The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age

    VP Mike Pence has Lost His Innocence

    Vice-President Mike Pence on the tragic deaths revealed today of 8 nursing home residents in a private nursing home in Florida, when the facility exceeded legal temperatures due to the loss of effective air conditioning:

     ....................................................(nothing..)...........................................................

    Congressman Mike Pence (R-Indiana) on the family that requested voluntary removal of life support apparatus and subsequent passing of irreversibly brain damaged Terri Shiavo in 2005:

    Washington, Apr 1 - 2005:

    "I grieve with the Schindler family and millions of Americans at the death of their precious daughter, Terri Schiavo. With her death, America lost not only a precious citizen, America lost its innocence.

    "Although Terri Schiavo's life may be over, the debate over the rights of incapacitated Americans is not over. Congress must right this wrong by ensuring that incapacitated Americans may not be deprived of their inalienable right to life without the assurance of the due process of law that our federal courts were established to protect. This will be Terri Schiavo's legacy."

    _________________________________________________________________________________

    2017: VP Mike Pence exploits comatose British infant Baby Gard to attack the British National Health Service, while also expanding into a partisan attack on any national single payer health care plan, one of which Bernie Sanders announced today.

    The Vice President appearing on the Rush Limbaugh show on July 10, 2017:

    VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I mean, you know, I’d leave it to you; you didn’t miss that back when it happened, and you’re not forgetting it today. And people ought to be reminded that, as you have Bernie Sanders out in Kentucky, where I’m headed to Kentucky in a couple days myself. He was out there championing single payer this week. So the heartbreaking story of the 11-month-old Charlie Gard in England is a story of single payer. I know you’ve covered that on this program. That’s back in court today, and, frankly, we breathe a prayer and the hope that the single-payer system in England will see its way clear to allow the family — the mother and the father to be able to choose —

    CNN's Robert Klitzman on VP Pence's cynical use of the Baby Gard story for partisan politics:

    Pence's comments are alarming. He has politicized a tragic story -- and in doing so tried to undermine single-payer health care systems, which exist in Canada and Great Britain and which many think should be established in the US.

    Under a single-payer system, the government would cover a certain basic amount of health care for everyone. Profit-making private insurers would no longer extract money out of the system as they now do to maximize shareholder profits. Rather, money allocated for health could be used more directly to help patients.

    Medicare, Medicaid and the US Department of Veterans Affairs health system are all examples of single payers for patients covered under these programs. The Affordable Care Act is a complex, hybrid model, but is a small step in the direction of single payer, increasing government funds and involvement to ensure that millions of Americans who would otherwise lack health insurance now receive it.

    Removal of life support for Baby Gard was recommended by the British National Health Service.

    Such action was not carried out until the infant's case went all the way to the European Union's Court of Human Rights,

    BBC:

    European Court judges have now concluded it was most likely Charlie was "being exposed to continued pain, suffering and distress" and undergoing experimental treatment with "no prospects of success... would offer no benefit".

    No such consideration, appeals or examination of a right to life was provided to the eight nursing home patients who just died in Florida.

    They were not being cared for in a single payer facility, but a "for profit" privately operated facility.

    And there is silence from Mike Pence.

    Mike Pence has lost his innocence.

    And so has the administration and the Party of which he is a member and spokesman.

     

    Comments

    Yeah

    I know that we would be worse off with Pence than the moron currently residing in the WH

    Pence would get things done!

    No Planned Parenthood.

    No removal of statues of traitorous generals.

    No SS.

    No Medicaid.

    No Medicare.

    No HUD.

    No ERA.

    No....

    Pence scares the shit out of me.

    And following many successes with the repub ignoramuses who run our national government, he would say:

    AMEN


    Mike Pence is such a disingenuous, dissembling, devious, hypocritical, cynical, deceitful, deceptive, duplicitous, dishonest, underhanded,  double-dealing, faithless, disloyal, treacherous, two-faced,  lying, untruthful, mendacious, evasive, shifty, slippery sociopath, he makes Trump seem a warm hearted humanitarian.


    GOP Senator Bill Cassidy ALSO hauls out the late Baby  Gard's case to attack single payer, just as Pence did. It works with their base, just like all their lies.

    Expect Republican boilerplate now will be to say: Bernie's plan will kill your babies!!!

    I don't know if Bernie set him straight as I have no time to listen to more of this sort of bullcrap. CNN


    Bernie gave no rebuttal to Cassidy on the Baby Gard calumny on single payer.

    Bernie should have eviscerated the Republican with the argument above, especially on the point it was a for profit nursing home, owned by millionaires, responsible for the deaths in Florida, not "evil government bureaucrats".

    If they scare monger and lie about  babies....?.. in other countries....?..they are truly lying charlatans...replay debate here.