling backstabbed about a politician not following through on campaign promises.
We thank him for his service.
Your father is (I don't speak of Good People in the past tense) An Absolute Legend 💯!
