I'm an emergency physician.  I have spent a huge portion of my life taking care of sick and injured people, and trying to help them through life crises like suicide attempts, psychotic breaks, homelessness, alcoholism and drug addiction.  As such, I'm always intrigued when politicians tell the country how interested they are in fixing health-care, caring for the sick and meeting the needs of the most down-trodden.  Because my partners and colleagues and I have been at it for a very long time, and remarkably, we never have any 'after-hours' numbers with which to contact caring politicians or policy-makers.  Heck, we never have any numbers to call during regular business hours.  I suspect that the heady business of fixing America's health-care crisis, and managing America's inefficient, unsafe, uncaring, rapacious physicians must require oodles and oodles of meetings, working lunches and happy hours, so that the bulk of caring for the sick is left to the aforementioned uncaring doctors like myself.  Oh well, it's a burden we'll just keep bearing until politicians and policy wonks swoop down and fix us good and proper.

But there is some striking evidence that it isn't only politicians, but the entire progressive movement, could really care less about the health and well-being of human beings.  And that lies in the reality of their typical platforms.  For instance, their insistence on fixing 'the system,' rather than the individuals.  Their willingness to sacrifice individual freedoms and choice for 'the good of the country.' And more particularly, their uncaring attitude about specific issues.  When DDT was banned, and untold millions of Third World persons died fo Malaria, the typical response was like the one I got from an ardent liberal:  'But if we hadn't done it, we'd have had less beautiful African animals!' 

Of course, a common mantra of the progressive left is that assisted suicide is a great thing!  Let's allow some old folks to go ahead and die!  It's good for the economy and good for the environment, right!  Wait and see how assisted becomes suggested becomes mandated if we develop a single payer system of health-care.  Then it will be our duty to die, right?  After all, it will be good for the country and good for the earth.

How about abortion, in which one million children are killed in the womb, or in the birth canal, every year?  The culture of life is really a culture of death.  Let's look at drugs.  For as long as I can remember, the left considered free, open drug use a societal good, while nasty fundamentalist, moralist nasties wanted to make the world a black and white drag.  I've seen drug abuse.  I've seen the pain and hopelessness in the eyes of men and women who wanted to die to escape their addiction, and the sorrow in their parents' faces.  It isn't cute or fun.  It's horrible.  What about HIV and other STD's?  As one liberal put it, when I said that 50% of African American teenage girls have an STD, 'well, isn't most of it just HPV?'  Yeah, the one that causes cancer deaths.  Liberals would rather cut off their own body parts than suggest that gay men have shortened lives due to diseases like HIV, or that promiscuous behavior results in HIV,  HPV, Herpes and other diseases leading to pain, infertility and death.  Death is OK, if your worldview is intact, it would seem.

The left has always been opposed to censorship, preferring the fantasy that pornography is a healthy choice of career that free-minded people engage in, unencumbered by the moral fabrications of religious oppression.  But it appears, more and more, that those who are engaged in the sex industry often are victims of what amounts to a lifetime of abuse and assault, often begun in childhood.  Do diseases and depression, drug abuse and suicide, infertility and dysfunction arise from that life?  You bet.  But does the progressive left care about that misery?  Not if it conflicts with 'freedom,' free love and their view of the world, they don't.

And what about energy?  If people can't drive to work to pay their bills, or engage in healthy lifestyle activity like health-care visits, so what?  At least the environment is safe.  And let's face it, in the end, the death of humanity is what most good liberals really want.  Well, except for them.  The death of annoying conservatives, brown people, drives of SUV's, religious nuts and anyone who opposes free love, free drugs, abortion and the gay agenda.  The death of those people would be good for earth, right? 

The left, far from caring about the health and safety of America or the world, could care less.  Their opposition to war is a joke; an enormous irony.  Their posturing about health reform, or even the environment, is nothing but that; posturing  Their worldview is a culture of acceptable death; of everyone else

Excuse me while I go back and try to save some more lives.  It's nasty, and it involves touching humans and learning to love them and even mourn them, but hey, somebody has to do it.  Maybe I'll catch a disease or be stabbed, and clean up the environment by dying in the process!

Edwin

I'm an emergency physician.  I have spent a huge portion of my life taking care of sick and injured people, and trying to help them through life crises like suicide attempts, psychotic breaks, homelessness, alcoholism and drug addiction.  As such, I'm always intrigued when politicians tell the country how interested they are in fixing health-care, caring for the sick and meeting the needs of the most down-trodden.  Because my partners and colleagues and I have been at it for a very long time, and remarkably, we never have any 'after-hours' numbers with which to contact caring politicians or policy-makers.  Heck, we never have any numbers to call during regular business hours.  I suspect that the heady business of fixing America's health-care crisis, and managing America's inefficient, unsafe, uncaring, rapacious physicians must require oodles and oodles of meetings, working lunches and happy hours, so that the bulk of caring for the sick is left to the aforementioned uncaring doctors like myself.  Oh well, it's a burden we'll just keep bearing until politicians and policy wonks swoop down and fix us good and proper.

