A couple of stories about medical ethics have been weaving through the news lately, and they lead, inevitably, to the politics of medical ethics. First, the popularity of lethal injection has led to the need for doctors and other medical professionals to assist in the execution of convicted criminals, but many people in the medical professions are refusing to do it. Killing people isn’t exactly what these folks had in mind when they chose careers as healers. Naturally, courts have become involved, and in at least a couple of cases, executions have been blocked temporarily for lack of a doctor to pass the gas. They probably didn’t plan it, but the opponents of capital punishment now have a new front on which to wage the political battle. In a way, it’s a facet of that paradox about so-called conservatives who are against abortion but in favor of capital punishment. Now we have conservatives who are against physician assisted suicide, but they want doctors to be executioners.

Then there are the doctors and pharmacists who refuse on moral grounds to participate in prescribing birth control and abortion. When such treatment is being subsidized with federal money, the feds are telling these conscientious objectors to suck it up. And that leads to the grandstanding by some politicians, including the Bushwhacker, on stem cell research. They claim that such research is the moral equivalent of abortion. These questions are tied together because the same people line up on the same predictable political side on all of them. They provide a way for the so-called conservatives to claim moral high ground while simultaneously ignoring the moral consequences of supporting organized killing for oil on the other side of the world. The people who claim to be liberal have pushed a stem cell research bill out of congress knowing for certain that it will be vetoed, so their moral stance has no chance of resulting in any action. Not to worry. The argument isn’t about the moral issue anyway; it’s only about spending federal money on it. The real question, therefore, is whether promising scientific research can be sustained without federal money.

If all these medical ethics considerations aren’t enough to induce complacency about war in somebody else’s back yard, the conservatives have one more red flag to incite the masses–same gender marriage. People as influential as leaders of the US Senate are telling us that this is so important that we ought to amend the constitution. It works surprisingly well to obscure the obvious–that the wheels have come off the Bush gang’s foreign policy.

Since I don’t care who marries who, I feel compelled to point out some of the latest ridiculous pronouncements by the guy who thinks he’s the president, even though we’ve done the same thing many times before. When Israel began it’s latest destruction of Lebanon, I admit that I was ready to throw up my hands and abandon all hope for even the slightest improvement to the hostilities in that part of the world. It’s a devastating development, for sure, but leave it for Bush to paint a layer of gallows humor over the situation. You might call it black slapstick.

You might say that Hezbollah started the whole thing by slipping over the border and snatching a couple of Israelis to hold for ransom. You might also say that Israel’s response was a little out of proportion. Initially, Israel didn’t seem to distinguish between Hezbollah and the elected government of Lebanon. Bush not only didn’t distinguish, he didn’t appear to even know the difference. He hadn’t been briefed, so his first response was the equivalent of a fist-pumping "go get ‘em" encouragement to Israel. Later, he cleaned it up, but another one of his encounters with an unexpectedly open microphone betrayed him. Dub can’t seem to remember the old adage that any microphone is an open microphone.

Maybe a little explanation is necessary here. Hezbollah, which translates to "party of God," is an influential minority political party in Lebanon, but it’s difficult for Americans to understand. Imagine that an important minority party in this country–say the Democrats–had its own army to enforce its own foreign policy separate from the elected government. That’s probably a bad example since the Democrats can’t decide what to have for lunch, let alone decide on a foreign policy, but Hezbollah was able to mount a small attack against Israel and provoke a disastrous response.

Even after that was explained to him, the open mike betrayed Dub’s inability to grasp the significance of the information. He thinks the solution is for Koki Annan to tell Assad to tell the Hezbollah to knock it off. Incidentally, the FCC just announced a ten-fold increase in the potential fine against broadcasters who air "indecent" language. I hope that Bush will have to pay that fine for the common expletive he used in explaining his analysis of this situation to Tony Blair and the world. Dub then went on to marvel at the similar air travel time between Moscow and other world capitals, then he followed it up with a little massage therapy for the prime minister of Germany just to show what a regular guy he is. And the American voters thought Al Sharpton was too much of a buffoon to be president.

People like the Hezbollah and the so-called insurgents in Iraq make it appear as though the criminals are running the show in those parts of the world, despite the presence of "recognized" governments. They also make it impossible to tell what the citizens of those places actually want in the way of government. That sounds exactly like the US. The only difference is that the criminals in the US have slightly more sophisticated methods.

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I see that Arizona has a public initiative on the November ballot to create an incentive to vote by giving a million dollars to one voter in each election whose name is drawn at random. Hey, why not? Voting is already a crap shoot; it might as well be a lottery too.

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