By the time you read this, Terri Schiavo may well be dead, and America will have taken the next step down the road to democide. While the brothers Bush may not have found it within their executive powers to prevent a woman from being legally starved to death, they did manage to con an entire nation into thinking that they did not act because they could not.

This is most unfortunate, because it is quite clear that neither George Bush nor his brother Jeb ever had any intention of saving Mrs. Schiavo from death by starvation. Like Pontius Pilate, they engaged in meaningless political machinations intended to deflect the blame from themselves while pretending that they were helpless to act. A simple executive order from either man would have sufficed to see the woman fed; the notion that the president has too much respect for either the 10th Amendment or the separation of powers doctrine to act is simply laughable.

For you see, George Bush has yet to veto a single law on the grounds that it requires exercising a power not specifically granted to the United States by the Constitution; instead, he has lobbied hard for many such unconstitutional laws. The Constitution gives the federal government no power with regards to children being left behind, for example. And every IRS tax court, every Justice Department immigration court, is a far greater violation of the separation of powers than the insertion of a feeding tube into a starving woman's stomach.

As for Jeb Bush, it's hard to know precisely what his position is since he's been hiding out ever since the Florida Legislature decided that it's down with offing the disabled. Considering the number of elderly concentrated in the Sunshine State, you'd think the Florida voting public would be paranoid about anything that might conceivably lead toward eradicating the useless eaters of society, but then, I suppose someone's got to play on all those golf courses.

Which leads us to what this affair is really all about. This is not a Democrat or Republican thing – many of the pro-starvation judges have been Republican appointees – it is a demographic thing. Already, the elderly soak up a staggering amount of national resources, as the blessings of technology allow them to live longer while turning them into wrinkled chemical cyborgs. This would be unobjectionable to anyone, except for the fact that the elderly are not paying for most of the expense of their much-needed medical treatments, and they are collecting Social Security for many more years than anyone previously envisioned.

The move to health maintenance organizations 20 years ago essentially sealed the doom of the elderly. It is already a well-established fact that when the health of an individual is at odds with the profitability of these government-mandated corporations, the individual is out of luck. This trade-off, writ large, serves as an example of what we can expect to see over the next 30 years when the "right to die" will become the "responsibility to die" and quality of life becomes a legal question to be determined by Department of Health bureaucrats instead of a pallid excuse to justify high taxes in certain locales.

It won't happen overnight. Schiavo simply represents the first nibbling about the margins. But soon will come the Fox News debates about the terminally ill and the mentally disabled – if an Alzheimer's patient can't even recognize his own daughter, is he really there anymore? It's customary to dismiss slippery slopes as a false form of hypothesis, but when there's both historical and international models that are obviously being followed, we're no longer talking about possibilities, we're looking at time frames.

And eventually they'll get around to the cripples and the Jews. This is an inspired evil that stems from a supernatural source whose inhuman goals are always the same: death, division and destruction. If you don't see how these things connect, recall that it was Jesus Christ who said: "I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me."

Keep that in mind the next time you're trying to decide if your government is on the side of the angels or not.

Vox Day is a novelist and Christian libertarian. He is a member of the SFWA, Mensa and the Southern Baptist church, and has been down with Madden since 1992. Visit his web log, Vox Popoli, for daily commentary and responses to reader email.