Once Again, the Facts Get In the Way

From the day of her tragic accident until the day she died, it seemed like everyone was looking for someone to blame. Surely a young person doesn't just slip into a vegetative state and then die without someone being at fault.

But as it turns out, you can't blame Michael Schiavo or the doctors or the courts. The recently released autopsy findings confirmed, in dramatic fashion, what he and the doctors and the courts had been saying all along—Terry Schiavo was in a persistant vegetative state with no hope of recovering. Allowing her to pass, then, was not the act of convenience that some alleged, but instead a simultaneous act of courage and despair.

You can't blame her parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, either. Sure, in the waning days of this tragedy they allowed themselves and their long-suffering daughter to be used as a tool or the ever-strident Right. But their motives were pure. Children are always supposed to outlive their parents and when the natural order of things is turned on its head, so too then is our equilibrium. Anyone can understand them wanting to believe otherwise. For them, it was purely personal.

But there is enough blame to go around elsewhere but we need to start, where we seem to start more and more these days, with the right-wing demagogues who chose to exploit this deeply personal and private matter for their own political gain. At the top, of course, is the man at the top, the fearless and peerless W. It's tempting to give him a pass since he’s a relative neophyte at practicing this brand of radical Christianity. Having lived the life of the hard-partying frat boy long past its expiration date, W gave himself precious little chance to let things like God or even one’s place in the universe soak into his gin-soaked brain during his formative years. His religious conversion, coinciding as it did with his political aspirations, has always been a work in progress anyway. Presumably he’ll get it right at some point, hopefully before it’s too late, and recognize that his political and imperialistic ambitions should acknowledge that their unifying purpose—freedom—doesn’t mean simply replacing one implausible form of religion with another.

Special mention, too, must go to the Fredo of the Bush clan, Jeb. As Govenor, you would think Jeb would have something, anything more important to do than order prosecutors to re-open the "Schiavo" case. Showing the true Bush pluck that there is no shame too great, Fredo Bush wants someone to explain why, 15 years ago, paramedics were allegedly not summoned more quickly to the Schiavo case after Terry collapsed. Of course, the context for this probe is the allegation, also proven wrong by the autopsy, that Terry was both strangled and beaten. Apparently Fredo and the boys want to be wrong on each and every aspect of the Schiavo case and this is the last stone apparently unturned. So while Florida suffers, Fredo fiddles.

Moving beyond the Bush clan, let's save some blame for the archangel of American politics, the inherently evil Tom DeLay. What makes DeLay more dangerous than the Bush boys is that he actually has enough intellect and arrogance to both hatch an evil plan and see it through to fruition, the cost be damned. True, he can be a political hack at times prone to the kind of outsized rhetoric that makes Texas politicians such rogues in the first place. But putting aside his best quality for a moment, let's remember that DeLay is the kind of American who truly hates America. Neither he nor the radical Right that he represents have literally any concept of what freedom and democracy really means. I don’t see how one can be for America and all it supposedly stands for and at the same time try to regulate away anything that does not comport to the values of the Christian Right.

Their fight about Terry Schiavo had nothing whatsoever to do with her needs or that of her family. Had it, they wouldn’t have been so quick to try and sully the reputation of Michael Schiavo by slyly implying to their friends at Fox News that Michael’s motives were less than pure—he wanted his wife dead so that he could get on with marrying the woman he was already living with. This kind of twisted character assassination had nothing to do with Terry Schiavo. It was done, as only the Right can do, to advance a radical religious agenda. Tell me what, again, are we fighting for in Iraq and Afghanistan? The irony, of course, is that our founding fathers came to this land to escape religious persecution. For all the technological progress we’ve made in the last 200 plus years, we’ve also made some embarrassing regression as a society.

And for now, we'll conclude with the good doctor, Bill Frist. As most recall, even if he doesn't he actually from the comfort of his Georgetown home (or was it his DC office, I forget), that Terry Shiavo didn’t seem all that bad to him. Maybe he should be sued for malpractice. Maybe he should lose his license. Or maybe he should just learn to keep his pie hole shut and leave medical work to those imminetely more qualifed. Dr. Bombay comes to mind.

What the autopsy really shows is that the good doctor is fast becoming the Enron stock of the Senate. A high flyer with misguided Presidential ambitions, he so wanted to look like a leader of national presence and wasn't afraid to do iton the back of poor Terry Shiavo and her grief stricken and confused parents. But as noted, his diagnosis was wrong and his awkward and wrong-headed legislative workaround failed miserably. It's been quite fun, actually, watching the doctor try to heal thyself since by trying to muscle through first, the bizarrely ill-tempered John Bolton, and second, the so-called nuclear option fo break the Democrats fillibuster over pending judicial nominees. Those were no more successful. As it turns out, Frist was no match for the lone Senator from his own party who doesn’t blindly think what Frist and his cronies tell him to think. And if Bolton was a disaster, how then to categorize his failure to pull off the "nuclear option"? Once again, the good doctor misdiagnosed the patient. At some point, before he completely implodes, perhaps Frist will realize, like most doctors do eventually, that having a God complex does not actually mean you are God.

We’d all like to think that the Schiavo autopsy report would be the cold slap in the face that the likes of W, Jeb, DeLay and Frist need to at least measure their public rhetoric more carefully. But that's doubtful. It just feeds the beast as it gives them a new group to rail against--activist doctors. I suspect it won't be too long before DeLay calls for a public lynching of them as well.

But my thoughts continue back to Terry Schiavo. She never asked for this circus. While her exit was not as graceful as it should have been, it least she had her dignity. The same can never be said for our friends on the Right.