The camera pans across an absolutely awesome gingerbread White House set up on the table in the Roosevelt Room, surrounded by cottony snow and figurines of trees and reindeer (which my adorable four-year-old niece has recently taken to describing as "mooses"). Man, no wonder they couldn't afford to light this show all season: they were scraping their pennies together to pay for this gingerbread masterpiece. Toby's at one end of the table, working alone, and chomping on something. I think he swiped a gummy candy off the White House. C.J. comes in to ask if he's seen the clips Carol dropped off, the headline of one of which is "Attorney General Cracks Down on Doc Peddling Death." Toby: "Catchy." C.J. says that nobody but the locals in Oregon have picked it up yet, except for the Jackson Clarion Ledger. Toby asks, "Jackson, Mississippi?" C.J.: "Home of the steamboat, the mud pie, and Attorney General Alan Fisk. He's talked about running for governor." Toby seems surprised to hear it. C.J. sits down and asks, "Is the Vice-President going to...." Toby says he's working on it. Man, she looks great in red, and she's wearing my favourite shade of it. C.J. thinks maybe it's time for them to "get back into this." Toby thinks they thought it through the first time; she says that was five years ago. He says that Oregon hasn't yet worked out all the kinks. C.J. points out, "The number of suicides among the terminally ill has gone down since they passed it." Toby mutters about a policy of non-intervention. C.J.: "A little lame when there's a 14th Amendment violation in the offing." Toby: "We have no Constitutional right to die. Refuse treatment, yeah, but..." C.J. argues that the framers never considered the notion of degenerative death: "An event which is entirely the creation of modern medicine. We have a right not to reach the end of life in unendurable suffering and agony." We do? Then explain this. Toby says they're not stopping anyone from saving up barbiturates and swallowing them with a bottle of vodka. C.J.: "In order to down the fifty Seconal you have to have control of both the muscles in the hand and the muscles in the esophagus. This is an opportunity and we're dodging it."













Comments