U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., in Denver Friday night. Photo by Joseph Boven/Colorado Independent

In a room of 600 conservative voters brought together by former Colorado Senate president John Andrews’ Centennial Institute, along with Liberty on the Rocks and Colorado Christian University, Bachmann brought the crowd to its feet more than once as she called for an end to the progressive agenda she said has taken over Washington.

“‘We are determined to live free or not at all. And we are resolved that posterity shall never reproach us with having brought slaves into the world,’” Bachmann read from founding father John Jay , ending her reading with the statement, “We will talk a little bit about what has transpired in the last 18 months and would we count what has transpired into turning our country into a nation of slaves.”

She reiterated her concern more forcefully toward the end of the program.

“I think this describes so well where we are right now,” Bachmann said before reading an excerpt from C.S. Lewis: “‘Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of it victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under a robber baron than under omnipotent moral busybodies… .’”

Bachmann urged the room to not only vote in constitutional conservatives like herself but also to make certain to implore their congressional delegation to vote them into leadership positions.

“I am not in leadership, but that is why I said in my remarks that it is extremely important that if the gavel turns, the leadership is made up of constitutional conservatives. All of you can put that pressure on them.”

Such a leadership, Bachmann said, would be able to implement a conservative shift in government that could, among many things, rein in federal spending. She pointed to numbers showing that when Obama took office the debt was $5.8 trillion, quickly rising to $13 trillion under his leadership.

According to the U.S Treasury Department on the day President Obama took office the total national debt stood at $10.62 trillion , and it has expanded to $13.2 trillion after massive spending on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to stave off another Great Depression.

Calling herself “giddy” with the notion of effecting change, she Bachmann laid out an agenda that has been the wish list for conservative politicians and pundits for years. She said first and foremost reforms to social security, Medicare, and welfare need to be addressed.

“We reform social security, then we reform Medicare, then we pare back welfare to the truly needy, for the truly disabled, because, yes, we can make that determination. No welfare for those who violate America’s borders. Close and secure American boarders, cut the budget, limit our foreign entanglements for America, then we massively cut spending first, then we cut taxes.”

Bachmann further said the military should not be used as a social experiment, called for the privatization of social security for those under 55, as well as the elimination of the capital gains tax, estate tax, alternative minimum tax, and the reduction of taxes to 20 percent for individual income and 9 percent for businesses. Finally, she called for the total repeal of “Obamacare” to thunderous applause.

Bachmann claimed the national health care reform package was implemented, in part, under the auspices of Rahm Emanuel’s brother Ezekiel, whom Bachmann, appropriating the claims of Betsy McCaughey, said supported the rationing of medical care to only those who were useful to the federal treasury. Bachmann, extending that claim to the administration, said , “It is about being useful not to you, not to others, but to the United States Treasury. How useful are you to the United States Treasury? These people are serious. It makes [Jack] Kevorkian look like Mary Poppins.”

While a number of sites have debunked claims against Emanuel, an ardent opponent of euthanasia, in a CBS interview he explained that he did not believe in rationing health care across the board but his contemplations as a philosopher found him looking at a situation where there might be one liver for three individuals. In those cases, he said he spoke of rationing, but that they did not apply to a larger system.

From the CBS interview:
Is he saying, as {Sarah] Palin and others have suggested, that those who aren’t “participating citizens” should have no guarantee to health care?

“No,” Emanuel says, “and I think I made it pretty clear I wasn’t endorsing that view, I was analyzing that perspective and what it might mean in practical terms. The rest of the text around that quote made it pretty clear I was trying to analyze it and understand it, not endorse it.”

BOULDER — A powerful precursor to the national shouting match over “death panel” health-reform this summer was the Terri Schiavo case, where a woman with severe brain damage was taken off her feeding tube and starved to death over the course of two weeks in March 2005. Schiavo’s brother, Bobby Schindler, an advocate for the rights of the disabled, spoke at the University of Colorado last night in a semi-filled chemistry lecture hall. The timing of the appearance isn’t coincidental.

“I supported your family,” said a woman in the audience during the Q&A session. “But why don’t you leave Obama out of this?”

“I thank you for your support, but I won’t leave him out of this,” Schindler said.

There is little that is cut-and-dried about the Schiavo case, a circus episode of the mass-mediated political culture wars, where the 24/7 infotainment news cycle left no room for reflection or subtlety, where the cast of characters and string pullers included Karl Rove and Mark Fuhrman, strange but apt bedfellows– men who have come to represent both the stamp and taint of contemporary authority.

But they were not the subject of the talk at CU Monday. Neither really was Terri Schiavo. The subject was the “culture of death” that has allegedly grown up in the United States in recent decades.

According to Schindler, two developments led directly to his sister’s end: The fact that providing food and water is now viewed as medical treatment if the food and water have to be delivered through tubes; and the creation in 1972 of the “persistent vegetative state” medical diagnosis, a form of contemporary death sentence, according to Schindler.

How did these two ideas come about and why have they been so widely accepted? There is financial incentive, said Schindler but, more important, there is also profound prejudice against humans suffering cognitive disorders.

The main culprit is an altered biological-science and bioethics mentality, which has seeped into pop culture, influencing news-media and Hollywood elite, who in turn spawn the millions of callous media products of the blogosphere and beyond. The name “Terri Schiavo” is now a punchline of the YouTube network, said Schindler, the endless joking a product and accelerator of the prejudice.

President Obama has surrounded himself with advisers who ascribe to and promote this “culture of death.” Pointing audience members to articles written by health-reform critic Betsy McCaughey, Schindler underlined the role of Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel in shaping the Obama Administration’s views on health reform. Emmanuel is Obama’s “health rationer-in-chief” wrote McCaughey in the Wall Street Journal at the end of August, fueling endlessly forwarded email-list discussion.

Schindler elaborated for the CU students: Emmanuel is just one of many Obama advisers who have elevated the scientific culture of death, which now guides health reform. These are men and women who accept abortion and its coarsening effect; who embrace the “quality of life” medical value system, which is subjective; who see personhood as something tied to mental awareness or sensibility, not something innate, a given part of any human with a beating heart.

The talk was sponsored by the local chapter of Students for Life. Refreshments were served after the talk at a local church. Priests in the audience made unprompted comments and clarifications about the Church’s position on related matters.

“Yes, Father, did you have a question?” Schindler said at one point, nodding to one of the men in Roman collars near the back.

A woman at the front with long salt-and-pepper hair in a pony tail was disturbed by the course of the conversation. Insurance companies make these life and death decisions too, she said.

“There are young people here and I feel like you’re trying to influence them,” which is when she added for the second time “Why don’t you leave Obama out of it?”

“I won’t,” Schindler told the audience.

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