6/18/2005
Going All In and Losing Large On Schiavo:
There's a lot of motherfuckers who staked their political capital and professional credibility on the idea that Terri Schiavo was not a vegetable, that she could be healed, that Jesus loved her that much. Well, tough shit. They went all in on that bet, and now it's time to make these sons and daughters of bitches pay. Turns out that science was right and faith was wrong.
It turns out that Terri Schiavo's brainpan was just a vessel for holding a bunch of goo, not a brain. It turns out she didn't follow any fuckin' balloon or look at anyone at any time because she was blind. Oh, and she wasn't beaten, yo, although Jeb Bush will resuscitate Schiavo's corpse in order to get all C.S.I. on her ashes in order to salvage any shred of credibility he has left. (More precisely, Michael Schiavo will be forced to suffer ever more for the crime of wanting his rutabaga of a wife to be allowed to die.)
Now, Mel Martinez, the Florida Senator that led the charge for Congress to intervene in the Schiavo case, is trying to save his ass by saying that he was wrong. Bill Frist, who spoke in the Senate about how Schivao "responded" to stimulus, is now saying he never said she "responded." The Rude Pundit wouldn't trust Frist to look at a boil on someone's ass, let alone their EKG. Terri Schiavo needs to become the Willie Horton around the necks of Republicans in 2006.
And what will our fair right wing commentators, so many of whom were soooo sure back in the dark days of March that Schiavo might be able to be rehabilitated, say as we extend the "we-told-you-so" mantra? Like Charlie "I Be a Doctor" Krauthammer, who wrote, "I have tried to find out what her neurological condition actually is. But the evidence is sketchy, old and conflicting. The Florida court found that most of her cerebral cortex is gone. But 'most' does not mean all. There might be some cortex functioning. The very severely retarded or brain-damaged can have some consciousness. And we do not go around euthanizing the minimally conscious in the back wards of the mental hospitals on the grounds that their lives are not worth living."
Or David Limbaugh, who wrote, "From what I've read, while Terri is severely disabled, she's not in a so-called vegetative state, she's not in a coma, and she's not medically terminal," and later belched up more: "I detect more than a bit of intellectual dishonesty among many favoring Terri's death. They are claiming they merely want to honor Terri's wishes, yet they rely on her tainted husband, callously discount the testimony of her loving parents, blindly accept the disinformation that Terri is in a purely vegetative state, and ignore multiple firsthand accounts, including from examining physicians and nurses, that Terri is responsive, sometimes animated, and definitely wants to go on living."
Or Maggie Gallagher, who, when not selling out cheap to support marriage, wrote, "a neurologist who was nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1999 (and who examined Terri Schiavo several years ago) [said] that Terri is not in a vegetative state. She sometimes responds. Terri (he says) has been able to swallow pudding in the past, and can swallow her own saliva right now. With therapy, she might not even need the feeding tube. 'They are truly withholding food from a person who is awake, alert, and can eat and swallow.'" Damn, Nobel Prizes are cheap trinkets these days.
Or the mad Michelle Malkin, who wrote, "If given proper rehabilitation, Terri could learn to chew and swallow on her own as well. She is disabled, not dead." Now Malkin desperately clings to the shadows of doubt that are built into any rational scientific document.
And the good lawyer Hindrocket, the queerly-named conservative blogger on the queerly-named blog Powerline, said in March, "I think pretty much anyone who sees it thinks--she's not dead. Severely disabled, yes. Dead, no. Deliberately starving her would be a terrible thing. That's how I reacted to it, anyway...And I believe it is undisputed that Terri Schiavo has never been given the tests normally used to diagnose a persistent vegetative state, apparently because her husband refuses to allow them."
While the calls for Frist and DeLay and Bushes Jeb [and] George to apologize are loud and resounding, there's been little furor over the destruction of the credibility of all of our sanctimonious right wing wads of fuck. Yes, it's more important to wreck the political "leaders" of the opposition, but it'd be the cherry on the fuckin' sundae to punish their media enablers.
Meanwhile, one must feel at least some pity for the poor, deluded parents of Terri Schiavo. They have to cling to the insane hope that their daughter could have gotten better. Otherwise, to accept the coroner's report, they would have to face the horror that they artificially kept their blind, brain-melted daughter alive for years. And perhaps one needs to die with illusions than to deal with that nightmare.
I thought this might be worth posting. All those assholes and deluded but decent folks who clung desperately to the notion that Terri Schiavo wasn't just a brain-dead vegetable have now been proven wrong, finally and completely. The ruling by the Florida courts was sound, based on the conclusions of doctors who have examined the late Mrs. Schiavo over and over. The woman whose body sat it a chair and did nothing but drool for fifteen years, while her family members waved a balloon in front of her dead eyes and imagined they saw them following it, was never going to recover, because there was nothing to recover.
I can only hope that eventually, Terri's family is able to accept the truth and let go of their daughter. I know a lot of people who lose their children have a rough time accepting it, but to drag it out like this in the face of overwhelming evidence that their child is gone and isn't coming back seems to me to be more painful and more devoid of actual hope than the alternative--which is acceptance, a period of grief, and then moving on.
As for the neocons and the pseudo-religious fundamentalists who cynically used Terri Schiavo's case as just one more in a long line of issues to be used and abused for political gain, I say FUCK YOU. You never cared one damned bit about Terri Schiavo, or her family, or the right to life. No, you fucking hypocrites don't care about anything except acquiring and retaining power at any cost--as long as it's someone else who pays the price. You make me sick, and that's why I say that you people (and you know who you are, just as the sane people to whom this rant does not apply know who they are) are the lowest form of life I can imagine. There is no tragedy you aren't willing to exploit for your own ends and your own gain. That's fucking disgusting. And you know it. I hope you all suffer the exact same fate as those you have exploited, as those whose lives you've destroyed in your mad, obsessive grab for absolute political power. If any justice truly exists in this tired old world, that is exactly what will happen. And when the rest of the world is finally, permanently relieved of the burden of your presence, we will pick up the pieces as we have always done, and go on to try and make the world better than it was when we came into it.
It's the politics of revenge, going after someone out of spite just because things didn't go Bush's way.
Makes me want to hurl, it does.