Tom Delay and Fred Thompson, Death Panelists
Slowly but surely, the mainstream media and even some Republican politicians are starting to roll back the GOP's vicious lies and fear-mongering over what Sarah Palin deemed Obama's "death panels." Ironically, many of the same conservatives who demanded the federal government should make the end-of-life decision for Terri Schiavo are labeling optional Medicare-funded consultations "euthanasia." As it turns out, the Republican luminaries Fred Thompson and Tom Delay would deny other Americans both the right and the support to make the painful, difficult and often tragic end-of-life decisions for loved ones they themselves made.
Coincidentally, it was on Fred Thompson's radio show that serial Republican health care fabulist Betsy McCaughey debuted her ObamaCare euthanasia slander. In a statement PolitiFact gave its "pants on fire" rating, McCaughey unveiled the easily debunked myth:
"Congress would make it mandatory - absolutely require - that every five years people in Medicare have a required counseling session that will tell them how to end their life sooner."
On August 5th, Thompson took to the pages of the Washington Times to defend his guest and his radio show from what he deemed a "campaign" launched by "Democratic strategists":
So is this a conspiracy to kill off granny? No. Will seniors be forced to make decisions they don't want to make? No. But will "practitioners" be encouraged to have end-of-life discussions that include when it might be best for patients to allow their life to end earlier than it has to? Of course. And seniors have a right to be satisfied that there is not, at the heart of this process, undo consideration given to cost-cutting.
In the end, it depends on how comfortable one is with having the government in the middle of this process. That is what this discussion is really all about.
Of course, that's not what this discussion is about. No one is proposing or wants government to have any role in this most painful of personal decisions. Of all people, Fred Thompson knows better.
Two years ago, Thompson revealed that in 2002 his family had faced a similar of end of life decision for his daughter Elizabeth, who never regained consciousness after an accidental drug overdose:
"Obviously, I knew about the Schiavo case. I had to face a situation like that in my own personal life with my own daughter. I am a little bit uncomfortable about that because it is an intensely personal thing with me. These things need to be decided by the family. And I was at that bedside. And I had to make those decisions with the rest of my family."
His personal experience made him understandably queasy when it came to toeing the Republicans' hard line on Terri Schiavo. In July 2007, presidential candidate Thompson tried to dodge a question on the issue:
"I can't pass judgment on it. I know that good people were doing what they thought was best. That's going back in history. I don't remember the details of it."
But by the next month, Thompson essentially agreed that Terri Schiavo's husband Michael was right all along:
"It should be decided by the families - the federal government and the state government too, except for the court system, ought to stay out of those matters as far as I am concerned."
No one would agree more than Tom Delay, provided it's his family.
It was Delay who led Congressional Republicans in calling for federal judicial intervention in the Schiavo case, a bill signed by President Bush on March 21, 2005. But when all courts state and federal consistently ruled in favor of Michael Schiavo, Delay issued a statement on March 31st threatening the judges involved:
"The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior, but not today. Today we grieve, we pray, and we hope to God this fate never befalls another."
But that fate had already befallen someone very close to Tom Delay: his own father. In 1988, Delay and his family chose to end life support for their 65 year old father, severely injured in a tragic accident:
"There was no point to even really talking about it," Maxine DeLay, the congressman's 81-year-old mother, recalled in an interview last week. "There was no way he (Charles) wanted to live like that. Tom knew, we all knew, his father wouldn't have wanted to live that way."
Doctors advised that he would "basically be a vegetable," said the congressman's aunt, JoAnne DeLay.
When the man'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."
On Dec. 14, 1988, the senior DeLay "expired with his family in attendance."
(In a further irony for the tort reform crusader Delay, his family filed a product liability lawsuit and later received a $250,000 settlement.)
And so it goes. "Asterisk Republicans" like Fred Thompson and Tom Delay sought to prevent other American families from making the very same life choices they themselves made. And now their GOP and its water carriers propagate vicious lies that cost-conscious Democrats are only interested in "getting rid of granny."
Apparently, to be a "death panelist," you must first be a member of the Republican Party.
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