BushCo’s ‘Pro-Life’ Hypocrisy
By Allen Snyder
March 26, 2005
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There are few areas where BushCo’s (this term now includes both the
Administration and its stockholders/supporters
/enablers) blatant, dangerous, and ever-increasing hypocrisy is more prominently
on display than in their robotic expressions and ubiquitous political lobbying
for what has (to the ultimate detriment of all living things) come to be called
the ‘pro-life’ position.
That this ill-named position and its feel-good rhetoric have been almost
completely co-opted by the GOP and the loony Right Wing is bad enough. The
Administration’s ultra-pious Party sycophants, the corporate-owned
propagandist conservative media, and the Christian Right obediently bleat out
whatever ‘pro-life’ platitudes that either get them re-elected or have those
of dubious intelligence (see some large pockets of The South and The Midwest)
disproportionately caring for frozen embryos, Terri Schiavo type patients with
no hope, or lining up little crosses to mourn those ‘murdered’ by legal
abortion.
In the wake of all this blather, they hoist each other up on moralistic wings of
rapture, condemn the rest of us to the eternal fires of Hell as damned heathens,
and rest content that only they and their like-minded zygote-lovers have had
their ‘Heaven’ tickets properly punched and their ‘Cloud 9’ parking
places duly reserved (on the extreme Right side of Heaven, no doubt).
If today’s reality resembled anything like that of yore (oh, reality, I can
hardly remember ye!), then being ‘pro-life’ would mean something like
‘having enough respect, concern and compassion for all living things as to
care for them and minimize their pain and suffering’. This not only
implies caring and acting for the welfare of people, but also the large and
complex ecosystem of which we humans are but a small and by no means integral
part; including both non-human animals and the natural environment
Why, if caring about actual living things and their habitats is even slightly
related to maintaining a coherent, consistent, and recognizable ‘pro-life’
position, are the Radical Right and Republican regressives allowed to posture as
though they give a shit about life in any of its forms, when their actions
routinely and totally belie that notion and all of their ‘pro-life’
rhetoric?
Consider the Right’s attitude toward the natural environment and non-human
animals.
Bushies rush headlong to support an Administration whose apocalyptic policies
assure us that the environment doesn’t matter ‘cause, if things happen the
way they’re supposed to (and Bush knows, what with his direct pipeline to the
Divine Intellect), we won’t be around to enjoy it anyway. Even
BushCo’s copious and non-stop use of Orwellian Newspeak can’t obscure the
fact that their policies aim directly at destroying damn near everything in the
name of corporate interests, the bottom line, and the deep pockets of their
financial puppeteers.
So the sky, trees, oceans, fresh waterways, and big and little critters can all
be damned – there’s money to be made in the here-and-now for exploiting,
poisoning, polluting, cutting down, mutilating, defacing, and destroying you!
Sorry!
That leaves human lives – people like me and you. Surely, even phony
‘compassionate conservatives’ (read: corporation-loving regressives)
care about us, right? Wrong again!
In fact, the more actualized, the more biologically developed, indeed, the more
human genetic material resembles a full-grown, full-fledged person, the less
interested the Right is in it. But, if you’re a microscopic globule of
cells incapable of rational thought, moral agency, even the simplest of
stimulus/response, then you’re A#1 in the Right’s eyes and your life needs
to be saved no matter what. Judging by their schizoid response to the
ongoing tragedy that is the Terri Schiavo case in Florida (where executions are
popular and life is so not sacred), your life really matters when you’re
irreversibly brain damaged, too.
But therein lies the rub.
With the same breath the Right orders the dropping of tons of illegal cluster
bombs and napalm, liberating tens of thousands of Iraqis (at least half of them
children) from their Earthly Bodies, silently pumping however-many milliliters
of toxins into the arms of death row criminals, or slashing the medical and
retirement benefits of both older Americans from the Greatest Generation and
veterans serving in the current Iraqi disaster, or leaving 300,000 children
behind on food and health care here at home, they issue forth righteously
indignant gasps, guttural growls of moral disapproval and positively froth at
the mouth over beginning and end-of-life issues like abortion, stem cell
research, and euthanasia – all things they seem to know painfully little
about.
And yet somehow, they’re allowed to do all this off-the-charts hypocrisizing
(yeah, well, it oughta be a word) in the name of being ‘pro-life’ or what
has become the new BushCo buzz-phrase, while promoting a so-called ‘culture of
life’.
Have these moral degenerates, war criminals, and mendacious scumbags become so
adept at the art of mass manipulation and political skullduggery that this
pro-life façade continues to hold up despite all their action to the contrary?
For the moment, it seems so, but moral and political overreaching tends to
exact quite the negative price no matter how fast you’re spinning.
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Allen Snyder can be reached at asnyder111@bellsouth.net
This article is copyright by Allen Snyder and originally published by opednews.com
but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, blog, or web media so
long as this credit is attached.