But there is some striking evidence that it isn't only politicians, but the entire progressive movement, could really care less about the health and well-being of human beings.  And that lies in the reality of their typical platforms.  For instance, their insistence on fixing 'the system,' rather than the individuals.  Their willingness to sacrifice individual freedoms and choice for 'the good of the country.' And more particularly, their uncaring attitude about specific issues.  When DDT was banned, and untold millions of Third World persons died fo Malaria, the typical response was like the one I got from an ardent liberal:  'But if we hadn't done it, we'd have had less beautiful African animals!' 

Of course, a common mantra of the progressive left is that assisted suicide is a great thing!  Let's allow some old folks to go ahead and die!  It's good for the economy and good for the environment, right!  Wait and see how assisted becomes suggested becomes mandated if we develop a single payer system of health-care.  Then it will be our duty to die, right?  After all, it will be good for the country and good for the earth.

How about abortion, in which one million children are killed in the womb, or in the birth canal, every year?  The culture of life is really a culture of death.  Let's look at drugs.  For as long as I can remember, the left considered free, open drug use a societal good, while nasty fundamentalist, moralist nasties wanted to make the world a black and white drag.  I've seen drug abuse.  I've seen the pain and hopelessness in the eyes of men and women who wanted to die to escape their addiction, and the sorrow in their parents' faces.  It isn't cute or fun.  It's horrible.  What about HIV and other STD's?  As one liberal put it, when I said that 50% of African American teenage girls have an STD, 'well, isn't most of it just HPV?'  Yeah, the one that causes cancer deaths.  Liberals would rather cut off their own body parts than suggest that gay men have shortened lives due to diseases like HIV, or that promiscuous behavior results in HIV,  HPV, Herpes and other diseases leading to pain, infertility and death.  Death is OK, if your worldview is intact, it would seem.

The left has always been opposed to censorship, preferring the fantasy that pornography is a healthy choice of career that free-minded people engage in, unencumbered by the moral fabrications of religious oppression.  But it appears, more and more, that those who are engaged in the sex industry often are victims of what amounts to a lifetime of abuse and assault, often begun in childhood.  Do diseases and depression, drug abuse and suicide, infertility and dysfunction arise from that life?  You bet.  But does the progressive left care about that misery?  Not if it conflicts with 'freedom,' free love and their view of the world, they don't.

And what about energy?  If people can't drive to work to pay their bills, or engage in healthy lifestyle activity like health-care visits, so what?  At least the environment is safe.  And let's face it, in the end, the death of humanity is what most good liberals really want.  Well, except for them.  The death of annoying conservatives, brown people, drives of SUV's, religious nuts and anyone who opposes free love, free drugs, abortion and the gay agenda.  The death of those people would be good for earth, right? 

The left, far from caring about the health and safety of America or the world, could care less.  Their opposition to war is a joke; an enormous irony.  Their posturing about health reform, or even the environment, is nothing but that; posturing  Their worldview is a culture of acceptable death; of everyone else

Excuse me while I go back and try to save some more lives.  It's nasty, and it involves touching humans and learning to love them and even mourn them, but hey, somebody has to do it.  Maybe I'll catch a disease or be stabbed, and clean up the environment by dying in the process!

Edwin

A liberal friend sent me a link to a new idea from MoveOn.org.  George Soros suggests that Scott McClellan donate his book royalties to the care of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans.  He was, they say, part of the decision to lie to America and enter us into an unnecessary and costly war.

Surprised that she would forward this piece of claptrap to me, I contemplated my response.  One doesn't want to sound harsh or sarcastic to friends, so I held back out of respect for the fine person my friend is.  So, on the sage advice of apologist and physician John Patrick, given in a lecture I heard him deliver, I decided to frame my response in a question.

If Scott McClellan gives his money to the care of veterans, then will Al Gore give his money, from all his diatribes about climate change, to the victims of starvation due to diminished food production?  Will he give his royalties to families in America and Europe out of jobs due to environmental over-regulation that threatens to crush Western industrial capacity?  Will he offer funerals to the children in poor nations, who die when no food is available, but carbon credits are finally ensconced as the salvation of mankind?

And when socialized health-care impoverishes us, and leads to interminable waits for necessary procedures, leaves us to far fewer physicians, and burdens us with further taxes (added to the weight of our carbon credits), will Michael Moore donate his royalties to improving American medicine?  Or at least to expediting American funerals and flights to Cuba for what he apparently considers the world's best medical attention?

Will Planned Parenthood be giving money back to the families of blacks, who were unwitting victims of the genocidal abortion campaign first set in motion by Margaret Sanger all those years ago?   Will  Marxist professors give back tuition money to parents of children led astray into economic ruin by ideology that runs in stark contrast to all reality?

Will atheist professors be refunding tuition to families broken by their children's loss of faith and drift into drugs and promiscuity, when their time-honored beliefs were set to the torch in the classrooms of America?

Will Hillary Clinton be offering campaign money back to families who donated to her ego-nmaniacal campaign during a time of financial duress?

I could go on.  But if we're giving back royalties or other money based on problems associated with our ideology, then the American Left has some pretty big checks to write. 

Edwin

www.edwinleap.com