By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — Loyalty is precious. How do you win it? How do you keep it? How do you lose it? That’s not just a question for a vote-seeking politician elected to six terms in the U.S. Senate like the Grand Canyon State’s John McCain, newly diagnosed with aggressive brain cancer.
It’s even more important for an infant who has earned no accolades and won no awards, but only can offer up his little head for a kiss. Is he important enough to miss?
Loyalty counts in ways large and small, precious or pedestrian. Even a school-crossing guard without loyalty to the job means possible tragedy. Life without loyalty is life without trust, wherever and however people face their days.
In London, not yet a year old, seriously ill baby Charlie Gard had the tremendous loyalty of his parents, who fought every step of the way for his life despite lances continually hurled at them by callous institutions. Their hearts lacerated, the British state kept rubbing salt in their bleeding.
Devising every potential solution they could, even raising a small fortune to fly Charlie to the United States for experimental treatment for rare mitochondrial depletion syndrome, parents Connie Yates and Chris Gard were slapped around worse than criminals.
They and their baby were brutalized by a system that not only said the forcibly detained infant was better off dead, but he couldn’t even be allowed to die at his own home, much less a U.S. hospital that might offer hope.
For a baby kidnapped by a system that said it knew better than his loving, devoted parents, here was the last twist of the knife. What was conjured up as best for Charlie required his dying in a hospice, not the family place with his own bed after a comforting bath that his parents had promised him.
Shakespeare couldn’t have written the scene worse for being driven insane with grief by witches on a moor. But these witches wore lawyers’ and judges’ costumes and worshipped the leaden deity of Process. They didn’t boil up a filthy cauldron, but did the dirt with fresh linen.
The court-appointed attorney for Charlie’s guardian, supposedly pursuing his best interests, was an officer with a euthanasia group. Charles’s parents were, of course, outraged to learn this. They had their own attorneys, not paid public defenders, to fight the foulness. Wicked spirits’ howling on the heath couldn’t have been more surreal.
The London-based UK Telegraph posted on July 18: “Victoria Butler-Cole, who speaks on Charlie’s behalf in court, is chairman of Compassion in Dying, a sister organization to Dignity in Dying, which campaigns for a change in the law to make assisted dying legal in the UK. Dignity in Dying used to be called the Voluntary Euthanasia Society.”
High Court Justice Nicholas Francis, upset that people dared question what was happening under his wizardry, actually attacked criticism against the system that kidnaps a baby to order his death. The Telegraph posted on July 26, quoting Francis:
“ ‘I do want to deal with the notion this issue is being dealt with by a judge because we have socialized medicine in this country,’ he said, explaining his role was to decide what was best for Charlie because the hospital and his parents were in dispute. ‘The notion the state is involved because we have a National Health Service is pure nonsense’.”
The Telegraph reported: “The precise timing of Charlie’s final hours were (sic) discussed at a hearing held behind closed doors because of the sensitivity. The judge made an order — the details of which were kept secret — that gives the precise deadline for Charlie’s removal from GOSH (Great Ormond Street Hospital) and the length of time he can remain in a hospice before his ventilator tube is removed.”
On July 24 the parents surprisingly had announced they were ending their appeals to try to bring Charlie to the U.S. because they feared too much time had elapsed to begin successful treatment. GOSH and courts had delayed them every step of the way.
The left-wing UK Guardian posted that when Yates “tearfully paid tribute to the couple’s son from the witness stand and insisted that they had only done what any parent would do, friends, family, lawyers, and members of the press also wept.”
News-media members in that courtroom still could sympathize with a troubled baby who at least had been born. But what if legal proceedings of a government ethics committee had occurred more than a year earlier, with genetic reports indicating that preborn Charlie likely would have health deficiencies? Would any tears have fallen in the press seating?
The latest and perhaps last step in the controversy was expected to be finalized the day this hard-copy issue of The Wanderer went to press, July 27.
(A statement earlier in the week by Charlie’s mother appears on page 8A in this issue of The Wanderer.)
Here was the kind of legalistic arrogance that, had it occurred in the U.S., probably would have had people threatening revolution.
Actually, in the U.S., the revolution got legs with the election of Donald Trump last November after years of arrogance by a corrupt establishment and lying dominant media that were comfortable with a political and legal system picking this nation into little pieces after the elite gobbled the big pieces.
Slaughtering more than a million preborn babies a year was business as usual here, but whispering a word that might offend a radical leftist could set off a bloody campus riot.
