Death-Loving Hypocrisy Watch

Jack Kevorkian and Peter Singer have this thing about death. They really enjoy it, so long as the casualties don't happen too close to home. Not me, says Jack. Not mom, says Peter. Otherwise, let's get rid of the weaklings, the losers, the vast horizon of useless humans. Kevorkian's currently doing 10- to 25-years for second-degree murder in the 1998 poisoning of Thomas Youk, 52, of Oakland County's Waterford Township. Kevorkian called it a "mercy killing." For his part, Peter Singer celebrates the virtues of terminating unuseful humans: "Killing a defective infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Sometimes it is not wrong at all." These two reprobates have something in common: they're hypocrites who exempt themselves from what they advocate for others. Kevorkian of course became a household ghoul for his advocacy of sick and disabled people taking their own lives. Now he's decided he himself wants to stick around and he claims he only advocated for the "right" to commit suicide. Similarly, Singer has waxed eloquent about why old, sick, and disabled people should die when they become useless — but he opted not to have his mother put down when she was a terminal Alzheimer patient. None of this is especially surprising. After all, social engineers who know what's best for the the hoveled masses typically decline, understandably, to apply their dicta to their own lives. (Remember the USSR commies with their palatial country homes?) Singer uses his position as a Princeton professor of ethics (go figure) to argue that fetuses, deformed newborns, and elderly people with dementia should die for the "greater good." Unlike Kevorkian, he doesn't actually get his hands dirty, or bloody. Also unlike Jack, that's why his offenses are moral rather than (also) criminal. One of these days, however, Singer just might not be able to contain himself. He may find it hard to resist actually taking one of those usefless lives — kind of a trophy thing. Imagine the conversations Singer and Kevorkian could have, in adjoining cells. Hannibal Lechter? Inarticulate by comparison.