Posted 10/28/2003 12:59:00 PM by Ocean Guy
More on Life and Death Decisions

Carl Hiaasen speaks for me on this one:

It doesn't get any lower than that -- capitalizing on the plight of a brain-damaged woman to score points with religious fundamentalists.

Not since George C. Wallace fought desegregation in Alabama has a governor so brazenly thumbed his nose at a judge, and Bush had plenty of help.

His Republican pals in the Legislature hastily passed a bizarre law giving him the one-time authority to intervene in the Schiavo family tragedy.

And this is the same GOP that rails incessantly against government intrusion into private lives. What a gang of phonies...

...The governor well knows that the law inserting him into this case is ineptly written, baldly unconstitutional and doomed to be overturned.

He also knows that the odds are minuscule that Terri Schiavo will ever improve, and that she'll likely spend her remaining days in the same condition in which she's been since 1990.

That lawmakers gave Bush only 15 days to act is proof that it was theater from the beginning, that concern for the Schiavo family was merely a front for appeasing the ideological fringes of the GOP.

That the governor went ahead and ordered Schiavo reconnected to that feeding tube was the most cynical, morally bereft moment of his administration.

The gratitude and relief expressed by her parents is understandable, but it will be temporary -- and Bush knows that, too.

Long after this obscene piece of legislation is nullified, long after Terri Schiavo is left to die in peace, Bush and the others who staged this cruel charade will be touting their righteous stand to fundamentalist supporters.

Meanwhile, all of us who have watched loved ones fade away and struggled with life-and-death decisions can only shudder at the prospect of surrendering such heavy responsibility to a total stranger.

Not a doctor, not a judge, not a clergyman -- but a vote-grubbing politician.