According to Mary Vought, Executive Director of the Senate Conservatives Fund, the real threat to America’s elderly is not COVID-19, nor is it the Republicans who dismiss the pandemic’s rising death toll on the grounds that it consists mainly of old people, many of them in nursing homes and therefore on their last legs (except for those in wheelchairs) and of no real value anyway. No, says Ms. Vought, the threat to seniors comes from Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a monster who, while working for President Barack Obama, attempted to “death panel” every American over the age of seventy-five.
Dr. Emanuel was recently tapped by President-elect Biden to serve on a White House coronavirus task force. Ms. Vought wants us to know what lies in store:
Six years ago, Zeke Emanuel, recently named to Biden’s coronavirus task force, famously wrote an essay that The Atlantic entitled “Why I Hope to Die at 75.” In a 2019 interview, he disclaimed responsibility for the article’s title, but not its sentiments. He then asked a provocative question surrounding the elderly: “whether our consumption is worth our contribution.” This naturally raises concerns about the government’s involvement in difficult decisions regarding end-of-life care.
Vought also documents Barack Obama’s determination to euthanize the olds:
In 2009, then-president Barack Obama said that “the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out there.” He called for “a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place.” The interviewer did not ask him to elaborate, but Obama’s reference to a “difficult” conversation implies his preferred solution to the “problem” of high health spending by chronically ill patients.
If elitists like Obama and Emanuel had their way, all Americans who cling to their guns or their Bibles or to living beyond the age of seventy-five would be rounded up and put out of our misery.
In all seriousness, Mary Vought should be ashamed of herself for such insinuations. Republicans wax indignant about proposed “end of life” planning, living wills, advance directives, etc. Their indignation does not change the facts of the matter—a disproportionate share of healthcare spending does go towards end-of-life care—nor does it help individuals, families, and healthcare providers, who, like it or not, will have to make those “difficult” decisions eventually.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of elderly Americans continue to die in a pandemic that neither President Trump nor his Republican enablers have taken seriously or attempted to mitigate. I promise to keep an eye out for a statement from Mary Vought about that.
Biden Advisor Disregards Dignity of the Elderly | RealClearReligion
Writing at Slate, Joe Knight inexplicably attempts to demean Russia’s heroic, world-historic defeat of Napoleon in the Great Patriotic War of 1812 (not to be confused with America’s silly War of 1812 in which British troops burned down the White House and Andrew Jackson won the Battle of New Orleans after the war had ended). According to Mr. Knight:
It wasn’t enemy soldiers or the normal privations soldiers experience that devastated Napoleon’s army. Most of his soldiers were battle-hardened young men, so they should have been able to tolerate the cold, hunger, long marches, and fatigue. No, it was a microscopic organism that wreaked havoc and annihilated Napoleon’s army and his grand plans for conquest. A microbe called typhus, spread by a scourge of lice.
Knight goes on to describe, in disgusting detail, what transpired:
Poland is where things started going badly for Napoleon. He found the region filthy beyond belief. The peasants were unwashed, with matted hair and ridden with lice and fleas, and the wells were fouled. The roads were soft with loose dust or were deeply rutted from the spring rains; the supply trains lagged farther and farther behind the main body of soldiers, and it became difficult to provide food and water. Many of the soldiers pillaged the homes, livestock, and fields of the local peasants. Nearly 20,000 army horses died from lack of water and fodder. The homes of the peasants were so filthy that they seemed to be alive with cockroaches. The typical battlefield diseases of dysentery and other intestinal diseases began to appear, and though hospitals were set up in Danzig, Königsberg, and Thorn, they were unable to deal with the large numbers of sick soldiers sent back to the rear.
But Napoleon’s problems were just beginning.
Several days after crossing the Nieman River, a number of soldiers began to develop high fevers and a red rash on their bodies. Some of them developed a bluish tinge to their faces and then rapidly died. Typhus had made its appearance. A lack of sanitation combined with the unusually hot summer made an ideal environment for the spread of lice. Typhus is caused by the organism Rickettsia prowazekii. It would be an entire century after the 1812 campaign before scientists realized that typhus is found in the feces of lice.
The typical French soldier was dirty and sweaty and lived in the same clothes for days; this is the perfect environment for lice to feed on his body and find a home in the seams of his clothing. Once the clothes and skin of the soldier were contaminated with lice excrement, the smallest scratch or abrasion would have been enough for the typhus germ to enter the soldier’s body. To compound the problem, the soldiers were sleeping in large groups in confined spaces for safety; this closeness allowed the lice to jump quickly to soldiers who were not infested.
Only a month into the campaign, Napoleon lost 80,000 soldiers who were either incapacitated or had died from typhus. The French army’s medical and sanitary measures were the finest in the world, but no one could have coped with the scale of the epidemic.
I will pause here just long enough to go take a shower…
To paraphrase General Sherman, war is lousy. As Knight chronicles, lice and typhus accompanied Napoleon’s campaign all the way to Moscow and throughout his retreat, in the face of a bitter Russian winter, back to France. A little more than a year later—March 1814—victorious Russian troops marched into Paris.
Knight may have his facts straight, but I see no need to denigrate Russians’ valiant defense of their homeland (no less valiant because they chose to abandon Moscow rather than to defend it and then put much of the city to the torch on their way out the back door) just because they had a little help from lice. All’s fair in war, after all, and a nation takes its allies where it can find them.
Knight concludes by adding insult to insult and spoiling a monumental piece of Russian music:
Most Americans are familiar with the ending of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, commissioned by Russia to celebrate Russia’s defeat of Napoleon. The musical score ends with the sounds of cannons booming and bells pealing; however, if Tchaikovsky wanted to accurately record the sound of Napoleon’s defeat, one would only hear the soft, quiet sound of lice munching on human flesh. An organism too small to be seen by the human eye had changed the course of human history.
The 1812 Overture will never sound the same to me.
If Joe Knight’s article piques your interest, you can get even more gruesome detail from the book The Illustrious Dead: The Terrifying Story of How Typhus Killed Napoleon’s Greatest Army, by Stephen Talty.
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