I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility to Charles Krauthammer, but in today’s column the good doctor punches a two-bagger right between my legs, politely explaining to liberals just why paying doctors to provide end-of-life counseling to patients might tend to piss off the “pro-life” crowd, something that might have been foreseen if my secular humanist pals weren’t in such a rush to solve everyone’s problems for them.
Charlie starts off by giving poor Sarah Palin a stiff elbow in the ribs. “We might start by asking Sarah Palin to leave the room.” The Krautman assures us that “I’ve got nothing against her,” which is just a wee bit of a lie. When it comes to neo-cons, Sarah has a near-miraculous ability to divide the men from the boys. If you can swallow her jive, well, you’re a man. If not, I’m sorry, you’re nothing but a damn Darwinist, and half-way to a liberal.
In matters medical, Charles is half-way to a liberal, and, since Israel isn’t involved, he can discuss the situation without getting hysterical. He takes us briskly through the terrain and gives a nice wrap-up:
“It’s not an outrage. It’s surely not a death panel. But it is subtle pressure applied by society through your doctor. And when you include it in a health-care reform whose major objective is to bend the cost curve downward, you have to be a fool or a knave to deny that it’s intended to gently point the patient in a certain direction, toward the corner of the sickroom where stands a ghostly figure, scythe in hand, offering release.”
Yeah, yeah, I could skip the ghostly figure with the scythe, but otherwise it holds up pretty well. For my take-down of one of the double-domes who have landed the Obama Administration in such a mess, ham-handed “bioethicist” Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, go here.
Afterwords
Contrary to what Dr. Krauthammer alleges, Dr. Emanuel is neither a fool nor a knave. He’s just an example of what happens to you when you’re very smart and spend all of your time with very smart people who think exactly the way you do.
