Wow. I couldn’t agree more with my fellow kids, whom I must thank, by the way, for their gracious permission allowing me to contribute to this forum. Just when you think Republican lunacy and hypocrisy have peaked out, we get something like this.
So, we are currently “at war” with over 1,500 dead and 9,000 wounded (60% of whom with traumatic brain injuries), the deficit is exploding, social security and Medicare are “in crisis”, oil prices are a record high and we are holding hearings on baseball and bi-cameral emergency sessions for Terri Schiavo. Republicans are now well beyond going off the deep-end, they’re in Mariana Trench territory.
Can you imagine former exterminator Tom DeLay, “the Hammer”, sitting by your loved one’s bedside in the most intimate and delicate of family moments – his unwavering hand grabbing at the tube you’ve just painfully discharged and reinserting it for you? We may have just witnessed that. "Mrs. Schiavo's life is not slipping away - it is being violently wrenched from her body in an act of medical terrorism," DeLay said. "To friends, family, and millions of people praying around the world this Palm Sunday weekend: do not be afraid. Terri Schiavo will not be forsaken."
The ironies, hypocrisies and constitutional breaches associated with this are too many to list let alone discuss. Aside from the trampling of state’s rights, separation of powers, checks and balances, right to privacy and a slew of other now-meaningless democratic traditions, there are a few items worth pointing out.
The Republican-controlled House this week, literally at the same time it was drafting a subpoena for brain-damaged Terri Schiavo to appear before Congress, voted to cut Medicaid by more than $20 billion. Medicaid, as it turns out, is responsible for paying for Schiavo’s medication and, along with Medicare, is the principle funding source for hospices and care for the terminally ill in the United States. Schiavo’s annual hospice care runs around $80,000. House Republicans essentially voted to remove Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube before they voted to re-insert it. John Kerry was rolling in his political grave with that one.
Looking at this more broadly, in the face of sky-rocketing medical costs, record un-insured, the elimination of employee health programs and collapsing health entitlement programs, Bush and Republicans are actively encouraging, indeed forcing, end-of-life augmentation. Last-year-of-life expenses consumed 22 percent of all medical costs, 26 percent of Medicare expenses, 25 percent of Medicaid and 18 percent of all non-Medicare health-care costs.
It’s not all about the eeevil trial lawyers driving up malpractice premiums I guess. Encouraging all-out death-delaying procedures and re-animation of the brain dead kind of runs counter to the idea that Americans should be more practical in their use of health care doesn’t it?
How about this one? Congress is currently working on legislation that would create a new constitutional amendment prohibiting same-sex marriage, right? So while conservatives decry activist judges determined to redefine marriage, Republican lawmakers, in the case of Terri Schiavo, are doing exactly that. In attempting to supercede the judicial adjudication of more than a dozen courts from the state district level all the way to the Supreme Universal Hall of Justice in Nuremburg, all of which have sided with Michael Schiavo, Congress effectively wants to challenge spousal rights and thereby re-define marriage itself.
The definition of marriage at least as I understand it legally, holds that a spouse has the right to act as next-of-kin and sole guardian. The logic there being that one chooses the person who will care for them as opposed to family which is not chosen. So the moral is, a recently-censured congressman from say Texas elected by .002 of the population really has more of a right to fulfill your wedding vows than you do.
