1) CIA Director Porter Goss has found that the report of Inspector General John Helgerson indicates the intelligence community are not to blame for the failure to sift through the data before 9/11; that the system itself needed some work. They find that, despite the efforts of hardworking members of the intelligence community, the CIA was underfunded. So the BlameBush.com folks have been, yet again, shown to be WRONG. In fact, just to aggravate the lefties, I’ll point out that this news SHIFTS the blame from Bush…… to Clinton!
2) The current Supreme Court hearings on Oregon’s ‘Right to Die’ laws have brought out the usual right-wing suspects with their pro-life rhetoric. But the issue is not whether or not we are ‘for’ life or not; the issue is whether the individual has the right to decide for themselves whether to live or not. The moral euthanasia debate is not related to the legal one! We decide whether something is legal or illegal not on the basis of whether we think it is moral or immoral, but on the basis of whether or not the action will violate the protected rights of another individual. In the case of euthanasia, or ‘assisted suicide’, in this case as it relates to terminally ill patients, the person who made the decision to take such an action has decided to affect their own freedoms and nobody else’s. So, regardless of our own personal ethics on the issue, it can in no moral way be construed an illegal activity. Advocating this does not constitute being what Rush Limbaugh today called a “death activist”, and does not give too much power to doctors; in actual fact only gives patients power, over their own lives. Those who claim otherwise tend to be control freaks who can’t abide the idea of individuals being able to make their own decisions on such matters. Bottom line: morality is, by its very nature, something we feel strongly about; but we only have moral jurisdiction over our own lives, not the lives of others.
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John Wright
johnwright@softhome.net
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