Why Does Betsy Mccaughey Have Any Credibility?

This past Sunday the Tribune-Review published this piece by Betsy Mccaughey.

It's a warning about how the President's Clean Power Plan will ruin us, just ruin us entirely.

Wasn't Betsy Mccaughey one of the loudest "Death Panel" screamers, warning us about how the Affordable Care Act was going to ruin us, just ruin us entirely starting with our ailing grandmothers?

Why, yes.  Yes she was.

From Mediamatters:

As Media Matters for America senior fellow Jamison Foser pointed out, what is most problematic about this individual is not simply her false and misleading claims, but that despite her consistent pattern of promoting falsehoods, the media continue to provide her with a platform -- and a veneer of legitimacy. Most notably, Rupert Murdoch-owned papers The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post have repeatedly provided her space on their op-ed pages, and Murdoch's Fox News Channel has repeatedly hosted her and advanced her claims. As The Atlantic's James Fallows has noted, she is an example of someone for whom there "seems to be almost no extremity of being proven wrong which disqualifies" her from being given a platform in the media. Indeed, the media's willingness to treat her as if she were a legitimate policy expert has continued even after she has backtracked on many of her claims after they were debunked.

So why should we treat her as if she had any sort of credibility?

In fact what's happened to all of the Obama doomdays our conservative friends have warned us about?  For an answer to that question, we turn our lonely eyes to Paul Krugman:

What did the men who would be president talk about during last week’s prime-time Republican debate? Well, there were 19 references to God, while the economy rated only 10 mentions. Republicans in Congress have voted dozens of times to repeal all or part of Obamacare, but the candidates named President Barack Obama’s signature policy nine times over the course of two hours. And energy, another erstwhile GOP favorite, came up only four times.

Strange, isn’t it? The shared premise of everyone on the Republican side is that the Obama years have been a time of policy disaster on every front. Yet the candidates on that stage had almost nothing to say about any of the supposed disaster areas.

And there was a good reason they seemed so tongue-tied: Out there in the real world, none of the disasters their party predicted have actually come to pass. Mr. Obama just keeps failing to fail. And that’s a big problem for the GOP — even bigger than Donald Trump.

And then he talks a bit about Mccaughey's "speciality", Health Care Reform:

Talk to right-wingers, and they will inevitably assert that it has been a disaster. But ask exactly what form this disaster has taken, and at best you get unverified anecdotes about rate hikes and declining quality.

Meanwhile, actual numbers show that the Affordable Care Act has sharply reduced the number of uninsured Americans — especially in blue states that have been willing to expand Medicaid — while costing substantially less than expected. The newly insured are, by and large, pleased with their coverage, and the law has clearly improved access to care.

And where are those death panels?  Ms Mccaughey, can you help a blogger out ?