I’m still hot over the exposing of a successful-legal-classified program by the New York Times and its little buddy, the Los Angeles Times. Today’s LA cat-box liner was the epitome of a Leftist manifesto, with two above-the-fold front-page stories right out of the Fever-Swamp-Nutter’s handbook: Iraqi Death Toll Exceeds Estimates at Over 50,000 and Greenland’s Ice Sheet Is Slip-Sliding Away and the main feature of their Sunday opinion section, Current, being a puff-piece on the glorification of mercy-killing, ie assisted suicide — At death’s window [b]y Anne Lamott, “The trauma, sorrow and bittersweet love that come with helping a friend to end his life.”

In the Iraqi death toll piece the Times writer states:

The toll, which is mostly of civilians but probably also includes some security forces and insurgents, is daunting: Proportionately, it is equivalent to 570,000 Americans being killed nationwide in the last three years.

Nothing like throwing out misleading, irrelevant numbers to make a point. 50,000 deaths since the invasion of Iraq is nothing to make light of, but how many people were being killed by Saddam and his army, sons and henchmen before he was driven out of power? John Hinderaker at Powerline weighs in this AM:

So, while 50,000 murdered people constitute a tragedy, it is meaningless to look at this figure outside the context of Iraq’s bloody history. That context includes not only the fact that far more people lost their lives–and far more brutally, for the most part–under Saddam. Equally important, it includes the fact that for the first time in a generation, the murderers and beheaders are hunted men rather than agents of a tyrannical government. The sacrifices now being made in Iraq need not be in vain, as long as Iraqis do not lose their commitment to freedom, and Americans do not lose their nerve.

Only the Iraqis can determine if they will stay the course to freedom, but if we allow the Democrats back in power this fall, we know that they will shut off the funding for the war and just like in Vietnam, will force the military to leave before the job gets done — and then Iraq will indeed become the hell on earth that the Dems keep telling us it is right now.

Lots o’ good stuff on Powerline today. Scott Johnson reacts to this week’s actions by the New York Times on exposing the classified International-terrorists-financial-data-tracking program and their inaction on the found WMDs as stated by Senator Santorum last week.

These people are not acting like journalists at all. They are acting as a fourth branch of government, co-equal with the others. They arrogate to themselves the power to classify and declassify, to protect or reveal secrets and sources, as they see fit. Which is to say, according to their political ambitions.

They aren’t journalists at all, they’re pols. And they should be treated that way.

They are already treated with contempt by the American people; just look at the polls. But they are not yet being held accountable for their actions, as elected and appointed pols are. They should be. The other branches of government should fight them with every weapon in their arsenal, just as the ‘journalists’ wage war on the other three branches.

And we should demand they honor their calling, we should demand that the whole document be declassified and released, so that we can evaluate it ourselves, and decide how important it is or isn’t. Because we know that the fourth branch isn’t going to give us the facts, unless they fit their agenda.

Declassify the WMD document now. We’ll tell you what it means.

And while you’re at it, how about producing the other Iraq documents—the stuff from Saddam’s files—that you promised to give us? We haven’t seen much of that of late, have we? I wonder why…

In the global warming scare story the subhead was: “The massive glaciers are deteriorating twice as fast as they were five years ago. If the ice thaws entirely, sea level would rise 21 feet.”

Yeah? Wonder what the real chance of that happening would be? They don’t answer that question. Indeed, scientists can measure what appears to be a current phenomena, but without going back literally millions of years, they can’t put this information into any meaningful perspective. And, what I keep reading and hearing from the global warming fanatics is that global warming will most likely bring on the next “Little Ice Age”. But hey, it does make great copy, and we all love a good scare now and then. Remember in the 70′s when the scientists were all predicting the coming of the next Ice Age? So, what’s it gonna be guys, global warming or global cooling? Warming or cooling, warming or cooling — kinda cyclic, don’t ya think?

And then, Anne Lamott’s heart-string-tugging story of helping a friend end it all.

THE MAN I KILLED did not want to die, but he no longer felt he had much of a choice.

You always have a choice — he could have chosen to endure whatever lied ahead and lived all the days that God had scheduled for him.

He and his wife still loved each other very much, but he’d lost the ability to do the things he had most loved to share during their 30 years together: to cook and overeat, hike and travel.

