I oculd just kiss Dahlia Lithwick:
This congressional authority to simply override years of state court fact-finding brings with it other superpowers, including the power of gratuitous name-calling: Members of Congress unable to pronounce Schiavo’s name just last week are denouncing her husband as an adulterer and common law bigamist who withheld proper medical care from her. I wonder what they’d say about my parenting
Rich
John,
I’m new to your blog, having been link from Atrios or some other leftwing blogger. I too am a leftist. You may not care what I think, or you may, I don’t know. I know you are addressing yourself to your like-minded conservatives.
But I want to tell you that I respect what you have been writing re: Terri Schiavo. It is a sad and difficult private family situation.
One thing that has troubled me over the past few years is that I see Republicans in power as caring more about politics and maintaining power than in pushing for either (a) good policy or (b) a sincerely held ideology. Conservatives talk about Federalism and state’s rights, and even individual rights, and then they violate these core principals when it is in their political interests, as in the 2000 elections and in the current Schiavo case. I can respect people who oppose abortion on religious grounds, for example, but I am deeply disturbed by “conservative” politicians who cynically pretend to hold beliefs and values that they do not have.
Tom DeLay hates government because he didn’t like regulation of his exterminator business. I am an environmentalist, but I can understand his perspective, which is a legitimate position in our political discourse. But there is no place for his cynical abuse of the Schiavo case to serve his political objectives.
It is a power grab in the name of conservative values. People will see through this and conservatism will only be discreditted in the long (or not so long) run.
TJ Jackson
Well I have to agree that the logic is what I’d expect to encounter at the Democratic Underground or at Willis site. If this is what Libertarians believe than they have lost their moral compass.
Gary Farber
I’ve refrained from saying a word about this issue, aside from a single comment left on another blog, so far, for various reasons.
A huge one is that I don’t think this is anyone’s business outside the immediate family.
It’s difficult for me to suppress rage at those who have made this about politics, and who have intruded into such a personal, tragic, thing. How dare they. How dare they.
How dare they.
Another is that all these people going on about the terrible horrible suffering experienced by someone who, under proper medical care and medication, dies from withdrawal of nutrition and hydration are a) very lucky to not have had the experience of living through a beloved one undergoing this; and b) if they’d have, they’d have an effing clue as to what they’re talking about. And it is, so far as I could understand second-hand, peaceful, unpainful, and without suffering.
Save on the part of the survivors.
And that’s all I care to say.
Beyond a lot of cursing.
Oh, and: thanks for your stance on this.
Dr Eyepatch
“This congressional action is hostile to the very principles of good government, hostile to medical science, hostile to the concept and of and legal rights afforded to marriage, and most of all, hostile to the best interests of Terri Schiavo.”
…and completely consistent with the principals of the republican party (the real principals, not the bullshit about small government and personal freedom they sell to the useful idiots)
ray
And that business out in California, between Scott and Laci Peterson—-that was all nobody’s business outside of the immediate family?
Bob
TJ Jackson, don’t confuse any right to life with the right to immortality.
An estimated 18,000 Americans die every year because of a lack of medical care, almost all of them poor and/or without any health insurance. With them the tube was never inserted.
Who are you gonna vote off the island?
That 20th Century philosopher Jim Morrison once opined, “No one here gets out alive.” No matter what direction your own moral compass takes you, TJ, you’ll be stepping over bodies to reach your terminus. Don’t presume your own moral superiority with so much blood on your own hands.