There are a lot of tubes in the Internet and if you look hard enough you can probably find anything, but I haven’t found any Democratic bloggers predicting that Senator Mike Johanns (R-NE) is going to be dead in six months.
Sen. Mike Johanns was released Friday from an Arlington, Va., hospital after successful surgery on Tuesday.
Doctors removed the lower lobe of Johanns’ left lung after a suspicious spot was found. It was determined not to be cancerous.
For some reason, Republicans can’t show the same courtesy to Teddy Kennedy or Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I may disagree with Mike Johanns on policy but I don’t wish him ill-health and I have more respect than to offer Bill Frist-like remote diagnoses about his long-term prospects for recovery.
I’m sick of all the talk about Rush Limbaugh, so I don’t want to make a big deal about his remark that ‘before [the debate is] all over, it’ll be called the Ted Kennedy Memorial Health Care bill.’ Rush Limbaugh makes a living making incendiary and ugly remarks. I just want to make two points. First, this death-wish type of rhetoric isn’t limited to Rush Limbaugh as Sen. Jim Bunning made clear with his remarks about Justice Ginsburg.
During a 30-minute speech on Saturday at the Hardin County Republican Party’s Lincoln Day Dinner, Bunning said he supports conservative judges “and that’s going to be in place very shortly because Ruth Bader Ginsburg … has cancer.”
“Bad cancer. The kind that you don’t get better from,” he told a crowd of about 100 at the old State Theater.
“Even though she was operated on, usually, nine months is the longest that anybody would live after (being diagnosed) with pancreatic cancer,” he said.
Fortunately, the doctors say that they caught Ginsburg’s cancer while it is still in Stage One, which means her prospects are considerably better than Sen. Bunning’s remote diagnosis would indicate. Which leads to my second point. Why do Republicans engage in this type of behavior and why is it that Democrats don’t reciprocate?
Democrats generally fantasize about throwing (deserving) Republicans in jail, not seeing them die from cancer. We also tend to leave the medical decisions and diagnoses to the patients and their doctors. It has something to do with privacy and common decency.
