Tonights Republican debate featured the following question and audience reaction from Wolf Blitzer to Ron Paul:
What do you tell a guy who is sick, goes into a coma and doesn't have health insurance? Who pays for his coverage? "Are you saying society should just let him die?" Wolf Blitzer asked.
"Yeah!" several members of the crowd yelled out.
Alan Grayson, of the Republican plan for sick people is for them to "die quickly" fame responded to this reaction by calling the audience reaction "sadism" and comparing it with the same mob mentality that cheered on the slaughter in the Roman Coliseum as Christians were fed to the lions.
There are some other very interesting comparisons from recent history. How many of the same Florida residents who seemed enthused at the thought of a young man without insurance being turned away from medical coverage and dying would have enthusiastically endorsed the protests in order to keep (then Florida resident) Terry Schiavo's feeding tube connected? They actually cheer at the prospect of a young man dying, but ferociously defend the "right" to keep a human vegetable connected to the machines against the wishes of her own husband.
These same whack jobs have taken their "pro life" Jihad to my own great state of Oregon. Oregon voters first approved our right to die law in 1994. That law has been challenged (and upheld) through the state and federal court system. We also reaffirmed the law at the ballot box again in 1997. These fervent pro life Republicans insist that people be kept alive as long as possible in their final days of agony, but young people without insurance should be allowed to die as the crowd cheers. Maybe the real way to get them to accept our right to die is to completely divest ourselves of medical insurance immediately prior to the doctor prescribing the lethal dose.
They cheer the governor of Texas because that state leads the nation in putting people to death, but insist that frozen embryo's are living people and should be given the same rights as all of us when it comes to stem cell research. It's somehow ok to toss bucketloads of those same embryo's into the garbage as biowaste, but by god, it contributes to the "culture of death" if we try to find miracle cures using those stem cells.
Somehow this all makes sense to them. I just don't get it, and I suppose that's why I hang out here and not at Redstate. Grayson was right. Their answer if you fall ill really is to die quickly, unless you are a vegetable, in your final throes of agony or a frozen zygote.