The Moose was a witness to felony grave robbery.
Republicans love to quote dead Democrats. It is quite common for GOP'ers who loathed these Democrats when they are alive to celebrate them when they are deceased. References and quotes from such donkey luminaries as JFK and FDR are common in Republican orations. It is a feeble attempt to clothe themselves in moral and bi-partisan garments.
The most egregious example of this type of identity theft was in this week's editorial in the Weekly Standard penned by Fred Barnes. Suggesting that the Democratic Party has betrayed its moral legacy by not following Tom DeLay's lead in the Schiavo case, Barnes invokes the old scourge of conservatism, Hubert H. Humphrey,
"THE WORDS OF HUBERT HUMPHREY became the motto of American liberalism almost from the moment he uttered them on the Senate floor in 1977. "The moral test of a government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life--the children; the twilight of life--the elderly; and the shadows of life--the sick, the needy, and the handicapped." Liberal Democrats embraced the Humphrey dictum as a measure of what they'd done and what they planned to do. This was the high moral ground they thought of as the Democratic party's exclusive heritage.
"It no longer is. The indifference of liberalism to the fate of Terri Schiavo, by itself, demonstrates that. Those in the dawn of life and those in the shadows do not have advocates in liberalism and the Democratic party, at least not many. More often the weak and the innocent are targets. Democrats and liberals have fled the moral high ground, and they've done so voluntarily."
According to Barnes, the sole standard for judging compassion is the position on abortion and hard end of life cases. For those living between those two poles, too bad. After birth and before death, the Republican commitment is to comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted. But, before you enter the world and as you are about to depart it, the GOP is the party of Hubert Humphrey liberal compassion.
Hasn't Barnes read the testimonials from John DiIulio and David Kuo - the compassionate conservatism ruse was just some pleasant window dressing to obscure the real agenda of rewarding the wealthy donor class. If you are a family with a sick child and mounting medical bills that force you go into Chapter 11 - too bad chumps. But, the GOP is sick with worry over whether a some cells will be destroyed in a laboratory to help find a cure to disease.
Oh, and did Mr. Barnes realize that his compassionate Republican pals want to cut Medicaid which helps pay the bills for "those who are in the dawn of life--the children; the twilight of life--the elderly; and the shadows of life--the sick, the needy, and the handicapped"? Ironically, just before the latest controversy erupted, Republicans were seeking to place caps on those malpractice awards that financed Schiavo's care.
Why don't the Republicans have confidence in quoting live Republicans such as DeLay, Santorum and Cornyn? Don't quote Hubert, but rather Gordon. -- | 
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