sotto voce USA

In Conclusion...

Live or die, this will probably be my last words on the Terri Schiavo tragedy. This is one family's highly personal decision that's been turned into a media circus and a political football. This is not news; whatever happens ultimately affects only Terri Schiavo's family -- except for the poignant reminder to us all of the need to have a living will. And none of us have enough facts to really know what the situation is. We have nothing but the "he said, she (they) said" spewing out of our TV sets. And every blog entry, news story, TV report, etc., etc., etc. just feeds into the Radical Right's political agenda. Just a couple of comments and I'm done.

Political Animal Kevin Drum has an excellent little piece on the "medical qualifications" of Dr./Sen. Bill Frist (one of my Tennessee senators), who "diagnosed" Schiavo's condition by watching videotapes and disagrees with the neurologists who have actually examined her. It's called "Stop This Man Before He Diagnoses Again." Frist's "diagnosis" has also raised eyebrows in the medical community.

Any sympathy I had for the Schindlers' side of the issue was destroyed in a heartbeat by the other Schindler daughter, Suzanne Vitadamo, on the Larry King show. This segment aired on Friday night. I caught just a few moments of it on a late Sunday night/early Monday morning rebroadcast...
KING: Suzanne, what is Michael's point if she didn't tell him that? What is his point in wanting this done? How does he gain by it, Suzanne?
VITADAMO: You know, Larry, I don't know. There's quite a bit of speculation out as to why he is so bent on killing Terri. You know, Michael has his family now. We agree that this is a family decision. But we are Terri's family. He has a fiancee and children, we're asking him to take care of his family and let us take care of ours.
KING: So, you don't -- you can't figure out a motive?
VITADAMO: As I said, there's speculation out there that I've heard running around. There might be maybe -- we have evidence that something may have happened pretty ugly the night that she collapsed. And, you know, again, he received quite a bit of money back in '93. And it was shortly after that he remembered these so-called wishes that we honestly don't believe. So, let everybody else maybe put something together and figure out why he's doing this because we certainly, you know, -- it really doesn't make any sense.

She goes on national television and throws out "speculation" of domestic violence, claiming to "have evidence that something may have happened." Larry King, being the consummate professional journalist that he is, fails to follow up on this startling revelation. "What evidence?" might have been a good follow-up question, but Larry was on to other topics.

While doing a Google News search to try to find the transcript for this interchange, I ran across Saveterrislife.com. The first link on the page pronounces, "Terri is a victim of Domestic Violence, but she can get better with treatment and therapy! Evidence here!" Okay, I'll bite. Clicking on the link takes me to a page with no evidence, just a promo for the website's author's appearance on Net Radio. A sad, sorry exercise.

In my previous post, I had a big list of Radical Right hypocrisies. Of course, I forgot the biggest hypocrisy of all: the party of smaller government, the party that wants to get government out of people's lives has no compunctions at all about getting involved here.

That's it. On to more important, more newsworthy issues...like how Halliburton subsidiary KBR charged the Pentagon - and American taxpayers - $27.5 million to ship $82,100 worth of cooking and heating oil into Iraq...

posted by fdtate @ 11:46 AM