This competition is open to members of any party in any country and there are lots of qualified contenders, but at this point I’d have to nominate[color=red] US Congressman Tom DeLay:[/color]
[quote]Today, as House Majority Leader, DeLay has teamed with his Senate counterpart, Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), to champion political intervention in the Schiavo case. They pushed emergency legislation through Congress to shift the legal case from Florida state courts to the federal judiciary.
And DeLay is among the strongest advocates of keeping the woman, who doctors say has been in a persistent vegetative state for 15 years, connected to her feeding tube. DeLay has denounced Schiavo’s husband, as well as judges, for committing what he calls "an act of barbarism" in removing the tube. . .
In 1988, however, there was no such fiery rhetoric as the congressman quietly joined the sad family consensus to let his father die. . .
When his father’s kidneys failed, the DeLay family decided against connecting him to a dialysis machine. “Extraordinary measures to prolong life were not initiated,” said his medical report, citing “agreement with the family’s wishes.” His bedside chart carried the instruction: “Do not resuscitate.”
. . . The preliminary decision to withhold dialysis and other treatments fell to Maxine along with Randall and her daughter Tena
I’d like to nominate Frist, a heart-transplant doctor so unethical he’s willing to offer up all sorts of fakey opinions on Terri Schiavo’s medical status despite 1) not having really examined the patient or her medical records 2) not even being a specialist in the relevant areas of medicine.
That’s not the case, and the media is mixing apples with oranges.
The Times cleverly managed to draw a comparison between the DeLay family’s decision and DeLay’s own actions 16 years later in the Terri Schiavo case.
Terri Schiavo was condemned to death by a judge who demanded that she be dehydrated and starved.
She is being killed by the denial of basic sustenance - distinctions the Times chose to ignore in its effort to smear Tom DeLay.[/quote]
I asked the people in my office… and it was a unanimous decision taken within a thousandth of a second …
GEORGE W BUSH :bravo:
My sincere congratulations to the president of “the most powerful nation on the face of the earth… blah blah… yuk…yuk…”
Oh, before I forget… the original poster asked for nominations. Bush just got nominated… by 35 foreign employees in my office… and I’m just the messenger.
What kind of company do you work for? :help: :loco:[/quote]
Obviously a company that selects only the best and brightest. You wouldn’t even make the first interview. :raspberry: :raspberry: :raspberry: :raspberry:
I second the nomination of George Wankstain Bush forever.
Please provide evidence, where available, in support of or opposition to any nominations, as a poll will be conducted when the nomination period has expired.
condolezza rice, one day she asks Europe to not sell weapons to China, than the next agrees to sell F-16s to Pakistan, and the next day releases a report blasting Pakistan’s HR abuses and military dictatorship…along with China’s.
That’s not the case, and the media is mixing apples with oranges.
The Times cleverly managed to draw a comparison between the DeLay family’s decision and DeLay’s own actions 16 years later in the Terri Schiavo case.
Terri Schiavo was condemned to death by a judge who demanded that she be dehydrated and starved.
She is being killed by the denial of basic sustenance - distinctions the Times chose to ignore in its effort to smear Tom DeLay.[/quote][/quote]
I agree with the logic here. Not keeping someone alive using artificial means who would otherwise die a natural death is fundamentally different than causing death by starvation and dehydration.
Is it fundamentally different? In both cases we have the shell of a human being, the remains of what once was a person, that are no longer capable of performing the most basic functions necessary to live, with no chance of ever regaining those functions, with a brain that has detiorated over time due to lack of oxygen so that now it is mostly gone and replaced by just spinal fluid, so that the body lying there has no cognition whatsoever and is merely a twitching heap of reflexes that will be dependent on outside assistance indefinitely in order to continue in its present state as a twitching heap of reflexes, rather than expiring peacefully and painlessly as would be the natural consequence if such extraordinary measures weren’t taken to prolong the twitching.
More fundamentally, from a Christian perspective, one could say that both are extraordinary measures taken to defy God’s will and postpone death, a natural event that will occur for all of us. The means of extraordinary relief may be different, but certainly not fundamentally different, and certainly not so different that a man who was in favor of pulling the plug on his own father in one case could make the claim without being a huge hypocrite that pulling the plug in the other case is “barbaric” and Congress has a moral duty to do everything it can to prevent it.
For purposes of this nomination, Delay’s hypocracy is bolstered by the fact that Delay often rails against lawyers, lawsuits and greedy plaintiffs in the strongest terms, yet his family hoped to cash in on the legal system by filing a massive wrongful death lawsuit based on his father’s screw-up that killed him, and as a Congressman Delay sought to pass a law that would invalidate some of the very product liability laws that his family relied upon in that lawsuit.
In both cases, it is an example of “I got mine, so screw the rest of you.”
What’s the difference? One set of machines pushes life-saving air into her body and the other pushes life-saving food into her body. In a person who is in a persistent vegetative state, it’s was not even as if they were dribbling food into her mouth and letting her swallow the stuff down – the tube went right into her stomach through the side of her body.
