Monday, March 26, 2012

Cheney "Just Fine" After Heart Transplant...

It has been axiomatic amongst the most rabid Left-wingers in America that Dick Cheney, the so-called Prince of Darkness, has no heart.

Now we know he's had at least two.

We here at the Asylum can't help but believe, although we love Dick Cheney with all our (no pun intended) hearts, that the whole Cheney Transplant drama sets a very bad precedent.

On the merits: While one does not begrudge Mr. Cheney (one of my personal favorites in the public realm) the right to life, and the best quality of life, one is left rather perplexed about the logic inherent in transplanting a healthy heart into a 71 year-old man with a history of arterial issues.

Of course, the overriding factor in whether in Mr. Cheney got a heart -- one that really should have gone to a younger person with more economic utility to a country with a $15 trillion debt and near-bankrupt entitlement programs -- must have been his (alleged) considerable fortune, and of course, the notoriety and publicity to be gained by the hospital and doctors who successfully performed the surgery on a former Vice President.

While I’m happy that Dick Cheney will live to tell Patrick Leahy (Communist – Vermont) to go fuck himself again, I’m not exactly certain that this was the best utilization of an incredibly scare and valuable resource. With all due respect to Mr. Cheney and his family, transplanting a healthy heart into someone of that age group is sort of like electing a half-black racial con artist with two ghost-written autobiographies, and a resume so thin you wouldn’t let him work night shift at Wendy’s, to the Presidency of the United States.

In other words, it’s probably a wasted effort, and but for the money this surgery generated for doctors and hospitals, it would probably not have been done had the patient been 99% of the people in the United States.

While we here at the Asylum do wish Mr. Cheney a full and speedy recovery, we cannot help but think that the entire exercise was hardly worth the effort. At some point, we need the generation that spawned the assholes who created the current pile of economic, cultural and political shit we live in to fuck off and die, if we’re to save the country from a bankruptcy so deep that my generation will never see a red cent of the Social Security or Medicare money that we’ve (over-)paid into a badly flawed system.

Doctors seem to be spending a lot of time, effort, and money on keeping people alive far beyond either their worth or decent expectations. That's when they aren't wasting time trying to figure out how to rearrange the private parts of sick and twisted individuals who claim to be "a ________ stuck in a ________'s body." But, I digress.

The example of Dick Cheney receiving a successful transplant will, no doubt, encourage other Boomers with the means to do so to seek such surgeries for themselves. Unfortunately, most of the Boomers with that kind of scratch happen to be Libtards. In fact, it is the often-expressed opinion of this page that anyone born before 1960 should be left to die the second they get that diagnosis of cancer or a bum ticker, if only because keeping them alive is too expensive, a complete waste of resources, and keeps the stupid political ideology of the 1960's Welfare State alive and kicking.

On this day when the Supreme Court will be taking up the question of the Constitutionality of the Obama Healthcare mandate, it behooves us to have a concurrent discussion on whether or not it makes any sense to be handing out organ transplants to people who one might not expect to live much longer, regardless of ability to pay.

After all, Mr. Cheney -- even if he is not this sort of person -- is on the leading edge of the generation brought you Woodstock, hedonism as a political philosophy, situational ethics, the Pet Rock, latchkey kids, exploding divorce rates, tech bubbles, housing bubbles, economic catastrophe, interminable wars that we don’t even pretend to try to win outright, and which continues to put anyone named Clinton, Kennedy, or Cuomo into positions of power and authority. There is hardly a baby Boomer alive today that will not end up costing the American Taxpayer ten times more to keep breathing well past the age where they are of any use to anyone than it's worth.

It is worth considering just what it ever was, as a generation, the Baby Boomers ever did that gives them the right to live as long as possible at someone else's probable expense, and how it is they often feel entitled to do so. Personally, I have as much use for most Baby Boomers as dogs have for their fleas.

With the recent economic downturn erasing much real wealth in terms of retirement plans and housing values -- money that Boomers no doubt depended upon to retire to that fucking working vineyard in Napa they all seem to want -- the call for "free" and "easy" care for every minor medical complaint you well might imagine will be enormous. Why do you think every pharmaceutical miracle advertised on television these days shows "active" Boomers in spandex biking clothes, playing catch with their grandchildren, or climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro before reciting the laundry list of potentially-fatal side-effects? Because this is how Boomers view the future of health care in this country -- a pill for everything, granting Eternal Youth and Vitality, followed by a half-a-dozen-more to deal with the side-effects, eventually to all be paid for by "the government", i.e. by their taxpaying progeny.

It's all so Brave New World.

There is no point in keeping Baby Boomers alive artificially, in my opinion, even if they are as cool as Dick Cheney.

There used to be a time in American Life when Old People simply suffered all the indignity and discomfort of what used to be called "Old Age" with grace, and silence. Instead, we're about to buried under an avalanche of selfish, greedy assholes demanding free, or close to it, care for everything from erectile dysfunction to a dusty-dry vagina -- because Baby Boomers are obsessed with sex and their genitalia, and measure their worth in terms of orgasms -- and expecting their children and grandchildren to pay for it without even as much as a cursory cost-to-benefit analysis.

UPDATE: corrected for grammatical and spelling errors. My bad!

1 comment:

Davo said...

I have always wondered how Steve Jobs, a man with unstable pancreatic cancer present, somehow got to the top of the liver transplant queue.

But he's dead now, so all's well that ends well.