The Post's Marc Siegel, perfecting that brand of useless journalism that Rupert Murdoch prefers, ran a Drudge-friendly scoop this weekend about a single sentence in the pending health care bill legislation.

Classy NYP headline:

'Retarded' House Bill

Here's Siegel's all-important scoop, in its entirety (emphasis added):

The proposed health-insurance bill from the House of Representatives refers to mentally disabled people as “retarded” -- a term advocates, relatives and physicians find outdated and offensive.

The bill refers to: “A hospital or a nursing facility or intermediate-care facility for the mentally retarded . . .”

The phrase could cause more problems with groups for the developmentally disabled, who were angered when President Obama referred to his poor bowling skills on “The Tonight Show” as “like the Special Olympics.” Obama later apologized.

Siegel, who apparently knows nothing about mental health in America, thinks it's a big deal that a piece of legislation uses the phrase “mentally retarded” because it's so offensive. (The NYP is now the PC police? Who knew?)

Except, of course, the phrase is used commonly by organizations like the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the American Association on Mental Deficiency, the American Associations of Intellectual and Development Disabilities, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Department of Health and Human Services,

In other words, “mentally retarded” is a medical term.

UPDATED: Some commenters have mentioned there is an ongoing debate about the phrase “mental retardation” and whether it should be used or not. What I pointed out was that all the above mentioned organizations still use the phrase. And that it's a common medical term.

More importantly, the Post, particularly with its headline and the lede, clearly tried to imply that Democratic legislation refers to mentally challenged patients simply as “retarded,” which was never the case.