Summum Bonum

I consider England my second home many weeks out of the year. I am a student of English culture, an admirer of its history and literature, and therefore sad at its loss of basic democratic and Western ideals. However, the British government’s latest deal with Libya for oil and the release of Lockerbie bomber is disgusting, beneath contempt, and will greatly weaken the already low esteem that US citizens in the know have for the UK. Given the consistent fatalism of the British public and the utter corruption of the British government from the top down, nothing will change the sleazy and appeasing political landscape of the UK, except some kind of conversion to reason. There is virtually no positive political will, in the sense of the affirmative, within its government. Gordon Brown is pathologically weak, is without even a vestige of integrity, and garners zero respect from any nation. And Britain’s people seem to like it that way. The country continues to tolerate a kind of soft totalitarianism with regard to civil rights enshrined in its bureaucratic little-red-book devotion toward “multiculturalism,” abridgment of religious liberty for Christians, lack of respect basic freedom, and intolerance toward dissent from their politically correct code of conduct. In a word, the stiff upper lip is completely sagged.

Love him or hate him Dick Cheney seems to have been speaking the truth when he claimed that “waterboarding” may have saved American and other’s lives. The Washington Post seems to agree. However, what few in the media are saying is this: the investigation of CIA interrogators is a purely cynical political maneuver on the part of Holder/Obama. They are both trying to find some rapprochement with the hard left which seems to be feeling abandoned and betrayed.

Mainstream pundits have said that Ted Kennedy was the architect of this late Health Care Reform push in the House and the Senate. If this is so, his legacy represents a dismal failure, a major disconnection with the country and its people, and a profound ignorance of what government run health means for the economy and the American way of life. The failure of the Dems to sell the health care bill also represents a massive failure of their party and how the party has become so detached from the daily life of the average American. There is some small relief now and hopefully the Kennedy dynasty has spent itself after the cultural enervation it aided during the last 40 years.

“The former Jesuit priest Albert Jonsen, emeritus professor of ethics at the University of Washington, recalls the meeting in his book ‘The Birth of Bioethics’ (Oxford, 2003). He writes about how he joined with the Rev. Joseph Fuchs, a Catholic moral theologian; the Rev. Robert Drinan, then dean of Boston College Law School; and three academic theologians, the Revs. Giles Milhaven, Richard McCormick and Charles Curran, to enable the Kennedy family to redefine support for abortion.”

The NYT on Ezekiel Emanuel’s writings on health care resource allocation.

The article is couched in terms of refuting the “distortions” of people like Betsy McCaughey. Yet even here we read:

“The paper [Emanuel wrote for the Hastings Center Bioethics Institute] laid out what he called a growing consensus among competing political philosophies about how a society should allocate health care services. In clinical terms, he said that consensus held that those who ‘are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens’ should not be guaranteed the same level of treatment as others.

He cited as an example, ‘not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.’

Dr. Emanuel said he was simply describing a consensus held by others, not himself. Who are these “others?”

But even some colleagues said in interviews that the paper did not go far enough in repudiating the view.

All in all, this is not going to reassure those who, correctly, fear denial of care for the elderly or disabled.

According to the New York Times, “economists and other analysts say a 30-year period in which the super-rich became both wealthier and more numerous may now be ending.”
But wait: aren’t taxes on the super-rich going to make this whole health care plan painless for the rest of us, according to Obama?

Kudos to Chris Wallace, Fox News, and the Wall Street Journal for covering this story, but most of all to Jim Towey.

Here’s a complete transcript of Chris Wallace’s Sunday interview with Towey.

Towey does make the point that he doesn’t think President Obama knew about the reinstatement of the “death book” which first surfaced during the Bush Administration until it was pulled.

But that’s not even the point. The point is that the VA and other federal bureaucracies are filled with mid-level bureaucrats who are pushing a pro-death, cost-saving agenda. That’s what the public is rightly worried about.

During the Bush administration, the only issue some liberals in Congress thought they had to establish their bona fides on defense issues was attacking the job of the VA hospitals, and, supposedly, defending veterans. Will we hear from them on this story?

UPDATE: Huffpost’s Marcus Baram claims that conservatives “got their facts wrong” on this, but the only specific example he offers is the composition of the review panel that reviewed the booklet.

Rifqa Bary, a 17 year old from a Muslim family who has become a Christian, should not be returned to her parents and US authorities will be gravely remiss if they make her go back to Ohio. Her return to her family is a death sentence.

Every day in this country Muslim young women are held hostage, abused and oppressed by their families because they assert their right to freedom and self determination in some way, often times very small ways. It is a hidden oppression of which the American public needs to know. Young women who are born here or who have lived here since childhood are frequently isolated by their families if they begin to show signs of independence and non-conformity to cultural norms. Of course, there is a continuum and degree of abuse in such situations. Let’s be plain: this is domestic abuse and often child abuse and it’s fairly common. There are organizations which minister to South Asian of all ages who find themselves abusive family situations.