If not now, when? If not you, who?

Huge H/T Mz. Amy Miller



I love the military.

I don’t come from a military family per se, but my daddy was a SEAL in Vietnam, and I’ve been taught a healthy respect and gratitude for the men and women who keep me safe everyday.

I do not tolerate careless, salacious, or hypercritical, ignorant comments about the United States Military.

So, needless to say, when I saw this little gem today (h/t to Janis for bringing it to my attention) I not only spat Diet Coke all over my laptop…I also fought the urge to puke onto my keyboard:

The Death Book for Veterans

Last year, bureaucrats at the VA’s National Center for Ethics in Health Care advocated a 52-page end-of-life planning document, “Your Life, Your Choices.” It was first published in 1997 and later promoted as the VA’s preferred living will throughout its vast network of hospitals and nursing homes. After the Bush White House took a look at how this document was treating complex health and moral issues, the VA suspended its use. Unfortunately, under President Obama, the VA has now resuscitated “Your Life, Your Choices.”

Lovely. A while into the article, Jim Towey gives us a few glowing examples of exactly what’s included in this friendly little document:

“Your Life, Your Choices” presents end-of-life choices in a way aimed at steering users toward predetermined conclusions, much like a political “push poll.” For example, a worksheet on page 21 lists various scenarios and asks users to then decide whether their own life would be “not worth living.”

The circumstances listed include ones common among the elderly and disabled: living in a nursing home, being in a wheelchair and not being able to “shake the blues.” There is a section which provocatively asks, “Have you ever heard anyone say, ‘If I’m a vegetable, pull the plug’?” There also are guilt-inducing scenarios such as “I can no longer contribute to my family’s well being,” “I am a severe financial burden on my family” and that the vet’s situation “causes severe emotional burden for my family.”

I’ll give you a minute to clean up the vomit.

Until I Googled it, I didn’t really know what the VA “Death Book” was. Now I know, and I’m afraid of it. I have to admit that until today, I haven’t really been afraid of what’s going on in Washington. I’ve been concerned, and I’ve made a lot of noise about what I feel are irresponsible policy decisions, but I never even came close to fear.

This thing scares me, and here’s why: if the Administration holds such little regard for the lives of people who put their lives on the line to defend America’s right and ability to exist, how does the Administration regard my life? (Sounds selfish, but I’m really not. Just hear me out.) America’s soldiers are heroes: they spend a great deal of time living in the gutter of global society, putting their lives on the line (and sometimes even taking lives, which is unimaginably horrifying no matter how you look at it) so the rest of us don’t have to go to bed at night wondering whether or not there will be a tomorrow.

And these are the people that the self-righteous bastards inside the beltway want to put to sleep, just as they would an old, lame dog.

I can’t imagine what they’d do to me if I was somehow incapacitated or otherwise rendered useless to the well-being of society, or however it is they’ve decided to sugar-coat this monstrous initiative. Wake up call! I wonder if any of the people who support this policy have thought about it that way.

Since I’m in the mood to make dramatic declarations, here’s one you can write down and hold me to:

I promise, here and now, that if I can use my law degree to do so, I will take down each and every one of the disgusting, soulless monsters who wrote and support this despicable document. I will be graduating law school in 2012 (go figure) so if Obama gets reelected, I’ll have my work cut out for me. I will not in good conscience allow this sort of thing to happen if I do indeed have the power to fight it.

Got that? That means you, Dr. Robert Pearlman, and you too, President Barack Hussein Obama. I am not prepared to be nice about this. What you have done with your death book is demean, impugn, and disrespect those for which you should fall to your knees every night and thank God; without them, you might be dead. Or under the rule of a totalitarian dictator. Without them, our country would have gone down in flames a long time ago–and you would have gone down with it.

Crossposted at The Minority Report

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