Kevorkian LIbertarian Crackpot

The video interview of Jack Kevorkian linked below is very revealing. He's a crackpot. He believes that the Ninth Amendment guarantees a radical libertarian Nirvana and anyone who disagrees that we are in a tyranny are mere sheep. Check it out.

Columnist Meets the "Real" Jack Kevorkian

Mitch Albom, a columnist for the Detroit Free Press interviewed Kevorkian face-to-face, and apparently was taken aback by what he experienced. After a little time with Kevorkian, Albom writes, "I couldn't imagine a suffering so bad that I would want Kevorkian to be the last person I'd see on Earth." Here are a few other key moments from his column:

As we spoke, I heard intelligence, self-assurance, even arrogance. What I didn't hear was humanity. He didn't seem to think much of the human race. He likened life to "a tragedy." He quoted famous people saying they wouldn't bring babies into this world. When I said that would wipe out mankind, he said, "What's wrong with that?"

I began to sense a man who was more interested in death than life. Death was his academic passion, and sick patients were part of that academic pursuit, like lab rats...

I don't know what's the way to go. But after an hour, I knew I wouldn't want to go via Jack Kevorkian, a man for whom the world is bleak, happiness is rare, belief is a waste of time and life is a finite, meaningless entity. The act he champions may indeed be one of compassion, but how can it be delivered by such a cold, cold heart?

A lot of people continue to cling to the idea of euthanasia as "compassion." But it isn't, or, at least, it certainly wasn't for Kevorkian. The root meaning of that word is to "suffer with." Kevorkian just discarded people.

Another Take on Kevorkian

Detroit Free Press columnist Brian Dickerson opines that Kevorkian was just a man ahead of his time. Imagine the "reality show" television potential, he writes, if Kevorkian were working today:

How differently things might have turned out if the nation's first shock doc had waited until 2007 to make his debut. He'd have been a star instead of a pariah, and network executives would be murdering one another for the rights to film him at work.

In "Whose Life Is It, Anyway?" terminally ill patients would compete for the opportunity to end their suffering with the host's expert medical assistance. A panel of medical experts would scrutinize each contestant's symptoms -- "That's an impressive cough, Mrs. Schlabotnik, but you didn't knock it out of the park" -- and viewers at home would cast their votes for the most hopeless prognosis.

But here, I think, Dickerson is wrong:

As things turned out, the conventional wisdom is that Kevorkian's premature crusade has doomed physician-assisted suicide, at least for this generation. Except in Oregon, where the practice enjoys limited legal sanction, pro-euthanasia activists have succeeded mainly in mobilizing the religious conservatives Kevorkian despises.

In Michigan, the conservative backlash Kevorkian triggered arguably has stymied stem cell research and gay marriage as well as abortion and euthanasia.

The actual backlash was from disability rights activists. It was Kevorkian's assisting the suicides of disabled people to general societal applause that caused Diane Coleman to form Not Dead Yet, and that changed everything. In my very informed opinion, it was NDY and its disability rights colleagues that actually stopped euthanasia from spreading around the country--not religious conservatives.

Jack Kevorkian to Clean Up on the Speakers Circuit

When Kevorkian wanted out of prison, his lawyer repeatedly pleaded for mercy because, he said, Kevorkian's was so ill with hepatitis and other ailments that he was on the verge of death's door. For example, in this Court TV report from 2004:

The state parole board declined to commute Jack Kevorkian's murder sentence or grant the assisted suicide advocate parole, saying his claims of ill health mirrored claims he had made just a year ago.

Or take this 2005 report about another Kevorkian release based on ill health:

Jack Kevorkian's attorney is asking Michigan's governor and parole board for a third time to pardon the 77-year-old assisted-suicide advocate or commute his sentence. Kevorkian is eligible for parole in 2007, but attorney Mayer Morganroth says he might not live that long..."The man is in dire shape," Morganroth said in a statement Saturday. "Prison has deteriorated him almost to the point of no return."

But now that he is actually getting out, Kevorkian seems to have had a "miraculous" recovery. How else explain how a dying man who had reached the "point of no return" in 2005 is now, suddenly, well enough to join the speakers circuit? His going rate will be between $50,000-$100,000. Who says that crime doesn't pay?