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Last updated on June 15th, 2017 at 01:33 pm
CASE ONE: The fight over removing Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube “is a great political issue … and a tough issue for Democrats … This is an important moral issue and the pro-life base will be excited that the Senate is debating this important issue.”—Republican legal counsel Brian Darling in a memo first reported on March 18.
Result: Much left-wing rage, many on the right embarrassed, Darling resigns.
CASE TWO: “We’re going to use Terri Schiavo later on. This is going to be an issue in 2006, and it’s going to be an issue in 2008.”—Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, April 15.
Result: Pending.
- Let them.Posted by richard mcenroe on 04/17 at 11:59 AM • #
- Case One should also include a Rush to Exploit and later Chronically Begrudging Retractions on the part of the MSM.
Critique at Powerline of Getler’s latest quasi-demi-retraction here.
Case Two is not “pending”– that was it. If you blinked, you missed it.
Posted by zeppenwolf on 04/17 at 12:20 PM • #
- Shiavo was entertainment for the woman-in-peril audience, which gave it legs. Normally evanescent moralizers, busybodies, hand-wringers and hysterics then got their say as long as that news audience liked the supporting story, and vanished quickly when the story did.
No offense to my right-wing cohorts but nobody cares.
It made Limbaugh insufferable for a week, was its chief effect.
The left’s idea is to represent the opposition as moralizers, busybodies, hand-wringers and hysterics. Not so! Many of us were mocking it at the time, in fact
- “We’re going to have an ad with a picture of Tom DeLay saying, ‘Do you want this guy to decide whether you die or not? Or is that going to be up to your loved ones?’”
Unbelievable. This is how they characterize DeLay’s effort to save Terry Schiavo’s life. I want Tom DeLay on my side if any of my “loved ones” decide to get rid of me.
- rhhardin:
I am not in the habit of rescuing damsels in distress and I had a problem with the Shciavro tragedy because I don’t think the law should be used to help a man kill his wife. Last time I looked we do not have sharia law here.
It can also have long term implications for the rights of the disabled.
The Democrats made an issue of conservatives using the incident for political advantage and then the new head of the party announces the Democrats intend to use the incident for political advantage.
The stupidity is stunning. Let them go campaign with Michael Schiavro and that strange little creep of a lawyer of his… I don’t think people are going to go for it.
- I’m sure the Schindlers will be delighted to provide all the free footage of their interactions with their daughter Karl Rove may wish to make use of. In between this and Howling Mad Howie saying that he “hates Republicans and everything they stand for”, it looks like we may have a lead in the 2008 election all set up for us.
- Hmmmm.
I think a lot of Americans don’t actually know the details of the Schivao case at all. All of the poll questions used, to justify the meme that it was a bad idea for the GOP, never actually told the facts as they were. The general assumption in the poll questions were that Terri Schivao was essentially dead and the GOP was interfering in a private family affair.
All of that is most definitely in dispute.
Frankly if the Democrats want to use this as a political ploy they can. But they’d be foolish to do so. What I’ve seen of the “Living Will” here in America is that it’s an extremely useless document. By default Living Wills assume that you’d want to die, not that you want to live. You actually have to write out that you want to live.
Additionally a recent case here, actually in Georgia, by the name of Mae Magourik demonstrated that a Living Will won’t stop a court and hospice from organizing to kill your. Mae had a Living Will that allowed witholding food and water only if she were a vegetable, which she wasn’t. And yet the hospice withheld the food and water anyways on the orders of Mae’s granddaughter.
Normally this would take a *medical* Power of Attorney but the hospice didn’t bother checking on what authority Mae’s granddaughter actually had until the second week of no food or water. After a lot of people pushed hard Mae is now in a hospital being evaluated for treatment.
Frankly there is a very dark undercurrent to all this. A lot of people have made assumptions on how the system of Living Wills and the “ending of life with dignity” stuff. It’s very likely that in most cases there isn’t any dissent and it is done well. But there’s also no review process at all and no agency that actually reviews any of this.
So if you’re the one in a hospital bed and helpless, better hope you’re not worth more dead than alive. This process is the only one I know of where an heir can legally speed up the inheritance process.
- And isn’t Dean a doctor? What hjappened to the Hippocratic Oath?Posted by Susan Norton on 04/17 at 11:13 PM • #
- You mean “Hypocritical Oath”, Susan. At least when applied to Dean.Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 04/18 at 05:40 AM • #
- Hubby remembered she wanted to vote for Hillary…Posted by richard mcenroe on 04/18 at 07:19 PM • #
