J's Cafe Nette

Archive for November 5th, 2007

I don’t know who Frank Rich hates most in his Sunday editorial in the NYT: Dick Cheney and the mob of neocon dead-enders, crazy Bush or hedging and straddling Hillary Clinton.

These are all adjectives used in his column, most of them in the first paragraph, but of course Hillary’s descriptives come in the middle and at the end as does President Bush’s.

WHEN President Bush started making noises about World War III, he only confirmed what has been a Democratic article of faith all year: Between now and Election Day he and Dick Cheney, cheered on by the mob of neocon dead-enders, are going to bomb Iran.

But what happens if President Bush does not bomb Iran? That is good news for the world, but potentially terrible news for the Democrats. If we do go to war in Iran, the election will indeed be a referendum on the results, which the Republican Party will own no matter whom it nominates for president. But if we don’t, the Democratic standard-bearer will have to take a clear stand on the defining issue of the race. As we saw once again at Tuesday night’s debate, the front-runner, Hillary Clinton, does not have one.

Oh, so the column is about us going or not going to war with Iran. With 14 months to go in the Bush Administration this Neanderthal Man thinks Bush will start a war with Iran and stretch our troops even thinner just so he can hand it off to the next president, who will surely be a Democrat if he does start such war.

And if there is no war with Iran Hillary loses because she has no defining issues of the race. How perceptive he is since her big loss last Tuesday night. Before that she hung the moon and the stars.

If Bush doesn’t start a war with Iran, it will be good news for the world but bad news for the Democrats. Huh?

Have we at last come to the point where we are rooting for a war while at war so the Democratic party can win the White House? Is this the only reason Rich can see for a Democrat to win? Not on the issues dear to most voters’ hearts, but on a war so his favored party can control the White House?

The reason so many Democrats believe war with Iran is inevitable, of course, is that the administration is so flagrantly rerunning the sales campaign that gave us Iraq. The same old scare tactic — a Middle East Hitler plotting a nuclear holocaust — has been recycled with a fresh arsenal of hyped, loosey-goosey intelligence and outright falsehoods that are sometimes regurgitated without corroboration by the press.

Mr. Bush has gone so far as to accuse Iran of shipping arms to its Sunni antagonists in the Taliban, a stretch Newsweek finally slapped down last week.

Anything slapped down by Newsweek or the NYT for that matter is nothing more than a common black fly. The only stretch is them reaching for such fly with the fly-swatter. In other words, if you believe Newsweek and the NYT you are pretty gullible, as they report from their comfy offices in downtown Manhattan. You know the place. It’s where the planes crashed on 9/11 or am I living in a parallel universe with Rich and pals?

And he even states if such a war happens Hillary, the presumed nominee, couldn’t handle it.

In 2007, Kyl-Lieberman passed by 76 to 22. No sooner did Mrs. Clinton cast her vote than she started taking heat in Iowa. Her response was to blur her stand. She abruptly signed on as the sole co- sponsor of a six-month-old (and languishing) bill introduced by the Virginia Democrat Jim Webb forbidding money for military operations in Iran without Congressional approval.

In Tuesday’s debate Mrs. Clinton tried to play down her vote for Kyl-Lieberman again by incessantly repeating her belief in “vigorous diplomacy” as well as the same sound bite she used after her Iraq vote five years ago. “I am not in favor of this rush for war,” she said, “but I’m also not in favor of doing nothing.”

There is one descriptive word I can use for this editorial: BALDERDASH!

If there’s a war with Iran during this president’s term it will be initiated by Iran and not Bush. In the meantime, crazy Bush (who doesn’t live in the real world according to Neanderthal Man) is positioning our troops in case of an attack by Iran—not to attack Iran in his last 14 months as president.

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Ten weeks after Rebecca Jones of Starke UK, found out she was going to have twin boys she was told one of the boys, Gabriel, had an enlarged heart and would die.

Doctors convinced her it would be better for him to die in utero where he had a twin brother, rather than be born, suffer and die alone. They also told the parents if Gabriel died it could cause Ieuan to die also.

She and her car salesman husband made the agonizing decision to let Gabriel die in utero and the doctors tried to cut Gabriel’s umbilical cord. The cord was too thick and it couldn’t be cut, so they went to plan B. Plan B was to cut the placenta so Gabriel would die and his twin brother Ieuan would live.

Something happened there too. Instead of getting smaller and weaker, Gabriel seemed to thrive in his own sac. As he got older in utero his heart became normal sized, he gained weight and, most of all he is alive today, weighing 12 lb. 6 oz. at the age of seven months.

He’s not as big as his brother, but they are both close, holding hands most of the time.

Here’s the baby who survived two abortion attempts:

The baby who would not die, Gabriel, is on the right and his brother Ieuan is on the left. Both are thriving.

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For those of you who think having nationalized socialized health care in this country would be wonderful, just take a read at this Daily Mail column from the UK.

On the last morning of his life, Ian Luck phoned his wife from the hospital bed where, ten days earlier, he had been admitted for a gastric disorder.

“He was crying so much I could hardly understand him,” says Debra, his widow and mother of his son Ben, now nine.

“Ian said he had spent most of the night in agony – the nurses had forgotten his pain-killing injections.

“He was covered in his own vomit, he’d been sick on the floor, and when a nurse finally came, she told him he was ‘disgusting’.”

A post-mortem showed that he had a ruptured oesophagus caused by continual vomiting….

…This rare condition causes massive shock and infection, which would have put fatal strain on the heart.

According to medical experts, the most likely cause of Ian’s excessive vomiting was a bleeding stomach ulcer, a condition that doctors initially picked up and treated.

But when Ian’s symptoms returned, they failed to carry out a simple exploratory process to diagnose further bleeding, which could have been treated with drugs or surgery.

As if his death wasn’t tragedy enough, Debra is haunted by the misery, pain and squalor he endured at the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Harlow, Essex, during the ten days before he died.

“An animal would have been treated with more compassion,” says Debra.

“No one wanted to help us. Every time we asked for pain relief, or to see a doctor, we were told to wait, or that we didn’t know what we were talking about.”

The final day of Ian’s life was spent in misery and humiliation on a geriatric ward, with uncaring nurses and doctors who failed to recognise that he was dying.

He had been shunted there from his surgical ward, having been told his bed was needed for a more urgent surgical patient.

“That day was a nightmare,” says Debra, now 43.

“I knew he was dying, his usual happy character had vanished, he was frightened and very low. He looked grey and clammy, his stomach was swollen, he was hallucinating and there was vomit all over his T-shirt.

“As fast as I changed him he was sick again. The nurses were not interested in helping me.

“At one point, an old man fell out of the bed next to us and lay there, crying for help. When I ran up to the nurses’ station to tell them, they said: ‘Just leave him.’

Read the rest, and if you still think socialized medicine is such a great idea vote for any one of the Democratic candidates for president and you, too, may have the pleasure of dying from something controllable and in your own vomit.

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