Krauthammer's Take [NRO Staff]
From last night's "All-Stars."
On concerns about end-of-life provisions in the health-care bill:
Byron talked about Obama's answer about the 100-year-old woman who... had the pacemaker, and he said, well, perhaps she should have had a painkiller.
Well, that not only is chilling, it is a revelation of abysmal ignorance on the part of the president. You don't treat an arrhythmia with a painkiller.
This is a guy who wants to run one-sixth of our economy in health care, and he doesn't know the most elementary things about it.
But on the larger issue here having to deal with end-of-life care, I looked at the language [in the House bill]. There is no requirement that you be counseled, because it would be inherently coercive. If you're dying and a government official shows up and says I want to discuss options including your death, that obviously is going to be kind of a coercion.
But the idea that it is important to do it [end-of-life counseling] years in advance is nonsense. We heard Senator Grassley say this stuff ought to be decided when you're 50 and not when you're 80. What doctor, when he has an 80-year-old with pneumonia, will look at a document signed 30 years earlier and say he [the patient] decided he didn't want to have extra treatment, so I'll pull the plug?
The idea of advanced directives (as it is called in the [medical] lingo) or living wills are determinative, is absolutely false. It almost never applies. It only [applies] if you are in a coma or demented, and even in those cases, it's the wishes of the family which almost always override everything in writing.
On the declining media coverage of Iraq:
The coverage of Iraq is driven by three factors: American casualties, media interest, presidential interest.
Our casualties are at a record low. The media interest is zero (a) because if you run a good news story, it's a retroactive vindication of the Bush administration and nobody in the press wants that; if you run a bad news story, it's a story that might imply that Obama is losing the war already won.
But a third factor here is presidential interest. Obama is not interested in Iraq. He is only interested to the extent that he doesn't want to lose this war. But he wants it off his plate.
What is so interesting about the Maliki statements, when he was here with the president, is he spoke about possibly having American troops beyond 2011. Obama did not, and we just heard Gates say we're absolutely out of there.
And also, Maliki when he was here spoke about the importance of the second agreement we signed. It wasn't only a strategic forces agreement. It was a strategic cooperation agreement, and he talked about Iraq being an ally of the U.S. in the region. Obama said almost nothing about that.
The Iraqis want us in, in the long run, as an ally, as a protector, [providing] airpower, et cetera. Obama has no interest in this. |