It’d be virtually impossible to imagine a President Hillary Clinton tweeting out support for Baby Charlie over in Britain, but that’s exactly what Trump did just before the Fourth of July. Certainly better than nothing, but Trump’s wishes didn’t seem to carry enough clout yet with establishments on either side of the Atlantic.
The immediate specter of what complete state control of medicine can do to unwilling patients or their families in the UK didn’t seem a strong enough lesson to Washington, D.C., politicians pondering a potential rebuke to Obamacare.
The same day the London judge pushed ahead to end the infant’s life, seven Republicans in the U.S. Senate on July 26 joined a unanimous Democrat Party minority to save Obamacare from being repealed and to keep funding Planned Parenthood with taxpayer dollars in the hundreds of millions.
Two years ago, six of those seven voted the opposite way, confidently knowing that Barack Obama would veto repeal. But on July 26, when they knew Trump eagerly awaited a repeal bill to sign, they rushed to show their bipartisan spirit with the Party of Death.
The seven GOP senators were John McCain, Shelley Moore Capito (W.Va.), Susan Collins (Maine), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Rob Portman (Ohio), Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), and Dean Heller (Nevada). Of these, only the liberal Collins voted against repeal in 2015.
National conservative radio host Mark Levin quickly said this means Obamacare is safe, and completely government-controlled single-payer medicine is on the way. Levin may have been too pessimistic, but the GOP seemed singularly incapable of keeping its repeal promises of seven years.
It’s as if Republicans had campaigned for years to sell a toxic jalopy disfiguring the front lawn, but when the junk dealer arrives to claim it, every single inch of the old car must be examined lovingly to make sure which if any parts really deserve to go to the crusher.
The Washington Examiner posted on July 27 that the GOP six may have voted as they just did “in recognition that cold-turkey repeal would give the system a case of the shakes so bad that it would do more damage than good. But if they keep standing in the way of reform, they will be revealed as self-important hypocrites. They would deserve punishment at election time, which could bring down their party with them.”
A Backhand
Especially troubling was the vote by McCain, who had entered the Senate chamber to acclaim just the previous day, arriving to do his duty at his desk after flying in from Phoenix with his brain cancer. An angry surgical arch over his left eyebrow was vivid evidence of medical exploration.
In many ways his “I’ve returned” address to the Senate on July 25 was inspiring and encouraging even to those dismayed by his “maverick” history and preference for liberal Democrats in lawmaking.
Still, McCain couldn’t keep himself from renewing a few wounds. “Stop listening to the bombastic loudmouths on the radio and television and the Internet. To hell with them. They don’t want anything done for the public good. Our incapacity is their livelihood,” he said.
The following morning, EWTN news director Raymond Arroyo said McCain had “a backhand that you have to watch out for,” adding, “He came out firing with both barrels.”
Later in the day, radio talkmeister Rush Limbaugh took issue with McCain, saying the senator’s “lashing out makes it sound like the Senate, at least the Senate Republicans, are prisoners to what we say. They’re not. They’re prisoners to what The Washington Post says. They’re prisoners to what the mainstream media says about them, not us.”
Bombast? “The real bombast is not here,” Limbaugh said. “The real bombast is to be found among elected officials who run around on the campaign trail and promise things for seven consecutive years and then peter out when the moment of truth comes. That remains the problem.”
True, it’s harder to recall McCain attacking liberal journalists than conservatives, or raking left-wing interest groups as he does the right. McCain knows his friends.
The majority of the front page of the pro-McCain, leftish Arizona Republic on July 26 was devoted to favorable coverage of him. Although the state’s largest daily paper is broadsheet size, not tabloid, there were only three stories beginning on page one, two related to McCain and a smaller one about the funeral for ten Arizona extended-family members drowned on July 15 when a flash flood hit a swimming hole.
The main headline was only two words, one above the other, in what the conservative Seeing Red AZ blog described as “war-sized.” Each word stretched across the entire page. The two-line headline was “McCAIN’S MOMENT,” above a large photo of McCain also stretched the width of the page.
That’s loyalty, too, between a man and a newsroom made for each other.
The Real Deal
Loyalty to Trump, on the other hand, comes mostly from people who’d never set foot in, or believed, a newsroom all their lives.
In Youngstown, Ohio, Trump at a July 25 rally basked in the testimonial of longtime Democrat voter Gino De Fabio, who exulted that the president was “the real deal” after the phony promises of other politicians. Think real hard; which platform is sturdier? “Make America Great Again” or “I’m With Her”?
Big tussles remain on serious fronts. Loyalty determines a lot.
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