An analogy stuck me yesterday as GW was speaking at the Naval Academy.  I put myself through university passing instruments in surgery; a surgical tech. I worked on every kind of case. Appendix, gall bladders, broken limbs, gun shots, knifings, the burn center, hip replacements, exploratory laparotomies, trauma, open heart, cranial, every cancer known, even eye surgeries.

Never did the surgeons, the circulating nurses, the anesthesiologists or specialists stop in the middle of a GD operation and walk away. Not even when a four hour schedule went horribly sideways and ended up to be eighteen hours. To walk away is so far beyond unthinkable that the mind revolts. And when patients were clearly teetering on the edge of life and death, they received so much care and effort and sweat from teams of professionals that the suite was overrunning Grand Central. We never backed off. Never. Good God, the very idea! We got even more serious. Only men who are the focus of deadly incoming fire understand that intensity when you're out of options, out of altitude and seconds count in life and death. You...do...not...quit.

What the Left is howling for is that, exactly. The United States determined that there was no choice but to put this patient on the table and open him up for a liver transplant. His liver had failed and his body become fatally toxic to him and everyone else. He was so toxic he was gangrenous. Now that we have the patient open and stabilized and are finishing the first steps of the grueling process of transplant, the Left is in a rage that we don't walk away and leave the GD patient on the table, unfinished and exposed, the gaping wounds of surgery open and untended. They say, let this guy finish the job himself. Get outta there.

Horrifying. Simply horrifying.

Michael Geer  12 1 05