I’ve lost the ability to do a lot of things that I love, like surfing, running, sleeping late without hip pain and sometimes remembering where I park the car, but hey — leave the cyanide in the cubbard, please!

Everyone recommended that he contact a hospice provider to help with pain management, but this was not his way.

“[T]his was not his way.” Huh? He’ll forgo pain management help but embrace assisted suicide?

I believed that God would be close to us all no matter how things shook down, even though Mel was not a believer.

So, God was going to hang, give his blessing on a believer killing a non-believer that she cares for? I don’t remember that being in my copy of the Good Book. Oh, and don’t miss the part about her and her siblings promising their terminal father that they would kill him if his pain became too much, and then wimping out in the end. “But we couldn’t do it. We were too young.” But, back to the present and a successful kill, ’cause now she’s not so young anymore.

We had discussed a story in the paper once, about a local man who gave his wife an overdose, and then sealed her upper body in a plastic trash bag with duct tape. Then he had done this to himself, and they died holding hands. What love!

Oh baby, you make me so hot! Kill me, baby! Yeah, that’s some real love there — Oh, you betcha! Sound more like a scene out of a serial-killer flick.

Mel was sort of surprised that as a Christian I so staunchly agreed with him about assisted suicide: I believed that life was a kind of Earth school, so even though assisted suicide meant you were getting out early, before the term ended, you were going to be leaving anyway, so who said it wasn’t OK to take an incomplete in the course?

OK, I’ve found myself in deep yogart before in questioning someone’s Christianity, but come on, “who said it wasn’t OK”? Uh — “Thou shall not [commit murder] kill.” That sounds reasonably familiar. God sanctions the killing of murderers and killing on the battlefield for a just cause, but I don’t think I have ever come across the part where he tells us to kill those that we love, for any reason.

Through wily and underground ways, I came up with a prescription that would cover enough pills for a lethal dose. That night, Mel and I had a cryptic phone conversation. “I got it,” I said, like a spy, or a drug dealer.

If all is OK, and everyone, including God is cool about it, why the cloak and dagger stuff? Maybe, ’cause it’s illegal or something!

He was in the kitchen when I arrived, very thin and weak, but still definitely Mel. His friend was there, teary, solemn and strangely friendly. Joanne had prepared soup for us, with bread and cheese. For the next couple of hours, he asked us to put certain albums on the stereo — Bach, Dylan, Leontyne Pryce. We shared our favorite stories. He was absolutely clear as a bell, brilliant as ever.

That’s comforting. Unlike a mortally wounded buddy in combat, or an animal squashed nearly flat on the highway with minutes to live, or a favorite loyal pet, to weak to eat and wracked with spasms, her friend was “absolutely clear as a bell, brilliant as ever.” Great time to kill him, huh?

I remember coming upon a cat once, in tall grass on a hillside by the side of a fire road, barely alive. Its eyes were open, and you had to bend in close to see that it was still breathing. I almost picked it up and took it to my vet, but my instincts told me to leave it, that it would be so scary for it to leave the soft grasses on which it lay, and the smells of the sun and its own body in the weeds.

Now, I’m confused. She finds a dumb animal in the wild, at the brink of death, and can do nothing, not even take it to a vet to put it down, cause she didn’t want to interrupt the process. How poetic she makes it sound — “the smells of the sun and its own body in the weeds.” But, kill a good friend on a lucid day? Why the hell not? Good grief!

I’ll let you go and read the part about “Mel’s” final repose. I don’t feel like copying and pasting that part, or commenting on it further. On the back page of the Current section they have two more articles on assisted suicide. The LA Times seems to like it, a lot!

So, until the Daily News starts coming, I’ll put those last issues of the LA Times to good use — ‘Cause there are bar-b-ques to light, and cat-boxes to line. Maybe someone can find some financial barbiturate to grind up and feed to the Tribune Co., help put it out of its misery a bit sooner rather than later — they do seem to love a good assisted death! (db)

Technorati Tags: Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Assisted Suicide, Deaths in Iraq, Global Warming, Terrorist’s Financial Data Tracking, Powerline Blog

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 25th, 2006 at 12:08 pm and is filed under Culture of Death, Iraq War, Media Doin' It Wrong. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.  |   Print This Post  |   Email This Post

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