William F. Buckley, Jr., is one of the great reactionary
political thinkers of the United States, and has been for
fifty years, but he makes more than a few good points.
(Keep in mind he's one of those relatively few rightists
who, like Congressman Jeff Flake, thinks that the best
way to get rid of the Cuban Revolution is to end the US
blockade of the island. He's held this view for ages.)

His linkage of the tragic Schaivo case with that of
Elian Gonzalez has merit, since it was in the case of
Elian that the United States Congress last tried to
intervene in a similar legal procedure by trying to
issue a subpoena to the severely-traumatized child.

In the Schaivo case, many issues are in conflict and at
stake, but Elian was a small traumatized child whose only
living parent, a responsible caretaker by all accounts,
was ready, willing and able to take care of him as soon
as the child could be returned. By contrast, Schaivo is
an entirely incapacitated adult who has been "living"
on life supports for FIFTEEN YEARS, and who had been a
fully functional adult before the accident which put
her where she is today.

Under the best of circumstances, assuming for argument's
sake that Schiavo's parents aren't rightist fanatics as
are the Republican operatives, they seem unable to face
the fact that their daughter has been dead for fifteen
years. That's a great deal of denial to be nurturing.

It's a tragic situation, but the Republican party, with
the assistance of many Democrats, are colluding with the
fundamentalist Christian right, all of whom are OPPOSED
to health-care for all, but are fighting now to try to
obtain "health care" for this ONE totally incapacitated
INDIVIDUAL. Their goal is to use her pitiful image as a
way of mobilizing support for whatever they want you to
try to read into it. It's not hypocrisy, it's LOWpocrisy.

The "rights" which her parents are attempting to exercise
are in opposition to the rights of her husband, and they
are prioritizing THEIR rights over and against his, in
the same manner as right-to-lifers in the abortion issue
prioritize the life of the unborn fetus against that of
the pregnant woman. It's the same rightwing game that
is being played here. Read the Republican Party's so-
called "talking points" document on the Schaivo case:
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Schiavo/story?id=600937


Walter Lippmann, CubaNews
http://www.walterlippmann.com
========================================================

THE GREAT QUANDARY
Tue Mar 22, 8:41 PM ET
By William F. Buckley Jr.

What was good was that the resources of the entire nation,
so it seemed, could be aroused with only the end in mind of
sparing -- more accurately, prolonging -- a single life.
It was left only to mobilize the Seventh Fleet to level a
thousand guns on the doctors engaged in removing the tubes
from Terri Schiavo. Not since 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez was
ordered by the courts to return to Cuba, there to submit to
a lifetime of servitude under Fidel Castro Inc., had there
been such a mobilization of public sentiment.

What broke the back of the Free Elian movement was a social
convention: deferral to the wishes of the father. He wanted
Elian home and traveled to Florida to pick him up after an
eristic judicial storm -- which ended with the simple
daybreak that the future of a child is to be decided by his
parents.

In the case of Terri Schiavo, orderly thought would have
led us to believe that her treatment was the next of kin's
to decide. But human concern for Mrs. Schiavo interposed
qualifiers: The husband had attached himself to another
woman, by whom another family had begun. This suggested a
diluted moral, though not legal, authority of the husband.
Then the father and the mother of the stricken girl argued
to keep her alive -- to keep her pulse beating. Terri is
not, repeat not, brain-dead, though she is unable to
communicate.

Meanwhile, the courts of Florida were guided, or seemed to
be, by precedents that treated as relevant only the absence
of a living will by Mrs. Schiavo, and the legal recognition
of her husband as head of the family. The two
considerations estopped any movement by the courts to
assume authority, as though she belonged to them.

Those many who pleaded to continue the patient's life
emphasized the theoretical possibility of a cure, or a
rehabilitation of sorts. On this point her parents argued
most tenaciously. They released, over the weekend, tapes
made of their afflicted daughter, which could be
interpreted as showing Terri to be responding to
stimuli of various kinds.

But the world was looking at a woman whose immobilizing
heart attack happened 15 years ago. An anonymous doctor
declared flatly that she had a flat EEG
(electroencephalogram, the brain-wave test).

The political impulse was heartening, even if the hopes
voiced were falsetto science. What caused the political
commotion was the sense that we were presiding over an
execution. Terri Schiavo remained "alive" until we stopped
feeding her. Then she began a fall through a trapdoor
descending toward death. She was being committed to a death
of an agonizing kind, surely? One that began with the
removal of the tubes, and would continue until starvation
and dehydration brought on the end of the heartbeat.

Some years ago, in a forum on euthanasia, my guest was
the Rev. Robert L. Barry, who had studied the subject
extensively. Father Barry argued that the deprivation of
food and water brings on physical pain whatever else the
human condition. Was the court system in Florida, then,
acquiescing in death by pain for Mrs. Schiavo?

A doctor consulted by one television analyst brushed aside
the question, in language not readily transcribed by a
layman. He seemed to be saying that Mrs. Schiavo would not
suffer pain as the term is commonly understood. But that
question was not directly accosted by the judge, who said
only that Terri's rights had not been abrogated.

It was unseemly for critics to compare her end with that of
victims of the Nazi regime. There was never a more
industrious inquiry than in the Schiavo case, into the
matter of rights formal and inchoate. It is simply wrong,
whatever is felt about the eventual abandonment of her by
her husband, to use the killing language. She was kept
alive for 15 years, underwent a hundred medical
ministrations, all of them in service of an abstraction,
which was that she wanted to stay alive. There are laws
against force-feeding, and no one will know whether, if she
had had the means to convey her will in the matter, she too
would have said, Enough.


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>