The Reapers Triumph

Looks like the ghouls have won:

A federal judge in Florida has ruled that he will not order a feeding tube reinserted to Terri Schiavo, a brain-damaged woman who is the center of a national legal battle over her life.

The case likely will be appealed to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta, Georgia.

Judge James Whittemore appears to have missed the point of this exercise - a fresh review of the facts in this case, which would expose the maliciously bogus contention on the part of the Three Horsemen that Terri Schiavo is a vegetable. Instead Judge Whittemore is functioning as if he were an appellate court judge reviewing the application of law at the trial court level.

In the meantime, Mrs. Schiavo, who is neither a vegetable nor on life support, is being torturously starved to death. I guess the only way for her scumbag husband to "prove" her "vegetative state" is to turn her into one. Then convert her to a cadaver. Which she will be long before the appeals process can be exhausted.

Once Judge George Greer sentenced Terri to death, the pale riders had the upper hand because her rescuers were locked into an unwinnable race against time, and they had enough allies in Big Media to ensure that the general public would be given a completely distorted picture of Terri's true condition.

And so, Mrs. Schiavo will succumb to an execution so "cruel and unusual" that, were it imposed upon a serial killer or a child rapist, would have so-called civil libertarians in a state of insurrection. She'll be a homicide victim, and her murderer will be the system itself.

Wherever he is right now, Jack Kervorkian must be smiling.

UPDATE: Senator Rick Santorum tells it with the bark on:

U.S. District Judge James Whittemore has defied Congress by not staying Terri Schiavo's starvation execution for the time it takes him to hold a full hearing on her case, a leading Republican senator said Tuesday.

"You have judicial tyranny here," Santorum told WABC Radio in New York.

"Congress passed a law that said that you had to look at this case. He simply thumbed his nose at Congress."

"What the statute that [Whittemore] was dealing with said was that he shall hold a trial de novo," the Pennsylvania Republican explained. "That means he has to hold a new trial. That's what the statute said."

"What he's saying is, 'I don't have to hold a new trial because I've already determined that her rights have been protected,'" Santorum said.

"That's nice for him to say that. But that's not what Congress told him to do," he added. "Judges should obey the law. And this judge - in my mind - simply ignored the law."

Boy, I sure don't remember much nose-thumbing being directed at Congress when the Democrats ran it. Of course, I also don't remember Republicans conducting scorched-earth filibusters of Dem judicial nominees when they were the minority, either.

If anybody still needed yet another abject example of why the Senate GOP needs to outlaw these filibusters, and clean these swaggering, arrogant, tinpot dictators with delusions of godhood off of the federal bench and replace them with conservative jurists who know and uphold the judiciary's proper constitutional role, Judge Whittemore served it up with a side of fries and a large milkshake.

Push that "button," gentles. Now. Let Terri Schiavo be your mascot.