Go kill yourself

It all starts with a discussion of what you see as your personal preference. Then some reasons why it should be a general preference. Then it’s published as a thumb sucker in a publication read by movers and shakers. Denial, of course, that it’s a policy prescription designed for the general public. And heaven forbid that it should become government policy. But for Zeke Emanuel, famed atheist, and architect of ObamaCare, Soylent Green is not a dystopian movie but a really neat Final Solution to the financial problems of government funded health care.  Death Panels will be known as SeniorCare brought to you by those lovable Liberals who are looking out for you.

Bud Norman has some further thoughts. (read the whole thing)

A recurring theme in the spate of dystopian futurist movies popular in our youth was that someday the government would start killing off all the old people. The notion provided a memorable scene in “Soylent Green” where Edward G. Robinson shuffled off to the local suicide center where the aged were treated to soothing music and images as they ceased to be a burden, and the entire plot of “Logan’s Run” was based on a society that maintained its perfectly organized order by offing anyone over the age of 30. In the late ’60s and early ’70s audiences found this plausible, with the younger and hipper movie-goers smugly assuming it was just the sort of thing that President Richard Nixon and his right-wing buddies would love to do, but it’s not been until the era of hope and change and the left-wing ascendancy that we’ve started to worry about it.

Our worries were heightened by the once-venerable Atlantic Monthly’s recent publication of an article by Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel in which he expresses his desire to die at age 75 and urges the rest of us to do the same. This morbid advice would ordinarily be easy to ignore, but Emanuel is the brother of former Obama White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, has served as a special advisor to the Obama White House’s Office of Management and Budget, and is currently a fellow at the Obama White House-affiliated Center for American Progress.