By John Brummett

If there ever was a crazier week in American politics than the one we just finished, then we need to identify it so we can study how the country managed to survive it.

Sarah Palin, comically uninformed and typically belligerent about it, got things started. She put on her Facebook site that Democratic health care reform bills would create death panels under the thumb of President Obama and that these death panels could well take the life of her child with Down Syndrome.

Then Newt Gingrich, not wanting to dilute the wingnut base, said, well, you know, it’s conceivable that she’s right.

This should go without saying, but, alas, I fear I must say it: There is nothing like that in any of the five Democratic versions percolating in Washington.

In the House bill, which exists in three committee versions, there is only a provision to provide Medicare reimbursement for doctors counseling seniors on sensible end-of-life options like living wills and hospice care.

Then Investor’s Business Daily, a business newspaper, offered an editorial in support of the wingnut notion that health care reform will ration care and dictate that people with dire health problems be killed.

The paper opined as follows: Stephen Hawking, the brilliant physicist suffering from a motor neuron disease akin to ALS, could never have survived in the United Kingdom because, over there, they have the very kind of nationalized health insurance that Obama was said in the editorial to be trying to foist on America, though, of course, he isn’t. And British health officials surely would have adjudged Hawking’s life not a cost-efficient interest, the editorial observed.

But here’s the thing: Hawking lives in England and teaches there. And, by the way, he says he is indebted to the nationalized health system there for its dedicated and high-quality care. He was in the hospital just last month, actually.

So Investor’s Business Daily published a correction, not of its wholly bogus and discredited editorial opinion, but only to say that the original version of the editorial inaccurately implied that Hawking did not live in the place where he, in fact, lives.

The real error, though, was saying that the British national health service would have left Hawking to die, though, of course, the plain evidence bears out that it obviously hadn’t.

Investor’s Business Daily did not do the right thing and pull the plug on its terminally ill editorial page.

Then U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill, sane Democrat from Missouri, was leading a rowdy town hall meeting, imploring people not to be so pointlessly loud and rude. As she tried to explain the nuance of some policy issue, she peered to the rear of the auditorium and beheld a man and a woman commencing to fight, which is to say physically brawling, and by which I mean with each other.

“Hey, hey, hey,” McCaskill began saying urgently, as security officers scampered to the scene of the tussle.

Apparently the woman had displayed a sign lauding Rosa Parks, even though people had directed that there be no signs in the auditorium. So a man tried to take the sign.

Next thing you knew it was Jerry Springer time in America.

McCaskill asked how many in her rowdy assembly were on Medicare and how many would give it up. The audience didn’t grasp that it had been had. Then McCaskill asked how many in the audience had seen their medical bills go down as a result of tort reform enacted in Missouri. Again, the audience didn’t comprehend that it had been had.

Over in Pennsylvania, 79-year-old Arlen Specter, a cancer survivor who switched from the Republican to the Democrats a few months ago so that he might more easily get re-elected, was holding his own town meeting.

There the aging senator was bellowing “wait a minute, wait a minute” as he tried to calm a shouting man who was angry about matters the man was unable to articulate decipherably either in the town hall meeting or the next day when he got his inevitable 15 minutes of infamy on cable television.

Leading Democrats were calling all of this craziness un-American, which was crazy in itself, of course, because it was all quintessentially American.

The craziest thing of all is that it’s beginning to appear, yet again, that we’re not going to reform our inefficient, unfair, bankrupting and altogether doomed health care insurance system.

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John Brummett is an award-winning columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock and author of “High Wire,” a book about Bill Clinton’s first year as president. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com.