A Swiftian Modest Proposal

George Neumayr, writing today in The American Spectator has a modest proposal (hat tip to Tim Birdnow over at Birdblog)

To wit:

It is a melancholy object to those who travel in America when they see the hospices and hospitals crowded with the disabled and elderly. These people, instead of being able to work for their honest livelihood or even show signs of meaningful mental life, impose severe burdens on the healthy.

I think it is agreed by all parties, at least within America's mainstream, that this prodigious number of disabled and elderly in the arms, or on the backs, or at the heels of their family members, and frequently of their isolated and deprived husbands, is in the present deplorable state of the country with its deficits, unsustainable Medicare costs, and Social Security crisis a very great additional grievance; and, therefore, whoever could find out a fair, cheap, and easy method of euthanizing this class of the ill would deserve so well of the public as to have his statue set up for a preserver of the nation.

There is a great advantage in this scheme, that it will prevent those undignified lingering deaths of those with no hope of recovery, and that horrid practice of husbands murdering their wives, alas! too frequent among us!

I have been assured by a very knowing Democrat of my acquaintance in Washington, that a disabled person can be dehydrated to death in 8 to 12 days. It is not improbable that some scrupulous person might be apt to censure such a practice (although indeed very unjustly and unconstitutionally), as a little bordering upon cruelty; which, I confess, has always been with me the strongest objection against any project, however so well intended." . . .