Statist Healthcare Logic and Mary Jo

According to Melissa Lafkey, the death of Mary Jo Kopechne helped launch the glorious Senate career of Ted Kennedy. Or, as Joe Stalin said, it may be necessary to break a few eggs, to make an omelette.

When the US Army entered Dachau concentration camp in Germany, they found evidence of horrific medical experiments of placing prisoners in ice water tanks and documenting how long they could survive in freezing water(s). The Nazi doctors wanted research on how to design clothes for pilots who would be downed in Russia or the wintry North Sea. As horrible as this was, the US kept the research reports and used the data to design suits that have since saved US pilots' lives, believing that the U.S. would not repeat such inhumane experiments again.

Today I am not so sure as to what the statists in the country are willing to do in having the less politically connected sacrificed for "the Good of the State." You think this statement is over the top? Let us look at what the advocates of the cheapening of ordinary people's lives advocated in the Huffington Post this week concerning Mary Jo Kopechne.

Although Big Fur Hat has compared Melissa Lafkey's despicable Huffington Post article to something in The OnionI do not have such a benign view of such leftist sophistry and extension of moral relativism (the author's use of the words). Ms. Lafkey's article stating that Mary Jo Kopechne might have considered her own death a worthy sacrifice to "launch" the long Senate career of Ted Kennedy was more like something from Julius Streicher's pro-Nazi organ Der Sturmer in tone and propagandistic intention. Streicher was tried by the Allies largely for inciting genocide with his paper's writings. As people become numbed and indifferent to the probable manslaughter or worse of one person in a car going off a bridge, the elimination of more people becomes easier to ignore.

It makes us feel better to think that the hard Left wouldn't advocate the killing of what they might consider American Kulacks, the small town guns-and-religion "bitter clingers." But Bill Ayers has advocated as much — openly.  A. M. Mora y Leon translated Ayer's current biographical self-description as an anti-capitalist revolutionary at American Thinker last year.

Many liberals are in favor of "Sacrificing for the Greater Good" — as long as the sacrificing can be passed along to someone else in society. But as more jobs are lost, more real inflation occurs (I'm talking about what you pay for items in stores, not some wishful doctored figures coming out of Washington), and less money is available for medical research by both drug companies and hospitals, something becomes more apparent. The Obama administration's definition of "Sacrificing for the Greater Good" has Mr. Obama and a small clique being defined as "The Greater Good," not the American people. Or perhaps I should have said "Sacrificing for the Greater God" because Obama's believers/supporters see him as just that, in a secular society where all men and women have become gods unto themselves. Yet some are more godlike than others.

Obama's Health Care Czar, like all the other czars, is not accountable to the US Congress or the Supreme Court. Liberals who fear wiretapping — even if reviewed by a judge – now miraculously assume that an absolute czar will rule in their favor in most or all medical treatments. Or let us, for argument's sake, assume that the current group of "wonderful, caring people" Obama has appointed to office will take the best interests of those that voted for them to heart. What happens when you are thirty or forty years older and the government officials are of a different generation of "non-sentimentalist non-bourgeois" sentiment and consider you an old fart not worth spending money on to keep alive? In fact, the situation is a lot grimmer than that.

There is an old story about two young men who are walking in a park. One has a box with a brand new pair of running shoes under his arm. They spot a mountain lion that has escaped from the zoo. The man with the box starts putting on his new running shoes.

His companion says, "Why are you wasting your time with that? The mountain lion can outrun us."

To this, his companion replies, "I don't have to outrun the lion. I just have to outrun YOU."

Of course, the two men could have chosen to band together to fight the lion, but what if the one fortunate enough to have a new pair of running shoes had decided that he should grow old as a Lion of the Senate — and considered the other person expendable? For the good of the State, of course. You see, it isn't simple greed like those right-wing types, but complex, sophisticated, nuanced greed. That makes it — you should pardon the religious expression — kosher. Unless you're the one without the running shoes.

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1 comment to Statist Healthcare Logic and Mary Jo

  • Jack Kemp

    A second morally depraved and greater intellectual celebrity has joined the “crap on Mary Jo” brigade.

    Joyce Carol Oates joins the Kennedy Kool-Aid drinkers

    American Thinker points out
    http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/09/more_kopechne_as_sacrificial_l.html
    that author Joyce Carol Oates has taken up the cause of Ted Kennedy’s “redemption” from killing Mary Jo Kopechne. Ethel Fenig states and quotes (the indented words are Ms. Oates’):

    ‘In Ms. Oates’ moral landscape, apparently Ms. Kopechne was an insignificant unloved cipher who had no potential, no talents and was a drag on society, in contrast to the last surviving son of American “royalty”; thus the whole purpose of her life was to propel Ted Kennedy to fulfill his.

    It is often in instances of the “fortunate fall”, think of Joseph Conrad’s anti-hero/hero Lord Jim as a classic literary analogy, that innocent individuals figure almost as ritual sacrifices is another aspect of the phenomenon.
    Yet if one weighs the life of a single young woman against the accomplishments of the man President Obama has called the greatest Democratic senator in history, what is one to think?’
    END OF QUOTE

    Another liberal ghoul advocates an excuse for the “moral murder” of Mary Jo.

    Here is the pertinent part of my posted comment to this blog piece, directed at Ms. Oates.

    Not being as well read as Ms. Oates, I just looked at the Wikipedia summary of the plot of “Lord Jim” that Oates uses to explain away Ted Kennedy’s shortcomings. First I must say that Lord Jim is a fictional character. Given that, Jim is a crew member that leaves a ship in peril full of Muslims traveling on the Haj. The passengers are saved by others at sea and Jim is disgraced and he spends the rest of his life working in far outposts attempting to make a living and indirectly redeem himself as a person. At the end, he risks his life to an extent in fighting off the attack of a marauder on a civilian population far from England.

    Hey, Joyce, did Ted Kennedy leave the centers of power, comfort, and – I’ll say it – white wealthy privilege to work helping far off societies as a local government or commercial administrator? Hardly. He did not travel to the Sandwich Islands but sandwiched a young woman between himself and Chris Dodd in a drunken Washington night.

    The comparison between Lord Jim and Ted Kennedy doesn’t hold water – pun intended.

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