Political Living Will

[sabra]

* In the event I lapse into a persistent vegetative state, I want
medical authorities to resort to extraordinary means to prolong my hellish semiexistence. Fifteen years wouldn't be long enough for me.

* I want my wife and my parents to compound their misery by engaging in a bitter and protracted feud that depletes their emotions and their bank accounts.

* I want my wife to ruin the rest of her life by maintaining an
interminable vigil at my bedside. I'd be really jealous if she waited less than a decade to start dating again or otherwise rebuilding a semblance of a normal life.

* I want my case to be turned into a circus by losers and crackpots
from around the country who hope to bring meaning to their empty lives by investing the same transient emotion in me that they
once reserved for Laci Peterson, Chandra Levy and that little girl who got stuck in a well.

* I want those crackpots to spread vicious lies about my wife.

* I want to be placed in a hospice where protesters can gather to bring further grief and
disruption to the lives of dozens of dying patients and families whose stories are sadder than my own.

* I want the people who attach themselves to my case because of their
deep devotion to the sanctity of life to make death threats against any judges, elected officials or health care professionals who disagree with them.

* I want the medical geniuses and philosopher kings who populate the
Florida Legislature to ignore me for more than a decade and then turn my case into a forum for weeks
of politically calculated
bloviation.

* I want total strangers - oily politicians, maudlin news anchors,
ersatz friars and all other
hangers-on - to start calling me "Bobby," as if they had known me since
childhood.

* I'm not insisting on this as part of my directive, but it would be
nice if Congress passed a
"Bobby's Law" that applied only to me and ignored the medical needs of
tens of millions of other
Americans without adequate health coverage.

* Even if the "Bobby's Law" idea doesn't work out, I want Congress -
especially all those
self-described conservatives who claim to believe in "less government
and more freedom" - to
trample on the decisions of doctors, judges and other experts who
actually know something about my
case. And I want members of Congress to launch into an extended debate
that gives them another
excuse to avoid pesky issues such as national security and the economy.

* In particular, I want House Majority Leader Tom DeLay to use my case
as an opportunity to divert
the country's attention from the mounting political and legal troubles
stemming from his slimy
misbehavior.

* And I want Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist to make a mockery of his
Harvard medical degree by
misrepresenting the details of my case in ways that might give a boost
to his 2008 presidential
campaign.

* I want Frist and the rest of the world to judge my medical condition
on the basis of a snippet
of dated and demeaning videotape that should have remained private.

* Because I think I would retain my sense of humor even in a persistent
vegetative state, I'd want
President Bush - the same guy who publicly mocked Karla Faye Tucker
when signing off on her death
warrant as governor of Texas - to claim he was intervening in my case
because it is always best
"to err on the side of life."

* I want the state Department of Children and Families to step in at
the last moment to take
responsibility for my well-being, because nothing bad could ever happen
to anyone under DCF's
care.

* And because Gov. Jeb Bush is the smartest and most righteous human
being on the face of the
Earth, I want any and all of the aforementioned directives to be
disregarded if the governor
happens to disagree with them. If he says he knows what's best for me,
I won't be in any position
to argue.