Sarah “I didn’t come from no monkey” Palin gets the ultimate soft ball interview from Rich Lowry at National Review: The Rogue, on the Record.

When Lowry asks about her absurd fear-mongering “death panels” statement, she compares herself to … Ronald Reagan. You remember how Reagan called the Soviet Union the “evil empire?” “Death panels” is the same kind of thing.

It wouldn’t be a Palin interview without asking about “death panels.” How did she come up with the phrase? “To me, while reading that section of the bill, it became so evident that there would be a panel of bureaucrats who would decide on levels of health care, decide on those who are worthy or not worthy of receiving some government-controlled coverage,” she explains. “Since health care would have to be rationed if it were promised to everyone, it would therefore lead to harm for many individuals not able to receive the government care. That leads, of course, to death.”
 
“The term I used to describe the panel making these decisions should not be taken literally,” says Palin. The phrase is “a lot like when President Reagan used to refer to the Soviet Union as the ‘evil empire.’ He got his point across. He got people thinking and researching what he was talking about. It was quite effective. Same thing with the ‘death panels.’ I would characterize them like that again, in a heartbeat.”

In this quote she says outright that she knows the “death panels” claim is false, and we shouldn’t “take it literally.”

But in her original statement she gave no indication that she wasn’t speaking literally. This is what she wrote at Facebook:

The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

Not only did she make a very specific claim, she used her own child to do it. I think she did knowingly, deliberately lie, in order to rile up the right wing base — and it worked.