“You Don’t Know Jack”

Secondhand Smokette weighs into the HBO Jack Kevorkian puff biopic today. How do I know it’s puff when I haven’t seen it?  It is based on the unpublished book of the same name by Kevorkian acolyte Neal Nichols, who is so enamored of his subject he once allowed K to inject him with cadaver blood.  Yes, as I have repeatedly reported, Kevorkian is that weird.

Debra points out a sad truth about the media and its reporting on Kevorkian: They don’t know what they are talking about.  From her column:

Fox News’ Neil Cavuto, for example, last week introduced Kevorkian as a “Michigan physician who claims to have assisted in the suicides of at least 130 terminally ill people from 1990 to 1998.”

Physician? Not the kind who treats patients. Kevorkian was a pathologist until his medical license was yanked in 1991. In 1999, a Michigan jury convicted him of second-degree murder after he gave a lethal injection to Thomas Youk, a 52-year-old man suffering from Lou Gehrig’s disease.

As for the risible notion that his victims were terminally ill, well, it collapses in the harsh light of a New England Journal of Medicine analysis of the autopsies of 69 Kevorkian cases in Oakland County, Mich. The report found that three-quarters of Kevorkian’s “patients” were not terminally ill. Indeed, five showed no evidence of disease.

It isn’t just Kavuto, of course. The “terminally ill” lie is ubiquitous. And writing as one who has fought editors, sometimes in vain, to get corrections, the media are not generally interested in learning and reporting the actual facts.  (For reasons why the MSM refuses to distort the news by failing to fully report some stories, I suggest reading Byron York’s take down of the NYT on its journalistic malpractice in the Van Jones controversy.  His thesis, the MSM refuses to report stories that might give the people they hate a victory. Too true.  I saw this “lying by omission” in exclamation points during the Terri Schiavo case reporting.)

Back to Seconhand Smokette: She provides some details of Kevorkian’s deaths, and then points out the utter dishonesty in advocacy that led to Kevorkian’s early release from prison—remember poor Jack’s ill health?

Meanwhile, Kevorkian, 81, has been in such poor health - read: high blood pressure, arthritis, hernias, hepatitis C, heart disease, Addison’s disease and lung disease - that when he was paroled in 2007, his lawyer didn’t think the death doc would live “more than a year.” And yet he endures. No doubt because life - at least for Kevorkian - is precious.

But what Kevorkian and assisted suicide advocates don’t understand is that we need to look at the lives of othersas precious, not just our own.  That’s one reason why assisted suicide is so insidious—it confirms people’s worst fears about themselves and confirms their deepest fears that they are burdens, that they are not as worthy of being loved as they once were, indeed, that their lives are better off extinguished.