The Politics of the Schiavo Case

As Jeffrey Bell & Frank Cannon set forth in the Weekly Standard, the Left and their Big Media allies are deluding themselves into another political minefield. Or, in their words, the Right has "lost a battle, but will win the war."

The starvation/dehydration of Terri Schiavo at the command of her husband [and its blessing] by federal and state courts, over the objection of the legislative and executive branches of government in Washington and Florida, is the upholding of a private killing for private purposes, not of government-sponsored mass killing. But the national scope of the controversy means that perhaps tens of thousands of feeding tubes all over the country have become far more precarious.

It was a substantive policy victory for forces opposed to the right to life (it doesn't seem accurate, in this instance, to describe these forces as "pro-choice"), but it may be a victory they come to regret. For one thing, in content it was far more an extension of the implications of legalized abortion than of assisted suicide.

That matters because the tide of public opinion has long since turned against abortion on demand, as evinced by even Hillary Clinton making token gestures of reconciliation with the pro-life movement. Why else did Democrats adapt a "keep quiet" strategy a week ago when the emergency legislation mandating federal review of the Schiavo case was enacted - with roughly 50% minority party support?

The murder of Terri Schiavo takes that factor one step further, however, because while abortion on demand has been rationalized as a "medical procedure" which merely "removes a mass of cellular tissue" - and the life snuffed out is not visible, and therefore easier to reduce to an abstraction - in this instance, it is a real, live, breathing, otherwise healthy, adult human being who is being eradicated, not by her own choice, as her scumbag husband and his death's head shyster keep mendaciously and infuriatingly insisting, but his. And as more and more facts come out - about the circumstances of Terri's original injury, the possibility that she was physically assaulted by Michael, the concommitant insistence on his part that her remains be immediately cremated to, possibly, destroy evidence of same, the fact that she has never been in a "persistant vegetative state" and Micheal refused to allow any tests that might prove his central contention false, the blatant conflict of interest on Judge George Greer's part - the death cult and all its left-wing cheerleaders who went to such ghoulishly gleeful excess in rooting for Terri Schiavo's execution will have effectively and efficiently buried themselves with such arrogant and obnoxious overreaching.

This has definite implications for the judicial confirmation wars, raising those stakes even higher, if that were possible. And it certainly wouldn't seem to enhance the chances of any "red" states turning "blue" any time soom.

The only caveat for Republicans is whether they will recognize the political opportunity set before them as readily as they recognized the moral rightness of what they did a week ago. The latter was an attempt to save one victim; the former can save the tens of thousands of other Terris all over the country whose survival has, thanks to the Three Horsemen, become far more precarious.